Around here we have “half furnished” apartments that include appliances.
I’ve always lived in a place where they are included with the rent. So I don’t have to move them up and down the stairs or the elevator every few years. Also, if they break, the landlord just change them.
To me, winning a refrigerator would be a burden. I’d have to store it and sell it. I’d prefer what it’s worth in money.
I have no idea. Electricity, heat and hot water are included in my rent.
Unfortunately this one depends a lot where you live.
I never owned a car but I live in Canada and public transit sucks. Our provincial government is actively cutting funds to cities’ public transit. And intercity routes are detained by VIA Rail or coach buses >!!<that sucks.
It’s easier for me to go to the airport and in another country than move in my own province.
VIA Rail trains are infrequent, always late, pricey and most employees are jaded. They also don’t take bikes. It’s a problem. Sometimes you can get stuck as a prisoner on the train, without food, water or toilets for multiple hours.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/via-rain-passengers-stuck-1.7311176
Another one was stuck for 12 hours last year.
Coaches are cramped and also have very limited intercity services. The city I need to go to frequently only has three coaches a day at inconvenient times. They are usually full and they charge $15 to bring a bike.
I’ve been car free for 20 years but I’ve come to hate taking the train or coaches here. I’m slowly realizing that my province really really wants me to get a car.
Reminds me of my father. He’s up super early, like 4 am, and to him 7 am is perfectly late enough to run the wood planer on a weekend day.
The hunt for the cofounders of torrent site The Pirate Bay was a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse, spanning several continents. In the end, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm all ended up in prison.
Pourtant c’est plutôt commun au Québec. Ça s’enchaîne pas comme les sacres liturgiques mais c’est bien utilisé. Quelque chose peut être fucké. Une personne peut être fuckée. C’est fucking chiant. Fuck ça! Juste, fuck!
I wasn’t aware of her comment. Googling for it showed me an article in English saying she dropped the F bomb. I thought it was in an interview in English but no, she used it in French, which makes it a bit less impressive.
Pour les gens qui veulent pas googler, voici la citation exacte
« Fuck aux réacs, fuck à cette extrême droite, fuck à tous ceux qui voudraient nous enfermer dans la guerre de tous contre tous ! »
Indeed
Where is the big LCD screen that I’ve been hearing about?
I’m not a fan but from what I’ve heard they are pretty disappointed that the North American version is displayed on a giant LCD screen instead of being projected.
EDIT: Apparently it’s an LED screen: https://exclaim.ca/music/article/hatsune-miku-downgraded-from-hologram-to-led-screen-at-vancouver-tour-opener
I do try to be aware of my water supply. If I’m in a place where water is limited by default, like having a well, or when in a Caribbean country, I’ll be careful as I know others will depend on that source in the very near future. But I live in Canada and from my immediate point of view, the St-Lawrence and the Great Lakes are not going to be dry soon. The only scarcity here is the energy required to pump the water (also provided by water), and its treatment.
And I do understand that our little collective efforts do add up. However, the issues are systemic. Only in a single region of my province (a region!), around 18 corporations and businesses are using more than 75 000 litres a day. We know just because they have to report it past that point. It adds up to billions of litres in a year. For a single region. The provincial government here also allows corporations to just pump the ground water for about $35 CAD by million of litres.
So again, I know that I could make a difference, if we all really tried. But because of the system, and since the pandemic, I’ve lost faith in our societies. I don’t think most people care. While all hiding in our places a few years ago, while the production slowed down, people have seen the changes in nature, the air clean up… and they said fuck it we just want to go back to how it was before.
Just seeing multiple police cars running their engines 24/7 to stalk and bully some oh so dangerous anti-genocide students made me see that any effort to reduce air pollution on my part will be nullified by the system in general. It doesn’t matter if I have car or not, if I recycle plastic while it’s produced in the first place, or if I try to save a few litres of water while Nestlé… sigh.
Sorry but… yeah.
Yes I let it run. Because honestly, I don’t care. People will try make you feel guilty over using water while continuing to make excuses to drive everywhere and why they really need an electric car to “save the planet”. Oh and please recycle while the city that collects the recycling sends it to the dump because this industry is not profitable. And use less water because giant tech companies are going to need it in order to cool and power some more AI servers.
I never owned a car and have driven only once in 40 years. But I know that whatever I do individually to reduce the amount of pollution in the air, it is absolutely useless and pointless. The army or the police will annihilate a lifetime of individual efforts in one day, or even a few hours. I could get a car right now and 90% of people would probably tell me I did the right thing, as a car is sooo useful. No problem as long as it’s electric!
So uuh, I let the water run when I feel like it.
I already replied and I’m sorry if seem to insist but I want to add on the subject and myth of “Elon Musk being a genius” and “contributing to society”, and went over the part about internet, and electric cars in general.
I’m glad you can have internet in a rural area, really. However, doing it via a constellation of satellites instead of having a robust ground network is posing certain issues for the future.
The size and scale of the Starlink project concerns astronomers, who fear that the bright, orbiting objects will interfere with observations of the universe, as well as spaceflight safety experts who now see Starlink as the number one source of collision hazard in Earth’s orbit. In addition to that, some scientists worry that the amount of metal that will be burning up in Earth’s atmosphere as old satellites are deorbited could trigger unpredictable changes to the planet’s climate.
In a paper published in May 2021 in the journal Scientific Reports, Canadian researcher Aaron Boley said the aluminum the satellites are made of will produce aluminum oxide, also known as alumina, during burn-up. He warned that alumina is known to cause ozone depletion and could also alter the atmosphere’s ability to reflect heat.
So as much as this could be useful, it’s also polluting the skies at a very rapid rate, and we’re not sure about the future consequences of it. And depending on where you live, fast and reliable internet in rural areas is often the result of other capitalistic companies not deeming those places profitable enough, and poor governmental regulations on internet as an essential service. We shouldn’t have to launch thousands of satellites in the air for this. But because it’s more profitable this way…
As for electric cars. Call me cynical, and anti car, which I am, but I don’t think the goal is to be ecological. Not anymore. Maybe when the company started with their three first CEOs. But it seems clear to me that Musk used the electric part as an ecological argument for greenwashing and selling to people that want to be “green”.
Electric cars are not to save the climate. They are to save the automobile industry. They want to continue to sell cars because it makes a profit. Electric cars are still posing an ecological threat, are still polluting the environment because of particles from the tires, are still killing millions of animals and people every year, and are still wasting vast quantities of space for parking lots, which are often not permeable.
And of course, people in rural areas will need cars, even if I don’t like them. But most people live in cities and Musk seem to be deliberately trying to delay public transit projects by announcing always soon-to-be-revolutionary technology like the Hyper Loop that has ben watered down multiple times to end up as a glorified LED lit electric car tunnel. Or the FSD which is not “full” “self” “driving”.
Again, I don’t like cars, don’t like to drive, and don’t have one. So I once was excited to see how the robotaxi part of things would evolve. But it’s been many many years and it’s obvious that I won’t be going from a city to a rural area soon, using a robotaxi or a self-driving car. I still need a driver’s licence for FSD. And robotaxis that do exist won’t go very far outside a city.
Also, if Musk is all about the environment with Tesla, why is he now trying to court people on the other side of the political spectrum; the side that doesn’t care about this?
Yes, electric cars are part of the solution, but cities need more public transit and micro mobility, not more cars (but electric and self-driving)! I’m sorry to say but it’s a lot of greenwashing, empty promises, and personality cult. The contributions to society are, I think, exaggerated.
Paypal is not from Musk, and he was eventually ousted when he tried to rebrand it to X.
The company was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Fieldlink, later it was renamed Confinity, a company which developed security software for hand-held devices. When it had no success with that business model, it switched its focus to a digital wallet.
In 2000, Musk had become CEO after the merger of his X.com and Confinity, the venture-backed company co-founded by Peter Thiel that owned the PayPal program that was a more popular money-transfer service than the one offered by Musk. The board ousted Musk as CEO and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000.
Tesla is also not of his own. He pretty much just bought an already working company.
He certainly made it his own over the years, investing early on and then overseeing its growth from niche luxury carmaker to mass production, adding on a solar business, and pushing self-driving technologies. However, the tech titan – and now the world’s richest man – was actually Tesla’s 4th CEO when he took that role in October 2008.
I have no idea about Space X, but Paypal and Tesla are absolutely not from Elon Musk. He just happened to cross roads with those companies and invest his emerald money in those.
If he contributed to those companies, it’s via money, not ideas and intellect.
I use them to worsen my personal impact on climate change, since those things are consuming vast quantities of energy. It makes me feel more manly to know that I’m contributing to the slow destruction of our habitat every time I use them. It’s like having a second SUV to go to the closest corner store multiple times a day. These changed my life for the better, made it easier, and I can’t live without them now.
My bash scripts. They are saving me lots of time at work, performing screen scraping, filling reports and monitoring old servers.
At home they are making backups and automating repetitive tasks.
I just love shell scripting in general. I should probably own a shirt that says “go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script”.
Yeah, the others were unremarkable but the first one made an impression on me.
That’s excellent for their clients. I’m guessing it set a precedent and the industry stopped trying anything else.
I didn’t follow the most recent developments here in Canada but AFAIK, a decade ago the industry tried to sue individuals that were “pirating”, and lost because they couldn’t proof that an IP could be associated with a single person, or something like that. Then the industry pretty much stopped trying to sue individuals from that point. They still send the threatening letters, but they don’t do anything else because past experiences with our courts didn’t go well for them.
Of course, there is a very very slim chance that the industry will try to sue a few individuals to scare others and create a new precedent, but it’s going to be a civil suit because it’s not even criminal here.
Why is it sad? No lawn to care about. No snow to remove in winter. No garbage day. No electricity bill. No roof or windows to change. No water heater to worry about.
I much prefer to rent than be stuck owning a condo where I have to deal with the other owners and plan maintenance. And I wouldn’t want an “affordable” house that is much too big, in a suburb or in the middle of nowhere, where a car would be a necessity, and another thing to own (or rather pay for).
As far as I am concerned, owning a home is a social construct. A goal imposed on us by capitalism. Our collective dream, should be to own a home in the middle of nowhere before we’re too old to have a family, with obviously, a car! But I never wanted to have a “death pledge”, nor a family, nor a house, nor a stupid condo. Renting is perfectly fine for a whole lot of people. It’s not something to be sad about. The only sad thing is that we don’t have enough cheap housing of any kind for everyone.