FaceDeer

I don't know how you're measuring efficiency, but a heat pump with greater than 100% efficiency lets you build a perpetual motion machine. That's not possible.

There are some cities that do things a third way; they have a centralized facility that burns the gas (or other fuels) to generate electricity, and then also pipe the heat out to the city in the form of heated water or steam running through insulated underground pipes. Buildings tap into those pipes and run it through radiators. That has the potential to be even more efficient because you're using what would otherwise be "waste" heat, but it depends on a relatively compact city to avoid losing too much heat while sending it through the pipes. I understand this is not uncommon in Eastern European and Russian cities. I'm not familiar with the details, though, so if you want to know more about this I'd recommend Googling around a bit.

Oh, probably because it's cheaper and more efficient.

If you wanted to use the gas in a gas power plant to produce electricity to run an electric heater, there's a bunch of steps where energy gets lost. The turbine and generator isn't 100% efficient and the transformers and transmission wires lose energy along the way to your house. Whereas burning something directly for heat is nearly 100% efficient, the only waste is whatever heat gets carried away by the exhaust. Which isn't much with a modern high-efficiency furnace. I've got one of those and every once in a while I knock icicles off of the exhaust vent outside when I pass it. They use countercurrent exchange to keep all the heat inside the house.

Yet, exceedingly rare to see fires from this

You just answered your own question. The techniques for running gas lines into houses and hooking them up to furnaces are very refined at this point, it can be done safely.

Ah, good, that makes this less of a dilemma then.

On the one hand not fond of the CCP, and this is a step toward making Taiwan more "safely" invadeable.

On the other hand not fond of the United States throwing its weight around like it's in charge of the world and not fond of monopolies in general.

So hard to settle on a reaction for this.

Canada and Mexico are doing fine. The United States isn't North America.

Could never have guessed.

I wonder if perhaps the trade war against Canada isn't really about fentanyl, either.

I do, however, enjoy it when various flavors of Nazi fight each other.

So, who's going to prison for this? Party of law and order, right?

When one option is live under a brutal dictator and the other option is have your ethnicity wiped off the face of the Earth, there isn't really an option, is there?

You're still missing the point. The people living there, at that time, didn't know what those options would ultimately lead to. They didn't have the benefit of hindsight. And even if they did, they were right there at that moment in time, having to make decisions that would determine if they survived one more day.

Basically every death in the European Theatre of WW2 can be directly blamed on Hitler and the Nazis for starting the whole thing

Poor Stalin, I guess he had absolutely no choice in all the massacring that he did. Hitler made him do it.

Re-quoting from my comment:

And they had to pick sides without knowing what the judgment of history would be.

Emphasis added. They were making the choice without the benefit of that Wikipedia page from 2025 to refer to.

And Stalin was right up there with Hitler in terms of total kill-count, which is why it was a rock-and-a-hard-place situation. There was no good option available.