> Many democratic countries have similar fundamental laws that are explicitly hard to change or bypass.
What exactly constitutes "hard to change"? In many countries, fundamental freedoms are regular legislation which can be overturned in the usual manner. Even a threshold of 2/3 or 3/4 to change is much easier to overcome than the federated constitutional amendment process in the US.
There are also countries that have a constitution that cannot be overturned like a regular legislation. It's not like the US is the only place that has it that way.
Right, I didn't mean to imply it was a US-only phenomenon -- plenty of countries have fundamental rights enshrined in their constitutions, with varying degrees of difficulty to amend. I was specifically responding to the claim about countries that instead have "hard to change" laws, since laws are typically much easier to repeal than constitutions.
> Even a threshold of 2/3 or 3/4 to change is much easier to overcome than the federated constitutional amendment process in the US.
This can go either way. If you can agree 3/4 of state legislatures to agree on an amendment, you can successfully ratify it (via convention if needed if Congress isn't amenable). But 3/4 of state legislatures can represent small states - so much so that it's possible to amend the US Constitution though legislatures that are nominally representing less than 25% of the country (and in practice even less than that when you consider the effects of FPTP).
I don't follow your objection. Banning books on sexuality from public schools threatens sexual education in those same schools. That is true even if individual parents can purchase such books for their children on the open market.
The point of universal education is to provide for all students, _especially_ those whose parents are unwilling or unable to provide a quality education independently.
The point is that decisions made by schools about which books they use or not are not equal to legally enforceable book bans for the general public. The article commingles these two ideas. That is the objection.
The snippet you quoted does not support that objection, though. It is clear from context that the "book bans" referred to are in the realm of public education.
Heat pumps are something like 5-6x as efficient as resistive electric heaters. So no surprise that your bill would be lower.
Of course, heating an entire house with (non-heat-pump) electric heat in a cold climate is kind of crazy. Natural gas is way way cheaper. But I've seen it in old houses here in the Upper Midwest, so it's not _too_ out of the ordinary.
Heat pumps are so affordable now, that just feels like a poor decision-making rather than an economic hardship. You could finance a heat pump and the savings would pay itself off in a year.
That completely depends on local electricity costs and climate. We get about 4 months of freezing temperatures and when I did some back of the napkin math, a heat pump installation would be cheaper than gas over its lifetime, but it was only by about 10-20%, at a much higher upfront cost.
I'm not an expert so I could've made a mistake somewhere, but my calculations said that the system would have to survive for 10-15 years before it would pull ahead of a new gas boiler.
Yeah it's called apartment living. I hit nearly $350 in Oakland a couple years (and many PG&E rate hikes) ago in a 600 sq ft apartment. Even if I wanted to pay for a heat pump installation it's doubtful the landlord would've been on board.
Last time I did the math, even with a 60% efficient furnace natural gas was cheaper than an electric heat pump. PG&E's electric rates are simply that much more expensive than their natural gas rates. Currently that's up to $0.49/kWh on the most popular rate plan vs $2.49/therm. Keep in mind that the fifth and sixth electric rate hikes of 2024 were just approved today by Newsom's regulatory body and don't factor into the price I quoted.
I was also going to point that out. Resistive electric heating costs could easily reach that much, but it’s a horribly inefficient way to heat your house.
Except scooters are literally motorcycles? From Wikipedia:
> A scooter (motor scooter) is a motorcycle with an underbone or step-through frame, ....
Scooters are often legally motorcycles as well. For example, I had to get a motorcycle endorsement on my license for a scooter I owned, because the engine displacement was too large for the extremely restrictive "moped" category in my state.
They're not really considered as such by motorcycle people, for decent reasons too. Scooters generally have rather different ergonomics and controls, notably CVTs rather than manual transmissions for "proper" motorcycles. Overall a pretty different experience to ride. There's not really a good umbrella term, either, though.
I live in Vietnam where the entire population drives small motorbikes or scooters. There's no defining feature except for having a cutaway to place your feet in a scooter. Even the engine placement is less of a clear thing now that many of them are electric.
There's motorbikes with scooter like controls, there's scooters with motorbike like controls.
Many small automatic motorbikes feel basically identical to driving a scooter except that your sitting position is very slightly different.
The "decent reasons" just sounds like snobbery or a reason to feel superior. Cars are cars, whether manual, automatic, CVT, whatever. Why should bikes be any different?
I'm a big fan of two-wheeled transport in all its forms, but wow is there a prevailing toxic attitude among a large group of "true motorcycle" riders. Instead of welcoming people into the fold, it's just tribalism -- you drive a scooter, you're not a true biker; you ride a cruiser, true bikers only drive super sports; you drive an e-bike, but only loud pipes make a true rider!
Agree about the snobbery, but there is a real difference in kind between them that would be nice to have a good name for. Even if, as the other reply pointed out, they exist on a spectrum, the endpoints are pretty distinct.
Street View shows these are residential roads mired in mud and muck -- surprising for being in a built-up populated area of the city.