Batteries degrade in storage and theres an ongoing recall on older models.

Elon/Tesla/Cybertruck shit aside, if someone buying a car doesnt want old dealer stock thats up to them and making an issue of it is just poor business.

Cybertruck bullshit aside, if you want me to take a car thats 5 months old it had better be discounted, especially if theres an ongoing recall on older models.

I once made “Povery rolls”

I took every last scrap of leftover food, all the half bags of frozen veggies and so on from the freezer. Defrosted it all, put it in a stock pot and cooked it till it was a thick stew moved it to a giant bowl and went buck wild with the electric mixer then threw in about 4kg of self raising flour and water. The dough tasted ok, but then I did the same thing with the spice rack… stock cubes, french soup mix… the works. They tasted odd. But I rested the dough, divided them up and baked them anyways.

Fuuuuuuuck they were amazing. They tasted like a family sunday roast dinner flavored heavy doughy roll. It made about 50 of them. I scoured the house for change and found enough to go grab a decent sized packet of powdered gravy mix.

I was genuinely sad when I used the last ones.

I dry nori sheets out, crush them up and put them in an old pepper mill. Few grinds into a bowl of tuna and rice with a splash of soy and its a ghetto sushi bowl.

Heh, I do now. Dudes pretty entertaining.

Its not “wasted” financially. I dont know the rates but if 1 unit costs 50c from the grid during the day they will only pay me 10c to feed into the grid, at peak times (evenings) they want $1 from the grid and I cant contribute. If I preheat/cool my house with 5 units of energy I would have only gotten $.50 for and halve my evening usage on maintaining it from say 10 to 5 im up by $4.50

The numbers are bullshit, but you get the idea.

Also down the track a little my wife and I are looking at making one of our cars a phev so we wanted to be able to charge it at home off solar.

Fight fire with fire.

Create dumb laws? Sue schools in red states and deep red voters with animal mascots.

I thought of these things.

Imagine the fun lawsuits you could launch over mascots and drama performances just to be a dick.

I do wonder just how much a policy like this would effect Valves bottom line though.

This would be pretty amazing for small studios.

If I were rich Id open a “Nerd-pub” board games, tabletop games, arcade machines, pool tables, pinball machines…

If I were just “doing ok” id probably start a youtube channel buying really cheap cars of FB marketplace and just reviewing how much of a piece of shit I’ve bought this month.

Yeah theres a LOT of variables at play here. I saw a headline today that “Uk braces for 30C heatwave.” As an Aussie I thought “Thats cute” we regularly see summer days into the mid 40’s so you can imagine what our peak daytime drain looks like.

You guys also tend towards way smaller houses than us, significantly higher population density, generally cloudier weather, energy costs will be wildly different… so many variables.

You have to remember that without a battery, your solar generally only helps out 8 hours a day and those are usually the 8 hours when you arent home, and arent the times energy companies charge peak rates…

When my wife and I built our house and sorted our (fucking massive) solar system our consultant said "Smart appliances are your best friend. Load the washer and dryer, set them to turn on at 10am before you leave the house. Set the airconditioning to come on at about 3 in the afternoon so that you not only get home to the AC/Heat but your using energy that would otherwise go back to the grid and then once the sun goes down you’re only maintaining temp which is way less energy intensive. Home batteries are still just not cost effective enough yet for us to justify one.

Dont get me wrong, even a small solar system on every house will make a difference. Just maybe not as much as people would like to think. The one benefit of having it be mandatory (and you’re right on this one) is that every new house will se set up for it, wired in right and easily upgradable from whatever they make the minimum standard.

It doesnt add a lot of cost, but it also doesnt help as much as you think.

In Australia its mandatory to have an (I think) 2Kw/h system installed. Which is about enough assuming its running at full tilt to power the air conditioner in the peak of summer on a small house. A mate of mine who knows a lot about solar said “2kw is about enough that your home is essentially energy neutral when you’re not in it. So the fridge, water heater, appliances on standby…”

Of course when you start talking a national scale it does add up.

I go with “Are you a professional fuckwit or is it just a hobby?” But its really the same joke.

People who think managers are useless have either likely only worked for good ones or bad ones. Good ones make it look so easy it looks like they do nothing.

Quite often when I’m managing the work floor if we have a good week I have almost nothing to do on fridays. Sometimes the staff make comments about it and I always say the same thing “If I’m scrambling on Friday, it means I fucked up on Wednesday and we’re all going to have a shitty Monday.”

Theres only a “few hundred million” Americans.

Realistically any “bring back manufacturing” plan can work it just takes a long time, even longer when you start making the world very economically uncertain.

But lets say John Deere decides to move some foreign component manufacture back to the us and builds a factory to do it in record time. They will not be building in downtown Manhattan, they will build in Deerdick Alabama because the land costs nothing and the local unskilled labor isnt spoiled for options so are unlikely to stand up to management or quit. If you can repeat that 100 times across the country in these poorer rural red states thats going to benefit his core greatly.

First thing I said was that whole foods are optimal, thats the key takeaway here. Yeah, some processed foods are TERRIBLE for you, some processed foods are “not bad” for you, some are even healthy. My point is that a food being processed isnt the defining element on wether or not its bad for you. In most cases its the ease of access combined with the hyper paletable nature of processed foods that will do you in.

See you just gave me the perfect example. Pringles.

Compare the macros on a serve of Pringles (definitely an ultra-processed food. I googled the ingredients - Dehydrated potato, vegetable oils, wheat starch (gluten), rice flour, emulsifier (471), maltodextrin, salt, acidity regulator (330).) and a serve of Kettle Chips (Potatoes, sunflower oil, sea salt) the macros are pretty damn close to the same. One is ultra-processed, one is at least processed and I imagine if you thinly sliced a potato and fried it at home and salted them you would get a similar product with similar nutrition to the Kettle chips but would it still be considered processed?

Admittedly there is an argument to be made about micronutrients and phytochemicals that would give the kettles and home mades a slight edge on any “which is healthier” discussion, but the honest answer to “Which of these foods should you sit down and demolish a salad bowl full of?” is NONE because processed or not, its a highly paletable bowl of calorie dense food thats incredibly easy to over consume.

The problem isnt the processing, the problem is that making a giant pile of home made chips is hard and time consuming so you probably wont and a bag of Kettles is a $3 addition to my trolley.

You ever see someone take a door off the hinges, measure meticulously, make a perfect cut, mount the doggy door exactly centered and level the perfect height from the doors edge… only to realise its in the wrong end of the door when they go to re-mount it?

No you havent, because I made sure nobody saw.

Exactly. Take my preferred snack for example, a bag of oven baked pork rinds. 37G protein, 12g fat, 0 carbs. (Ok theres an assload of salt) about 250 cals. No artificial colors, flavours or preservatives… is that “processed”?

My point was more along the lines that a “processed” formed chicken breast pattie isnt somehow worse for you than a big slab of crunchy fatty pork belly because it went through a machine. Its possible to make good decisions involving processed food and terrible whole foods decisions too… delicious decadent “now I want pork belly” decisions. I do wonder how many of these studies control for calorie intake, quality of nutrition, etc.