ed25519 verify key: 6614c7acfe8e7419bbc26709d7f0fdcc55d8258f205a95173ce37e42e1715462

  • 0 Posts
  • 136 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle

  • The food is the main draw, and it’s unique mix is better than anywhere else in my opinion. The food is mostly what locals do when they travel somewhere it seems. The other thing I like about Malaysia is that once you are away from petaling street in KL, you don’t really get treated like a tourist and people don’t really try to give you tourist prices. Much different compared to neighboring countries, and I say this as a university level Thai speaker who worked in Thailand and still felt tourist-hassled in much of Thailand.


  • Kuwait. Got stuck there by taking Kuwait airways and being turned around due to a snowstorm at the scheduled stopover at Stansted. I swear in 2012 you could still see damage in the airport from the gulf war.

    Food was good, interesting looking place, but might be the least helpful people if you are a woman. They also wanted to confiscate our passports while we were there- no thanks.







  • I’m receiving tech patent royalties and moved with wife to France. I have lived in Malaysia and Singapore and a little time in Spain before this.

    Our life didn’t change much, but we have a new baby and the constant back and forth of us politics makes it no longer a good investment for me in the US. We don’t want to worry about shootings and extremists and corporations allowed to steal from us and worrying about taking a baby to the emergency department because of costs. Food is miles better, healthcare is great and affordable even not yet being covered by the national scheme. I’m clearing out my real estate and investments in the US and going to start again in France. Making friends, especially french friends, is slow, but to be fair we haven’t had time to invest in and participate in our hobbies. I’m sure when we do we will find our people (french lessons will help too). I am happy to pay the extra tax and social charges to preserve the system here as it is.

    Pros: far better and cheaper food, weather where we are in the south is great, cars expensive but affordable, much less driving but I still own a car, great schools and accessible healthcare. Cheaper rent, and cheaper house prices. I also personally agree with the very real concept of egality in France- everyone is treated the same.

    Cons: things take longer here, some rules and rights aren’t quite as good as elsewhere in Europe because France is a bit conservative in some ways. Situations not within the normal permanent work contract in France and background in France can sometimes complicate things. Pay would be less if I had a local job, but I don’t think my life would be negatively impacted much.





  • Renewable energy and battery storage are seeing an absolute collapse in prices such that it is inevitable in the near to mid term future that we will move away from fossil fuel extraction leaving much of it in the ground. This will happen no matter who is in charge politically or who tries to subsidize fossil fuels because money is king and a lot of free energy hits the earth every day.

    This, combined with falling birthrates, means we will hit peak carbon emissions and begin to drop back to a new normal, a new economy built around labor rather than capital because of the shift in balance between resources and workers similar to what happened during the black death. It is my opinion that this will begin to happen in my lifetime and will fully come to pass in our children’s lifetime.








  • Interested in your calculations for 2kl, do you have a small, highly efficient house? For my house, IIRC I needed something like 3000L (glycol, so a little less capacity than pure water) at 30C to maintain 16C in the house for 12h. That’s calculating losses at average winter night temps of -8C and a relatively efficient adobe house of 150m2, and including estimated losses for a buried tank surrounded by foam installation.

    Roughly: 3kw/hr worst case home losses, times 12h is 36kw, 36/0.00114 kWh/L is 31.5k liter-degrees, 31.5k/14 degree temp drop is 2.2kL, so 3kL inclusive losses. Experimentally verified heat loss calcs after installation of the 9kw resistive boiler which used around 30kwh for the coldest 12h winter nights which ends up being about a 50% duty cycle at the medium heat setting of 5kw. Yes my electricity bill was $500/month for two months a year when pulling it all from the grid.

    If I was building the house i’d spec a 1m mixed layer slab and run two layers of hydronics through it. The bottom layer is the heat storage side and the top layer is the home comfort side. The waste heat from the storage dumps into the house and you’ve got a ready made heat battery right where you need it. Run your resistive boiler while the sun is shining to get your heat battery toasty and at night use your pumps to move the heat up when home envelope losses are more than the heat battery leaks up through the floor.

    Heat pump didn’t make sense in my climate because there is no need for cooling, when heat is needed it’s usually way too cold for heat pumps to be efficient, and we have basically unlimited sun and therefore energy. High desert New Mexico.

    I found the book “heating with renewable energy” helpful when designing my system