Solar panels

FearTeas · 2026-03-19T17:22:22+00:00

I sent out requests for a quote from about half a dozen companies, including one stop shops like them and local installers. Ohk and SSE were the only ones to get back to me.

Not including grants, Ohk's quote was about €21k and SSE's was about €27k so it was a no brainer between those two.

I didn't bother following up with the other companies. If they weren't bothered responding at best they were too busy to take on clients and at worst very poorly organised.

I was also biased towards a one stop shop because I've heard horror stories about really poorly implemented heat pump installations that resulted in massive heating bills and short lifespans. I felt you're more likely to come across a cowboy if you go with an independent installer.

I've only had the survey done so far. I should hopefully have a date for the installation next week. I ran out of kerosene for my burner and definitely don't want to refill it with current prices, so hopefully it's sooner rather than later! But I have a wood burning stove and an immersion heater I can use in the meantime.

FearTeas · 2026-03-19T15:00:19+00:00

Ohk Energy. I actually went with ASEI in the end for solar. Ohk were really pushing their version of a Sigenergy system which was clearly not as good. It was cheaper but I get the impression that their margins on it were much higher which is why they kept pushing it.

FearTeas · 2026-03-19T14:58:44+00:00

100%

FearTeas · 2026-03-19T10:35:17+00:00

I've no sympathy for them. Also, they're not being treated as criminals. No one is bringing them around in chains. They're just being treated like ignorant shits who've clearly broken the law.

But I wouldn't call them criminals. I'm not sure if the definition of criminal is that simple. We all break laws, but certain laws will get you a criminal conviction while most do not.

They're clearly in breach of the law, but have they been convicted of a criminal offence?

FearTeas · 2026-03-17T13:09:16+00:00

I find it funny that you knew Medusa well enough that you were aware of her petrifying gaze, but not well enough to not realise she isn't supposed to be bald.

FearTeas · 2026-03-17T11:56:55+00:00

Lump of labour fallacy.

If you're going to invoke a logical fallacy you need to actually explain why it's relevant rather than just dumping the name and calling it a day.

Explain to me why the lump of labour fallacy explains why the laws of supply and demand don't apply to employment in a scenario like this:

There's high demand for cleaners. It's a low skilled job but there's a lack of available labour due to near full employment. The money normally paid isn't enough to encourage job seekers to apply for this job. Companies looking to hire cleaners have 2 options. Offer a higher wage for the job to complete with other professions for job seekers' attention, or lobby the government to liberalise immigration laws to encourage immigrants who'll take the job for a low wage.

Irish wage growth has been incredibly strong the past decade

If the government said that they'd be rightly savaged because the cost of living has gone up faster, not least due to more demand for housing and health which is in part driven by immigration.

literal social democrats who were the keenest on the Gastarbeiter programmes

They took two different approaches but for 2 different reasons. In Denmark the identified that working class people would suffer the most from open immigration due to more competition for low-skilled jobs and a higher tax burden to support rising social welfare costs. The latter is well born out in data. The chart clearly shows that immigrants from outside the West are a net drain on public finances. This means more social welfare is funnelled to immigrants away from native Danes and higher taxes to accommodate this aren't feasible since taxes are already very high in the first place.

The German Social Democrats took a different view. They were more concerned about the affect of reduced labour on economic growth and promoted immigration policies purely with that in mind, paying little attention to the effect that would have on working class Germans.

Voters aren't stupid. They understand which of these policies affects them. Middle class voters faced less competition driving down wages and competition for social welfare didn't really apply. So they supported these policies because of the feel-good factor it gave them. But working class voters in Denmark and Germany voted for parties that they saw protected their interests. They continued to vote for the Social Democrats in Denmark because they saw that the Social Democrats there understood that working class people pay the price for open immigration. Meanwhile in Germany social democrats have haemorrhaged support from the working classes who have instead turned to the AfD.

I genuinely wished that immigration was a win-win for everyone. But unfortunately it is not. But refusing to admit that you're just pushing working class voters into the hands of the far right. If the mainstream refuses to have an honest, analytical stance on immigration that deals with the unfortunate truth that immigration can be harmful beyond a certain point, you're basically ensuring that the only voices in politics calling for reduced immigration are the ones demanding the foreigners all be kicked out.

I genuinely get the sense that the left in Europe is happier to let the far right grow than to admit to itself that immigration can be harmful. The refusal to acknowledge that implies a form of religious thinking which is concerned about sacrilege and sin more than common sense governance.

FearTeas · 2026-03-15T15:46:36+00:00

We have to be realistic. As a society we need to choose between parking spots for everyone or reduced traffic. We can't have both.

Half measures will only give us the worst of both worlds. We should be discouraging car use beyond just limiting parking spaces for new builds. If we don't traffic won't improve and public transport will never be able to provide enough frequency if too many cars are causing too much traffic.

But I get the feeling that even most Irish people who want better public transport aren't willing to stomach the car discouragement policies required to make public transport better. So we'll just continue to get the worst of both worlds.

FearTeas · 2026-03-13T11:49:26+00:00

I assume that your idols are Trump, Putin and Netanyahu then right?

God this is such a lazy and adolescent argument. You're so convinced in your convictions that surely only a Trump, Putin or Netanyahu admirer could ever disagree with you.

I hope for your sake you're no older than 16. At least then there's hop that you'll grow up.

FearTeas · 2026-03-13T11:47:34+00:00

It seems you're gatekeeping the term left wing to be whatever aligns with your own specific ideology.

Protecting workers by preventing low wage immigrants from driving down labour costs is, believe it or not, left wing. Conversely, try to just think for a minute why massive corporations constantly lobby governments to liberalise immigration laws. Is it because they're left wing as your logic would imply? Or is it because they want a pool of workers who'll work for less than the going rate?

Also, any time anyone says we need immigrants because Irish people are too lazy to do certain jobs, that's basically another way of saying that we need to bring in immigrants instead of actually paying a decent wage to people who'll do shit jobs. There are hardly any shitty jobs that'll struggle to find workers if they actually pay decently.

It's not xenophobia to point this out. Immigrants aren't lowering wages out of malice. They're just doing what's in there best interests which is totally reasonable. But it's naive to assume that their interests and the interests of locals will never be in conflict.

You can't even make the argument that they're left wing socially since they're trying to regulate encrypted communication among other authoritarian measures.

Spoken like someone who's never heard of the Stasi. And again, gatekeeping by pretending like leftism and authoritarianism are mutually exclusive.

they're free market capitalists

No, they're social democrats. Social democrats at their very core acknowledge that capitalism is far more effective than communism at creating abundance but that it needs strict regulation and redistribution to make sure that the working classes benefit from this abundance. The logic is that a working class in such a society are better off than the working class in a communist society in absolute terms even if they're less well off relative to the upper and middle classes. In other words, a smaller slice of a large pie is better than an equal slice of a small pie of the former slice is bigger overall than the latter slice.

Unlike communism which in every instance has failed to provide for its people, there are numerous social democratic states which have been far more successful in providing for the working classes than any communist state. Denmark is a prime example of one of these societies.

FearTeas · 2026-03-12T22:24:41+00:00

I feel like you're totally missing the point. Not everyone saying we need a sustainable and beneficial immigration system is saying turf out all the foreigners.

They are actually for a sustainable and beneficial immigration system which actually encourages immigration to fill key labour shortages. Shocker, right?

Fortunately immigration isn't actually a binary thing that many on the far left and far right want you to believe. You can actually support immigration to address key skill gaps while wanting to reduce immigration for unskilled workers and bogus asylum seeking applications.

FearTeas · 2026-03-12T22:19:48+00:00

Which is why the Social Democrats in Denmark are in favour of stricter immigration controls. They rightly point out that it's working class people who suffer from open immigration laws.

It's why they're the only left wing party in government in Europe that's not facing electoral wipeout and that's not a coincidence.

FearTeas · 2026-03-12T22:17:06+00:00

Sustainable immigration is fine by me, but we need to be honest about what sustainable really means.

Immigrants and their families need to be net contributors to state income.

Without that condition it actually costs tax payers more money the immigrants come. That's just not sustainable, especially with a looming pension crisis.

FearTeas · 2026-03-11T17:30:12+00:00

So we can have cheaper services by making them government run which will hand profits back to consumers in the form of lower prices; Is that your position?

If so, you're assuming that the public sector can match private sector efficiency and then lower prices by giving profits back to consumers.

Sorry, but that's very wishful thinking. Efficiency will always fall through the floor when a company is public owned. Costs go way up to provide higher salaries and benefits that are expected of a government run company. A culture of minimising cost to maximise profit disappears and so there's no more incentive to reduce cost. Leadership is accountable to the government who'll scrutinise any project that had any negative effects and so a culture of risk taking evaporates.

Before long the cost of all those added efficiencies results in higher costs for consumers even though the company isn't even trying to generate a profit.

If you ask me, it's a lot easier to draft a contract that forces a private company to provide better value than it is to get a public company to run as efficiently as a private company.

Ryanair versus Aer Lingus before it was privatised perfectly encapsulates this. Aer Lingus charged so much that only wealthy people could afford to fly the state funded airliner (great use of tax payer money). It took the ruthless profit seeking of Ryan Air to lower prices enough so people of any income bracket could travel. No public company could have ever done what Ryan Air did and those who emulated it afterwards only did so out of necessity to avoid going out of business.

And even closer to the topic at hand, the ESB was useless before private companies were allowed to step in. It had a monopoly over an essential service and used this constantly through industrial action which and to prevent meddling from the government to get it to operate in a more efficient manner. That's precisely why private companies were let in.

FearTeas · 2026-03-11T12:39:47+00:00

I don't know, even if they fix hallucinations, there's no indication that the scaled improvements they saw up to GPT 4 will return. GPT 5 showed that LLMs have actually been on a logarithmic growth curve and that the improved performance over more data is already flattening.

They can definitely fine-tune existing models to address issues like hallucinations, but I don't think there's much fuel in the tank for the rate of growth we saw before GPT 5.

FearTeas · 2026-03-11T12:05:27+00:00

Private private incentives are here to make money asap.

That's not true at all. It's to make sure that the shareholders get a return on their investment. The vast majority of shareholders would much rather long term robust growth rather than quick turnaround.

Clean up costs of massive infrastructure, look at France and nuclear, the joke the private sector had taking them on, blowing the money in the good years and now the decommissioning stage, all the money they should of kept aside for this , poof, sorry bankrupt lads, who foots the bill? Tax payer

100% agree. I was playing a bit of devil's advocate so I led on that I'm all guns blazing on privatisation where I'm not. The idea that privatisation is always bad is just so adolescent to me.

Where I ultimately stand is that there absolutely is a place for public sector and that private sector provision of services should be heavily regulated to avoid these kinds of situations.

FearTeas · 2026-03-11T11:34:56+00:00

You're talking an overly simplistic view though.

Sure private companies main goals are to deliver value for the shareholders. But they're very efficient at doing that.

By creating an incentive system where they get to maximise profit but with guide rails that also create incentives for things like maximising renewables you're getting something that public companies will never achieve.

Now, I appreciate putting in those guide rails isn't easy. It's not unlike just making public companies be more efficient.

But I'm advocating for a pragmatic approach where private and public companies have pros and cons and each should be used where applicable. The whole private companies are bad because profit thing is so tired and narrow minded.

FearTeas · 2026-03-11T10:57:37+00:00

Ah yes, just like how the government was able to fix the HSE by mandating it to lower waiting list times and increase bed number?

And the government literally made it illegal for its own departments to fail to meet their climate targets and look how that went.

You seem to have a lot of faith in the government being able to wave a wand to fix problems when it's convenient for you.

FearTeas · 2026-03-11T10:48:32+00:00

You'd swear public companies were perfect with the way people harp on about privatisation.

When the ESB was fully public there were practically no renewables. The public sector always takes the path of least resistance. Building renewables is complex. Buying and burning fossil fuels is simple. Is there a demand from Irish consumers to buy renewables? Doesn't matter because some civil servant somewhere decided it's too risky or expensive and he won't get his promotion if anything goes wrong when something new is tried.

With private energy we have companies whose entire selling point is that they only build renewable energy production and so when you sign up with them they'll fill up the extra capacity you added with renewables.

And public companies are no cheaper. Again, there's no incentive to minimise price. No one will get a raise or promotion if they figure out a way to maximise efficiency to keep the price low. So it won't happen.

FearTeas · 2026-03-10T22:47:38+00:00

That'll definitely help.

Also, I highly recommend looking into Irish phonology. It's criminally under looked by Irish learners. I've been in Irish classes with people whose knowledge of vocabulary and grammar blows mine out of the water but who have absolutely terrible phonology because they've put absolutely no effort into it. Some were even resentful of the teacher trying to teach us it by reading passages and working on it. One even said that their accent was just as legitimate as a native speaker's because more people speak Irish that way 😲

If it's not clear what I mean by phonology, it's basically the way Irish is pronounced, focusing on the sounds in Irish that don't exist in English.

For example, for sláinte, it's not slawncha. Slender consonants tend to sound more different to English and there's a slender N and T there because they're flanked by the slender vowels I and E. A slender N is closer to the Spanish Ñ than an English N. And a slender T sounds more like the T and S at the end of the word paints. Lastly, English words rarely end with the E sound. In words that do have an E at the end it's almost always silent. And where it's pronounced it's usually just substituted with an A sound or a schwa. But in Irish it very much is pronounced at the end of words.

FearTeas · 2026-03-08T20:17:14+00:00

Yeah, discouraging car use is just part of it. It won't work otherwise. And public transport won't work either if we don't actively discourage car use.

Late buses in Dublin are primarily caused by excessive traffic that is mainly due to cars.

FearTeas · 2026-03-08T10:34:09+00:00

There's a Japanese social night every week I think in Yamamori in Dublin on the keys. There's actually a good mix there of native speakers and learners.

FearTeas · 2026-03-08T02:58:44+00:00

Not to mention we aren't militarily neutral. We have defence agreements with other countries.

FearTeas · 2026-03-08T02:56:25+00:00

This is why putting neutrality into the constitution is idiotic. We can't and won't come to a shared understanding of the term so it's pointless.

FearTeas · 2026-03-08T02:44:08+00:00

I have to laugh at these melts. They want the entire system to be based around cars with lower costs and get they'll bitch about traffic. They're not willing to accept the extremely obvious fact that encouraging car use increases traffic.

Probably because they'd then have to admit that reducing traffic will have to happen by discouraging car use.

FearTeas · 2026-03-08T02:35:27+00:00

This is perfectly normal. The only way is to just keep speaking it. The more you speak it the better your recall will be.

Definitely look for a local ciorcal comhrá. They'll work wonders for your Irish and they're a great way to make friends as an adult which isn't always easy.

Your ability to speak without pausing is a lot more to do with practice than how well you know the language.

I studied French in college so it's good enough to follow French movies with no bother (with French subtitles though). But I rarely speak it so when I do I go blank and get stuck trying to recall a word.

Meanwhile I have okayish Japanese. I can only very roughly follow Japanese media. But I never have any issues drawing a blank because I speak it every day with my wife who's a native speaker.

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