Scientist, Drummer, Dog Owner person.
Don’t worry, your pessimism isn’t totally misplaced. See that big “natural gas” line?
Natural gas is just a more palatable word for methane, and burning methane is still putting an enormous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. But methane by itself is like 10x worse than CO2 and the EPA estimates as much as 10% of all methane for domestic use ends up in the atmosphere. Fun!
That’s not run down, that’s a warehouse. Is it falling apart? Is the flooring worn? Are the walls cracking? Ceilings leaking? That’s what run down means, not whatever your weird complaint is about the decor and color scheme is.
Have an electrician come map your outlets. They find the connections in the breaker panel, then they trace them out to figure out where they go and what they do. Your contractor may be right, but as someone that bought a house that’s over 100 years old, it’s just as likely that the switch goes nowhere/isn’t live, or powers something you’d NEVER think of, or powers something that you can’t even see because someone put a drywall facade over it or some other weirdness!
We discovered that we had a LIVE outlet, under our living room floor. For some reason, at some point someone decided that needed an outlet literally in the middle of the living room floor (coffee table lame is my guess). The previous owner/flipper put feaux-hardwood laminate down in the whole house and instead of deactivating it, they just put the flooring right over the top of it and its live 100 year old cloth wrapped wires, leaving us a lovely little fire hazard! That outlet was controlled by, you guessed it, the mystery switch on the wall next to the front door that didn’t seem to do anything.
Would you fucking stop please?
All due respect to my fellow lemmings, but the ones in these comments are vastly over complicating this. It’s extremely simple - you give that info away, and you do it happily. Here’s an extremely simple example of every single one of your questions:
Financial
political
You subscribe to websites with particular political leanings. The content you engage with on social media falls in certain political camps. You interact primarily with people that also have those leanings. You block or avoid content that is not to your politcal liking. Every like and subscribe is your personality and political affiliation.
health
You searched “symptoms of (insert thing here).” You ordered a next brace on Amazon. Your doctor sends your invoice to your Gmail account. Cvs emails you your receipts.
religion
See politics.
browsing info
Google literally sells everything you do. It’s their business model. Every time you’re signed in with Google it’s tracking what you do. Every email you receive. Everything you click on. Every item you purchase. Every review you fill out. Google sells it all, and you’d be amazed how fast they do it. Fun experiment, go buy something - jeans, a shirt, shoes, drums, and guitar, whatever from a new place you haven’t shopped before. Go buy it and have the invoice go to your Gmail account. Then get on Instagram…time how long or far you scroll before you see an ad for a similar product. Perhaps even a brand you comparison shopped.
You tell it all these things. Whether you realize you’re doing it or not, you tell it everything it wants to know just by using your phone. Google sells it, instametathreads buys it, learns more, and then sells what it learns back to Google and advertisers. Rinse, repeat.
This is correct.
Dead cells
YES, methane stays in the atmosphere a shorter duration as methane, but most of it naturally breaks down into CO2 which then stays in the atmosphere just as long as all the other CO2. It is much worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.