> I have to contend with Canadian winters, which means opening the window is a valid strategy for a minority of the year unless I buy an expensive heat recovery ventilator. I don’t have a good solution for mitigating carbon dioxide buildup in the winter.

Why describe the solution to a problem, and then say there is no good solution? Do we need to make HRVs more popular, and hope that economies of scale can drive costs down, or are most of the costs already due to unavoidable labor?

> Noise issues are happily easy to control: earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones will generally do the trick. It would be utopic to eliminate bothersome noise from the environment altogether, but it’s not necessary.

Another option is to raise the noise floor of your environment. Copy some brown noise onto an MP3 player, run it through a decent set of speakers, and raise the volume until you can't hear the interfering source.