Why make election season much longer than needed?

Printing ballots can be done quite quickly.

And is 6 months of campaigning really better than 2 months?

It’s really insane that the police get called on US citizens peacefully protesting against a genocide in a foreign country.

You might be interested to learn about the concept called “hostile witness”.

Google is your friend. Hope that helps.

Indeed, also it’s much nicer to use a shared high quality tool than to buy an el-cheapo disposable tool.

Even something simple like a crowbar. I once borrowed a (shorter) professional crowbar after struggling with a (larger) cheap one. The thing I was trying to pry came out like butter.

Even though physics dictates that a shorter lever should be inferior, it just had a much better design and grip.

Better for our wallet, sanity and environment.

After reading (3), I was going to suggest (4), but you did it yourself.

We should drastically raise property taxes and make them deductible from income taxes for owner-occupied housing up to a certain amount.

That would really put middle class home owners and starters in a competitive position compared to those who consume a lot of housing.

And this, in turn, will incentivize property developers to target the middle class

Yes, but that’s not the only factor.

We also have a larger population. And we have smaller household sizes, which means that the number of households has grown even quicker than the population. And higher rates of urbanisation, which means those households all want to live in a few overcrowded urban areas.

And we have more households owning multiple homes, either as investment, for recreational usage or to rent it out.

Solving these issues will not be simple, but it has to be done.

There is a difference between electricity and thermal energy.

I don’t know the details, but it’s highly likely that they are using waste heat from power generation or industrial processes here. They are not going to be using excess renewable energy.

To use excess wind or solar to generate thermal energy, you would need to invest in extra grid capacity, or electric energy storage (e.g. batteries, which are much more expensive) and either use heat pumps, or resistive elements, which would then require even more grid capacity.

And even if you would do all of that, you would only have excess renewable energy a few hundred hours per year, so it will not pay for itself

Exactly.

Imagine if Coca-Cola tried to shame or guilt people into buying Coca-Cola.

How would that work out.

The guilt tripping and shaming is going to backfire.

To win, you have to inspire people to actually want to vote for you.

Otherwise, they just might not even bother showing up.

Just switching by itself is a huge contribution.

And I also think they pay to use it, since commercial usage is not free.