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tannranger

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In general, our natural gas costs are overwhelmingly for heating - house heating in winter, and hot water. Our gas per month expenditure in the middle of summer is perhaps 20% of winter.

My guess is that our gas stove costs rarely exceed $10/month, maybe less than that.

I would recommend checking your gas bills for mid-winter and comparing to mid-summer. And then take into account any other gas users in your house (clothes dryer? hot water heater>).

More likely than not, the vast majority of your gas costs (especially if you live in a place with cold weather!), is similarly going towards heating, not stove..

There's ~100,000 BTUs per therm (as sold in the USA). A therm where we are (Bay Area California) costs roughly $2 USD.

We pay ~$0.30 per kWh via electricity.

We can convert a kilowatt hour to BTUs - ~3400 BTU/hr ~= 1 kWh.

Whereas the $2 we pay for a natural gas therm is equivalent to (100000/3400) ~= 29kWh or ~$0.07/kWh.

tldr; leaving out all other conversion inefficiencies, gas is roughly 25% the cost of electricity, for equivalent energy, at least in California (which is a place that would presumably push a bit harder for gas->electricity conversions).

Doesn't seem so radical compared to other systems. I have heard in China doctors will give preferential treatment to patients who give sufficient 'hongbao' (red envelope = money). I imagine (with no evidence) this might be common in many developing world/traditional societies.

So we are just evolving toward that kind of system.

If anything this provides another lever for free market principles to decide who survives based on willingness to pay (WTP - likely familiar to those who went to business school).

So there's a lot of talk about how encryption algorithms relying on the difficulty of factoring primes could be weakened by quantum computers in the near future.

Are there any technological advances or scenarios where the security of hash algorithms could be weakened (other than computers just getting fasters via ~Moore's Law).