Th3 Core

Ha! Well, we're going to need a new car sooner or later. Might as well be one that simplytheresa is excited about.

If it's $45K, I'm down with that, but I'll be surprised especially since it was announced as AWD. That would make it the cheapest AWD vehicle on the market.

Cool stuff. I really wanted solar shingles to be ready for prime time, but they weren't. I'm happy with our small panel array and unlike you, I like seeing it up there on the roof. Our house has very poor curb appeal (major error in construction not paying attention to that), so it can only help ;-)

>>ban the sale of portable generators in the state

I get the reasoning. Unfortunately, it's the whole-house generators that drive me crazy. I hope price of batteries comes down fast before the whole-house generators sprout like weeds.

>>much prefer cooking with gas vs. electric

I used to say that. I insisted on it when we built. Having visited friends/family with more modern electric ranges, I now think only a commercial gas range with piping to match so it spits out huge heat can compare to a nice modern electric (i.e. induction or glass top with IR coils instead of those old coil ranges like I had way back which do indeed suck). Standard gas ranges, in my recent experience, are much less functional than a modern electric range, except in one respect.

Other than the power outage consideration, I think induction is superior in every way. Oh... and price. They're not cheap.

And we have a panoply of camp stoves, from ultralight to two-burner, that we can deploy during power outages.

>> Leaf Blowers

The elderly neighbor came to me distraught the other day. She was walking her dog and I was out using my leaf blower. "They're going to take those away from us you know?"
"Not this one. It's battery-powered."
"Do you like it?"
"I love it. I wouldn't consider buying a gas leaf blower ever again."

I'm super happy with the electric pressure washer.

My friend, who I've helped take down trees over 100' tall, showed me his new electric saw. He loves it. Another friend has an electric saw that he uses for everything up to 32" - he has the backpack battery so he can go all day, but does say that adds to fatigue, so he only uses that if he has a lot of starting and stopping. If he's going to just cut and cut, he still uses gas.

There are fewer and fewer small machines where gas is better. I now avoid gas whenever possible. No oil to change. No gas that goes bad. No carb that gets gummed up in the off-season (since most small machines are seasonal or very intermittent in usage). Less noise.

I'd love an electric snowblower. That's the one machine where I've had them go "bad" on multiple occasions (gummed carbs) and when you need it, you often really need it. But when I look at the videos, they are a joke. Beyond 6" of snow, they won't work and I can still shovel 6" of snow without problem. If the snowblower can't handle two feet of snow, it's not worth owning for me.

We are still on propane for heating and hot water and we don't have air conditioning, so our best strategy for time shifting there would be to get a bigger propane tank and buy in the summer when prices tend to be lower.

We just got a refill at $6.36/gallon.

Philosophically, I want to get off fossil fuels and I intend to do so eventually. But if propane stays at $6.36/gallon, it might happen sooner.

The issue here is that our electrical infrastructure is so bad. A multi-day outage is something we expect to hit us every couple years, but they come in waves, so some years it's three multi-day outages in a few months with lots of small ones in between. We expect multiple 8-12 hour outages annually. So getting off fossil fuels means

 - more inconvenience, which would be fine with us but for the rental property
 - more batteries and bigger inverter, which is okay except that baseline inefficiency of an inverter is a function of capacity, not usage, so if you size up for no reason, you are throwing energy away.
 - a standby propane generator, which is not only back to fossil fuels, but also noisy, expensive and just feels like last century's tech to me at this point.

So my plan is to burn fossil fuels a bit longer. But as I say, there are a lot of economic/technology signals that would push that decision point earlier or later

 - changes to net metering
 - changes to price of fuels relative to one another
 - changes to prices of batteries and inverters
 - upgrades to our electrical infrastructure to make it more reliable
 - smart metering with ability to buy/sell power based on price and to be able to do so from home or car batteries

If you start stacking these one on top of another, pretty soon even people who believe that global warming is a good thing will be buying electric cars and converting their home heating. If none of these get deployed, even people like me who believe that countering global warming is urgent will be hanging onto fossil fuels a lot longer than I'd like from a philosophical/aesthetic point of view.

Yes, I believe I posted that a couple days ago - down 40% since Jan 1.

That said, Boston peaked early. If you look at the other graphs for other cities, it looks a lot worse at places where omicron hit later. So Boston is almost certainly past peak. NY too. But the rest of us might just be getting there and here we tend to peak a bit after LA and SFO. So I think we'll need to wait and see what this week and next bring.

Yes, pre-holiday predictions were for a peak around Jan 15-20. I think the question is whether the faster incubation of omicron means we're already there or the higher virulence means we haven't seen the peak yet.

Should be soon, but the question is whether it will be before or after businesses shut down en masse. So far it's mostly reduced days/hours. But if case rates go up 20%, it's just going to be shutting the doors for a couple weeks.

As a non-smoker, I don't know what the cost of illegal pot is so it's hard for me to know whether $161/pound + 15% of retail cost is expensive or not.

At the height of the lockdown in the first wave, our county had something like 8-10 active cases and 0-2 hospitalized. Current report is 58 active cases and 16 hospitalized. And keep in mind, with the new quarantine rules, "active cases" is cut almost in half.

The main hotel in the park has 12 of the kitchen staff out. Going into the MLK holiday, the concessioner is just hanging on. Ski areas too. Unless we are at the post-Christmas peak and things get better from hear, expect things to start closing. That is, if current rates go on for another couple weeks, businesses will simply start to close.

Already, my transmission repair is pushed back a couple weeks - too many mechanics in quarantine.

>>Amazon

I have to say that my 92yo dad loves Alexa. He recently got Alexa set up to run his TV and to add appointments to his iPhone calendar. And with a simple, "Alexa, what do I have scheduled today," Alexa reads out what he has on his schedule for the day. Alexa interfaces with his Nest thermostat. So when he's cold, he just says, "Alexa, turn the heat to 72," and it's done. Alexa can check whether his garage door is open or closed.

I see an Alexa-enabled Smart TV in his future.