The amount of power they can generate on a car is truly impressive. And as poVoq says, those old cars are generally lighter, which helps with range.

A downside of most older cars, unfortunately, is safety is pretty massively compromised. The T2 and T3 Volkswagons are significantly better than some other vans from that era, but they are woefully inadequate in a head on offset crash compared to modern vehicles. Since they do not have crumple zones, any high-speed crash is almost certainly a death sentence.

Warning, car safety tangent incoming:

Vans and trucks in particular (in the US, at least) were way behind sedans/wagons when it came to safety features like airbags, collapsible steering wheels, reinforced doors, etc. I personally wouldn't recommend any US brand made before 2004, since the 90's federal safety mandates didn't apply to them. You can see the massive difference between this 2001 f150 and a 2004 f150 here. Even after that period, avoid all Dodge vehicles like the plague, just terrible in crashes.

For cars, wouldn't recommend any US or Japanese passenger cars made before 1994-ish. 1996 was when most major safety features became federally mandated. Though even after that period, how well a vehicle crashes is highly dependent on the specific model. A Ford Taurus from 1996 was quite excellent for that era, while a different model Ford from that same year could be a death trap.

I would make an exception for that 1994 cutoff date with certain European vehicles, such as Volvo, Mercedes, BMW, and Saab, as they took crash safety much more seriously even back in the 80's, and tended to do quite well. Still not as good as a good modern car, but probably still fairly survivable.

Happy cake day, Plum! :)

Damn. That was an extremely well written, compelling read, with an equally excellent ending quote. Cheers for sharing it here, Five!

Steven Mould did a great video on this topic, for those intrigued.

Oddly, I've never seen a reversible window AC in my area. Checking my local stores, they're definitely a bit more expensive than the non-heating models (cheapest I could find was $489), which might explain it.

Interesting, I never perceived a smugness to his presentations, I always felt they came across like a teacher very concisely presenting a lesson to a classroom. I would've loved to have had him as a teacher, but that's just me.

In the comments of that second link you provided, someone made a salient point:

At the end of the day, it all comes down to content residing on someones hard drive. That will cost, either directly through cloud services, or indirectly by decentralized storage like the libry app where users donate their disk space and bandwidth. It is not clear to me how the new system works, and who carries the cost?

Odysee's response was this link, which another commenter then pointed out:

I love how Arweaves biggest flaw (bandwidth) is only mentioned as a cliff note "Notably absent from Arweave's formulation of the Kryder+ rate are bandwidth costs. Arweave covers this using a separate set of karma-based incentives – see here." And the article linked just dodges the actual question at hand by throwing an empty promise to incentivize people to give their bandwidth for "karma"

So Arweave is literally just Peertube with another brand new crypto on the backend to incentivize people to start using it and ultimately 'sell' their hard-drives to the blockchain to be used to host the video content. Otherwise, you need to pay to 'permanently' store your content on the blockchain for a baked in 200 years worth of storage time (so, I imagine that will be rather high).

It should also be noted that in the FAQ regarding what will happen to LBRY Coins once this new crypto replaces it, they simply say "It'll still be yours to do with as you please!", I.E, this shit is worthless now since nothing will use it, but hey, it's your shit, and that counts for something!

Again, I would highly recommend viewing Folding Ideas video on the subject if you haven't yet. This is ultimately going to be another thing that makes the creators a tremendous amount of money, but will ultimately crash and burn for everyone else.

Air conditioners are Heatpumps without a valve to reverse the direction of cooling/heating. If you flip an air conditioner around, it will produce heat at about 3 to 4x greater efficiency compared to an electric resistance heater.

Good find! Besides the coffee from Finca Sonador in Costa Rica, most of their other coffee looks to be Zapatista.

At least according to the wiki link in the post body, there are some EU distribution hubs as well, if you're out that way. Not sure what they are, though.

You're quite welcome :D

I can nerd out about appliance efficiencies for days! (help), always glad to help spread the good word of that sweet, sweet COP (not to be confused with the bad type of Cop).

Tech Ingredients did a pretty great video about easily improving efficiency of solar panels by adding an enclosure and some box fans to the back of them, which seemed to have no real downsides, so I'm quite intrigued to see how he'll drastically improve the efficiency of that air conditioner in his next video.