Rest of the world exists you know, where corn doesn’t get insane subsidies and sugar cane / beet is far cheaper than corn syrup.

Ingredients of our Cola bag-in-box for postmix machine: Water, sugar, colouring (sulphite ammonia caramel), acid (phosphoric acid), flavourings (contains caffeine), sweeteners (acesulfame-K, sucralose), preservative (sodium benzoate), anti-foaming agent (dimethylpolysiloxane)

Oh, sugar tax and health labels (green A good, red E bad) made everyone cut back a little and add some sweetener… Meh.

You can still accidentally leak your password via phishing or malware. 2FA is fine if you don’t tie it to a phone number, simplest way: install any authenticator app for TOTP tokens. Scan the QR code on multiple devices like phone + tablet, or old phone, for redundancy. Or save the secret key.

Google and most critical services also give you a list of 10 single use emergency codes that you should print or save in Keepass - lost the phone? Nbd just use one of the codes and reset 2FA.

I also never thought my non shared password would be public but one day I suddenly got prompted on the authenticator if I wanted to login; still no idea how or why but at least no one could get in and immediately rotated out the password.

For women. For men’s shoes it is US 15 UK 14 EU 49.5. Source: https://www.asos.com/discover/size-charts/men/shoes/

Or 15 14.5 48, https://shoesizingcharts.com/

UK 13 seems too small, EU 48 idk is a maybe.

Zalando has like many many pages of shoes in the size 48 to 49.5 on the EU site, and even choice up to 52.5, do we have bigger feet here?

Eh, good thing factory chicken is a thing of the past in The Netherlands, it’s okay vs decent vs good.

Rondeel is decent: https://youtu.be/zwleQLKU-UI

Label Rouge (France) is good: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aHlCEIAOpEk

Yeah sure it’s €4 to €5 per 10 eggs instead of €2.50 but there’s a big difference in quality. You get watery whites, tasteless yolks and paper thin shells with the cheapest eggs. Same for chickens, the Label Rouge ones are really small at 1.5 kg in comparison to faster growing ones.

A double espresso from 16g of beans is less than 40ml and stronger than a bigger lungo from a nespresso pod (~7g coffee).

Smaller cups tend to be stronger. That same double espresso with 130g ice and 100ml milk and blend until ice is crushed makes a pretty strong frappuccino.

From espresso to lungo / americano to Starbucks recreations, they all basically use the same dose but wildly varying cup size.

Cup to mug of the same strength filter coffee makes a difference though.

The expected return part is the main tax on billionaires. With capital gain you can hold on forever and never get taxed, and if you die you completely skip capital gains tax with inheritance. Effective tax rate is near zero. This trick obviously only works for people who don’t need their invested money, buy and never ever sell.

Compare that to NL’s tax. Invested? You pay 6.17% x 32% = 1.97% on your investment account, immediately, no deferral possible, year after year. And the rate went up to 36% in 2024 to reduce passive income’s rate advantage over income from work.

We have two main models here, one with a sizable compressor enough to heat a whole home (7-20 kW heat) and a water tank on the side which doesn’t need resistive backup, or smaller, hybrid models that have a few hundred W compressor and maybe 1-3 kW heat output. The latter are almost all backed up by a gas boiler in a hybrid setup, usually uses zero gas until you run it dry - then the 25ish kW gas powered furnace can provide enough power to quickly fill a bath or send tons of hot water to a rain shower.

Efficient with money means you get more of that world and environment as savings per dollar.

Would you choose paying €4000 to replace 600 kWh of heat pump boiler hot water with solar boiler, or 4000 kWh of basically a whole home’s energy usage including hot water?

The solar boiler doesn’t even heat well during all seasons, mine still uses gas to back it up at least half the days.

[citation required]

Unsubsidized PV is around €1 to €1.5 per Wp, IKEA offers 4200 Wp for €4321 right now. That saves at least €800 off my power bill.

A solar boiler starts at €2500 at minimum and easily goes up to €4000. It saves me €250 per year in gas. Or I could get a heat pump boiler for €1500 and save 80% of the €250.

Thermal solar was a thing when PV was stupid expensive but it makes no sense in ROI now, with PV you can power your hot water, home heat and everything else for about the same price as 2-3 solar heat collectors and a boiler.

Powered solar heat pumps sanitize themselves once a week if temperature doesn’t reach 70C at least once. Same for heat pump boilers, they are usually set to 50C but goes up to 70C weekly.

On solar, there is always a downstream heater that can heat cold water to 60C+ and must be set at least that high for legionella. My setup is like that, unpowered solar tank for free heat if available, and gas boosts it up to safe temperature and does all the work in the winter.

What crazy ass compressor needs 220V 30A? Here in Netherlands heat pump is standard as new gas connections are banned for environmental reason, and most homes heat water and the whole house on 7 kW heat, 1.5 kW electric, or about 7A on 240V.

The backup element which only runs at extreme cold outside is a few kW yes but for hot water we just let it run dry and the tap gets colder, no big deal.

Dedicated hot water only boilers have a 300-700W compressor and sometimes a 1.5 kW backup coil. If electrical connection is an issue, just look for a pure compressor driven boiler.