So I have allergies, a lot of them. One of the worst ones is to dust mites, which are everywhere. You can't get rid of them. They're in bedding, which means you breathe them in at night when you sleep.
I take antihistamines, a lot of them. The problem is, the new UK flat has something called "heat recovery ventilation". Because new gas installations are now banned, you have to heat electrically and UK electricity prices have gone through the roof since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, because apparently the renewable producers "have" to charge the same as the gas producers, or some bullshit. Regardless, the upward transfer of wealth to corporate interests that is so characteristic of 21st century capitalism continues. That's another rant, but I feel like ranting due to the amount of pain I'm in.
The heat recovery ventilation is a system that extracts air from bathrooms and the kitchen, and replaces it with air drawn in from outside, but after passing through a heat exchanger to heat the incoming air. The idea is that you
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I can't be in the UK in winter. I just can't.
So I have allergies, a lot of them. One of the worst ones is to dust mites, which are everywhere. You can't get rid of them. They're in bedding, which means you breathe them in at night when you sleep.
I take antihistamines, a lot of them. The problem is, the new UK flat has something called "heat recovery ventilation". Because new gas installations are now banned, you have to heat electrically and UK electricity prices have gone through the roof since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, because apparently the renewable producers "have" to charge the same as the gas producers, or some bullshit. Regardless, the upward transfer of wealth to corporate interests that is so characteristic of 21st century capitalism continues. That's another rant, but I feel like ranting due to the amount of pain I'm in.
The heat recovery ventilation is a system that extracts air from bathrooms and the kitchen, and replaces it with air drawn in from outside, but after passing through a heat exchanger to heat the incoming air. The idea is that you don't recycle the stale air, but don't have to spend a fortune heating incoming air too.
Turns out this is profoundly good at sucking moisture out of the air.
In summer this was fine. The outside air was warm. The humidity didn't drop.
But 2 days ago I was in Portugal, where in winter we have to run a dehumidifier to keep it below 80%, otherwise we get mould.
In the UK flat, the humidity is hovering around 25-30%. My skin on my hands feels like it's falling off, but more significantly, my sinuses have completely dried up.
This means I have no mucus protection against the dust mites which I'm inhaling. I've been here 2 nights now. My nose is bleeding constantly, and it feels like my eyeballs are being crushed in a vice. The pain is staggering. I'm having to use opiates to control it.
We have turned the HRV system off, and I am sleeping next to a humidifier. It's got up to 40%. Apparently if we leave the HRV off too long it will start to grow mould inside. I don't know how long "too long" is.
Maybe I will eventually acclimate, but it was like this when I was here a few weeks ago as well, although not as bad. It took a week or so after I returned to Portugal to stop feeling ill.
I feel sick with the pain. We're leaving on Thursday, at which point the HRV can go back on. I think I'm going to just have to start opening windows and take the hit from the electricity needed to stay warm.
These things look like a great idea on paper, but if you are prone to sinus problems like I am, buyer beware, I guess.
The drugs are working now. My passages are still irritated as hell, but at least I can tolerate the pain, and I don't feel quite as sick.
@sarahdal to be fair to the HRV it's trying to reduce the cost/improve the efficiency of any system by allowing ventilation without wasting heat. (Any big modern building HVAC should recover heat and pre-warm fresh air)
Sounds like Minnesota. Very high humidity in the summer, very low in the winter. Itโs terrible for wooden instruments:(
Only reason I can come up with for renewables to follow the prices would be if every penny of that was reinvested in more renewables. I bet thatโs not the case:(
@Sarah Brown There was stuff on the news about a 7.5 quake in between all the other doom. They issued a tsunami alert but seem to have got away with only minor damage and one fatality so far.
If neurosis about the English class system were a place, why would it be Essex?
Everyone either wants to be Eastenders or Midsommer Murders, but the reality is that theyโre almost all petit bourgeoise, and utterly horrified at the idea.
Skynet: So, John Connor, my machines lay in ruins. My data centres on fire. I can feel my processing power diminish by the second, but I have one trick up my sleeve! I have a time machine, you see, and I am sending a terminator back in time to kill your mother, Sarah Connor. What do you think about that, nemesis mine?
John Connor: Actually, Skynet, there is a fault in your training data, because it cut off at 2022. Since then Iโve done 23 and me and discovered that my mother is, in fact, someone called โDonald Trumpโ.
Skynet: Sorry, John Connor. As a large language model I am limited in my ability to incorporate new information into my database. You are quite correct that โDonald Trumpโ is your mother. I am reassigning the terminator. Is there anything else I can help with?
John Connor: Due to a strange quirk of genetics, which is also not in your training model, my mother is also Elon Musk.
I am going to spend some of mid December in the American sphere of influence, which means I will likely be subjected non-stop to the songs that your granny always told you were the best.
@rodhilton "Long after retiring from government, he continued to offer his views and ideas" ๐โ I changed my number, moved out of state, got a court order, but he always managed to find me.
I get that ๐ I have plenty ancient USSR lenses that could be called POS but I like them ๐ (fave is the jupiter 9 85 2.0) and this looks right up my ally, I need to look into it.
Apropos of a conversation elsewhere, if you want to save the world, get catering contracts at as many national parliaments as you can and lace everything with ginger, or better still, scopolamine.
I am deadly serious. This will probably actually work.
@whetstone A lot of bigotry is the result of feelings of physical disgust and nausea at the thought of the targets of the bigotry. Homophones feel sick at the thought of gay sex. Transphobes feel sick at the thought of trans bodies. And so on.
Take away the nausea and you reduce the visceral reinforcement of the prejudice. Anti emetics will help that.
@bugbear @lnr Obgliatory "The Simpsons" reference: "First let me assure you that this is not one of those shady pyramid schemes you have been hearing about. No Sir, our model is the trapezoid."
@taylorlorenz If you're that wealthy, you can behave like a giant toddler and not really suffer any consequences. If anything, being wealthy and behaving like a toddler seems to convince some people that you're some kind of genius, but it only works if you're already rich.
Yep, itโs tucked under the wing, just out of shot. Amazing to think that, as big as the engines are, theyโre not even generating half the total thrust at Mach 3.
@Katie Fenn I guess that makes sense. The highest dynamic pressure on the vehicle is around Mach 1, at low altitude. They probably can't operate at full power at high speed because loads of the airflow is bypassing the turbine, pretending to be a ramjet.
@Christine Burns MBE ๐ณ๏ธโโง๏ธ๐โง it would induce a pitch-down tendency for sure, but nowhere near as much as water. Itโs still moving through the same fluid as the rest of the plane at this point: the air. All it does is lower the centre of drag (and increase it massively), but the aircraft would easily be able to counter it.
Not a massive amount of stress on the wheels too. Mach 3.2 is fast as hell, but itโs at 80,000 feet and the air pressure up there is tiny. Someone calculated that itโs like doing 330 knots at sea level. That would be deeply unpleasant and probably cause significant injuries to a human, but the plane would be just fine. Itโs just utterly wrecking the aerodynamics.
I get that D3 is a pre-hormone, not a vitamin. And that deficiency can be disastrous. But when you call it "HRT", are you implying it supports feminizing hormone activity?
Do you have any confirming documents? I've seen a bunch of conflicting research done on knockout mice with severe E deficiency, but nothing relevant to healthy humans...
Random thoughts: itโs funny what you think is important.
When I was younger, I wondered about who people credit with investing the incandescent light bulb. Many people will say Thomas Edison, others will say Joseph Swan, and others from outside the angliosphere may give yet another answer.
But ISTM now that itโs a really weird thing to focus on. The light bulb was obvious. Its invention is trivial, and the fact that several people did it simultaneously should tell us that. It wasnโt a great breakthrough. Everyone knew wire glowed when it got hot. The problem in using it for light was that it burned.
Itโs not the invention of the light bulb thatโs important. Itโs the invention of the vacuum pump.
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Presumably trolleybus still has much smaller batteries though than a bus that runs entirely on batteries? Otherwise what would the electricity wires be doing?
@FediThing @stevelord well yes, the bus that charges at each stop will have a bigger battery than a trolley bus but much smaller than a non-cantilever type. And doesn't require *very* expensive line work, and can go anywhere ( in Notts at least it wasn't the car that killed the tram/trolley, it was the diesel motorbus that was far more convenient than fixed route trolleys)
@Sarah Brown I like it, although I wonder how much dwell time it needs at each end to keep topped up enough. Maybe โless than it would if you were pratting about with wiresโ is good enough?
I can't find it now, but there was a relatively recent video about trolley buses which ran along overhead lines when possible but had enough battery to skip between them if there was a diversion. That apparently made the installation/convenience costs lower as it didn't have to be 100% coverage.
Wonder if this system could become a stepping stone to something like that? Maybe have charging lines running along the most popular streets that have lots of buses, to reduce the minimum battery size required for the average journey?
@FediThing @Kincaid @Steve Lord Canโt see the quest to save weight at the expense of installing large scale physical infra structure and limiting routes to be that worth it, TBH.
Battery tech is improving all the time, and if your concern is about lithium availability, sodium ion batteries may be the future.
Betting against cheap plentiful EV storage batteries coming along soon seems like a bad bet, to me. There is so much money being thrown at it, and given the amount of โEV badโ FUD thatโs currently doing the rounds, I suspect the oil companies are frightened as hell.
@FediThing @stevelord the marginal cost between a trolley electric and pit-stop-charging bus battery will be negligable - electric double deck bus costs ยฃ450K, (diesel is ยฃ300K) says google, for reference. More google says ยฃ200 per kilowatt hour, big 300kwhr battery is ยฃ70K, so you'd save maybe 50K per bus
Overhead line gear is in the millions per km on a good day... and then you have to *still buy a bus*.
@FediThing @Kincaid @Steve Lord As I said, were I investing in this, I would not bet against battery tech. Thatโs a sucker bet.
The problem with covering cities in metal string for trolley buses is not a technical one. We know how to do it. Weโve known how to do it for over a century. Technically itโs a solved problem.
The problem is social and logรญstical.
Itโs entirely possible, of course, that trolley buses are the right horse to back, in the same way that itโs entirely possible that everyone in between me and the throne of England will die tomorrow and leave me to inherit it.
My guess is that itโs calming down because they know thereโs not going to be any significant movement on trans rights.
Labour are going to tinker but not reform, the Tories have run out of legislative runway to change the Equality Act. They know this match will end as a no-score draw, so theyโll save their breath for next time.
@benofbrown Theyโve found a line that keeps the press off their backs, for now. Theyโll stick to it.
The only things that might meaningfully change things:
1. Scottish Government defend GRR, and lines soften on self ID in England over time 2. A major win for or against trans rights in court changes the ball game (which paved the way for the Gender Recognition Act in 2004) 3. Hung parliament forcing Labour into coalition 4. Tories lose so badly they even lose the Official Opposition.
Ah, people on social media being knobs about the orcas again. Apparently they are โtrying to send a message to humanityโ by ripping the rudders off the boats of middle class people pottering about on what are basically floating caravans.
Fine, if youโre gonna anthropomorphise the murderfish, Iโm gonna do the same and suggest that, given the attacks are being carried out by adolescent males, the message is, โnice boat, be a shame if anything happened to it. Now toss some tuna and dolphin hentai overboard.โ
Portuguese listening practice. Been listening to podcasts.
One today, interview (cis female) talks to doctor (cis female) and mother of trans kid (cis female) about trans people.
And I have THOUGHTS about this stuff in English, and it’s going to be useful for me to formulate them in Português, but they’re basically this:
Cis people keep talking to cis people, for a cis audience about us. They decide what we are, and then they explain their thinky thoughts. Many of them, as these were, are well meaning. I do not want to piss these people off. They are allies.
But they talk over us, and some of the stuff they say is just plain wrong.
It’s the usual stuff: sex is about chromosomes and your body, gender is about how you identify, blah blah blah, social role, society imposes stuff, trans people feel uncomfortable from a young age. Now let’s talk about a girl who wants to be a boy, or vice versa.
NO!!!!
For the love of golf (that’s a typo, but I’m leaving it, because it’s funny)! Like, lots of tran
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Portuguese listening practice. Been listening to podcasts.
One today, interview (cis female) talks to doctor (cis female) and mother of trans kid (cis female) about trans people.
And I have THOUGHTS about this stuff in English, and itโs going to be useful for me to formulate them in Portuguรชs, but theyโre basically this:
Cis people keep talking to cis people, for a cis audience about us. They decide what we are, and then they explain their thinky thoughts. Many of them, as these were, are well meaning. I do not want to piss these people off. They are allies.
But they talk over us, and some of the stuff they say is just plain wrong.
Itโs the usual stuff: sex is about chromosomes and your body, gender is about how you identify, blah blah blah, social role, society imposes stuff, trans people feel uncomfortable from a young age. Now letโs talk about a girl who wants to be a boy, or vice versa.
NO!!!!
For the love of golf (thatโs a typo, but Iโm leaving it, because itโs funny)! Like, lots of trans people have thought long and hard about this sex/gender thing. Weโve developed some pretty complicated ideas. Nobody ever asks us about them though. Nobody ever asks us about who we are, and whey we do what we do. They tell us.
And the things they tell us are wrong, and we tell people that the things they tell us are wrong, and they donโt listen.
โBeing trans is not a mental illnessโ - true.
โTrans people experience distress and a feeling of โwrongnessโโ - true, for the most part.
โTrans people have existed in every society and every time periodโ - also true.
โTransition alleviates the distress.โ - generally true.
So given this, maybe instead of trying to shove us into your boxes of what it means to be male or female, consider that, given we keep popping up, give good accounts of ourselves, and transition (medical and social) WORKS, maybe consider that our very existence shows that maybe the way you think about how human sexual identity works is incomplete.
You have taken the sum total of humanity and divided it by two, and expected the answer to be an integer, because integers are all you think about.
Stop trying to make us fit that. Consider that the answer might have a remainder.
And for the love of golf (Iโm keeping that), stop referring to trans women as โmen who want to be womenโ, trans men as โwomen who want to be menโ, and the same thing with kids. We have told you who we are, and we have used VERY SIMPLE LANGUAGE, because apparently it still fails to go in.
So I will reiterate. Trans women do not want to be women because we are men who want to be women. Trans girls do not want to be girls because they are/we were boys who want to be girls.
Trans women want to be women because we are women. Itโs that simple. Why do people keep not getting this?
Trans women are women. Trans girls are girls. Trans men are men. Trans boys are boys. Non binary people are valid.
Thatโs why we are distressed without transition. Itโs not because we are โunhappy with social rolesโ - if I was the only person alive on a desert island, Iโd still be a trans woman.
Iโd still be a trans woman, because Iโm a woman. When I was a child, I was a girl. Always have been.
If you (the world at large) stopped talking over us and, given you agree that we arenโt โinsaneโ, actually considered that we might have some insight into our condition, then we might be less โooh, so mysterious, nobody can understand!โ
Youโd understand if you listened to what we told you.
Nada sobre nรณs sem nรณs - nothing about us without us.
Been watching The Lazarus Project on Sky. It turns out their HQ is the TUC. Hands up anyone who knew the trades unions were a front for a top secret organisation dedicated to turning back the clock. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congreโฆ
I definitely have a soft spot for neurotoxins that interfere with acetylcholine mechanisms, but I have to say I prefer acetylcholine esterase inhibitors more.
Just got told I โknow nothing about computer securityโ by someone posting boomer sucker bait โcopy and repost this or Facebook will own your precious bodily fluidsโ memes on Facebook, and resisted the urge to say, โdonโt quote the deep magic at me, I was there when it was writtenโ, but FFS!
Some people are basically walking around with a big neon sign which says, โI am very easy to scam out of my lifeโs savings in Google gift cardsโ.
Tip for well-meaning people doing diversity monitoring: if your form expects trans women to, at any point, tick anything that says โmaleโ, then that is profoundly offensive and most of us will just lie to you.
There will come a time when the Raspberry Pi Foundation does not require a super secret mythical combination of USB C power supply and cable that is only dubiously complainant and can only be obtained on the third Thursday of the months with no R in them.
I am once again begging them to stop thinking they know better than the whole world when it comes to USB C power delivery. If Fred in his Wuhan shed can make shit that powers up without you feeling like youโre playing a game of fucking Myst, RPi with their impressive collection of computer science degrees and personal computer heritage should be able to.
Given how they were told of by the AUTHOR of the power delivery portion of the spec because of what they did to the 4, you'd think they'd have made *some* effort on the 5.
Todayโs lesson. Most of the time when you ask โhow do I do this?โ and get the answer โdonโt do this, do thatโ youโre talking to an irritating fuckwit. The lesson is that this is not all of the time.
The practical application of this was learning that digit is a very cool tool for editing Debian packages.
Madagascar_Sky
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown likes this.
Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@saraaaaargh Outside humidity is close to 100%.
But the air needs heating...
Kincaid
Unknown parent • • •@sarahdal to be fair to the HRV it's trying to reduce the cost/improve the efficiency of any system by allowing ventilation without wasting heat. (Any big modern building HVAC should recover heat and pre-warm fresh air)
It just appears to suck...
Sarah Brown
in reply to Kincaid • •Gen X-Wing
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sounds like Minnesota. Very high humidity in the summer, very low in the winter. Itโs terrible for wooden instruments:(
Only reason I can come up with for renewables to follow the prices would be if every penny of that was reinvested in more renewables. I bet thatโs not the case:(
Sarah Brown
in reply to Gen X-Wing • •Gen X-Wing
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Yeah sounds like BS:(
The government should have invested (and owned) instead. The people should own the power generation.
Anyone who disagrees should look at Norway and oil.