Meanwhile I’ve always been the one that takes the smallest possible meal at McDonald’s, and would think that 5 nuggets with fries and drinks is just enough. In fact I hate going to restaurants in general because portions are always much too big for me. I can’t usually take doggy bags, and I feel like I’m wasting most of what I’m served. I can’t recall even finishing a plate in a (real) restaurant; there’s always too much. I’m always like “oh it was really tasty but I can’t eat much more!”

How do people intent to power cars during the apocalypse? I guess electric cars can be charged with solar or wind but it’s not a small battery to charge. As for ICEs, stations are going to run out of gas after a few hours, and AFAIK, gas has a limited shelf life so making reserves for the long term would be a problem.

As someone that doesn’t get cars nor the “freedom” they supposedly confer, I also never got that part about an apocalyptic future. To me, a car is already a burden, and I can’t see why I would want one during the apocalypse.

I don’t know for dogs but I read that other species have different “accents” depending on their group and where they live.

Apparently, animals like dolphins, orcas and whales have different “accents”. And birds apparently also sign differently depending on their group and location.

Like, some ducks quack differently, from one region to another. I don’t think this can hamper simple communication, but there is apparently variation in their calls.

It depends what. Plastic recycling is mostly a scam/fraud and does not fix nor change much.

The industry has long known that plastics recycling is not economically or practically viable, the report shows. An internal 1986 report from the trade association the Vinyl Institute noted that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution [to plastics], as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of”.

In 1989, the founding director of the Vinyl Institute told attendees of a trade conference: “Recycling cannot go on indefinitely, and does not solve the solid waste problem.”

Despite this knowledge, the Society of the Plastics Industry established the Plastics Recycling Foundation in 1984, bringing together petrochemical companies and bottlers, and launched a campaign focused on the sector’s commitment to recycling.

In 1988, the trade group rolled out the “chasing arrows” – the widely recognized symbol for recyclable plastic – and began using it on packaging. Experts have long said the symbol is highly misleading, and recently federal regulators have echoed their concerns.

Cited article, and the report’s source

Recycling paper, metal and glass will help and make a difference, keeping in mind that we need to use less in the first place. However plastic recycling is broken by default, pretty much everywhere.

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.

Four to five weeks of vacation is pretty standard in Europe and I don’t think it has anything to do with productivity. AFAIK, a German or Belgian would pretty much get the same amount of vacation. I’m in Montreal and the standard by law here is two weeks but my contract with a local employer is giving me four weeks. And, I’m still working when I’m working, even if I have some vacation time at some point?!

I took eight weeks this year. So you’re saying I (or a French person?) am not getting anything done when I work, because I took some extended vacation time?

I know this behaviour from big corporations is not exclusive to French companies but my type of work allows me to work from home and I’ve never seen a company despise WFH so much than my once French employer.

This was before the pandemic and I had the habit of working from home with my previous employer when I was sick. When I changed employer to work for a French hosting company in Montreal, they were adamantly against WFH. Even if sick. They preferred that you missed a day (or two, you know, take your time to recover!1!!) from work, taking “generous” sick days, than letting anyone from the lower ranks WFH. This was a pretty big red flag for me. Anyway their work culture was pretty toxic and I ended up quitting after a few months, but the “no work from home even if sick” policy is the first thing that hit me when I started there.

My current employer allows me to WFH and I’ve been looking a bit around to see if I could find something else, but they mostly all seem to require some sort of hybrid schedules at the office now, which obviously sucks.

So, where is Saddam Hussein?

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.

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This 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.

In Québec there is a moving company that has been using the same jingle and phone number for decades. Ir’s really catchy and sticks in your head.

Le clan Panneton, pour déménager, faut composer le 937-0707.

The ad from 1997: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBIADSFYoVk

The ad from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_VYYkFMcFk

Ask anyone in QC what’s the Clan Panneton’s number and they will start signing it.

I smoke my cannabis with a pipe. I’ve discovered that grinding it and putting it in a travel bottle makes it easy to carry around and as a bonus, also easy to dispense it in my pipe’s bucket.