admiralteal

What other video platforms does Louis Rossmann upload his stuff to, by the way?

He does, you know. But I notice you aren't watching him there.

I mean, I'm a happy, paying subscriber to Nebula. Any content where I have a choice to watch it there, I do. It's stupidly cheap, too. Usually you can find a promo to get it for under $20/yr.

But I am also not pretending that Google owes me free & ad-free YouTube on my terms. They don't. Nor do the creators owe me uploading their videos to my platform of choice. I'd prefer both these things to be true, but I at least can understand that it is not reasonable. YouTube, frankly, is probably the ONLY killer product I couldn't do without made by Google, other than some open source software.

People should pirate all they want. I don't really give a fuck. I don't consider it some great moral evil. But pirating from YouTube is not some symbolic, ethical stand for your values. If you really think what they're doing is bad, stop using the service and pressure the YouTubers to upload elsewhere (which they pretty much ALL could do without consequences from Google). The entire platform only exists because of advertising. Period. If you hate ads as much as I do, pay for the ad-free versions.

You think Google pays "shitloads for ad revenue to creators"? Is that why it's so rare for major creators to rely on sponsorship deals to be their primary stable income?

I don't think there's much for consumer single heat pump systems that do both. I've seen a few, especially with geothermal systems, but mostly it's just a tiny heat pump built into the cap of a traditional water heater.

Worth pointing out that the nature of a heat pump is that the housewide heat pump is first pumping warm air into the house to make it available for the water heater, which then pumps that warm air into the water. So it is just one big machine, fundamentally. Or, if your air conditioner is running, the water heater heat pump is adding some cooling to the space.

The criticism of the heat pump water heater: they're loud. A high frequency compressor buzz while operating. If you are switching to one, make sure it is located somewhere where the noise won't bother you. Mine is in a mechanical room in the middle of my house and it is annoying when operating -- I program it to run at night and close doors when going to bed. If I could do it over again, I'd put in in the (insulated) attic in spite of all the risks involved in that. More hot air available for it to use up there anyway.

Ironic that megacorps get privacy rights they don't deserve while the rest of us get jack shit and are told we should be grateful for it.

Just barge on talking about something entirely irrelevant to the article you didn't read. Don't look back or doubt yourself for even one moment.

Cool, cool.

The article is talking about Apple services you can use on Android or Windows or even regular Linux PCs, though. There's no "free computing" alternative to Apple+ , other than the high seas.

The dumbest thing is if you look at actual crash test statistics, SUVs don't actually perform better than passenger cars, by and large. Maybe a bit, but definitely not enough to justify the huge difference in size and cost. Smart cars are a great example -- they actually perform super well in crash testing in spite of being so tiny.

People get so confused about the whole relative size thing. They think being in a bigger vehicle makes them inherently safer -- but that isn't really true. Being in a SAFER vehicle makes you safer. Big SUVs with their poor suspension and stiff frames, in many kinds of common accidents, perform very poorly.

The confusion comes because people forget there are two vehicles involved in the kinds of accidents they are scared of. They think that if their vehicle is bigger, it means the other vehicle is smaller. And of course, if the vehicle you're in a collision with is smaller, you will be safer. But it doesn't matter that it be smaller than you. It needs to be smaller in absolute terms.

And in a crash with a stationary object or rollover, being in a one of these trucks is pretty much universally worse.

Of course, the entire appeal to "safety" is nonsense anyway. US roads are just not safe. They are not designed to be safe. Safety is not a priority. Level of service is the priority. We can and happily do sacrifice safety for the sake of reducing congestion all the time. Just look at how nearly-universal right on red and sliplanes are, or how often we put in expensive urban signalized intersections instead of all-way stops.

If you're curious, it is because wagons are classified as passenger vehicles and SUVs are classified as light trucks. Wagons are held to higher emissions/safety standards than SUVs, making them less profitable to produce in the US. So most automakers steer clear. They don't want to accidentally compete with their own most profitable products by selling a less profitable one that better-matches what consumers need.

Also fuck Tesla.

A big part of this is also that the auto industry is increasingly steering people to buy big, expensive, profitable trucks over smaller, saner, more reasonable vehicles (that they earn less profit on).

It's not just that consumers "want" these vehicles. Consumers are being pushed to want them.

There's a reason Kei-style trucks basically do not exist in the US -- because they're cheap and useful and the automakers thus dare not allow them.

Consumers literally do not have a choice to buy the services the article was discussing -- apple's media streamers -- from someone else. Apple monopolizes that content.

RTFA. It is not about phones.

And even for phones, to get a functionally-acceptable product, your choice is one of maybe 5 manufacturers who all tacitly collude to keep prices up and keep unprofitable consumer choices far, far away.