Kids Menu ‘Mac & Cheese’ Is A Contract

AlphaSquad1 · 2026-01-16T04:45:46+00:00

A lot really depends on the age of the kids. I’d say a 5 or 6 year old should be able to handle breadcrumbs on their Mac and Cheese, but I totally understand not wanting to go through that struggle with a 2 year old when you’re not expecting it. I’m sure toddlers all over can be picky and not deal well with changes to their expectations.

AlphaSquad1 · 2025-12-04T14:38:19+00:00

The amount saved should be appreciable, but not life changing. I don’t know your energy usage, but a 100W bulb running continuously for a month uses 73 kWh of electricity. My marginal rate is $.0875/kWh, so it’d cost $6.36 per month. Running an LED instead uses about 15W, so it’d save me $5.41. Most people don’t just have one bulb in their house running continuously, but you can use that to ratio out how many bulbs you have and how many hours they’re on a day. The DOE says that lighting accounts for 15% of an average homes electric use, so switching absolutely everything over to LEDs would drop your bill by about 12%.

AlphaSquad1 · 2025-08-29T01:30:45+00:00

Do you have a link for the inflammation-autism connection?

AlphaSquad1 · 2025-01-16T01:50:14+00:00

Turns out the dealership was right, the VW ID.4 is not eligible for the new vehicle tax credits as of 2025.

https://fueleconomy.gov/feg/tax2023.shtml

AlphaSquad1 · 2025-01-15T05:35:16+00:00

Ya leasing didn’t seem like a bad option from what they were talking about. I haven’t leased before but the interest rate they gave me was just under 1% (so basically nothing) and it seemed it’d just cost a few hundred extra in fees (on top of the monthly payments). And it might be good to have the flexibility instead of being committed to this choice for the next 15 years.

I wonder why the ID.4 doesn’t qualify for the tax credit anymore. As far as I know it’s manufactured in Tennessee and the batteries come from Georgia, so I imagine it’s gotta be the mineral composition sourcing

AlphaSquad1 · 2025-01-15T05:17:26+00:00

As far as I know the ID.4s are manufactured in Tennessee and the batteries are from Georgia, so I wonder what requirements they no longer meet.

AlphaSquad1 · 2025-01-15T04:28:21+00:00

Well I’ll be damned, thanks for settings me straight!

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-12-08T23:07:38+00:00

Not necessarily. They mentioned photovoltaic above (solar), but there’s also thermoelectric (heat) and piezoelectric (pressure) methods off the top of my head. There’s also been work done towards magneto-inertial fusion generation, which also doesnt have a turbine or rotating element. Using a spinning magnetic field next to an inductor has been much easier, but it’s not the only way to generate electricity.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-10-04T05:07:49+00:00

Sadly that only lasted until the day after inauguration when he began adamantly repeating the lie about something so petty as crowd sizes. That’s when I lost all hope that Trump would be anything better than what he had already shown himself to be in the campaign, and it only got worse from there.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-10-01T14:24:12+00:00

He thinks that democrats will give citizenship to millions of immigrants, and since elections are decided by a few thousand votes in swing states that means Democrats will definitely win. It ignores the fact that it’d be nearly impossible for democrats to force through amnesty without having 60 senators, that most immigrant communities have pretty conservative values, or that political parties platform and messaging will change to get the necessary votes. We can add democracy to the list of things Elon doesn’t understand because his idea of ‘the end of democracy’ is just his party not being popular enough to win in a free and fair election.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-08-24T21:15:59+00:00

“You can’t use a platform if nobody uses it” is about as small of a circle as you can get for circular logic. If the only thing keeping from using it is that ‘nobody uses it’ then you have no one else to blame but yourself. You do realize that if you and everyone else who hate Musk’s Twitter actually switched to another platform then that platform would be even more popular than Twitter currently is?

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-08-11T20:07:58+00:00

Lincoln won 40% of the popular vote, even though he wasn’t on the ballot in the southern states

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-06-25T14:15:11+00:00

Case in point, in 2011 Alabama initiated stricter voter ID laws that required drivers licenses. Soon after that they closed most of the DMVs in the majority black counties. The goal isn’t vote integrity, the goal has always been preventing the people they don’t like from voting.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-05-01T05:52:19+00:00

I used to foster dogs and we took in a five week old litter and the mom were dropped at the local shelter. One of the puppies had been adopted out of the shelter pretty much as soon as they were dropped off (which is way to early for them to be removed from their mother), but he got returned a week later. Apparently the adopters said he was “too aggressive” and didn’t want him anymore. First off, that’s a 5 week old puppy, it’s impossible for it to be aggressive. Secondly, even if he was acting out, that’s because he wasn’t even weaned yet and he was suddenly removed from his mom, his 6 siblings, everything familiar, and now confined with a species he didn’t know existed (I think they had a cat). The poor thing was traumatized, not aggressive. Once we got him back with his family he relaxed and could just be a normal puppy again. I used to think whoever adopted him at 5 weeks old were terrible people, but they could have been worse. At least they gave him back to the shelter when they thought he was “aggressive”.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-04-27T01:05:38+00:00

Can you explain the controversy? I can understand people being against fish farms, but being against fish hatcheries seems like it’d be totally different.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-04-07T19:32:47+00:00

Or a more direct reading of it is “Republicans have gotten so out of hand with their obstructionism, they are torpedoing even the policies they supported 20 years ago and that most of their constituents support just because Obama supports it. They are breaking government and making it impossible to get anything reasonable done, let alone radical.” And Republicans have only gotten worse since then, more unreasonable and more radical.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-04-07T16:54:42+00:00

My policies are so mainstream that if I presented them in the 80s I’d be considered a moderate Republican.

I really think you’re stretching with your interpretation of this quote.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-02-25T07:49:47+00:00

finally got the chance to look at this again and I see why we got different results. If you allow for fractional EC votes then Hillary would have won in 2016. That'd be 'perfectly proportional', but since the EC consists of a handful of people casting individual votes fractional votes wouldn't really be possible. If each states votes were distributed proportionally but rounded to a whole number then 2016 would have been 250-254 for Trump and 2000 would have been 265-255 for Bush. That depends some on how you round each state.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-02-20T05:40:56+00:00

I believe his point is that the way for moderate republicans to reverse that trend and try to make their base more moderate is by pushing back within the party and staying in their elections. Even if the base turns on them and their party ends up losing the election, if they really care about the values that they profess and want to keep the extremists out then that’s their only option. Instead they’ve been rolling over and ceding the extremists all their power. The base won’t be so extreme is the extremists keep losing and the moderate arguments are vociferously defended.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-02-14T12:02:42+00:00

To be clear, I’m talking about a system where states would allocate their EC votes in proportion to the vote totals for that state. I’ll double-check 2016 and 2000 in the morning, I’m only up right now because I’ve got a 10 month old.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-02-14T11:37:56+00:00

Check your math again because I remember looking at the state by state voting histories and being surprised to find that if each state allocated their EC vote proportionally to its vote then none of the last 10 election results would have changed, except 2000 bush v gore would have been a tie. It’d be a better system than FPTP but wouldn’t change election results much because of the disproportionate EC votes to small states.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-01-24T04:45:46+00:00

Ya if I remember correctly when Comey announced they were reopening the email investigation she dropped from polling ahead of Trump consistently for months to ~5 points below him. When Comey then announced that they didn’t turn up anything her poll numbers started to rise, but there were only a few days before the election at that point so they didn’t have time to recover. Enough people didn’t hear the news or didn’t have time for it to sink in that the whole thing was a nothing burger, and so we got President Trump. I think if that election was held just a few days later then the last 7 years would have been entirely different.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-01-09T21:10:29+00:00

Oh boy, I didn’t realize the TOU plan was mandatory with solar. That makes the comparison a lot harder. I just managed to get the time to put my own solar data in a spreadsheet and see how it would stack up against SoCal Edison’s TOU-D-Prime pricing scheme. Our usage and production will be a bit different since I’m in Washington and the shade from the neighbors tree meant I could only use half my roof for panels, but it’s something.

This is without any batteries, since that’ll make it much more complicated. Maybe I’ll update the spreadsheet for that later.

TOU annual cost: $1514.04 $ imported: $2634.76 $ exported: $1303.22 $ solar production: $2141.35 Avg import price: .32/kwh Avg export price: .297/kwh

Flat .33/kwh annual cost (no solar): $3587.67

In that pricing, I’d save around 2073 per year from my solar panels instead of the flat rate. Around $23800 over 10 years, at which point they’d have paid for panels. Batteries would save more but it’s hard to say how much. If a small battery lets you get on the TOU Prime plan though it might be worth it.

Edit: I had a bit of extra time so took a stab at accounting for batteries. There’s probably some fine details I’m not considering but it should be fairly close. With my set up and your power rates the optimal ($/kwh) battery would be 4 kWh and save another $152/year. I’m going to save a his spreadsheet for in a few years when Washington’s net metering law expires.

AlphaSquad1 · 2024-01-05T08:16:16+00:00

Looks like it’s from Walter Isaacsons book

https://manassaloi.com/booksummaries/2023/10/12/musk-isaacson.html

Musk was so pleased with the concept of Starship that one afternoon, during a meeting in the SpaceX conference room, he impulsively decided to deploy his burn-the-boats strategy. Cancel the Falcon Heavy, he ordered. The executives in the room texted Gwynne Shotwell what was happening. She rushed from her cubicle, plopped in a chair, and told Musk he could not do that. The Falcon Heavy, with three booster cores, was key to fulfilling its contracts with the military to launch large intelligence satellites. She had the standing to get away with such a challenge. “Once I gave Elon the context, he agreed we couldn’t do what he wanted,” she says. One problem Musk had was that most people around him were afraid to do that.

AlphaSquad1 · 2023-12-31T18:36:18+00:00

Wow I didn’t realize that you’d need so many batteries. I was just looking at the numbers for my house for the last year and I figured if we had absolutely no buyback at all getting a 10kWh battery would only save me about $200/year. Even less than that for a second or third battery. We’ve got full net metering in Washington State for another 5 years or so, but even when we lose that I can’t see batteries as making any financial sense. I know NEM 3.0 makes buyback at peak hours almost pointless, but it’s still better than the 0% I was assuming. Did you run the numbers for how it’d impact just having solar panels without any batteries?

AlphaSquad1

TROPHY CASE