0x5345414e

This is having a direct impact on my wellbeing. I was at Whole Foods in Hudson Yards NYC and I couldn’t get the prime discount on my chocolate bar because the system isn’t working. Decided not to get the chocolate bar. Now my chocolate levels are way too low.

Yes

Right. Aside from declining GDP per capita, way too much immigration, a housing crisis and wage stagnation things are going great!

Education centre seems like a strange choice given that it’s in the middle of nowhere…

Yeah I’m not sure I agree with that statement either…

This is a bit like saying you cheat on tests by studying…

I don’t see how this challenges the CICO argument at all. Weight gain is just a function of calories absorbed and calories burned. You can dig into the details of what those two numbers might be for different people but it doesn’t change what the function is. That being said, CICO is bordering on being a truism and not really adding much to a discussion on weight gain.

In aggregate, employees make a company money. That much is trivially true. At the individual level, one can be a net gain, net loss, or breakeven. I often wonder how skewed this distribution is at some companies. Ideally you trim the ones that are a net loss and thus on average aren't making the company money. Whether or not it's obvious who those people are isn't known to me. Anyway, I don't think it's a good assumption that the people being laid off are making the company money on average.

True, that’s pretty common in industrial and commercial settings as well. Though here I’m thinking more in terms of a residential setting. Relying on a secondary fluid loop would likely raise the cost quite a bit due to the extra components required.

They’ve raised the global warming issue about current refrigerants but what really matters is the economics of isocaloric vs. vapor compression because there are more modern refrigerants[1] that have quite low global warming potential. It makes that argument carry less weight than it used to imo.

[1] See R455A, R1234ze, R515B, for example.

So it’s a solid and it melts, absorbing heat, then it must turn back into a solid, releasing heat. I’m curious to see how they move the solid back to where it started to complete the cycle. Maybe the material doesn’t move at all, it’s on some kind of revolving assembly? It’s just that in modern refrigeration systems, the evaporator isn’t necessarily that close to the condenser, so with a solid I can see this being awkward in some situations.

New refrigerants will make a big difference here. The main theoretical restriction is the pressure delta required to go from a low enough pressure to transfer heat into the system at a low ambient temperature, then to a high enough pressure to transfer heat out of the system at a high ambient temperature. That’s what causes the loss in COP at low temperatures—the increased work the compressor has to do.

It’s definitely theoretically possible. There are refrigerants that can do this now with a relatively low delta, but generally they are flammable, toxic, or have high global warming potential.

There are other ways around this like booster systems, but it becomes a $$$ issue at that point.

COP vs. efficiency. In the case of a heat pump, it takes 1 kW to “move” 3 kW of heat, rather than turning 1 kW into 3 kW.