Born and raised in London. Just a normal guy with a moral compass.
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The thing is tourism does more damage than good, hence saying frig recreational flights. If people are determined to travel, make them sign up to educational holidays.
6·11 hours agoDon’t jinx it
I genuinely think the oversimplification of what a heat pump is and how it compares to AC is malignant. It’s like comparing a rickshaw to a bullet train.
Ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) are generally the most efficient, achieving 350-500% efficiency by leveraging stable underground temperatures, though they have higher installation costs. Air source heat pumps (ASHPs) are also highly efficient at 250-400%, extracting heat from the air, but their performance can be affected by extreme outdoor temperatures. In contrast, a traditional gas boiler for heating is around 90-95% efficient, while separate air conditioning units cool, but neither offers the combined, high-efficiency performance of a heat pump. Therefore, for overall energy savings and reduced environmental impact, heat pumps are the superior choice for both heating and cooling.
They’re literally the same thing.
A traditional air conditioner provides only cooling by moving heat out of your home, primarily contributing to summer electricity peaks. In contrast, a heat pump offers both heating and cooling by simply reversing the refrigerant flow, making it a more versatile and energy-efficient solution for year-round comfort. While heat pumps increase overall electricity demand by electrifying heating, they also shift energy consumption patterns, creating a new winter peak for the grid to manage. However, this increased electrical load presents an opportunity for demand response, allowing smart heat pumps to adjust usage during peak times to balance the grid. Ultimately, widespread heat pump adoption, powered by a decarbonising electricity supply, is crucial for reducing fossil fuel reliance and achieving a greener energy system, albeit requiring significant grid infrastructure upgrades.
It’s a meme.
1·12 hours agoIt’s something worth a post of its own, but I wouldn’t put it down as a competitor/replacement.
Similar how? Tesla has over 2 billion self driving miles, comma’s own website says it’s 100 million. Where’s the comparison?
If your meeting requires you to go to the Bahamas, so be it. But there are doctors and nurses that have been travelling around the world, educators that travel, carers, archeologists. Yes, some will attempt to game the system, but there’s a lot of good people doing vital work that need to travel.
In my attempt at brevity, I articulated myself wrong, totally my bad. I would like the old school systems replaced with either air source heat pumps or ground source heat pumps, backed up with on-site solar and batteries. Modern heat pump systems can heat and cool and are much more efficient than AC as generally installed.
People have family they should be allowed to see and work they need to travel for.
Switch all traditional AC to being powered by Heat Pumps, destroy all private jets, ban recreational flights and power AI responsibly or not at all.
That’s a fair distinction to make.
Now that heat pumps are becoming a norm, air conditioning will become a moot point. But for real, for us, we’d get like two days of summer and it would rain for three months straight, hence the reluctance to invest. It’s only thanks to climate change that we’re now getting sustained heat. This is genuinely a novelty to us.
They are also noisy. Electric cars won’t change that.
But they do. Electric vehicles are much much quieter than the average ICE car. The gap is smaller for newer ICE vehicles, but it’s still there.
In the case of Waymo, they are not a solution to relieve transit in busy cities.
Agreed, but it doesn’t mean they don’t have their place. In an ideal world, if would result in more car sharing. In reality, they provide the ability to mobilise the disabled as well as people that can’t afford cars in places with poor transport links.
I actually think this is kinda unfair. Up until recently, the only self driving system actually worth a shit was Tesla’s. Due to the way it collected street data and upcycled it. The problem is that the system they implemented has a ceiling, but it was heads and tails above all competition for a while. Waymo are benefiting from not being Musk related, but as things stand, they’re using more tele-operators than Tesla did for the normal Tesla’s. Compared to the Robotaxis, who knows. That will come out in a few years.
First off let me say, thanks for having this conversation, I’m enjoying it.
Educational holidays are a concession and would have to be tested. So holiday goers would have to show they’re attending lectures and visiting sites for the bulk of their visit. I honestly haven’t fleshed out the idea as I just came up with it.
But to talk about tourism, I think it was Prague that was able to showcase just how damaging tourism truly is. The city centre has miniscule local residency due to properties being brought up to lease as Airbnbs. With businesses attempting to target tourists, prices of food and travel increased and you know what didn’t go up wages. So people were forced to move out of the city and commute in just to serve tourists things they can’t afford. During tourist season, it’s vibrant and busy, off-season it’s a ghost town. The citizens aren’t benefiting, it’s exactly the opposite. Tourism is just imperialism flexing its muscles.