The MIT Technology Review tells us “Everything You Need to Know About the Wild World of Heat Pumps”. “Everything” may include the news that they work better at severely cold temperatures than you’ve heard. And if you’re wondering how you squeeze heat out of 25-degree air, well, long story short: the refrigerant starts out in liquid form, but has a very low boiling point (-15 degrees), so heating it even a little in a heat exchanger (and heating it with 25-degree air is surely heating it a little!) turns it into a gas; then putting that gas through a compressor it makes it considerably hotter, until its temperature reaches 100 degrees, and then it dumps off heat into your house via another heat exchanger, and in doing so turns back into a liquid, and the cycle begins again. And don’t let your right-wing uncle pooh-pooh it because it runs on electricity and thus equals fossil fuels, because that’s really only true in West Virginia (which gets some 97% of its electricity from coal), and you shouldn’t let the perfect murder the good.
Sonali Kohatkar at Znet instructs us that “Tipping Is Not a Reward – It’s an Insult,” and when you consider that tipped employees’ federal minimum wage is much lower than the standard ($2.13/hour, versus $7.25/hour), and that more than two-thirds of tipped workers are women, and that tipped workers are more likely to suffer in poverty than non-tipped workers, you’ll find it hard to disagree. When you find that other cultures think tipping is actually “rude” or “petty,” and you may find it even harder to disagree. And remember that tipping not only allows bosses to pay their workers less, but forces customers to evaluate their workers, when that’s surely a boss’s job. A male customer might decide not to tip a female worker who doesn’t respond positively to their come-on, which does not speak particularly well of tipping as an employee-evaluation tool. (No use responding that a boss could treat a female worker the same, because there are actually laws against that, and there are no laws against bad tipping.) It sure is amazing how much of what’s “just the way things are” in America don’t actually have to be.
Speaking of which: Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian explains how Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s have been able to avoid actual unionization at their stores, despite workers winning all those union elections. Long story short: because our laws don’t punish corporations for engaging in delaying tactics or other forms of union-busting. Naturally, the PRO Act would have fixed that, by giving corporations 120 days to negotiate a contract with a union representing their workers and forcing those negotiations into arbitration if they don’t meet that goal. Of course, even though the PRO Act passed our House, our Senate didn’t bring it up, since Republicans would have filibustered it as a unit. They still should have brought it up, and forced Republicans to go on the record as favoring endless delaying tactics after a successful union vote, a tactic of which I’m pretty sure even a lot of regular Republican voters wouldn’t approve.
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