Find out where all the dead/broken Apple Cinema Displays landed up in the ewaste stream and cut off the connector from those.

Gas heating is increasing in price in the USA as well. The price per therm doubled from 2021 to 2022, although it has tapered off a bit. During that time, electricity in my market was mostly stable. There is a segment of folks here in the Northeast that would benefit from a heatpump though. We still have TONS of houses using heating oil due to the lack of natural gas infrastructure. Even with electric costs being high in parts of New England, a heatpump is cost competitive vs running an oil burner.

The vast majority of California's population centers aren't in areas that demand a ton of heat over the winter. Most of the system's usage is likely cooling during the summer months.

Depends on how much the installer is looking to rip you off. I had a new 2 ton Rheem RP14 system installed last year for $8700US. There were hucksters trying to sell me the same exact system for $15,000US installed! If you look at wholesale prices, the air handler and heatpump cost about $3200US if you were to buy them yourself.

Ever wonder how those Mitsubishi "Hyper Heat" mini-splits work? They are actually oversized vs. their nameplate capacity. They can pull this off since they have variable speed compressors.

The coils are buried below the frost line.

I had to replace my heat pump last year and finding anything beyond the standard single stage units was pretty tough. When you did find something fancy (variable speed inverter compressors), the price was ridiculous to the point that it made zero sense due to the longer ROI. I'm in Northern NJ, so moderately cold climate. The biggest difference of a higher end unit was likely to reduce the use of heat strips, but I hardly use them now. The balance point of the cheapo unit I got is surprisingly good despite the crap insulation here.

A heat pump thermostat has an extra terminal labelled "O/B" that controls the reversing valve (aka, heat or cold mode). It will also have extra logic to control the auxiliary heat strips as a second stage and offer the option to use the strips as an emergency backup if the heat pump should malfunction.

Yeah, thanks to the Trump "tax cut", people are getting hit with taxes from employer fringe benefits, particularly "take home" vehicles provided by the employer.

My insurer pays out a dividend if there is anything leftover in that "pot" at the end of the year. Nice to get a discount.

NeXT and OS X is/was big with the Model-View-Controller method of software development.

A heat pump will still provide heat at those temperatures, just not enough of it to keep a house comfortable for humans (but likely enough to keep the pipes from freezing). Once you go below 20F or so, assuming you have a decent heat pump, you are going to need resistive heating to supplement (this is based on my own observations running a heat pump in a cold climate). It also doesn't help that houses in Texas likely aren't all that well insulated despite it being beneficial during hot summers too. A tight building envelope keeps heat in AND out of a structure.

Don't mock heat pumps, they are one of the most efficient sources of home heating (being that that move it from outside to inside) and recent tech advances make them viable in cold climates. Their primary downside is the "fuel" is more expensive then straight burning natural gas.

The German works council system can't exist in the USA due to the Wagner Act. As for unions looking for membership outside of their traditional areas, it doesn't always work so well. Their legal teams may not have the requisite experience drawing up and negotiating contracts for workers outside of their traditional niche.

I don't have a VM handy, but I recall Windows 98 allowing one to create FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB. The provided versions of FDISK didn't quite work right on drives over 64GB, but Microsoft did release an official patch for that.

The Internet Archive has a growing collection and uses Ruffle to play them back: http://blog.archive.org/2020/1...