multjoy

You'll have to be a bit more specific - is it export restrictions, or connection limits or what?

Even if you go for something that isn't grid tied then you're still breaking even within years if you spec it right.

Obviously if you've got grid electricity that's almost too cheap to meter than I wouldn't bother but for most of the western world the economics to not install solar simply aren't there.

Nonsense. I've just installed PV in the north of England and my payback is in the order of five years, even with the gloom of our seasons.

Large swathes of the US have hours of uninterrupted sunshine all year round. With a battery, a residential owner may never need to pay an electricity bill for the lifetime of the system.

Email is, given the issues with connectivity, something you can justifiably make someone else's problem.

There's no reason not to have your own domain though. I've been using Migadu and the amount of flexibility that gives you is ridiculous. The only downside is the lack of push notifications, but if your email is so important that you can't wait for a refresh then I can't help.

Belatedly, no, but I think our installer may have (possibly as a result of the free money!) wildly overspecified the tank which I suspect we will never empty even if we actually tried.

Daikin (and presumably others, but they're the ones we went with) do have integrated tanks/heatpump internal units. It might be worth having a think about your actual needs and it may be that there is a solution.

My experience with electric hot water taps is that they've been universally awful and only a last resort, but equally the state of the art may have moved on since I last looked!

I've had a cooling/heating heatpump fitted. Adding a couple of wall units bumped the price by about £1500, although the whole thing was softened by the grant for getting rid of an oil fired boiler.

While our house is relatibvely small and we kept the units (which also do heating as well) confined to the main living space, it wasn't especially burdensome. The bulk of the work was installing the behemoth of a hot water tank!

I would make the hypothesis that racism outbursts are driven by Farage, Tommy Ten-Names, Putin and the right wing engagement mill that is Twitter.

If you give the public access to ANPR they're going to spend 30 seconds googling the cops and then they're going to go to town on wives, husbands, exes, stalking victims etc. etc.

A touchstone for people who forget that engines have been fuel injected for decades.

Have you seen the price of solar?

But that's not how Mastodon works.

Like email, I sign up for a Mastodon account on a server that suits my tastes. I then follow other accounts, on other servers, using a client - I use Ivory on the mac & iPhone (because it's made by the same company who made Tweetbot) - and those accounts show up in my feed in chronological order, like Twitter in the old days.

You wouldn't let Joe Public create an email account on your mail server, why would you let them do so on a mastodon instance?

This is an area where Mastodon ought to shine. Departments/organisations can create their own instances, with named users. Interested constituents follow those users with their client of choice. Direct following means you avoid the federation dramas.

No algorithim means that people get the updates they want when they're posted. Users get a familiar-looking client to bang out the quick updates.

Obviously the issue is someone will need to run it, but if you're not open to public signups then the moderation burden doesn't exist and it's just a case of keeping things updated.

Are you actually 'both sidesing' slavery?

The biggest issue is that at the time of the vote, nobody had any idea of what Brexit actually meant. The leave campaign could literally promise anything and a) they wouldn’t have to deliver it and b) everyone who voted for Brexit can reasonably suggest that they voted for something other than what was actually delivered.

The best you can say about the Brexit vote is that 51% wanted something other than the status quo.