danielquinn
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Polling lead by age group, November 2025 4 days ago:
Jesus, the discrepancy between the Green vote among the young and old is… horrifying.
- Comment on Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea 1 week ago:
Your math is waaaaay off. Let me help you.:
Let’s assume that you commute a rather conservative distance of just 25mi to work. That’s 50mi/day, 5 days/wk, plus let’s say half that over the weekend. Assuming an (again, generous) fuel efficiency for your truck at 25mpg, given a ballpark 300mi/week, that’s 12 gallons of fuel/week. The current average price of gas in the US is a remarkably low $3.071, and that adds up to $36.85/week.
Now consider the costs of maintenance. If you’ve really had zero problems in the last 20 years on a pickup truck (honestly this is far from average), you likely did an oil change every 3 months at the very least. These days it’ll run you about $100.
In terms of insurance, I asked this site for the average cost of insuring a Toyota pickup truck for one year: $1937. Let’s be grossly optimistic and pretend that those rates will never go up.
Initial cost: (Provided) = 11000.00 Fuel costs: (50 × 6 ÷ 25 × 3.071 × 52 × 20) = 38326.08 Oil changes: ($100 × 4 × 20) = 8000.00 Insurance: (1937 × 20) = 38740.00 Parking: = ? ------------------------------------------------------ Total 96066.08
Excluding the cost of parking, the purchase of your miracle never-needs-repair truck if purchased today would be roughly $100,000. Note also how very conservative these values are. It’s entirely possible that your real costs are well above what I’ve stated here.
The total cost of the rental was
$1000plus fuel costs, so using our above figures, that’s a grand total of$1042.99assuming you drove it roughly 50mi/day for all 7 days of the week. That’s assuming that you don’t opt for the much lower rates that appear to be available to you in the area of $250 - $350/week.So, if you didn’t own a car and instead only rented on when you needed to “move a couch”, you would save just over $95,000. In other words, your insistence that you absolutely must own your own vehicle has cost you the equivalent of a downpayment on a house.
- Comment on Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea 1 week ago:
Car rentals are exceptionally cheap compared to paying to own and drive a car capable of hauling a couch for that one time 4 years ago when you needed that.
- Comment on Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea 1 week ago:
As a big car-hater myself, I can agree with most of what you’re saying here (the “but it snows” argument is baseless though, see Denmark).
I think that if you’ve chosen to live in sparsely populated areas, then being car-dependent is your choice and you should be able to have that… but you don’t get to drive your car into the city.
Cars ruin cities. They’re loud, dangerous, dirty, and they kill millions. If you’re happy to live like that, then that’s on you, but you (I’m using the “motorist demographic” here rather then the personal “you”) can’t insist on having wide, multi-lane, high speed roads and plenty of free parking where most of the world’s population actually lives. You park at the periphery and take transit or a bike into town.
- Comment on Andrew will be banished from royal premises to King Charles' private and remote Sandringham estate 2 weeks ago:
“Oh no! Not Sandringham!” - Andrew, probably.
- Comment on Serverless Is An Architectural Handicap (And I'm Tired of Pretending it Isn't) 3 weeks ago:
If you build for a containerised environment, standing up your service in Kubernetes with HPA gives you all the scalability (and potentially cost) benefits of serverless without all the drawbacks.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
“Oh hi! Here’s some code. I didn’t write it and don’t understand it, but you should totally run it on your machine.”
- Comment on Green Party membership surges even higher as Labour loses a member every 10 minutes 5 weeks ago:
Welcome!
- Comment on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | Season 4 Clip | Paramount+ (NYCC 2025) 5 weeks ago:
Am I the only one who thinks this might be a Caretaker reference?
- Comment on Yet another note taking recommendation needed 1 month ago:
Plus the FF extension is really full-featured. I can clip in different formats or even take a screenshot if the webpage makes clipping hard.
I didn’t even know there was a Firefox extension! I might give it a look.
- Comment on Best Synology Replacement? 1 month ago:
What exactly is an external drive case? Are you just talking about a USB enclosure for a single drive or something that can somehow hold multiple drives and interface over something more stable than USB?
- Comment on Yet another note taking recommendation needed 1 month ago:
Joplin will do this for you. It comes ready to sync with all sorts of cloud options, as well as “local folder” which works well with Syncthing. It’s offline-first, cross-platform, and FOSS.
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 1 month ago:
It’s the expectation.
Boris and Truss were abject morons and Sunak was an insulated, rich Tory. They were expected to be terrible and so we weren’t surprised.
Starmer won in a landslide victory for Labour and went about screwing the poor, arresting old ladies, and presiding over genocide. Conservatives hate him because he’s on the Red Team, and the Left hate him because he acts like a Tory.
If he’d run as a Tory, he’d be scoring higher than everyone since Cameron, but he was supposed to fix the mess, not make it worse.
- Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad? 1 month ago:
I agree 100% with this take and want to thank you for that excellent video! I’m not all the way through yet, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it.
- Comment on Polanski apologises over claim he can increase women’s breast sizes with his mind 1 month ago:
Hooray!
- Comment on Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards 1 month ago:
The opposition to id cards themeselves in this country is very strange to me. Most civilised countries have some sort of national identification number/card that can be used to access government services, and having worked inside the UK government, I can tell you what a total nightmare it is to develop services for Britons without such a unique id.
What kills me, is that inevitably the id card debate here seems to focus in on the existence of a card rather than what the government wants to attach include with it, like biometric data, or pairing it with an app with invasive permissions. You need an id number for me so that I can be identified when accessing government services, you don’t need to keep a record of every time I boarded a train or more surveillance nonsense.
This country is so used to government surveillance that they automatically assume that “id card means more tracking” rather than objecting to the tracking that already exists (have you seen Oxford Street?) and opposing an id that’d save the country mountains of cash and hassle if used properly.
- Comment on Zack Polanski urges UK to protect Gaza flotilla, as other countries risk war to resist Israeli impunity 1 month ago:
Fuck yes. More of this please.
- Comment on Just watched SNW 03.04 and that monologue by "Joni Gloss" about inspiring generations... it touched me 2 months ago:
Probably the only good moment in all of season 3 frankly.
- Comment on Green MP spots banned cluster bombs at London arms fair 2 months ago:
I downvoted this, largely because while you may have identified the photo correctly the way you’ve done so here makes it sound like Berry has made a mistake when there’s no evidence of that from the article.
From her X post (why the fuck are these people still on X?):
Confirmed by staff, and removed swiftly by event organisers.
- Comment on Israeli president’s planned visit to UK angers MPs 2 months ago:
Duck that. Roll out the red carpet for him and then chuck him in prison.
- Comment on Polanski apologises over claim he can increase women’s breast sizes with his mind 2 months ago:
Watch his recent interview with Channel 4. I think you might come around to him.
- Comment on Spelthorne Borough Council Public Space Protection Order 2 months ago:
With a name like “public space defence”, I honestly thought this would be about making spaces more friendly to the public, removing hostile architecture like skatestoppers and Camden benches, or replacing ads with public art, roads with bike infrastructure.
I’ve been living here 10 years. I really should know better by now.
- Comment on Overheated homes: why UK housing is dangerously unprepared for impact of climate crisis 3 months ago:
That is… nuts. Is your home listed or something or is this must the council being crazy?
- Comment on Overheated homes: why UK housing is dangerously unprepared for impact of climate crisis 3 months ago:
Yes and no. So long as the air temp outside is higher than the inside, you should close and shutter all windows regardless of the direct sunlight.
- Comment on Overheated homes: why UK housing is dangerously unprepared for impact of climate crisis 3 months ago:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but surely both are necessary parts of the solution given the trajectory we’re on?
Absolutely, but critically these don’t address heat. More importantly, swapping a gas boiler for a heat pump in a poorly insulated home will just result in wasted energy and cold/damp people.
In order to counter that we need an efficient way of moving heat from inside back out again without letting any more in, which is not something many houses in the UK can do today.
In 2025, most people in developed hot countries are using air conditioning in addition to everything else
While I can’t speak for the whole of warm countries, my wife’s family is Greek and we visit often, where air conditioning is surprisingly limited given the temperatures they endure. Instead you see shutters on windows, tile floors (with rugs they pull out for the winter), and tree cover that shields the home from the outside. That’s not to say that AC isn’t common, it is, and rolling out solar everywhere is a great way to deal with that. My only objection is to the common refrain of “more heat pumps” without acknowledging that most homes in this country are so poorly insulated that any temperature regulation is lost unless it’s constant.
- Comment on Overheated homes: why UK housing is dangerously unprepared for impact of climate crisis 3 months ago:
Neither of those things address the problem of heat, and they don’t even address the cold due to the sorry state of most homes in the country.
The problem is insulation. It keeps the heat in in the winter (making a heat pump viable) and the heat out in the summer. British homes are largely horrendous on this front, so much so that we used to have a whole protest group called Insulate Britain devoted to the issue. In keeping with the British pattern of arresting and ignoring protestors however, they were widely demonised by media and politicians.
But they were right.
Another problem is just design. People in hot countries use shutters on the outside of the house to block out the sun. Pretty much every house here only has curtains, so the sun comes through the window and heats up the air between the window and curtains, which then circulates around the room.
Finally, the last problem is education. Too many people in this country have no idea how to deal with heat. Our neighbours were actually complaining about how well insulated our homes are because they hadn’t figured out that you’re supposed to keep the blinds and windows closed during the day and open them only at night.
- Comment on The Most Popular Baby Names From the Past Year Have Officially Been Announced 3 months ago:
I think the real take away here is that in 2024, more people named their kid “Awesome” than “Cuthbert”.
- Comment on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 | SDCC Surprise 3 months ago:
The high seas have you covered!
- Comment on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 | SDCC Surprise 3 months ago:
- Comment on Macron plan to recognise Palestine puts pressure on Keir Starmer to pick a side 3 months ago:
I just don’t think he’s capable of picking the right side though.