SMS messages are crammed into the messages your phone exchanges during ‘pings’ to register with the local cell tower. It literally costs the telco nothing to exchange texts between subscribers on the same network, and as far as I know, telcos don’t charge each other for exchanging SMS messages, because the cost of tracking it all exceeds the practically zero cost of just forwarding the message.
These people are literally a herd of cats in a room with a laser pointer pointed at a disco globe.
My mother is a conspiracy theory sucker. Being isolated during the pandemic with her idiot boyfriend literally spun her around from being a compassionate intelligent woman who ran her own successful business for over a decade to literally being afraid of everything and everyone.
Maybe 100 in total? Doesn’t matter… It used to be a factory, and it’s now mixed use. They did a few modernization projects (lighting, replaced old power-hungry equipment), and reduced their average power draw by 1MW. And there aren’t that many electric cars, and they’re not all there are the same time. When I need to charge, I plug it in, but schedule the charge to start at 1am when demand drops off.
So, a few things…
Most homes that I’ve been in have electricity. If you have a wall socket, you have a car charger. You might not be doing 500km every day, but you’ll be charging.
Second, most underground parking spots can have a 15A, 20A, or 50A plugs installed. My office has underground parking, and every stall has a 120V 15A plug, included in the monthly cost of parking… PLUS it has 10 L2 chargers available, which aren’t available to the general public. This article probably only includes public infrastructure, but there is a metric fuckload of private infrastructure as well.
Last, I’ve done trips from Montreal to Havre St Pierre (via Lac St. Jean!) and on a different trip, to Gaspé. The charging network is already very, very good. Even places without cell coverage have MULTIPLE public overnight chargers – I was astounded that Saint Michael du Squatec had three publicly available chargers, plus a campground that will let you plug into a 50A socket for free. On both trips (which lasted a month each) I had to wait for a fast charger just two times. Once for 10 minutes, and another for about 30. I realize this will change as more electric cars hit the roads – but every company (The Electric Circuit, Chargepoint, Flo, major gas station brands) are all installing new infrastructure weekly.
A buddy of mine is working with provincial electricity authorities to create a ‘second use lifeline’ for car batteries. Even if a battery pack only has 70% of its capacity left, it can be stacked in a steel box with a dozen others, and used to balance demand on the grid - absorbing excess capacity minute-to-minute, and putting it back on the grid when demand is highest. They would continue to use the pack until it was down to about 45-50% of its capacity, then send it off for recycling. The only reason it hasn’t been rolled out anywhere is that the competition for used car batteries is fierce.
Yeah, my old furnace had an AC on the outside, but electric heat coils on the inside.
The only big perk was that it acted like a dehumidifier in the winter - since I switched to a heat pump, I’ve had to put a dehumidifier in the basement.
Then you’ve been lied to. My heat pump keeps the house cool when it’s 40C, and warm when it’s -40C.
My new heat pump works perfectly fine down to -30C, but it’s a very new model. And for the few times a year it gets that bad, use a space heater.
Monterey still gets security updates. :)
Really? I just handed down a 2017 MacBook Pro – still supported by Apple, meaning it runs the latest OS, and gets patches.
Can you give me an example of any other device with longer software support from the original vendor, at no cost to the end user?
Had the same issue with WestJet, and they fucked my vacation to Iceland that had been planned BEFORE the pandemic, and was rescheduled three times. Had to take the Via train to Toronto to get my flight, ended up arriving three days late, fucking up ALL my reservations, and missed about 1/3rd of the outings I’d planned.
I hate the airlines with the intensity of a thousand suns.
Yeah, Belleville… Competing for first place in the race to the bottom, neck-and-neck with Peterborough for the towns with the most brainwashed idiots. All they need to do now is try and arrest some cops at the local police station.
In the medical field, they’re starting to refer to deaths due to adulterated drugs as ‘poisoning’, rather than ‘overdose’. The implication is that people are merely trying to get high, but because of a lack of safe supply, their drugs may contain powerful narcotics like fentanyl, it’s effectively unintentional, not a deliberate attempt to consume too much.
Suicide is a symptom of mental illness in the absence of an obvious physical ailment like cancer, ALS, etc. We shouldn’t stigmatize mental illness further by drawing arbitrary lines when the result is the same.
The stupid part is that they’re allowed to make exclusions to a “life” insurance policy – the idea is that they pay out when you’re no longer alive. If they take your premiums, they should have to pay out when you die – the only exception should be if you’re provably alive.
But they were restoring all my posts and comments for weeks after I deleted them.
You simply tax the things that harm society until those things go away.
Corporations owning residential homes should get taxed an extra 1% on the total value of the home every year, increasing at 2x the rate of inflation every January 1st. Do that for 5 years, then apply the tax to individuals who own more than one home, same deal - 1% + 2x the rate of inflation.
Combined with actual rent controls, this solves the problem, and it won’t shock the system and cause a housing crash, because various homes are at different stages of profitability.
I’m just some idiot on the internet. Why can’t some idiot in government come up with a similar plan?
I think seizure of a passport for 5 to 10 years, plus compensation to the victim is an acceptable punishment. If you commit a dickish crime and make us all look bad, stay the fuck home.
The numbers are still in favour of getting vaccinated. Complications from the vaccine are as close to zero as any medical procedure could be. The complications from raw-dogging COVID are far greater, regardless of your cohort. Turning a life-threatening infection into an inconvenience is what the vaccines do. If your concern is minimizing total risk, getting a COVID booster each year with your flu vaccine is the way to go.