I’m not a novice, but I’m badly out of practice. Doing things like properly shaping sleeve caps for set-in sleeve is something you lose pretty quickly once you aren’t doing it every day.

I would be very, very suspicious of claims about this. Grading patterns and fitting them to a specific person is much harder than simply plugging numbers in to a program. You’re likely going to need to do significant fitting of the pattern. (Also, without getting too deep into the process, you’re going to need to either have a very wide format printer, or a pen plotter, in order to use the patterns. Which certainly isn’t the end of the world, but most people don’t have a 72" wide roll-to-roll printer at home.)

I’m saying this as someone that did their undergrad work in fashion design, and used to be pretty decent at pattern making before I switched industries.

I’ve used multiple flat patterning techniques from a range of authors; you can get some really weird results when you plug your own measurements in, versus the ‘ideal’ measurements. For instance, I always need to significantly pitch the back of jeans patterns for myself (like, 2-3" or more); some ways of creating a jeans sloper end up being so incorrect on me that they don’t work at all.

You can make hydrogen from water, using electricity generated from hydro, solar, wind, or nuclear. But it’s not a cheap, efficient process. Fundamentally, we need to rethink travel.

TBH, I don’t think that it’s going to matter though. Too little, too late. I’ll fight to the bitter end as best I can, but the time to fix this was 40 years ago.

If the fuel you were burning was liquid hydrogen, then we’d be okay. But any kind of hydrocarbon, regardless of the source, not so much.

Bluntly: no.

Burning fuel puts CO2 into the atmosphere. Yes, you might be at close to net zero if it’s a biofuel (e.g., the carbon in the atmosphere goes into the corn, when then goes into the airplane and back into the atmosphere), but we need to be at negative carbon, not net zero.

Requires a log-in. That means that there’s absolutely no way to anonymize your searches. At least if I want to do an anonymous search, I can open my laptop, boot up in Tails, and search DDG on Tor. With a required log-in (and billing that presumably doesn’t include a Monero option), you can’t make that work.

Pass.

There are only two companies that I can track down through energy.gov that are fully certified and able to do energy audits in my general area. I expect that I’m going to pay a lot to figure out just how leaky my house it… :'( Still, I really want to reduce my carbon footprint, and heating with propane is expensive when your house is leaky, even when you live in a nominally warm part of the country. A wood burning stove is enough most of the time, but still, carbon footprint.

I think that the issue with the electrical panel is that it’s full, and there’s not a great place to put the breaker. It should have sufficient amperage. There was a nasty hot tub that used to be on the porch when we moved in that’s gone; that breaker is probably sufficient for a heat pump and air handler, but the wiring would need to be re-routed.

Even with FLIR, it’s really hard to see the places that need to be sealed. I’ve rented one–back when my local Home Depot had one to rent–and there are just a ton of small nooks and crannies that it’s hard to get a read on. My guess is that it’s best to do that when there’s a really sharp temperature differential, like a cold winter day. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to tear open the walls on the upper story to fill the voids with 2" foam board, and seal with spray foam; I looked into spray foam, and without sheathing on the upper story, it would make replacing the siding an enormous pain in the ass. Plus, it would not allow air circulation behind the clapboards, which leads to premature failure.

My state is deep red, so I’d be shocked if there was much in the way of specialty certifications beyond what’s necessary at the federal level. They’ve been talking about cash rebates on retrofits for a number of years now, but that still doesn’t seem to have actually happened yet.

They said that I needed to do electrical before they came in for the installation–depending on where I wanted the exterior unit–and I noted that I needed to have an energy audit and get the insulation fixed before I had a heat pump installed. That def. was not on their estimate. (For reference, it’s a 1500 ft^2 living space log cabin, and was built before there were picky little things in my county like, “residential building codes”. So it’s drafty.)

I’m trying to schedule a 2nd contractor right now. I know that I need to get multiple estimates before I open my wallet. The estimate I have doesn’t give the exact model number for any of the heat pumps they’re referencing, or the air handler, so I can’t look up the BTU rating to see if it’s in-line with very, very rough estimates of my heating needs. It lists the tonnage and the SEER/EER/HSPF ratings, but nothing past that.

The person that came out initially said that he though I’d be looking at an installation of around $9000 total, ignoring any tax credits or state rebates. His good/better/best low estimate, with credits and rebates, was a little over $13k, or about 145% of his ballpark number. The high end was 215% of his ballpark with rebates, etc., and 267% without.

My biggest problem with heat pumps right now is that the one contractor that will give me an estimate is about 3x above the national average for a new system installation, and I can’t get anyone else to come out and talk to me in the first place. WTF, guys? (Seriously, if the components for a 3 ton system from Mitsubishi Trane is retailing at about $9k, there’s no fucking reason to price installation of a new system at $28k.)

What are you talking about? Yes, you absolutely can. The control rods speed up or slow down the reaction, which in turn changes how much heat it’s pumping out, which controls how much electricity is being generated. Nuclear output isn’t a single constant, always giving exactly the same number of megawatts of power.

The experts are right; there are real and serious risks with nuclear energy. However, there’s one huge benefit: you can increase power generation on-demand. If it’s calm and overcast, you make not be able to generate significant power from wind or solar, and nuclear can fill that gap. On days where you can generate a lot of power from solar or wind, you can decrease the amount of power that a nuke plant is generating.

I think that we’re going to need more nuclear, even as we build more and more renewables.

No. I’ve tried prostate massage, and it does absolutely nothing for me. It’s not painful, but it’s also not enjoyable; it mostly just feels mildly awkward. I genuinely do not see what gay men get out of it on the receiving end.

The idea that all men likes it, and men that don’t like it just haven’t tried it correctly yet is just… Dumb. Like, it’s a level of stupid that’s on the order of insisting that lesbians just haven’t had the right dick yet.

Microsoft Edge is actually good, so I sure hope the team building it isn’t about to resort to more tricks to get Chrome users to use it.

No. No it is not.