merc

@merc@sh.itjust.works

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The internet kind of sucks right now⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

Nowadays, if you’re a crackpot, you can instantly find 17.000 other crackpots who will happily not just confirm your idiocy, but make up fake stories to support your bullshit ideas.

And because crackpots like this are very engaged in their crackpottery, it’s a great place to put ads. That means that the big Internet ad companies all want to be the ones to host those bullshit ideas.

Back in the day, the reason crackpot newspapers had to be self-published is that the big publishers didn’t want to have anything to do with the crackpots. But, in the modern world, Google / Meta can find someone who wants to run an add to your crackpottery, so you get the same treatment as a big media publisher. In fact, you might get better treatment because crackpottery may be stickier than say the Boston Globe, so Google / Meta might prefer to work with you because it allows them to show more ads.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teddybears - Punkrocker⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I feel like this might need some context.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teddybears - Punkrocker⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I think it’s a challenge to make superman interesting because he’s both so powerful and so good. That’s why, when I read / watch DC stuff, I like it when he’s a side character, not the main character. I think Captain America is the Marvel universe’s equivalent of Superman in terms of personality / attitude. But, he doesn’t have anywhere near Superman’s power, which is why it’s easier to write interesting stories with him.

You’re completely right that that’s the mindblowing part of Superman – that he has all this power, but he doesn’t use it to reshape the world. Instead, he saves people from dying, whenever he can. And, he stops people from hurting other people.

I think a lot of the conservative mindset is that there are people who are supposed to be at the top, and people who are supposed to be at the bottom. If you’re at the top, it’s because you deserve to be there. If you deserve to be there, you have the right to impose your will on the people below you. Superman is undeniably at the top in terms of power, but he refuses to wield his power. That doesn’t make sense if your world view is that might is right.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Electricity Consumption⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking about. I think in the modern world we underestimate how much “power” was being used on a daily basis before the industrial revolution. The main thing the industrial revolution gave the world is the potential to have constant, predictable power in a location that was convenient.

Windmills and water mills could be pretty powerful. But, as you said, location was everything. And, in the case of wind, it wasn’t always predictable. And in map form, it would be really cool to know where that power was being generated, and what effect that might have had on another kind of power: political power.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teddybears - Punkrocker⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
The funniest thing is that the superhero they have a problem with is Superman.

If it were Batman, that would be different. Batman isn’t a pure-hearted hero, he’s a more complex character. If it had been someone in the X-Men, or pretty much any Avenger other than Captain America, there would be room for a discussion.

But, Superman is such a good, kind-hearted hero that it’s basically impossible to be a good person and be anti-Superman.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teddybears - Punkrocker⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I thought the movie was awful, but the message was good. The plot was just bad. The characters were so unrealistic that it was distracting. Like, the people Luthor had in his command centre. These ordinary people were eager to kill, or at least badly injure Superman? That detail needed an explanation. It wouldn’t have needed one if they hadn’t focused so much on those characters, but for some reason they were made an important part of the story.

The only really great scene in the movie was when Lois Lane grilled Superman on his intervention in the war. It was good to see a good-hearted man who was confident he had done the right thing stumble when asked hard questions.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Electricity Consumption⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
It would be interesting (if the data was available) to see the energy consumption in Europe at that time: windmills, horses drawing carts, cooking fires, etc.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t know ƿy, but some of your letters have become Old English runes, like “wiþ”, “þe”, et cætera. Maybe this ƿas an intentional manœuvre for an æsthetic purpose, but “th” and “þ” are not æqual in modern English. Ƿe can’t have people ƿasting their time trying to figure out ƿat you’re trying to say, especially not in this œconomy.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
For one thing, you can’t do a code search on GitHub unless you have a GitHub account and are logged in.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
It’s not just GitHub. People are also using VSCode, despite it slowly suffocating the non-MS dev ecosystem.

Microsoft switched from the really aggressive “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” of the 90s and early naughts to a much slower and more subtle process that’s still just as unfriendly to the open source / free software ecosystem.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

Can VSCode GUI

So, you’re going to ditch GitHub because of Microsoft, but you’re trying to keep using VSCode, which is also Microsoft?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

Snow plows for roads exist and often just run and run and run to keep roads open.

Which is very expensive, but necessary because of the shitty climate. What’s your point?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Ooh, wheat! Great. What about fruits? They’re important for a balanced diet.

It turns out that Canada imports 50% of its vegetables and 75% of its fruit.

But do go on, tell me how Canada’s climate isn’t limiting in what it can produce domestically.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The video says that there were more than 500,000 bike share trips in Toronto in the winter months. Let’s be conservative and say that “the winter months” are just December, January and February. The reality is that there’s ice on the ground until May pretty often, but let’s just pretend it’s 500,000 trips in 3 months to make the numbers seem as big as possible.

Is that big? Not really, 500,000 trips in 3 months is 167,000 trips per month. Meanwhile in the summer it’s 1 million trips per month. So, cycling drops by a factor of at least 6 in the winter. That’s massive.

And yes, I’ve watched that Not Just Bikes video. It makes the point that in order for people to bike in the winter, you need massive infrastructure that Canada refuses to spend on. The city in question in the video, Oulu, makes it a priority to clear the bike routes within 3 hours of a 2 cm snowfall. Theoretically could that be done in every rich city in the world? Sure. Is it realistic it will ever happen anywhere in Canada? Doubtful.

I stand by what I said, “winter is a major factor”. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to commit to clearing all the bike routes within 3 hours of a 2 cm snowfall? You could argue that the cost is worth it, and that the cost is smaller than doing similar things for cars, but it remains a major factor.

Besides, it wouldn’t even make sense to have snow clearing like Oulu unless they first built a dedicated bike network for the city. There’s no point in just clearing the “bike lanes” which are just a tiny strip of pavement next to the gutter.

Canadian cities aren’t doing enough to build mass transit and bike lanes. But, even if they did, the weather sucks in the winter. And Oulu, is colder than Toronto. But it’s slightly warmer than Ottawa and Montreal, and significantly warmer than Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary. So, even if you replicated all the bike lanes from Oulu, committed to clearing the snow as quickly as they do in Oulu and made cars and fuel as expensive as they are in Europe, Canada would probably have nowhere near the number of winter bikers as Oulu per capita. Canada is much colder, cities are designed around cars, and people have “car brain”.

⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

Canada should really just wait until the US collapses and then move south into the wreckage.

The Nordic countries don’t understand bad climate. Maybe they want to continue existing as they are, but Canadians will want to move south as soon as the US destroys itself.

Measure	Oslo	Stockholm	Helsinki	Ottawa
Coldest Mean Daily Minimum	-4.7	-3.2	-6.3	-14
Coldest Mean Minimum	-15.9	-13.7	-20.6	-27
Coldest Record Low	-26.0	-28.2	-35	-38.9
Hottest Mean Maximum	29.6	30.6	27.9	32
Hottest Record High	34.6	35.4	33.2	37.8

Ottawa is significantly colder than those country’s capitals during the winter, and significantly hotter in the summer. It might be unpleasant at times to live in those European climates, but it’s truly miserable to live in Ottawa for much of the year.

People in the Nordic countries might want to stay there because it’s the only place where their language is spoken, or because there are thousands of years of tradition in living there. Meanwhile, Canada as a country is barely 150 years old, and speaks the same language (with roughly the same accent) as the neighbour to the south.

There’s a lot in common in terms of culture too. Sure, Canada plays a bit more hockey than the southerners, but they have the NHL too. The other sports are largely shared: Toronto has NBA and MLB teams. Unlike Europe where “futbol” is big, it’s pretty small in the English-speaking part of North America, but to the extent it exists, Canada is part of the same system, with teams in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. The only split is that Canada plays a superior version of gridiron football with far inferior players, and the US has a mass market hugely popular version of gridiron football with worse rules but much better players.

Canadians watch the same TV shows and movies, and listen to the same music. Many of the stars of stage and screen in the US are actually Canadian, and many shows that are set in the US and air on US TV are actually filmed in Canada.

So really, there isn’t a lot that Canada has in common with the Nordic countries. I like the idea of working more with the EU and less with the US, but culturally Canadians are part of the English-speaking North American culture… except when it comes to politics, guns, and healthcare.

I just hope the US hurries its collapse up so that the remnants of the fractured states can petition to join Canada and the border can be shifted down. Then Canadians can move to a more hospitable climate without having to abandon the parts of their culture that matter.

⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I agree that Canadian cities aren’t doing enough to build mass transit. But, I still think winter has a lot to do with that.

Mass transit means waiting outside for a bus or tram, and waiting outside when it’s either +35 or -30 sucks. Many people will prefer cars for that reason. It isn’t the only factor, but it is definitely a factor.

As for bike lanes, winter is a major factor. It’s certainly possible to bike in the winter, I’ve done it for many years, but it isn’t easy. In Canada as it exists now, biking in winter means biking in traffic most of the time. Bike lanes exist, but often in winter they just shove the snow to the side of the road and block the bike lanes. I don’t know of anywhere in Canada where they clear bike lanes as a priority. That could be done. It is done in some places in Finland, for example. But, there’s a catch 22. It’s not worth it to clear the bike lanes because there aren’t enough winter bikers; there aren’t enough winter bikers because it’s dangerous and unpleasant to bike during winter because they don’t clear the bike lanes.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
If anything, this proves how much Canadians don’t want to be Americans.

Canadian weather is shitty, you can’t grow crops for most of the year. During the fraction of the year where the climate is suitable for growing crops, the variety of things that grow is small compared to what’s possible in the US. And, as bad as winter can be, summer’s no good either. You don’t want to be outside in the winter because it’s -30, and you don’t want to be outside in the summer because it’s +35. The cost of living in Canada is high because you need to heat your home in the winter and cool it in the summer. Almost everybody drives a car because of that “being outside sucks” thing, but cars are expensive to own and operate in Canada. There’s the cost of winter tires, more expensive winter fuels, antifreeze in the windshield washer, plus the constant freeze/thaw cycle wrecks the road surfaces, which results in potholes, which results in more wear and tear on cars. In addition, to make driving safe they drop a lot of salt and sand, which just rusts your car. Because the country is a thin strip, everything is far away, and everything communications-related is expensive. And, a low population relative to the US means that a lot of companies just don’t offer services in Canada because it isn’t worth it to comply with Canadian laws just to get the same number of customers you could get from a single American state. I could keep going on and on.

Yet, despite all that, Canadians huddle up as close as possible to the border for warmth, but refuse to go any further south because that would mean entering the US. As bad as Canada’s climate is, putting up with that is an easy decision to make when the alternative is 'Murica.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Damm WaterCatholics⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Look out! Here come’s an “s”!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
No system completely represents the people, but sorting people into only A or B is worse than systems that allow more categories.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
That sounds good in theory, but I’ve heard a lot of Australians complain about politics there. Maybe that’s just because people complain about politics everywhere. But, it also seems like Australia has a lot of problems that aren’t getting solved (like housing cost).

It definitely doesn’t seem like a place that has things all figured out.

Switzerland is the only country where people seem pretty proud of their system. It has its issues, but that’s mainly because they have some pretty awful voters and a direct democracy system that has caused some real headaches. For example, voters voted for some laws that were incompatible with the treaties the country had signed as part of the EU, and had they gone into effect it would have meant cancellation of their work with France on CERN, for example. I can’t remember how that was eventually resolved, but it was a real mess.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The candidates might all focus on the big population centers, and the central California voters might have to choose between LA candidate A, LA Candidate B and SF Candidate C.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Ah, so you meant “Full Expltination”?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So glad I suck dick⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
But, isn’t it wonderful that we can have a fediverse where there can be annoying instances like those ones, but if you don’t like it you can just move or block?

The fediverse is chaotic but I sure prefer chaos to having one corporate overlord with one point of view, and one goal, which is getting ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So glad I suck dick⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The correct answer is: “Those seem to be Disney characters, and Disney is a horrible company, so none of the above.”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Where text lists blue-then-red?