The store nearest me will deliver whatever you want for a $30 flat rate. I have a minivan so I can still carry a lot of stuff myself but for that price it lets me avoid messing with removing my seats so it’s worth it

Funnily enough, in my town there used to be a Future Shop, and then a Best Buy sprung up in the new commercial district, but apparently couldn’t compete because it closed 2 years later. Then about a year later Best Buy bought Future Shop and they re-branded the existing Future Shop to Best Buy.

Yeah, ToysRUs is alive and well in Canada. I have no idea that the bottom-right one is.

Connecting more people to the Internet, giving more options in rural areas.

I’ve personally been a Starlink subscriber for about a year while I was traveling, and it really was a game-changer. Rock-solid internet in remote places, fast enough to have Zoom calls on, all for a price that’s only about twice what I currently pay now that I’m back home (people complaining about Starlink’s price don’t know what they’re talking about, this is 100+ Mbps statellite internet we’re talking about. Other options are ten times the cost for less than a tenth of the speed).

It just drives me nuts when I see progress being blocked for stupid reasons. Examples in other areas would be wind power (“but what about the birds”), electric cars (“but cobalt = slave labour”, “akschually, when you charge the car with the dirtiest fuel possible and take into account all externalities it’s less green than just the tailpipes of a gas car”), space exploration (“the potable water sprayed on the launch pad leaked into the environment, here’s a fine”). There’s some stuff that’s been disproved years ago by anyone with half a brain that keeps being repeated, it’s infuriating.

“Just asking questions”… It’s just a bit suspicious that as soon as the safety aspect was proven to not be an issue, you immediately switched to another angle.

But to answer your question, yes, vapourizing someting made of metal and plastics in the upper atmosphere could certainly count as pollution, and we don’t really know the effects it might have on it because no studies have yet been done.

What has been done, though, is a study of how many meteors fall on the earth every hear: early estimates in the 60s were of about 100,000 tons per year, but further studies (1) showed this was grossly underestimated and more accurate values would be about triple that.

Starlink has launched 6,054 satellites in orbit (2) that total about 3,838,042 kg or a bit below 4000 tons. Even if they all fell in the atmosphere tomorrow, it’d only amount to less than 2% of this years’ “stuff” that burns up in the atmosphere (the rest coming from natural sources). Honestly I don’t think that’s significant, but I’ll concede that we don’t really know for sure. I just think that there are other more immediate, much worse sources of pollution that people should direct their anger towards.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110512174406/http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Moon-Dust-and-the-Age-of-the-Solar-System.pdf 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches

Man, you really are looking for any excuse to hate on SpaceX, right?

If you’re that worried about pollution, just look up the mass of a starlink satellite vs the mass a coal plant burns every hour… Even if the satellite ends up vapourizing as 100% pollution, I’m pretty sure it’s orders of magnitude below other industries like coal power or aviation.

They’d burn up / vapourize. This is partly why it took them so long to get their space lasers to work (for satellite to satellite communications); these things usually are usually based on a crystal that wouldn’t burn and could hurt someone when the satellite falls.

Shortest answer is that even if all Starlink satellites suddently exploded at the same time for no reason, they’d fall back to Earth in a matter of weeks. They’re waaaay lower than the other satellites you’re thinking of (see discussion on geo-stationary satellites for why), so they need to be actively pushed every few days just to stay up. They’re so low they’re still subject to atmospheric drag.

Respect has always been at the core of my wife and I’s parenting philosophy. Children are fully-qualified persons in their own right, they’re not an extension of their parents. They have their own tastes, dreams and aspirations. They’ll test to find the limits of what they can do, and it doesn’t really matter where it’s actually set but it’s really important that they do find it. They can understand why we have to say no to them, and if you communicate the reason they’ll respect it.

All of this continues well into their teenage years, BTW.

I keep telling my wife we have to write a book on parenting, but she thinks it’ll be too controversial (especially our views around daycare and schooling)…

Gen Alpha’s main influence for slang is Cocomelon.

Owner of 2 pinecils here, there are buttons and a display that shows the current temperature and other stuff. I only just learned that there’s an app, it works more than fine on its own, out of the box.

I got that specific iron because I needed to power it from 12v, and it works very well on the USB PD power supply I already have for my laptop.

Docker’s secret that most “getting started” tutorials seem to miss is docker-compose.yml. Who wants to type these long-ass commands to start containers? I always just create a compose file, and then docker compose up -d.

Dockerfile is for developers, you shouldn’t need more than a docker-compose.yml for self-hosting stuff.

Yeah, there’s some stuff on the side, but get a can of chef boyardee, a sealed packet of crackers and a pop tart, and that’s pretty much it. Add some Qwik and Gatorade powder for hydration, maybe. At 250$ per 12-pack it’s more expensive than eating out.

I’m involved with the Canadian cadet program, and these are the exact ones we eat when we go on expédition, they’re nothing fancy. They are convenient, though.

It’s still basically canned food, it’s just that the can is a pouch. It’s more expensive too.

Well, someone did it at least partly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdPRhkbeQJk

Altough in this case it’s to improve acceleration, not anything related to privacy.

That’s exactly what I was saying a few comments up. There’s a use-case for cars, and there needs to be a way to get into the city when you arrive by car. Any good solution will probably involve parking the car somewhere outside city limits, otherwise it’ll probably be co-opted by suburbanites.

I’m not talking about commutes, I’m talking about going to the city for an appointment/shopping/conference/concert/sightseeing/etc.

But yeah, cycling the last mile works in the Netherlands between cities or suburbs because they are relatively well served by inter-city transit, but what about places like this random dairy farm . Can this guy just take his bike to downtown Amsterdam?

Canadian here. It really depends on if it’s a cultural use or something the government might have an influence on through legislation. They can force industries to label packages in metric, but they can’t force grandma to change her manually-transcribed recipes. The other big influence is obviously our neighbours to the south. A lot of industries haven’t switched over there, and we get their products. Main culprit here would be the construction industry, lumber and hardware is all in US customary units and I hate it.

Have you watched Idiocracy? I consider myself a smart guy, and having children is my way to fight against the world getting stupider.

Also, it is a joy. Yeah, it’s expensive, and yeah, it’s a ton of work. But it’s like working on a very big project that you know you’ll be proud of when it’s done. I didn’t understand it before because I only experienced other people’s children, but it’s different with your own children in a way that’s hard to explain.