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9·9 days agoI don’t really have a choice as heat is provided by my building, and they just keep it on at all times. So in winter it’s pretty much always around 26/27C except when it gets really cold outside and it “drops” a bit. I do like the heat but it’s a bit too much. Sometimes I have to open a window. 24C would suffice.
They even keep the heat on in summer so it can rise up to 35C during sunny days, but I have a portable AC to fight the building’s system and bring it back down to a “cool” 24/25C.
I was 15 during the 1998 ice storm.
It’s obviously not as dangerous as a tornado or an earthquake or a flood, but it’s still a natural disaster, and disrupted society in the region for weeks and months.
At first it was difficult to realize the size of the catastrophe but then millions went without power, the infrastructure crumbled under the ice and roads became impracticable. The magnitude of the disaster became apparent when the army had to come and help.
Luckily I lived in a rural area at the time and we relied on a wood furnace for heat and hot water. We also shared a generator with other family members so I had power a few hours a day. Compared to people without heat water, food or electricity, it went ok for my family.
It took about 10 days for my region to have power back, while others had to wait for up to 30 days.
This left its mark on me and now I try to be prepared, have batteries charged, solar panels, water reserves, food for a few days, a camping stove, ways to keep warm, etc., just in case.
This reminds me of the efforts made against tobacco and for cleaner air in certain areas, but it also reminds me how we do this for other things too.
Radium toothpaste, lead paint and asbestos curtains.
So, as someone that sees cars as a significant source of pollution, from exhausts, brake pads and tires, I find it ironic that some places are banning outdoor smoking in public areas while it’s perfectly acceptable to drive a gas guzzler around and among those places.
Like, I’m so grateful nobody can smoke around me on that restaurant’s terrace, this way I can fully enjoy breathing the pollution from the thousand of cars around.
I can’t tell for BlueSky because I have not joined yet, but I did create a Mastodon account months ago and I’m not sure what to do with it or how to interact with others. I find it confusing.
On Twitter I was mostly following a bunch of like minded people, liking their stuff, and I could see what they liked too. But on Mastodon there’s uuh, boosts and favorites?! I’m not sure of how it works or what I’m doing. I can’t just “like” posts? I have to boost them?! I found the people I liked that were on Twitter, but on Mastodon I feel like there’s nothing I can do aside from seeing posts and it’s just not attractive.
I can’t stand ads. It’s even worse on TV when they yell them at you. So I actually stopped watching TV in 2009 because I couldn’t stop the ads, and I was tired to have the TV trying to convince me to buy a car every 15 minutes.
If I want to watch something that was on TV, I download it from… * the internet *.
My parents still watch TV and just let the ads blast in the background, and we need to yell over them to talk. I hate it. Then they’re like “oh it’s just like in the ad”. I don’t know how they can tolerate this. I did when I was younger but when I realized that the TV was trying to sell me twice a car in 15 minutes, or about 8 times an hour, I couldn’t help but notice and it’s just really annoying.
Yes, same for me.
I’ve been working nights for about 20 years and it was easier when I was younger. Now that I am in my early 40ies I find it more difficult to just go to bed and sleep.
Some weeks I can keep a steady schedule, sleep during the day and feel well rested, but other weeks I can’t get more than a few hours during the day and feel miserable when I work.
However it’s also changing with seasons and things I do during the weekend. I tend to sleep less in summer because of the heat and the light. Also I go camping during the weekends and have to sleep during the night, then switch back to day sleeping during the week. It’s much easier in winter because it’s always cold and dark and I just stay home.
So, it varies a lot for me.
Yeah pretty often. It goes even further, as in, I don’t want to participate in society, or forced capitalism, in general. I’m aware I’m part of it but I always tried to not be a part of that shitty system. I’m not buying a house, no car, no gas to buy, no superior education, no certifications or high paying job. I just wasted my “potential” and will continue to do so.
To me it looks like a big chuck of people have some sort of Stockholm syndrome towards capitalism and how our society makes us think this is some sort of meritocracy.
That being said, my behaviour can also be linked to my spicy brain. I’m probably neurodivergent but the health system where I live doesn’t help adults with that.
In short, I’m disappointed by what I see around me and I don’t want to join the game. I don’t want to join the competition of poors against poors
4·2 months agoI go camping for an additional night. I already planned to bike and camp to the closest national park one last time before winter, this weekend, but I would gladly add one night to the trip and go right now instead of tomorrow.
4·2 months agoHow’s it feel rest of the world? To have English seep into your language after so many centuries of only having your languages seep into English.
French:
Although, aside from the great vowel shift, we gladly contributed at fucking up English orthography.
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.
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.
The one about the memorial built in advance for a damn disaster that they all saw coming but did nothing about, except for the memorial of the future victims.
This disaster will have been preventable. All of the warning signs are here now. Yet, no one will have fucking done anything about it.
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.
PeOpLe On BiKeS dOn’T StOp On rED LiGhTs! HueHehUhEHUhE!
Meanwhile people driving multi-tons vehicles are not coming to a complete halt at every stop sign and it’s completely fine. People in cars are important. They have places to go. Not like those idiots on bikes that may start ahead on a red light not to get hooked by a car turning right.
Look at all those damn people on bikes not stopping at stop signs:
2·3 months agoThis thread is giving me flashbacks to the times before Unicode, when swapping files between Windows and Linux partitions would have a good chance of fucking up every non-ASCII characters in their names.
There was ways to set it up so the ISO character sets would match, but it was still a giant pain to deal with different ones.
Blessed be Unicode.
I work with IBM i/AS400 servers and those are not exactly the quickest thing to “reboot” (technically an IPL). Especially the old ones. I have access to the HMC/console but even this sometimes takes several minutes (if not dozens) just to show what’s going on.
It’s always a bit stressful to see the codes passing one after the other and then it stops on one and seems to get stuck there for a while before continuing the IPL process. Maybe it’s applying PTFs (updates) or something, and you just have to wait while even the console is blank.
I’ve been monitoring those servers for years and I’m still sometimes wondering if it hanged during the IPL or if it’s just doing its thing, because this part, even with codes, is not very verbose.
Fortunately it’s also very stable so it pretty much always comes back a few minutes after you start wondering why the hell it’s taking so long.
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.
I do that too but only because it’s much easier to help my relatives with Linux than those with Windows.
I even “convert” some people because Llinux is easier for them if I just manage it. I had a neighbor that was using Window on a very old computer, it was slow and choking under the weight of simple updates. Plus, she was always asking me why her computer kept rebooting by itself while it was obviously Windows update. So I installed Mint and all the problems went away.
Anyway I don’t want to have to deal with Microsoft accounts, licenses, office365, the general bloat, the ads, the new versions of Windows… I have enough at work, so if I am going to help on my free time, it has to be on the OS I find easier to deal with.