Natural gas is abundant and cheap in North America, and transporting gas overseas has always been inefficient and expensive, so each continent tends to have their own price for natural gas.

Electricity is expensive in California in large part because the transmission lines cause devastating wildfires, so the rates now includes the cost of preventing fires by continuously trimming trees and other vegetation near power lines, and paying off past liability for billions of damage in previous fires.

Right now in California natural gas is about $14-15 per thousand cubic feet (yeah it’s a stupid unit), which is about 1 million BTUs (another stupid unit of energy). That translates to about 290 kWh.

The average residential price of electricity in California is about 30 cents per kWh. So the same amount of energy in electricity would be about $87, about 5.8 times as expensive as gas per unit energy.

If a heat pump is 4 times as efficient at heating than a gas furnace, then we’re still looking at higher heating costs for heating a home.

And things like stoves and hot water heaters tend not to be as efficient as heat pumps, so you’re still looking at a 4-6x cost difference from electrification on those.

My favorite of his are:

This commentary on Batman

The best things in life are free

The true meaning of Christmas

Yeah, I agree. I drop in on CrossFit style classes from time to time, maybe 2-3 times per month (not actually named CrossFit anymore as my local gym de-affiliated from CrossFit itself). They help me identify things that I’m not good at, and give me ideas for programming in stuff to build in those weaknesses.

So compared to the typical regular CrossFit gym members I’m probably much stronger on powerlifting, slightly stronger on Olympic lifting, middle of the pack on steady state cardio like rowing or running, and way behind on metcon type workouts where you do a bunch of barbell or kettlebell or body weight exercises for time.

After I hit my strength goals this summer, I’m probably going to switch to 2 strength workouts and 2 metcon style workouts per week, specifically to address that weakness. And then I’ll have to program mobility and flexibility work, too, as that is another significant weakness of mine.

No kids: I could wake up at 8:30 and be in the office by 9, but generally preferred to wake up at 8 and have time to slowly get going.

1 kid: I could wake up at 7:45 and get the toddler dropped off at daycare by 8:45, then be in the office by 9. It would usually be a harried morning, not at all relaxing.

2 kids: I wake up at 7 and try to get a few things ready for the slog of getting the kids to eat their breakfast, brush their teeth, get their clothes on, and on their way to a daycare and an elementary school. I roll into work at 9:30, and I take like 30 minutes to make coffee and get ready for the day. I’m now senior enough in my office that I can refuse routine meetings/calls before 10am, and nobody cares what time I come in or leave.

Note that I live within a 10-minute bike ride to my office. Most parents I know chose to move further from work so that they’d have more space for kids and maybe better schools, so many people have added even more time to their commutes for their kids. I consider myself lucky and privileged to be able to not have to wake up before 7, and still be able to pick up and drop off my kids.

This week, I deadlifted 455 lbs (206 kg) for a PR, up from 430 lbs (195 kg) when I last tested about 4 years ago. I’ve had unusually good consistency the last 3 months, and had decent consistency throughout most of 2024, so I’m glad there’s an objective indicator that I’m stronger than ever.

I intend to test all 3 big powerlifting lifts (squat, bench, deadlift) around the end of August to get a sense of my total, and then switch to other fitness goals more aligned with conditioning/cardio, while simply maintaining whatever strength I can.

It’s a California Kong, which is two California kings tied together with gorilla leather.

I’m fully aware that I sound like a snob when I say this, but the world building in Paw Patrol seems like a mess. And sure, I get that people get bored of the same rescue plots over and over, so they had to introduce a villain (Mayor Humdinger and all his cat allies trying to cause trouble), and then some kind of supernatural meteor that gives the dogs super powers, and then some mermaid dog society in the mix. Like, pick a lane: is this show about first responders or superheroes or mermaid dogs? And what should I make of the fact that cats are inherently villainous, unless they can talk, at which point they’re good guys?

Just seemed like it’s sloppy world building and I don’t like it, so I don’t need my kids watching it, either. Not a particularly good reason, but my kids aren’t really clamoring for it.

I gatekeep my children’s access to YouTube/Netflix/Disney content, basically only allowing certain channels.

Super Simple Songs is one that my kids basically learned a bunch of songs from, and remain part of the audio playlists that I put together for my kids. The affiliated “shows” (Bumble Nums, Mr. Monkey) seem OK by my standards. They seem professionally produced and not geared to manipulate kids’ attention spans. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that they’re truly educational, but they do introduce some concepts that I can flesh out on my own with my kids.

Storybots on Netflix is probably my favorite thing for them to watch. Good educational content that is actually accurate without being overwhelming. The songs are pretty fun, too.

Bluey is great. There’s a genuineness to it that is pretty unique in children’s programming.

Octonauts is good for teaching about animals in the ocean, but I don’t enjoy watching it myself. They don’t really bake in stuff to keep the parents engaged, in my opinion.

PBS content (and Sesame Street content wherever licensed) seems pretty good. My kids don’t actively stay as engaged as with some shows, but they have enjoyed Wild Kratts, Daniel Tiger, Curious George, and some other programming.

I actively avoid Paw Patrol, and Cocomelon is outright forbidden in the house. Also, a bunch of colorful kids channels on YouTube are banned, too. I don’t need that short attention span brainrot, especially when my kids already likely have mild ADHD (just as I do).

Things will get more challenging as they get older, but while they’re still in toddler and elementary age I can still largely keep them away from the vast majority of YouTube and steer them towards professional/studio produced programming, especially by nonprofits.

Disney licenses the distribution/streaming rights to Bluey, and just signed the theater and streaming rights to the upcoming Bluey movie (scheduled for 2027) but doesn’t own merchandising rights. They did, however, just recently sign a deal for rights to use the characters in theme parks and cruises.

A lot of young people don’t realize just how difficult post-school dating was before online dating. Once we exhausted the pool of 5-10 single people who were friends of friends, that was basically it. We’d have to go find strangers at the bar.

That conditioned everyone to be slightly more willing to settle for less perfect matches, knowing that there wasn’t necessarily a replacement available. That could be a good thing (people more likely to have the patience to let a spark develop) or a bad thing (a higher percentage of couples who just resented each other).

I can see an argument that things were better before online dating for some subset of people. But having lived that period, I can say from experience that it wasn’t easy then, either. And for someone like me, who is a better writer than I am a speaker, especially over the phone, the rise of text-based communication was helpful for navigating the early stages of relationships when that became the norm.

Is there another kind of table?

That’s the possibly apocryphal origin story of Spanish tapas, too: a slice of bread to cover the wine glass between sips (hence the name “tapa,” which means a “cover”), then a few things to dress up that slice of bread, maybe a piece of meat or cheese. So traditionally a single tapa is served for each glass of wine you order.

I like stir frying for the versatility in playing around with different ratios of vegetables to meat as your macros allow (and can be paired with rice as macros allow). Yes, sometimes that’s broccoli, but often it’s something like snap peas, onions, carrots, bell peppers, celery, even peanuts or cashews. And you can rotate through chicken, beef, pork, shrimp, tofu, seitan, etc. It’s basically a formula that takes away a lot of the thinking while giving the versatility to make full use of the ingredients you have on hand, and doesn’t get tedious or repetitive.

Similarly, I use a lot of vegetables for pasta, and do some kind of pasta primavera pretty often: blanch some combination of broccoli, broccolini, peas, snow peas, snap peas, asparagus, fiddleheads, etc., and then put in with your cooked pasta and cover in freshly grated parm, maybe some cream or butter. Add chicken or shrimp if you’d like to take it in that direction. Use high protein or whole grain pasta if you’d like.

Or even a traditional tomato based pasta sauce has a ton of room for other vegetables, meats. And it doesn’t even have to top pasta, if your macros don’t have room for those carbs. A red sauce can be put on eggplant or zucchini and still tastes great.

If you’re accommodating another group of people you should produce enough to always feed them, too, not just sometimes in surplus years. The whole point is that you’ve gotta plan for a surplus, otherwise you risk starvation in bad years (and it doesn’t make it any better, morally, if the people who bear the risk of starving are “another group or people”).

how does waste prevent a shortage from becoming a famine ?

Making the expected production a higher number than the expected need will give the headroom necessary to deal with a shortage without people starving.

If you’re aiming to produce food for a population of 100,000, but have the capacity to make food for 200,000, then you can afford to waste half of your food without starvation. You can also accommodate a 50% drop in production without starvation.

So that buffer is expected waste, but it’s also starvation resistance.

It means you have a lot more strength to gain. I think you can afford to just maintain while getting stronger, maybe for a few months, and then when you start cutting again it’ll be easier.

I am not sure how to judge my strength.

You could always plug in your numbers and take a look:

https://strengthlevel.com/

I’d say that if you still have a lot of strength to gain, then you can afford to keep cutting until it starts interfering with your workouts.

That being said, I find it easier psychologically to stick with a long term plan when I’m not cutting too much or too long.

So when you say your BMI is 30, are you a strong 30 or a fat 30? And have you plateaued in your strength gains from resistance training, or are you stronger than you were a month ago?

Personally, I find it easier to cut when I have the fitness to be able to burn a ton of calories through exercise: being able to run 30 minutes straight, being able to put in a high volume weight lifting workout, etc.

So if it were me, I’d lean towards pausing the cut and just getting stronger and fitter on the same weight, so that the next round of cutting, a few months from now, is easier.

Then again I’ve never been able to maintain a cut for more than 2-3 months, so you should be aware of my bias.