DesertCreosote

$3k-$5k is what I was expecting; I did price things out when I moved in two years ago and the estimate I got then was around $3k. I suspect the firm I got the quote from pushes higher prices for their financing options, since those were listed front and center on the price sheet they gave me.

My family has been helping organize my basement for the last week and a half. The new racking I ordered for the tubs should be arrive in a couple days, and at this point I’m starting to think about paint colors for the walls.

I’ve also had three electricians out this week to give me quotes on replacing the breaker box and upgrading my electrical service to 200 amps; I got the first quote yesterday and it was $6,700 (including running a circuit 20 feet and adding a couple outlets in a half-finished storage room), which seems pretty steep. Hopefully the others aren’t as high.

Turns out communism was just a red herring!

Sorry, I meant theoretically as in “at some distant point in the future where we’ve figured out how to make it work.” I probably read too much science fiction.

Unfortunately it’s a hard limit due to the speed of light. Theoretically you could use quantum entanglement to get around it, but then of course you wouldn’t need the satellites anymore.

Honestly I don’t have anything specific I’d recommend. When I was looking into it, I just did a ton of reading on forums along with articles about how to get everything set up. I also looked at the prices I was offered compared to the prices I’d be able to pay elsewhere, and got quotes from several different companies.

In the end there were a bunch of reasons I didn’t go with solar. I really love it as an idea, and I really want to do it, but it’s enormously expensive. There are lease options, but they’re also expensive and many of them seemed predatory. My utility ended their purchasing program for solar-generated power, and I’m still required to pay a large monthly fee to be connected to the grid, so I couldn’t plan to offset my costs there either. The tax credits are helpful, but you still need to pay up front.

There are a couple animated adaptations of some of the books, and the live-action adaptation of Hogfather is pretty good!

Unfortunately the amount of delta-V you’d need to boost it to a parking orbit of some kind, or to the moon, would be deeply impractical. And it doesn’t have the shielding required to support any sort of deep space habitation.

I’d love to see some or all of it returned to be displayed in a museum, but it would probably be more expensive to do that than it was to build it in the first place. The vehicles to return it in whole or in pieces simply don’t exist right now, and on-orbit disassembly would be incredibly difficult and dangerous for astronauts to carry out.

No, this was part of a group buy program in my area, which was designed to reduce prices. I ended up turning them down because it was still more expensive than it seemed like it should be, and they were going with an older single inverter system instead of a newer and more efficient micro inverter system.

I’ve heard the door to door guys tend to massively upcharge. I haven’t had any come through here, though, so I don’t have any direct experience.

I was talking with a solar company about a solar install with battery storage last year, and they only offered the Powerwall as an option. I literally laughed at them and said there was no way I was tying an enormously expensive piece of home infrastructure to Tesla, because they couldn’t guarantee it’d keep working if Tesla decided to shift direction.

I’m fairly similar to this myself. I don’t really care too much about my gender identity; it feels like if I woke up tomorrow in a female-presenting body, I’d be totally fine with being a woman. At the same time, I don’t mind being a man, and don’t have any strong desire to change anything.

At the end of the day, I don’t strongly identify with being either male or female, so I’ve just called myself gender apathetic. I stick with he/him pronouns because it’s easiest, but I’d be fine with any other pronouns as well. I’m me, and that’s the most important thing.

Sure, and I’ll even broaden that. I’m pretty sure everything that has ever been used as a medium of exchange has been used in a scam somewhere, and the easier it is to use that medium of exchange, the more scams have been perpetrated using it.