evranch @ evranch @lemmy.ca

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2

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465

Joined

2 yr. ago

You would be surprised the level to which our healthcare system has degraded in recent years. I'm lucky to have a doctor as my wife's doctor left the country, leaving her searching for a new doctor for years. Nobody is accepting new patients and my daughter is in the same situation so they have to go to walk in clinics if they have any issues.

Acute care is OK but wait times are so long that people are dying in the ER, and you'd better hope you don't have something that requires long term management if you can't find a doctor.

Plus pharmacy and dental have never been covered, and those are a large portion of the average person's healthcare cost, so you still need to carry private insurance.

Long live XMPP!

When you don't want to download a messaging app, you still have SMS...

You all still have SMS

Interesting as anecdotally, here in Canada, I only have one friend or acquaintance who is still married as I approach 40. Feels like the divorce rate in this country is easily higher than 80% after Covid, high inflation, and the stress both put on relationships

Today all they would have to do is stand at the border and yell "We'll give you American citizenship and you can trade your $CAD for $USD at par"

I'll go fetch the white flags

Guessing you weren't around for "the artist formerly known as Prince", this is an ancient reference that the media is getting a kick out of bringing back to life.

5 years with a 40oz "Bubba" thermos bottle. $20 at Walmart. Farm and tradesman duty every day, it bounces around the truck or tractor cab and is covered in dents but still keeps my water cold and doesn't leak. Only failure is a flimsy handle of sorts attached to the lid broke off within weeks so I tied a piece of paracord to it. I loop the paracord over my transfer case lever in the truck so it doesn't bounce out of reach.

The lid is a sort of rubbery plastic and seems super tough. The rest is stainless. Would buy again in a heartbeat

At this point my next TV is just going to be a big monitor plugged into a fanless PC, or the functional equivalent (all smart features disabled, HDMI input only) if I can't find something I like at a good price. A monitor will have better picture, refresh rate and response time as well.

Honestly I do all my IoT stuff in plain code, it's actually simpler IMO than trying to use a graphical functional block type interface like NodeRed. And it's a good way for you to get into coding in a way that you can work with real systems in a fairly safe way.

Check out Python's MQTT library, you can build an event driven MQTT handler pretty easily. You set a list of topics you want to subscribe to and then when a message arrives it will call the message handling function. You can check the topic/payload and act on it as you want, publish other messages or perform other operations.

I like distributed control systems myself where individual nodes subscribe to each other and communicate directly (through the MQTT broker) when possible, plus a couple Python scripts running on the broker system to coordinate operations that can't be easily managed that way.

For example an "sundown" topic can be published by a light sensor in the evening, and then either individual lights can subscribe to it and respond, or a script subscribes and iterates through a list of all the lights that are supposed to be on and sends them a power on command. The first option works with custom built endpoints, the second works to integrate Tasmota or similar where several different node devices may exist with different command schema.

When discussing carbon offsets with the regulator I asked if the buyers would get a refund if their chunk of carbon offset forest burned down in a forest fire.

He laughed and said they should but there's not a chance, because the system only exists to legitimize emissions. In fact many of them have already burned. And that's right from a government agent.

Kelp farming or ocean seeding are the only natural carbon capture that make sense, but we aren't doing them. That and paying people not to destroy existing forests and grasslands, but that seems hard to sell as well.

It already is! We're proud to maintain our pastures in their native state and we grazed them rotationally with long rest to emulate the way the buffalo used to graze them long ago. They're a mix of grass, brush, trees and slough. Even though my stock is gone we plan to background some steers or heifers occasionally just for the sake of the land as it needs grazing. However this will allow us to plan grazing around the grass instead of being forced to put our own animals out for need of feed.

That was part of the reason I initially thought I could get some carbon offset credits simply for maintaining them in that state, because we are supposed to be encouraging people to maintain wild prairie, and the land does soak up significant carbon every year just by doing its natural thing.

However as mentioned the system is a fraud. The only way to get carbon credits is to break it up and then rewild it after the damage has been done. They told me I could easily generate credits this way by destroying my native habitat and then replanting it... Which is absolutely a crime against nature.

Carbon credits are a racket, tell your friends

In this particular case it's "maybe"... I farm on the edge of the Palliser Triangle, famous for drought cycles over the centuries.

However climate change is definitely shifting the dynamics of the seasons here, with rainfall getting front-loaded into the "useless" months from February - May and scarcely a drop during the summer when we need it. It's the same volume or possibly even more but it's useless for crops or pastures.

I've pivoted to selling hay as it's capable of growing decently off of the runoff pulse. Those with suitable land are going all in on irrigation as the spring runoff can be stored in lakes and reservoirs. It's an odd situation here as the ground often stays frozen until after the snow melts, so very little snow water soaks in.

I farm in Canada which has a carbon tax, $65/ton. We're in the grip of terrible drought and I've sold all my livestock. Thought maybe I could do the world a little good and maybe make some money off my empty pastures by planting some trees or something.

After talking to the regulators it was obvious it's a HUGE fraud. There's so much red tape, and by the time you're done talking to them you find out that you can make $1-5/ton for sequestering carbon. And due to flat fees in the regulatory structure, it's really just designed to funnel this money to huge landowners and not to encourage anyone who cares to plant trees or do anything really.

So working Canadians are forced to pay $65/ton to heat their homes and drive to work, but big emitters buy bogus credits for under $5 and continue to pour out pollution while claiming to be "carbon neutral". It's the Canadian way

Sometimes a guy just wants to not have to cook and to just go eat some god damn chicken strips

Apparently even the simplest pleasures in life are luxuries now.

I've heard good things about them online but sadly they aren't supported by my Canadian carrier at this time, and as my carrier gatekeeps services like VoLTE and VoWifi with their firmware for some reason it's not really worth the risk of importing one especially at full price...

But I'm hoping they make it out here soon to provide us with another rugged option for sure. I've been so happy with Sonim for years that I'm quite disappointed in their latest offering.

I'm a farmer and need a rugged phone that can fall off a tractor into an irrigation ditch on a regular basis. So I buy Sonim, end of story. Usually replace them every 5 years as they never get updates and the Android version starts getting obsolete.

Unfortunately the Sonim XP10 looks to be not as sturdy as previous versions and they have walked back their previous bulletproof warranty. So I guess I'm in the market for a new ultra-rugged phone, luckily the XP8 I'm using should last for years yet

True but this was a reply to someone who wanted it easy, they're not running a seedbox they're just looking to leech and maybe seed back a reasonable ratio if the torrent is active. And that's totally achievable without port forwarding.

Same, built a PC this year, Intel CPU and Radeon GPU. "Dual boot" with win10 for gaming but after booting back and forth a couple times to test performance it just stays in Linux 24/7. At least I did a big NTFS partition with my Steam library on it (Proton emulated games will run on both!), so it's not like I'm out a ton of HDD space for the unused Windows system.

Use Mullvad, $5/month prepaid and you can even mail them cash if you have no other way to pay. No subscription or other scammy stuff. Your entire login is a single auto-generated number, and if you use their app (Open source, 3rd party audited) you just punch it in and boom, VPN time.

I think from signup to using the service was under 5 minutes!

For the power users you can log in on their site and generate Wireguard keys, which you can use with Docker to wrap up all your piracy stuff inside a container that can only access the VPN connection for safety and convenience. But you don't have to do that, you can just run the app and put everything through the tunnel when you're downloading.

I would say purely "because it works". SpaceX has received a ton of funding, for sure. But they've delivered incredible advancements in reusable rocketry, methalox fuel cycles, cost to orbit and much more, while SLS was literally a flying scrap pile that was late and over budget despite being reused 1980s tech.

Let's not pretend that NASA rockets were really public work either, with most of the development and construction done by contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Aerojet Rocketdyne and more... But these old guard companies were happy to keep turning out the same old product with incremental improvements.

SpaceX could have been a tremendous failure or success with the risks they've taken, and we're all lucky it turned out to be a success (so far...). It says it all when they are going to launch Orion on SLS but Starship is going to be waiting there at the moon for them. Well, if it doesn't blow up on the pad.