Because heat pumps are popular now, and the government is helping people pay for them through inflation reduction act rebates. So they can jack up the price and price gouge the shit out of us, because they know they can and know that they will get away with it. And I bet they were never popular because the same people selling home AC units also sell gas powered furnaces for home heating. So they charge you for two appliances and two installations, with two maintenance calls every time something goes wrong and two upgrade cycles. But now that they come as one unit, they still have to find some way to return more money to shareholders than last quarter so the price goes up.

I just got whole home AC replaced with a heat pump with an integrated furnace backup because it can get very cold here, and also had all my baseboard heaters ripped out. Perfectly fine in the winter and it has freed up at least 1/4 of all my walls to have stuff right up against them if I so choose, but really annoyed that the whole thing costed $20k when it could and should have been built this way 60 years ago. Not to mention all the inefficiency of burning gas for heat when heat pumps move more energy than they consume, multiplied across decades for nearly every building on the planet.

Flip flopping implies indecision regardless of validity of fact and switching without good reason. If there is good reason to switch, then it is simply making an informed decision. People who don’t change their stance when presented with convincing evidence to the contrary are cultists.

I see that as offering services that people clearly use and value, and that the bills have to be paid somehow. So as long as proton can deliver the privacy and security features it promises, I personally don’t see anything wrong with providing an alternative when the only other options are built on monetizing your data.

Power, water, internet, healthcare, education, transit, there’s a lot of things that should be public utilities or at least with a convincing public option because of the clear conflict of interest between private corporations and social benefit, but aren’t, because money controls politics.

The peak of irony considering the porn age ID verification laws and abortion bans they impose on people living in the states they control.

Did they stutter?

One of my best fried chicken experiences was a $5 fried chicken buffet somewhere in rural Kentucky near Lincoln’s birth home.

The midwest has always been pretty centrist at least within living memory, usually split right down the middle. It only ever gave the impression of heavily republican leaning because they’ve been gerrymandered to shit. Wisconsin in particular has been ratfucked by redistricting - both a democratic governor in 2018 and Biden in 2020 won because those are state wide votes, but as of 2022 the state legislature is 66% republican while only having won 53% of the popular vote in that election.

I also think a big part of it is how active users are counted. Saw in a different thread that it only counts accounts who have commented or posted in the last month. Well… I browse and vote on probably an average of 30-50 posts and many of their comments every single day, but the last comment I left was over a month ago.

I also wonder if the active user count is counting people who made multiple accounts across different instances and was therefore always massively overinflated to begin with. I have 5 lemmy accounts - one on lemmy.world when I first joined, one on lemmynsfw for happy fun times, and 3 more trying to find a different instance with the de federation policy and hoster that I wanted after lemmy.world was going through their ddos downtime issue.

I don’t want to tell you how to play your game, but I will say that diamond is well worth the effort, even if you don’t want to get it the easy way with villagers. The amount of time you will save using diamond will more than make up for the time spent mining, and make you resent all the time you’ve wasted using stone. Just dig a tunnel down to y -59 and strip mine, you never need to see a mob or get lost in a cave if you don’t want to. A normal level 30 enchant with efficiency 4 and unbreaking 3 will last a very long time, and can be repaired infinitely if you get mending on it.

I would compare it to something like drinking instant coffee all the time and finally tasting a properly brewed, high quality coffee. Or only buying cheap shoes all the time and then investing in a proper pair of very comfortable and well made ones. Or playing video games on a 5 year old hand me down Mac then upgrading to a decent gaming pc.

And sugar.