silence7

Just do it in Portuguese; the default language settings there mean you only see your preferred language.

However heat pumps just don’t seem to make any sense, and the more marketing materials I read critically, the less convinced I am of their practicality, nor the integrity of the vendors - if they work similarly to air conditioning units or refrigerators why do they cost 20x as much as those devices?

A refrigerator cools a fairly small volume with excellent insulation, which allows it to use a fairly small compressor running at a single speed. This is cheap.

The big differences between typical air conditioning units and heat pumps are:

• they're set up to move heat both ways (eg: both heating and cooling) which requires a tiny bit of additional hardware
• They often have a more substantial compressor to handle the larger temperature difference associated with colder temperatures
• They're a lot more likely to be a system intended to support the whole home instead of a single room
• People care about efficiency, which has variable-speed systems getting installed
• There's a lot of demand for them right now, and limited supply

It doesn't take people on the internet saying it though; just an association with people saying something and the name, which happens to people who write news articles about something.

I think the main impact will be to convince a modest but significant slice of voters to not vote for him.

There's a chunk of the population for whom this is a very big deal, and it's easy to communicate what happened.

The effect is looking fairly small; I think they're largely ending up on BlueSky because Lula is active there.

I can see how that could happen for some homes. Worth doing the calculation though, since it can be cheaper if the pipes are adequate.

There has been a huge spike in BlueSky use, and Lula is now active there.

The big reason somebody might want air to water is that it enables a low-cost retrofit of an existing heating system which uses water to distribute heat. Definitely not what I'd choose if designing from scratch, but I can see how it makes financial sense in a lot of homes.

And yes, induction is amazing, but there are a whole bunch of people who have been marketed into treating gas stoves as their personal identity.

The NYT really does take Musk at his word even when he's got a real history of banning accounts for saying true-but-left-wing things.

Acronyms are a real issue; the great one is "BLM" which depending on context, means "Bureau of Land Management," "Black Lives Matter," or ironically "Bureau of Logging & Mining"

The bots are not reliable summarizes like that. They often can't tell the difference between the author and the subject of a piece of writing.