A rich phoque

This can also be practical in places where the police can force you to unlock your phone with biometrics but not with the PIN.

Ever since I’ve seen the police here force people to delete the videos of them abusing citizens, I have been very wary of biometric identification.

So far my ‘emergency’ procedure would be to restart my phone, as it’s asking for a PIN after a reboot.

The last proposition to reduce food waste is

urge companies to donate more food.

Before that we’re gonna try to make it last longer, and compost more of it, then maybe companies could think about donating more of it.

But they have to be careful because if they donate too much nobody is gonna want to work to buy food anymore!! Or people could sue if they get sick from old food. Better send it to the composting site instead of giving it away.

Obviously we can’t force companies to give unsold food, we can only urge them to do so.

No money to buy that tempting watermelon about to expire? Ok then, we’ll send it to the composting site to reduce food waste.

Seriously though, it’s better than nothing but… aaah sweet capitalism!

Meh. I have a cabin in the countryside 130 km away from my apartment and I can cycle the whole way, or take a coach with a foldable bike and pedal the 30 km left.

It’s actually in the region where I grew up so I have to get there frequently to see my family. It’s a hassle sometimes but it’s only because my government can’t adequately fund and maintain a decent transit network.

I also bike to national parks nearby, and sometimes haul my inflatable kayak with a bike trailer.

People overestimate distances and think the country side justifies a car but it’s usually just excuses. I did move in a big city eventually but I lived in small towns and cities for a decade before that. I still hated cars and didn’t have one.

For example, my mother lives on a rural road outside a village of less than 2000 people. And she works in the next town that is 7 km away. Meanwhile I live in a city and work in the same city but I have to bike 9 km to get to work.

So sometimes distances are shorter in smaller cities and towns but people still insist they need a car. People will give any excuse to use their car. It’s like cocain.

Also, here Uber is only available in major cities where it’s competing with public transit anyway. AFAIK you can’t take an Uber to a small town or a rural road.

EDIT: Also, most people DO live in a city anyway. And they still have excuses to use a car.

Today, some 56% of the world’s population – 4.4 billion inhabitants – live in cities.

I prefer to be compared to Diogenes of Sinope, thank you.

Jokes on them, I hate cars, don’t have one, and would never take an Uber.

My very anecdotal theory is that those seeing humans frequently get used to us (up to a point) and usually just end up hissing when we get too close.

Where I live geese are omnipresent in parks and people are cycling, jogging and walking through their flocks. They will certainly act inquisitive, hiss and act like they own the place, but I’ve never seen them attack.

However, maybe a flock in a place less busy with humans and less used to seeing them would be more willing to attack.

Oh they’re not suing anyone for a change. I guess they have the means to give some of that money away now.

I still remember them from the times they threatened to sue their fans for not buying their music.

Metallica hadn’t sued fans directly, but were making clear their intent to hunt them down. A consulting firm was hired, and complied a list of over 300,000 internet users in a single weekend who were alleged to have downloaded Metallica songs.

As a French speaker, this is one of the words that reminds me about the dropped “s” and the change in pronunciation over the centuries. We still say fenestration to talk about the windows of a building, but those are now called fenêtres, without the s in the middle. Same for words like veste (vest) and vêtements (clothes). Or foresterie (working in forests) and forêt (forest). Or fête (feast) and festoyer (feasting).

There is a whole bunch of words now written with a circumflex accent that were written and pronounced with the “s”, like défenestrer.

More about those words here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumflex_in_French#Disappearance_of_"s"

It’s a bong. Weed has resins. It will do that while being used. Your majesty doesn’t have to use it if they think it’s not clean enough for them.

Babylon 5 (The Gathering) is set in 2257 and the following years. To my surprise, it’s pretty close to The Fifth Element’s timeline. However the date is about the same thing they have in common.

I know. I’m in my early 40ies and have been trying all my life to convince people around me and do what I could. But with time, I learned about the fraud that is plastic recycling and how capitalism is really not interested at all into solving the issue. My city is fining people for putting recyclables in the trash, but the recycling centres are full and they themselves trash the recycling. What matters is short term profits and virtue signalling. What matters is to look green. Just buy electric cars and everything will be good, apparently. Buy green! But don’t stop buying!

Then a pandemic happened and people disappointed me en masse. We could see the changes in the environment and in ways we could live, but most people were “EaGeR To GeT BaCk To ThEiR RoUtInE”, even if it meant commuting 5 days a week to the office, just to “resume” the economy. What mattered was not other people, it was the economy. Even when they forced us to stay inside with curfews, people couldn’t go out to run/walk in the evening, they barred unvaccinated people from stores (I’m vaccinated 4 times but it’s still not okay), it was all for the economy and to save the system, not the people. And if you had a minor disagreement with this, you were a grandma killer for wanting to go cycling at night. Then we went back to our routines and nothing will ever change. People are whining because of paper straws and want the plastic back. And all this straw stupidity is not even important on the grand scheme of things. Most people don’t want to change anything. Most people will not vote for change. The system does not have any incentive to change.

I never owned a car and everyone around me is telling me how great they are and how I should definitely buy one because it’s useful and practical. I would have total absolution! Some people here are vociferously fighting against active and public transit, and the government is actually cutting public transit funding. People are yelling at me when I trash some plastic instead of putting it in the recycle bin, then they drive away in their car that generates literal tons of toxic fumes and greenhouse gases in the air, accusing me of not caring.

I gave up a few years ago. We will deserve most of it.

Don’t worry, the rich will eat well and survive, with their private security forces willing to kill others, while the poor will starve and die. We’ll have rations and curfews but it will all be for the good of the people economy. Just like in the pandemic, It will be an effort of the poor, to save the rich. That’s what we want. You just have to become rich before it happens.

AFAIK Kodi can use pulseaudio and probably pipewire. I use Kodi too on those computers and I just leave it to use the default PA device that I’ve set. I switch the default devices with pasystray.

What’s usually breaking for me is paprefs. Every so often after an upgrade, the options are greyed out and I can’t share or access my devices over the network.

I never tried to setup simultaneous output before because I just switch from device one to another, but I just enabled it in paprefs and it’s working too.

I won’t bother reading AI stuff. I don’t appreciate cars in large parts because of their environmental impact. And the same goes for AI.

Just as cars, AI is also polluting our spaces, and wasting energy.

I work in a call center where we are all speaking English as a second language. At one point we had a pharmaceutical company as a client. They had employees in different countries but the American employees whined that we didn’t speak English correctly or made bad comments about my coworkers. Eventually we lost the contract and they went with an all American call center for their American employees, because apparently they didn’t like our English.

Of course, Monsieur le Marquis de SuddenDownpour.

Also, it’s obviously inaccurate as he would have said it in French, not English. Duh!

In certain areas, a bug net for hammocks is a must.

Sœur is pretty common too. And bœuf.

We (Canadians) actually have two layouts to type French characters. The modern Canadian multilingual layout, and the traditional “French (Canada)” layout. As an older French speaking Canadian, I prefer the traditional layout but both work. You can even type English words with these.

I work in IT and I have coworkers that use caps lock to capitalize single letters, like the beginning of a sentence. It hurts a bit every time I see it.