All im saying is ive never had the inspection sticker stolen off my car in my home town, 25 miles away.

You seem very defensive of rutland...im not attacking you personally, i have friends in rutland snd hang out there sometimes. But it is objectively shittier than the surrounding towns.

The timber frame/sip combo is a great setup.

With recent spikes in foam prices were getting r40 walls and r60-80 ceilings for similar or lower cost than sips. In our experience with sips it’s been very easy to get a decently tight house but hard to get a very tight house. Getting to 1 ach50 seems easy but getting below .33-.5ach 50 hasn’t been consistently easy. The double stud alsogive a lot of benefits such as being able to run plumbing in exterior walls.

Overall we’re so much better at this than 10 years ago. Being unsatisfied with 1 ach50 was nuts in the US 15 years ago.

I get it but there are often a lot of threads like this clogging up the page.

That’s true but sometimes recommendations from local folks helps weed out the material. I often come to Reddit for food recs before traveling to a new place. It can give a lot of extra insight.

So I just ran the numbers and the majority of their expenses are on the insulation and construction, not the windows. I think it’s safe to assume they’re spending about $30,000 on insulation and thicker walls, that’s about $83 a month added to their mortgage over a traditional home. If you invested $83 a month in a high-yield mutual fund averaging 10% which really isn’t even that high and it’s over 30 years you’d have $172,000. The savings from not paying to heat your home barely breakeven especially since they’re “cheating” in this case by having solar panels. it sounds great and if you’re well to do you can get away with it but for most blue-collar folk they’re doing something to help the environment which is great but they’re spending well over $100,000 more just on insulation then they would’ve spent to heat the home. Some decent windows and some decent insulation is more than enough, I pay maybe $500 a month four months out of the year to heat a significantly larger house and I just leave the thermostat at 70f.

At least street justice is working. Until the state starts actually punishing criminals, this will continue to happen.

But hey, one scumbag dead and one in jail on murder isn't a bad deal!

Certainly you’re correct that you can do things to make it work. Do it more, do it better, and do it with less.

See they are running a heat pump and it cost them nothing but that’s because they’ve invested in solar so between the at least $30,000-40,000 for extra insulation and whatever they paid for solar panels they are spending significantly more over the next 30 years that if they were just heating a house with good windows and reasonable insulation.

I’m not being anti-environmentalism, no lol if you can afford it go right ahead. These are just the thoughts of a blue collar guy that does what they can to help the environment but couldn’t justify spending that much to never get the money back when I could put the equivalent money in high yield mutual funds. Let’s say the extra insulation cost $30,000, that works out to about $83 per mortgage payment over 30 years. If instead that $83 was put directly into a high-yield mutual fund monthly doing an average of 10% over 30 years you have $172,000. These two look like money having been a poor kid that grew up around rich kids, that’s great for them not good for blue-collar people.

its not even any more shithole than any other town in the area. it is completely average, not "LOL RUTLAND SHITHOLE XDDD". it's a generic small town with generic small town problems. it's gotten leaps and bounds better in the last decade, and it's on track to get leaps and bounds better again in the next.

That’s why I have a concealed carry license.

Sounds about right, my point was not to be anti-environmental it’s that people should know what they’re spending their money on. The savings from that much insulation don’t actually pay for themselves if you were able to put the equivalent money into a high yield mutual fund or slightly lower yielding retirement funds. judging by the age of that couple they’re probably 30 years from retirement. Some people would prioritize lower emissions but they’re already getting that in part by having solar panels.

No. They dig through that stuff too. Sealing the holes, bait stations around the area, cats, etc.. Those things keep em out.

Will never forget the first time I went to a rope tow. I was like 12 years old, but had been snowboarding for 6 or 7 years. In other words, I was quite competent. Holy cow—that thing threw me into next week. I was wildly embarrassed.

So you get to taste it twice... I don't see a problem.

Rutland is only more of a shithole than many of its neighboring towns. On a national scale its not bad.

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Exactly this.

I looked into Passivhaus design when I started planning for my new place, and given our climate and the overall costs, I decided net-zero should be my goal. I took about 4-5 years of research and planning before I even broke ground in 2019.

I built a 1500 sq ft timber frame house, R24 SIPS for the exterior walls, R38 SIPS for the roof. Roof aligned with the south and my main windows on the south wall. 4 zone minisplit system and a small woodstove. SIPS have virtually zero thermal bridging except on wall penetrations, the insulation doesn't degrade, or pack down, and can be made into large panels, they just really seem like best envelope you can make, whether stick-built, or timber frame.

It isn't fully net-zero yet...I need to install a ERV system, then size my solar appropriately (waiting to install the ERV and possibly a Level 2 car charging setup before I size my panels), but it's all designed with it in mind.

I use 1.5 to 2 cords of wood per winter (most of which I can harvest on my land), and the house is a nice 70 all summer and a nice 75 all winter. My electric bill is stable at $150/mo year round with no solar at the moment. The only fossil fuel on-site source is my gas cooktop, which seems to use about 20 gallons per year.

I'm very pleased so far.

> If we held runoffs by holding them again and again until we got to 50%, but that’s not actually how it’s done. There are only ever two rounds, the election and then a runoff between the top two candidates.

But that's a terrible system! It encourages two-party rule, and enforces the spoiler effect. There will NEVER be a competitive 3rd party with this rule, because if you vote for a candidate that's unlikely to win, you're effectively giving a vote to the side you dislike, pulling a vote away from the side you DO like.

> Let’s pretend we’ve got Sanders, Warren, Gabbard, Clinton, Biden. I really don’t want to vote for Sanders because he’s my neighbor and I don’t like him, and Clinton and Biden are old and outdated. So I rank Gabbard and Warren, both of whom get knocked out. If we have IRV I’m done, my vote “effectively” has been negated, my vote doesn’t get redistributed as others have that ranked everyone, even those candidates they don’t even know or don’t like.

You can't choose to not vote between two candidates, then complain you didn't get to vote between two candidates. A runoff between any two candidates could happen. If you want to participate in that runoff, rank them. If you hate them both and don't see one as slightly less bad, don't vote for either. If you CHOOSE to not vote for them, yes, of course you won't get a vote.

> In a traditional runoff maybe Sanders and Biden are the top two vote getters. I can see clearly the race and although I think Biden’s old and his time has gone by, I dislike sanders because he blows his grass all over my driveway and complains about my pickup. I’ve got the opportunity to vote “against” him.

You already had that opportunity with IRV! You chose to not rank them. There's no difference between the two, at all. You are simply choosing "I will vote for the runoff between these two people I dislike" at the polling station, rather than waiting for a second runoff and having to take more time off work and more time out of your day to do it (or to decide not to do it). It's the exact same except one doesn't require a 2nd trip to the polling stations (which is hard on many working class Vermonters!)

> IRV does NOT make the runoff clear at all and I my only Choice is to vote for candidates that May it may not be running

This doesn't make sense. it's not "I have to vote for candidates who may or may not be running", it's that you get the BENEFIT of BEING ABLE to vote for candidates who might not win, without killing your primary party's chances. So I can vote for Bernie without killing Hillary's odds. You are never "voting for candidates who are not running". You literally CANNOT get your vote thrown away unless you choose not to vote at all at some point in the runoffs, at which point you've DECIDED not to vote - not had that vote take naway from you.

> And again, outside of a token amount of money saved I don’t see a benefit or reason to change the current system that is straightforward and simple.

A huge benefit of removing the spoiler effect (3rd party votes taking away from your primary party votes, thus helping the other side) and reducing (but not eliminating) two-party rule. Pretty gigantic benefits. On top of money saved on runoffs, which is a minor benefit. It would also dramatically increase voter turnout, because it means a vote for a 3rd party isn't a wasted vote, so people have more choice and will feel better represented.

Yes, I think they would but they would be dealt with differently. If you take the responsibility to be the biller you need to know the rules.

Great place! For such a small community, we are pretty lucky with our restaurant options.

Do you value your friendship? Get her lessons. Perhaps you can take over once the fundamentals are solid.

I find I am personally more helpful in dealing with the anxiety aspect of skiing. Helping people get over and through the fear of gaining speed, dealing with others around (behind) you, and focusing on the eventual benefits while keeping expectations in check. None of that stuff is teachable until the fundamentals are there.

yeah, so am I. my point was that Rutland has the exact same issues as every other small town in the state and the country. it's not some extra special shithole.

perhaps you need to get out more if you believe that to be the case !

So does that mean I would have to go a month without doing laundry?

What if im at work for the 3 hours its sunny.

I cannot over stress how important those visualizations of what's possible are. Even in the face of overwhelming facts in it's way. It's not about "it has to be exactly like this" to me it's how far can we go, how much is even possible. Any improvement in rail infrastructure will benefit VT.

We will never improve our state if we are too afraid to take bold action.

Art helps people see the vision. Art is essential.

Lovely lighting!