All those poor Tamagochis

Random fact: it's because of a rich entrepreneur from Portland that my small native town in Québec got a railway in 1850. The first international railway was between Portland and Montréal. It still exists.

The line was proposed as a connection between Portland and Sherbrooke, Canada East, in 1844 by Portland entrepreneur John A. Poor. Portland was desperate to connect its ice-free port with Montreal, and Maine was at risk of being eclipsed by a similar proposal running from nearby Boston, Massachusetts.

It always depends to what you compare. I visited Germany twice for a total of about 15 days, taking trains mostly every day, and I don't recall any major issues. I read online since my first visit in 2016 that it got much worse so I expected at least some issues when I went back in 2024, but it went well, either in RE trains or in ICE. Of course, it's a very small sample and I'm Canadian, so anything more than five trains a day and not yielding to freight is just magical to me.

Ambulances and emergency vehicles. I live in a busy place and there's lots of ambulances and emergency vehicles passing on the streets in front of my place. Several times a day. And the most annoying ones are the ambulances just switching the siren on and off every few millisecond.

I understand the need for expediency but those loud sirens are extra loud so that car drivers can hear them while sitting in their insulated bubbles, while the rest of us have to suffer through that noise. If emergency vehicles were so important, they would have emergency lanes in places where they have to go frequently, so they don't get stuck behind traffic and don't have to lay on their insanely loud horns and jerk their sirens.

In a song from RBO in the 90ies:

On a une police qui tapoche sur tous les noirs qui ont l'air croches, pis quand les noirs se sont tous sauvés, les policiers se vengent sur les gais.

It didn't change in 30 years and won't change any time soon, because ACAB.

I'm always a bit amazed of how things have progressed and on what Linux can still run.

This is an extreme example, but it's also possible to run a modern Linux OS on SBCs like a Raspberry Pi Zero, and still have something somewhat usable depending on your needs.

To have a computer half the size of a credit card with more RAM than my full tower rig from 2001 is amazing. And it can even run software from that era with dosbox or wine.

My 15 years old laptop is still supported and can still read 1080p on YouTube, using Linux.

Linux devs just recently decided to drop support for 486 CPUs and some early Pentiums.

There's just no competition.

No. Nothing matters. He said it himself.

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?

TBF this is not really about programming. You have to be knowledgeable about how computers work and their history for this one.

As someone not from the US, I can't say how much I appreciate the last part of his video. As much as I understand why YouTubers want to "keep politics out of entertainment", it's disappointing and makes me lose interest in some US content because it seems like they are ignoring what's going on around them.

And about the batteries, that's unfortunately an argument I sometimes hear from skeptics. "What are we going to do with all those batteries?" they ask. I explain that they can mostly be recycled and like to ask what are we going to do with all the CO2 in the air, but apparently it's different. Ironically one of those persons is my father, that has a cabin with a solar system that I installed for him. He originally bought a generator but since it's very noisy to run only for some lights, he prefers using the battery bank powered by a few solar panels on the roof. I'd show him this video but he doesn't speak English and it's probably a lost cause anyway.

We can only hope that at least a few people can be influenced by this video; both parts.

It's not like there's an international cabal of human traffickers and pedophiles run by billionaires to go after.

Yeah. My grandmother is in that situation. She is a grandmother to me but she's a great great grandmother for some of my family.

She moved in a nursing home more than a decade ago expecting to be there for a few years but she's now 98, losing eyesight, hearing and mobility, and hopes it will end at some point. When she caught covid we thought she might have got what she wanted, but no.

He didn't forget. He never cared to learn it in the first place. He got what he wanted and it's all that matters. The name of the woman that gave him the prize is unimportant. Only Trump is important.

Not being from the US, I was flabbergasted when I learned how voting laws are working there. Where I live we're all automatically registered by the government. They send a card with your name and your address. If there is an error, or if people don't get a card, they can manually register or correct the error. And we all stay registered unless we move or there is an error. That's it.

I'm in my mid life and had to register once in my 20ies because I moved a lot. Otherwise the government just automatically registers me. Nobody can challenge that except the election's office. They decide who meets the requirements to vote or not. Not some random conservative asshole that thinks people are not white enough. Democracy in the US seems like a joke.

Ironically, saying thank you to machines is wasting energy and costing millions.

https://www.usatoday.com/...

I wonder if just like Brits and French, Unitedstaters emigrating elsewhere will call themselves "expats" instead of immigrants.

We, white people of the west, can go anywhere in the world for work, affordability and/or safety without considering ourselves immigrants.

Many years ago I was chatting with someone from Malmö. He was complaining how immigrants were "taking over his city". But when I mentioned that I, a Canadian, would also like to move to Sweden, he told me it would be fine, that he would not consider me "an immigrant" because I'm from the west.

Anyway, I understand why anyone would want to leave. It's just that it seems the vocabulary used is different for different people.

Hey, that's me. More or less.

I have been living paycheck to paycheck for about two decades but things changed during the pandemic. I got a substantial raise, stopped smoking, and kept the same micro apartment in a high rise for years. I also live alone, refuse to pay for a car, and don't have any children.

So I was able to put some money aside in the last years and now, I take extended vacations (I took 8 weeks this year), I travel, and treat myself with what I want.

My sister wonders how I can afford to take that much time off work to go to different countries and think that I just recently found interest in traveling but really, it's just because I can afford it now.

It's interesting to see that China is taking this seriously and might ban them, while the US forgets more and more about "car safety".

If China bans it, most manufacturers will have to follow their rules if they want to sell cars there, including Tesla.

It's not much in the grand scheme of things but it's nice to see that at least one major country is considering this.

Maybe if we have cheaper gas, burn more oil, buy even more stuff, and concentrate on having a strong economy, things will get better?