Star Trek

So we’re just spreading trash in the environment and feeling good about it because it can be reused by other animals?

This just made me look up and learn about the environmental impact of tennis balls.

Every year, an estimated 300 million tennis balls are manufactured globally, and most of them end up in landfills. The rubber core is pressurized with air or nitrogen to give the ball its signature bounce. However, rubber itself is a challenging material to recycle, especially when combined with pressurization and other materials. The felt covering is partially synthetic (nylon), which contributes to the microplastic pollution problem. Synthetic fibers shed during play, adding to global plastic waste.

I’m just pointing out that cheaper energy means people tend to use more. I’m very much for renewable energy and against AI. Just that we also need to find ways to be much more efficient with it. I live in a place with “cheap” renewable energy and we use more per capita than most of the rest of the world. So it’s just something to keep in mind. I’m saying it’s excellent to have renewable energy, it’s excellent to have it as cheap as possible, but it can also lead to waste and pollution in other ways.

You don’t have to make a false dichotomy where it’s either one or the other.

EDIT: Just to give you an example. People know here that our energy is “renewable” and cheap. So when we’re asked to reduce usage during peaks, there’s a few people yelling at the top of their lungs that we just have to build more dams, flood more land, and that “water will always flow in the turbines anyway”.

Have you read it? Translated or in French? Because this is a list of facts, with a conclusion addressing what you are pointing out. It’s literally from the government of the province.

Le Québec, avec son climat hivernal rigoureux, connaît des besoins élevés en puissance électrique lors de périodes de grand froid, alors que toute la population doit se chauffer simultanément. Ces épisodes, appelés périodes de pointe de puissance, ne durent que quelques heures par année, mais exercent une pression sur le réseau.

Translated: The province of Québec, with its cold climate, has high energetic needs during the peaks of extreme cold periods, because the whole population has to heat their homes at the same time. Those periods, called power peaks, are only lasting for a few hours every year, but are putting pressure on the network.

Also, those places have summer. Most of the population in Québec and Norway don’t live in an arctic tundra.

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If the electricity bill would be lower people would use more energy and switch to electric cars real fast. I’m sure some people would not change their habits, but I’m inclined to think a lot of people would just use more and care a bit less about trying to use it as efficiently as possible.

Just take cars as an example. Everyone wants low gas prices, but when gas prices are low, people are buying bigger cars that consumes more gas/energy. Another example are places with renewable energy powering the grid, having cheaper electricity, but also ending up using more per person.

The province of Québec is one of the biggest consumer of electricity per inhabitant in the world, behind Iceland and Norway. Source in French.

Those places have super high percentages of cheap renewable energy being generated, but they also consume much more per inhabitant. Sure, if we cover the earth in solar panels, reservoirs, tap geothermal, and have enough energy to waste for everybody, and every manufacture. But this takes resources, space, batteries, and ends up polluting too. The less we need, the better it is for everyone.

I’m not saying we don’t need renewable nor deserve lower bills. Just that the actual system of consumption cannot only be reduced to “more cheap renewable energy”. I’m in Québec and energy is mostly renewable and relatively cheap here. But we also can’t just continue to build giant reservoirs visible from space to quench our insatiable appetite for electricity. We’ll have to learn to use less energy too; be more efficient with what we have. Not just convert everything to renewable and call it a day.

Fuck cars. I’m car free and glad to be. My bike doesn’t spy on me. And I don’t really fancy getting an e-bike that requires an app just to work. The only thing spying on me is my Android phone.

And gamers will still pay for them, apparently.

Seeed - Ding

Yeah, about that.

My province just had a very dry summer with very low water levels. Some wells dried up.

At some point farmers were wondering how they would be watering their crops if it got any worse.

Or what about flash flooding, either on flat ground, or in mountain towns? Or wild fires?

There’s certainly places safer than others, but a lot more people are going to be affected than just coastal inhabitants.

I’m undecided with modern GUI because most modern software is just a web page now. And it will offer you a choice between boring light mode and boring dark mode.

I miss the days of GTK2 with hundreds of themes. It was one of the main reason I switched to Linux; the customization. I don’t know how many hours I must have spent on gnome-look.org. Now I don’t even bother to try new themes and just use Fluent-Dark. My desktop is boring and looks like everyone else that has a dark mode. I really really miss GTK2 and all my favourite themes I can’t use anymore. I tried making my own and played around with Oomox but it’s not the same.

But one thing that I do prefer to be GUI now is IRC. Now that there are web clients (sigh) that can display images and videos directly in the channels, chatting in text mode only is kind of annoying with all the links we are sharing.

I’m dumb. I wanted to try with French and was like nouuuus?! But then I realized that we have oui. And it can even be used cromulently in this exact situation. Ouiiii!

Best is suggestive. It’s a weird movie but I wish there was more of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. Maybe a sequel since the movie ended on that possibility. But it’s probably going to end up repetitive, if not recursive.

And its an idea that has been explored in different other movies and series anyway. So as much as I liked the style of that movie, upon reflection, maybe it should just stay where it was left.

I still use IRC. There are now modern web clients like The Lounge or Convos that can display/share images in the channels, keep history and push notifications. Apparently Convos can do video chat but I never tried it. Unfortunately I’m not aware of screen sharing features for any of these.

So on a very simple setup, you need an IRC server, then install and connect one of those clients to your server, and use them through a web browser, either on a computer or on a phone.

It’s obviously not entirely Discord-like, but it is a simple way to chat and share images.

Of course they did that, they are Microsoft. You will do what they want, for easiness and convenience.

They started doing that in 2019 for all the the Office products. Here is the official annoucement. Now every Office installation that is up to date will force users to use OneDrive as the default save location. Even Office 2016. They are retroenshittifying.

Yes, but it’s also the nature of how those platforms work. It would be hard to get new subscribers without popular and active posts. If mods of small communities are removing posts and comments from people that diverge from the main opinion there, growth will be difficult.

It is something I try to keep in mind before commenting on a random thing I see when browsing all communities instead of just what I’m subscribed to. Check the community before making a comment, to make sure I’m not insulting fans of something I don’t like.

I was too anti car for /r/fuckcars. When on that sub I was told multiple times that some people had no choice but to use a car and all their excuses were valid, always. So there were lots of comments in an anti car sub just saying “I would lOoOOvVe to ditch my car but its just impossible because…”

As a car free person, it felt like I didn’t belong in that sub. Plus, there was the API scandal at that time and that meant RedditIsFun would stop working eventually. So I abandoned reddit for smaller communities here.

Unfortunately lemmy has kind of the same issue reddit had. When the post of a small sub/community gains traction, it gets popular beyond its small community and gets “invaded” by people browsing “all”, resulting in a majority of comments from users not subscribed to that community.

You must be aware that they made OneDrive the default location to save files. The ‘Save as’ dialog box now proposes OneDrive as the default location. So it’s more steps than before to achieve the same thing, just because we have to ‘go around’ OneDrive.

It’s not a question of not knowing how to do it, it’s a question of now being forced to go around their crap, shoved in our faces.

No no no. There will always be solutions to the problems they cause.

They kill billions of animals every year but we can build nature overpasses. They kill millions of humans every year but we can blame pedestrians for wearing headphones or not looking properly. The tires shed about a quarter of all microplastics in the environment in Canada but surely we will find a technological solution for that eventually. The parking spaces still cause heat islands but we can just cover them with solar panels. Parking also causes flooding because of impervious surfaces but we can just resurface all of them with new materials.

And soon cars will all run on hydrogen and be totally environmentally friendly. And soon cars will all run on electricity and be totally environmentally friendly. Everyone on the planet just has to buy a new car eventually, keep buying cars, and spend (buy!) energy to move them everywhere they go. But they will be environmentally friendly! Except for all the other issues but surely we will find solutions for them. Save the planet by getting an electric car, the biggest and most expensive consumption object, and have a taste of freedom when paying to fill it with energy.

/s just in case.

The article doesn’t mention any “miles per hour”. Do people in Australia use mph?

In December, the NSW premier, Chris Minns, announced a plan to halve ebikes’ power – and therefore reduce their top speeds – to 250 watts…