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Not at all, it’s a fair question and I think others will benefit from your explanation

I think my wording just fell flat then. I’m not saying that they are self-aware of their own delusion, but that they are delusional due to commodity fetishism, and make the result of that delusion the center of their ideology. That is a step beyond garden-variety liberalism; it’s a religion constructed around commodity fetishistic ideology.

They don’t say “we are deluded about commodities and so should you,” they instead say “we believe the Free Market is a conduit for God’s providence” and use that to justify poverty of the masses and wealth for the ruling class. (After all, if the Free Market is divine, then wealth demonstrates God’s approval.)

The term is misused a lot, but I used it intentionally in the precise meaning you described, the sense that people attribute agency to commodities and The Market more broadly. Evangelicalism is a neoliberal religion that is highly adapted to contemporary capitalism. Whereas an “ordinary” politician speaks quasi-religiously about the so-called Founding Fathers and Liberty, Evangelicals attribute all these “virtues” of capitalism to God. In other words, capitalism is divinely inspired and to be capitalist is to be Christlike. It’s why evangelicals are among the most rabidly anticommunist: to be a Marxist is to oppose God, in fact to substitute humanity in his place.

That looks nice, and I agree about the paragraph width.

I’m a fan of double-page view on landscape layouts because I read better when I can see contextual pages.

He found the one correct thing Elon ever said and decided to object

Liberalism is accepting commission to portray a genocide survivor in an antiwar movie, then accepting another commission to celebrate a man immensely wealthy^[1] from the slaughter of millions of chickens per annum.

What do evangelicals have?

What don’t they have? Evangelicals are IMO the politically strongest religious group in USA. They’re basically the Mormons of the East Coast. They are highly adapted to capitalist reality and earnestly hold up commodity fetishism as a virtue. They have their own massive university that can be thought of as a foil to their Mormon counterpart, BYU. Republican politicians routinely go through campus to hold major rallies. Evangelicalism is essentially the religious face of the Republican Party.

But fucking evangelicals want to both have their own stupid society but also be broadly accepted by wider culture

It’s more that their raison d’être is infinite expansion, infinite domination, infinite destruction of any impediment to their will and worldview. In this sense their ideology is a perfect expression of capitalism within the imperial core.

I’m glad you’re here (especially to enlighten us with the quote in your profile lol)

Pastor at the end: “You see, it’s not fucked up because we’ve done it for 32 years”

That uh… doesn’t make it better.

That’s true about the double standard. It’s not great to use a bunch of carbon based energy to heat in the winter. I guess what makes cooling more conspicuous is that it’s a positive feedback loop. The waste heat makes the problem worse. Not to mention other issues like one person using (portable) A/C causing humid air to be sucked into the building, making everyone else less comfortable. But ideally, we would at least use clean energy for heating rather than carbon based fuels.

Heat pumps are a lot closer to theoretical efficiency limits than cars. Most of the gain for cars has to do with aerodynamics and energy storage / regenerative braking. The engine itself, only modest gains. Even the most efficient ICE engines are like 45% or something, or looked another way, 55% effective at producing heat.

Variable speed and 2 stage systems do provide gain. However those are still expensive and complicated. I’m skeptical that someone using A/C for max 2 months per year will break even versus a conventional system. Could be true for common residential buildings, not so much for detached homes.

Regardless of theoretical efficiency, the problem is more “supply side”, how much heat is getting into your building. The most effective way to save energy is to reduce the heat you have to reject in the first place. Reflective roof tiles, low emissivity windows, a dang tree. Each of those could be measured in terms of heat reduction but don’t have an efficiency rating directly comparable to a heat pump because they operate passively. The social-political question is whether to move in a one-way direction toward A/C dependence or if these other options can be used instead in more temperate countries.

In Europe, most buildings are relatively well insulated and use materials with a high thermal mass. So the building itself can soak up a lot of heat during the day and radiate it out during the night. In North America you see a lot cheaper construction out of lumber and drywall instead of brick and cement, and with modest insulation.

In North America, a brief heat wave is immediately noticed and requires a lot of work by the A/C system. In Europe, you can tolerate a heat wave lasting up to a couple days. But weeks on end? Your buildings will heat-soak and at that point it starts to work against you. Your air conditioning will run all day and all night because now the insulation and thermal mass is acting like an oven, keeping the interior warmer than the outside.

Thermodynamics has not changed in recent years. There has not been any change to the fundamentals about A/C generally taking a lot of energy to run. It is just slightly complicated because of the need to factor in the building and neighborhood in which the A/C is operating.

What are you comparing it to?

A passively cooled home, architected to prevent heat buildup in the first place (especially considering neighborhood-scale solutions like tree canopy) can take zero watts of electric power to cool. I guess if you take the architecture as given, and look only at options that consume electricity, then yes there isn’t much juice to squeeze on A/C technology. There are still some options like whole-home fans which gently suck the hot air upward.

But if A/C is avoided, then you aren’t inputting extra heat into the system to run the A/C, avoiding the local heat increase. Remember if everyone is pumping heat out of their homes, that heat ends up immediately outside the homes and into the street.

Supergirl GO! to the polls

I’ll go out on a limb and say it has to do with the demise of the USSR and the type of futurism that is only possible with a major socialist project in the world. We are only barely now starting to see a revival since the 2010s with the rise of China.

Capitalist futurism, at its root, is about domination over nature. “We” go to the Moon or to Mars, not for any humanistic objective but to claim it, as if to say to the universe, “nothing for me is off-limits.” For the bulk of humanity, for animals, for the environment — there is no future under capitalism.

The futurism of socialist countries has the capacity for humanism, and I think that is reflected in the imagination of society.

This is true in the general sense that the Catholic Church was reluctant to update their interpretations of the universe. But what’s lesser known is that Galileo didn’t provide very good or scientific evidence at first. It was basically vibes that turned out to be right.

Dr Fatima has a great video essay on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7a65AvELdU

It is not yet clear whether this toll will be obligatory, Bloomberg noted

The toll is only a suggestion dw about it

Sorry babe, I can’t eat my beans without setting my bean bowl on my bean mat

Looks great!

The enhaired Lenin has also been airbrushed and hair dyed. His eyes are slightly less bagged and his eyebrows filled in. Bottom lip somewhat tighter, mouth smaller. Even the tie knot is tighter. Not only a hair transplant has been done.