Yup here in Canada the gas station or "co-op" is the hub of a small town. It's where you get your mail, groceries, snacks, smokes, pizza and sandwiches, farm supplies, and lean up against the counter and drink coffee and chat with the neighbours and staff. Oh yeah and they have gas, but you'd better move your truck before you pour your coffee or the next guy who needs gas is gonna be pissed at you.
I have spent far more time socializing at gas stations than bars. See the example "Corner Gas"
Note that aside from the "park" which you could call "everywhere around here", I am 2 hours of highway travel away from everything on the list. Except the gas station, which is a half-hour drive on gravel/dirt roads.
Needless to say I can see how fuckcars appeals to city folk, but there is no other practical transportation system for us farmers who live way out here. Without a vehicle, you will actually die. I like to go visit my city friends and walk to the bar, though :D
Other things like what, driving the car? Chatting with your passengers? Orienting your cheeseburger properly? Hopefully you can handle all of these at once and still not miss your turn.
Are you so inept in your life that you need your phone to tell you where you're going?
Where I live the roads have no names and the cell coverage is marginal. Some roads are flooded, some covered with snowdrifts... Some haven't been passable for years. I don't know a single person who uses the navigation features of their smartphone.
I'm not talking about paper maps, I use Google maps myself. I do like the feel of a paper map but they aren't practical anymore for the reasons you mentioned.
I even search for my destination and look at where I'm going.
However I don't use the navigation feature. Never seen the need. If I can't find my way around the city without an AI holding my hand, I've got dementia.
I miss the shared culture that broadcast TV and radio gave us. Is the selection today better, with more, higher quality content? Definitely.
But all of us Millenials can quote Simpsons at each other all day even if we've never met. South park, Futurama, King of the Hill, James Bond and other corny action movies. We all saw them so many times, because that's what was on.
That shared culture is worth more than the content actually being good, IMO. Half the time now someone will ask if you've seen a show and you haven't ever heard of it.
Just learn how to navigate properly with a map. You know where you are (hopefully) and you look up where you're going. Do your own routing, it's not hard and once you've been doing it for awhile you'll have instinctive routes you use to link different areas. No location permissions required.
If you use navigation all the time you can become like my ex-wife. Lost without it, in her own city. Exercise your brain by finding your way around with landmarks and signage, I have never used navigation apps because I know my way across three provinces, and can navigate the major cities just based on my instinctive mental maps of them.
Edit: I don't mean a paper map. But being able to use your phone's map software to find a route without it dictating every turn to you is a valuable skill that is apparently getting lost. What are you going to do if your phone dies, will you be able to go anywhere?
Also a winner is "get the fuck out of here, cat" never fails to encourage the cat to stay
Hot tip for farm cat owners, putting masking tape on the back of a cat will not harm it but will prevent it from jumping up temporarily. This should be long enough to put the valve cover back on an engine without trapping the cat inside.
There was at one point a group of people who filmed themselves putting fleshlights in car exhausts and fucking them
There was another, way funnier phase when guys just taped them into the exhaust and started up the car to see them get crazy blown out. Worth a watch if you haven't seen just how stretchy these things are, but now I'm scared to search for "fleshlight in car exhaust"
Man it's been like 6 months since I read it, give me a break lol. "80% of Canada's emissions" is correct, it can just be read either way, and I remembered it the wrong way (as % of combined, not % of emissions)
In 2021, Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 670 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (couldn't find 2023 quickly on mobile but it will be close)
The wildfires that Canada experienced during 2023 have generated the highest carbon emissions in record for this country by a wide margin. According to GFASv1.2 data, the wildfires that started to take place in early May emitted almost 480 megatonnes of carbon
470 / 670 = 72%
To be fair this is not 72% of total emissions including wildfire smoke, but wildfires emitted 72% as much as the Canadian economy did.
So yes, it's not 80% of total emissions - but it's still a massive amount. Putting out these fires would have had nearly the same effect as shutting down our entire country and letting them burn.
Or you could say letting them burn nearly doubled our emissions, and in the hand-wavey world of emissions accounting you would be pretty close.
I believe it was a CBC article last fall that mentioned it, talking about the massive rise in acres burned from previous years. But I can't directly give you a link at this time unfortunately, am on mobile and can't find it either.
Unfortunately they are correct as the carbon tax in Canada is indeed a racket. It's only on consumer consumption.
oil exports, our largest source of emissions, are exempt
agriculture and forestry, the next largest, also exempt
shipping and rail, oh look, exempt
heavy industry can buy phoney carbon credits for $5/ton instead of paying the $65/ton tax. Some of these are for forests that have already burned down
oh yeah the greatest emission source last year, dwarfing all others, 80% of our total emissions came from the massive forest fires for which our policy is just to LET THEM BURN
So the only people who carry the burden of the Canadian carbon tax are the ordinary taxpayers. But hey, the optics are good! Looks very progressive. Despite the fact that Canadian consumer consumption is the definition of a drop in the bucket that is global emissions.
If Canada wanted to make a difference they would nationalize the grid, build nuclear and renewables. Or forget it all for now and just put out the damn fires!
Edit: I forgot one more, as imports are not taxed, the carbon tax actually encourages the import of goods made with coal power in China, over goods made with hydropower in Canada!
Often they have signed leases with themselves. With original owners, holding companies etc.
This is a way of extracting value from a corporation without paying it as a dividend or salary. Dividends go to all shareholders. Lease payments go to one specific one.
So obviously if there's no reason to pay these leases anymore, somebody powerful is going to be very upset.
I actually run my own streaming setup where I stream off my computer through VPN, local buffering on the phone, it works really well in the truck where service is usually not interrupted for that long.
However a lot of people don't realize just how many hours of music you can burn through when you're putting in 12hr+ days in the field or even the mental effort in picking what to play next when your eyes are up front (I don't run autosteer on anything). So just turn on the radio and get the job done!
I wish we had normalized this system for other industries besides aviation.
Cold day in the winter here on the farm, all the batteries are dead, the oil is -40C, the hydraulic fluid is practically solid. Instead of dragging around chargers and plugging in an assortment of dinky heaters, we should have a big shore power system capable of putting out full cranking amps to start a tractor (and no, the "200A start" charger doesn't count).
Bonus points if it could circulate and heat fluids. Oh man, it would be so great, but it would be a lot of work to build and retrofit to everything for lack of a standard.
At least we have one thing in common, I have air cooled Deutz tractors which usually catch on fire once a year and burn off the oil on the heads. You just bring up the revs and let the cooling fan blow out the fire. Get some funny looks from the road with more smoke coming out the side than the top.
That doesn't sound too different from the regular Unix paradigm where all your config is stored in your home directory. I've wiped my root partition many times over the last decade but usually everything in my desktop environment is just the same as it was. Aside from migration of dotfiles into .config which was honestly overdue.
Unless NixOS is kind of like Ansible and is a build script for the whole system, package management and all? Haven't tried it myself.
My concern would be slow buildup of unused packages if that's the case. It's nice to wipe out that junk on an upgrade.
I just bought an old diesel Mercedes that I'm hoping will last me until the next era of car technology. I can't believe how easy it is to work on, almost as if it was designed to be maintained instead of to discourage the owner from doing so.
Currently it's had only 200k of its reputed million miles used up, so it has a long way to go yet!
Yup here in Canada the gas station or "co-op" is the hub of a small town. It's where you get your mail, groceries, snacks, smokes, pizza and sandwiches, farm supplies, and lean up against the counter and drink coffee and chat with the neighbours and staff. Oh yeah and they have gas, but you'd better move your truck before you pour your coffee or the next guy who needs gas is gonna be pissed at you.
I have spent far more time socializing at gas stations than bars. See the example "Corner Gas"
Note that aside from the "park" which you could call "everywhere around here", I am 2 hours of highway travel away from everything on the list. Except the gas station, which is a half-hour drive on gravel/dirt roads.
Needless to say I can see how fuckcars appeals to city folk, but there is no other practical transportation system for us farmers who live way out here. Without a vehicle, you will actually die. I like to go visit my city friends and walk to the bar, though :D