Despair seems eminently logical in your situation; I felt it, when I put myself in your shoes, reading your comment. That is not to say it need take precedence, or supremacy, to that most human of emotions: hope. I have hope, that you and your partner will prevail, and live a life agreeable to both your terms. I’m sure many who read your story will too. Please, lean on hope, not despair.
The good news is, you absolutely can tell a total stranger about your recent mishaps, or worries or problems or whatever! Services like The Samaritans exist just for this and many people find them extremely beneficial.
Alistair Reynolds has a number of good books which can capture some of the same darkness you'd find in part's of Banks's work. The Revelation Space books are great in their gothic way, and House of Suns has a lot of the galactic wonder aspects of the Culture books.
Ken MacLeod as a friend of Bank's and a good writer. His Fall Revolution books are probably the best known and explore various radical leftish ideas for organizing society across the nearish future.
And this last is a bit of an oddball but Leonard Richardson's Constellation Games was a book I really enjoyed that starts with aliens coming to Earth looking to help out and our protagonist, a video game reviewer, asking for alien games to review but ends up in a place that resonated with The Culture very strongly.
Neal Asher's Polity Universe will probably ring a lot of the same bells (realpolitik, AIs in charge, a dash of horror).
Probably the biggest difference between the milieus is that in the Polity, machines are just as likely to be suffering from PTSD as organic intelligences.
I just finished reading A Deepness in The Sky by Vernor Vinge which I totally enjoyed and as I read it reminded me of the scale and depth of Banks' Culture novels.
I've seen houses with ground bonded to the copper water/gas pipes...and upon further inspection they were supplied with plastic piping outside of their property boundary. Yikes.
My understanding is that neutral goes to ground at the substation
They are bonded to ground so that if a hot happens to run or chaff up against them, you don't have hot water or gas lines conducting in your house -- a dead short to ground will trigger a breaker overload (near) immediately assuming they are working correctly.
If these pipes were not grounded, they are just pretty scary conductive pieces of metal strewn throughout walls and ceilings, and usually terminating at a place where people physically contact, as well.
> My understanding is that neutral goes to ground at the substation
Close. It's at the transformer.
North American "split phase" power has the neutral center tapped into the transformer winding. The two 120v lines are phased 180° from each other with respect to neutral. Line to line gets you 240v, line to neutral is half that, 120v.
Downstream in the breaker panel itself, the grounding conductor (ground) and grounded conductor (neutral) are bonded at the panel. The ground wire is basically just an alternate path back to the box.
At the distribution point, usually. Some gas networks intended for industrial use don't contain the chemical that makes gas smell as that gas is an input in a chemical process, not burnt for heat.
