These tend to work fine down to -25° C or so ambient temperature (you lose some efficiency below -5° C or so), so should always be outside. Obviously you need an alternate source of water heating if you live somewhere where it routinely gets below that, but even in a lot of places like that you could set it up to use the heat pump 90-95% of the year and a cheap but far less efficient resistive heater for the very cold days, and still come out far ahead.
I have a heat pump that uses R290 (propane) (as well as an CO2 one for hot water) and would take that any day of the week over ammonia! The charge of propane is pretty tiny and the safety standards extremely strict, so not really concerning in terms of flammability, ammonia I would consider far, far more dangerous.
Profit cap would be unworkable, Hollywood is already famous for creative accounting… No work would ever reach it on paper (while actually making many times more).
It’s not something anyone else in the world seems to struggle with, where there are *.gov.uk, *.edu.au etc.
If anything the .gov, .mil and .edu being just American is confusing, as well plainly inappropriate (it feels like an American cultural imperialist thing to people from outside the US). It would have been much better if those had been retired decades ago and moved to under the .us TLD, so e.g. whatever.edu would become whatever.edu.us like every other country. Any existing domains on .gov, .mil, .edu etc. should only be allowed to exist as 301 redirects.
It's imperialist to own and control the thing you created?
If .gov had been an international TLD that was at some point available to everyone, or had been created by everyone, ok. But .gov was created as part of the work the US government did to build out the initial DNS structure. It probably wasn't even a given at the time that arpanet would be international in nature
Also, 301 redirects are not a DNS thing, that is an HTTP thing. Not sure how that would solve your problem since HTTP is intrinsically at the base of it tied to just A or AAAA records. DNS does a lot more than pointing to websites
The plane has since had a cabin upgrade and is still expected to operate at least until 2028. It’s operating SIN-LHR right now as I write this, currently flying over Azerbaijan.
> but need to independently implement updates going forward.
That's not needed either? But since you've provided no rationale, it's hard to point out where the mistake lies.
What's wrong with using known code updates as long as you remove the anti-user parts?
Because you have no control over the future of the project. If Firefox or Chrome starts going down a route where they deprecate features you need you probably won't have the expertise to keep them going.
Anyway modern browsers are too hard to build profitably I guess without anti-consumer weirdness. Might have to switch to a cli RSS reader...
I use Firefox and I like it (especially being able to use uBlock Origin), but I really dislike what Mozilla has become over the last ten years or so. I think that's the key distinction, I can mostly manage Mozilla's crap by turning off a bunch of stuff in my Firefox settings, but I think it's really important for the web to not use a Chromium based browser.
Then let me pay for Firefox. I don't need a resold Mullvad (which incidentally took forever to come to my country) or an AI chatbot (which seemingly are the options Mozilla provides to give them money), and donations to Mozilla don't go to Firefox. It took them ~20 years to work out that was the solution for Thunderbird, they shouldn't spend another 20 years flailing about for Firefox.
AFAIK, from reading the annual reports years ago, this nice sum of money belongs to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works on making a better web. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity that makes Firefox, doesn’t seem to have as much as it needs. Hence MDN Plus, Mozilla VPN, and other services.
That's their choice, nobody forced them to implement that corporate structure and they can decide to deconstruct it any time.
Google pays Mozilla for default search engine selection in Firefox, no other product. If Mozilla then redirect that money to other non-Firefox ventures then maybe they should explain why.
They specifically implemented that structure to be eligible for search licensing revenue that they might not otherwise have gotten and that's been the lifeline that's kept them able to compete with Google.
The non Firefox ventures are things like lobbying and building a community of support for principles of the open web, which seem pretty defensible to me. It's not like the CEO of WeWork paying himself from his own company's money to turn his private property into a revenue stream. Which I know might disappoint people looking for things to accuse Mozilla of.
That's self-inflicted though; they could just thesaurize that money and live on the interests to fund Firefox forever.
That they decide to burn through it by paying 7 figures salaries for their C-suites, buying luxury offices at the heart of Paris and launching plethoras of feel-good initiatives left-and-right is their own choice.
They already do have an endowment fund and they do get annual revenue from it but it's something on the order of 10% of the cost of developing the browser.
Most of their money is spent on software development, they seem to pay at market rates and CEO spending is something like 1.5% of their overall budget and consistent with industry norms. I don't personally love it, but I also don't think it's a conspiracy or enough to legitimize theory that they're supposedly wasting money. If anything, mozilla stands alone as the most successful pure full stack browser company in the history of the tech industry precisely owing to their intelligent handling of revenue streams and long-term financial planning. Got to go back to the drawing board and find a new accusation.
I don't think it's a conspiracy, it's a simple application of the purse theorem: if there is money to be spent, it will be spent, regardless of whether it makes sense to do so.
_E.g._ OpenSSL, PostgreSQL, or Wayland make do with a dozen contributors and maybe a couple hundred grands per year, but because Mozilla drowns in Google money, they feel the need to spend it fast.
> CEO spending is something like 1.5% of their overall budget
That's... huge? If I donate $100 to Mozilla, it's not to give $1.5 to an already multi-millionaire CEO.
Pretty recently, maybe in the last year or so?. It's pretty crazy to see it - CATL have started selling LiFePO4 cells as low as US$63/kWh while lead acid tends to cost more than US$100 per kWh! Obviously a finished battery + retail margin is going to cost more than those figures but we're coming to the point where it will just be cheaper than lead acid on an amp-hour to amp-hour basis.
Of course, on a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) basis, it was already cheaper quite a while ago (for the last 5 years I'd guess). It was a combination of LiFePO4 batteries having such longer cycle lives than any lead-acid chemistry, and the greater depth of discharge meaning you could use a lot more of the energy. So if you build a new lead-acid based system, you'd need almost double the amp-hours of batteries to supply the same amount of energy with a safe depth of discharge, and you'd still have to replace them much sooner. So you'd not only have to factor buying a lot more batteries with lead acid but also replacing all the lead acid batteries at least once while a LiFePO4 system would continue to operate.
I don’t know about that - yes it’s simpler to recycle but the cycle life is at least four times longer (I had accidentally understated in my post, did some more reading and lead acid is worse than I remembered), but apparently advanced LiFePO4 cells are getting potentially more like eight or nine times the cycle count!
So if you think about the amount of materials - lead acid are almost double the weight vs. lithium batteries per amp hour to start with, then multiply by two because of the usable capacity difference, times four to eight for the cycle life… So you’re talking having to recycle something like sixteen to thirty-two times the weight of the lithium batteries in lead, before the LiFePO4 batteries would have even reached their end of life!
It’s really almost unbelievable how much better and cheaper the lithium batteries have become!
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