Slevin11

This is a very silly take. If you consume any animal foods raised in the US, you are consuming canola / rapeseed meal, soybeans (90% of soy grown in the us is used to create animal feed), and sunflower seed / meal already. You are consuming it in a condensed secondary form (one tropic level up). It seems exceptionally backwards to be worried about eating any of these foods when the animals you eat are essentially just condensed versions of these ingredients where any downside effects would have accumulated heavily.

Also canola oil is now considered on par or healthier than olive oil. Soybeans are one of the worlds few complete plant protein sources with a high quality protein and widely consumed all over the world to both animals and humans to much beneficial effect. Sunflower oil is the least healthy thing here, but still considered quite healthy without excessive heating.

In many places there is no higher cost insurance to offset the risk.

This is a bad take. Of course methods meant for a local region don’t scale everywhere. Different regions require different methods of cultivation, and should be applied in the correct places.

Ideas like syntropic / successional agroforestry are needed to scale a place from having bad soil, to slowly accumulating nutrient density, and accumulate soil health. This then supports a successional planting of trees with an end goal of a mature forest with multiple healthy stories and a healthy loam underneath.

This doesn’t mean you need large herds of free animals (though obviously if you build these forests, you will accumulate more animal biodiversity since they can thrive there), but free roaming animals certainly can help in some circumstances. Though large herds of bipedal monkeys will definitely be needed.

It is technically the correct climate; but unfortunately the incorrect place for them, given the electricity costs and propensity for large power outages during storms (read: times when you actually need heating).

If you are in one of the cities with public utilities where electricity is cheap, then go for it, great choice. But on PG&E, the monetary proposition is awful compared to a gas heater, modern wood stove, or masonry / rocket mass heater.

Given the extreme excess of wood in the region (that otherwise ends up in huge forest fires), it makes a lot of sense to be running an efficient wood stove / masonry / mass heater.

The big loss is of course automation, so it pays to have some automated backup source of heat for when you are out of town, but that could just be whatever heating method you are using already.

If you are already heating using electric baseboards though, yes, definitely move over to a heat pump. It will save you a lot of money. Not as much as natural gas or the others, but savings are savings.

Also, there are plenty of ducted air source heat pumps that work as drop in replacements for gas furnaces. Use one of them if you already have a ducted system that works well and do a heat pump replacement.

Yeah so basically the guideline here is 25 btus per sqft, which is 270 btus per m2, house is 110ish m2, so it’s roughly 30k btus. So then get a 30k btu condenser, about $3400, plus three 12k air handlers ($600 each or so), plus labor and the rest of the random parts. Could be overkill, I’m just following guidelines for the estimate.

Agreed. I live in the CA, and am a homeowner. I love the efficiency of heat pumps. I have a high personal incentive to install cool efficient tech. I have the 20k lying around to install a heat pump (or 5-7k for a mini split). Yet I will never install a heat pump, because PG&E is running a racket on electricity prices. In fact, I’m considering instead installing a new wood stove / masonry heater.

CA needs to get its incentives aligned to meet any of these goals. You want people to electrify? Just make it cheaper to run in the long term, and everybody will just do it by default.

Have you actually watched Jodorowskys movies? Because if you go and watch one, you know that his Dune would be have been an absolutely incomprehensible nightmare. The costuming would have been really cool, but the story would have been totally changed to be incoherent, and it would have become an infamous scandal at changing a movie away from the book storyline.

I was so intrigued by this documentary, and how amazing it might be, until I went and actually watched ‘El Topo’. It was probably the worst movie I’ve ever watched… To this day everyone I asked to watch it with me will bring up how bad and weird,incoherent, and gross it was.

Only thing I’ve had that worked against argentine ants was termidor sc. Non repellent, and slow kill time. Spray it on an active walkway, and it will slowly spread through the colony and kill them all off. Again, supercolonies, so it isn’t a perfect solution. But it’s the only thing that works for me for 6+ months at a time. Then, I have to spray again as soon as I see another Argentine.

Plenty of people in California are doing this. Basically they buy a large amount of acreage up where nobody cares (mostly Mendocino county or Humboldt county, but sporadically throughout Sonoma County / Marin County/ rest of the Bay) then spend about a decade putting the land into a trust, and marking each separate trees to make sure people don’t poach them. The largest one is the ‘Save the Redwoods’ league, but I’ve spent many days hiking through redwood preserves just from some random person who died and made a land trust as their legacy.

People 2000 years from now will also be enamored with Redwoods (provided they still exist), they’ve been highly regarded for thousands of years already, and they will for thousands more.