I’ve been following your hike through the Canadian Rockies over the past few weeks. I’ve been particularly interested because I was there myself earlier this year. Here’s a piece of Bow Lake when it was a little bit colder:

Many of those footprints in the distance are mine walking on the very frozen Bow Lake. If you happened to have a shot you’ve taken during these warmer times from around the same spot, I’d love to compare side by side. My shot is right off the Ice Field Parkway.

Love low taxes. Keep it up.

But enough about the ideas of the rich aristocracy leading up to the French Revolution…

Do I have to bring my own brown shirt or will they be provided? /s

For AB I’m thinking its more “I can’t afford to live in Banff, but that’s where work is so a place in Canmore is where I call home with a 30 min commute each way.”

Or “Yeah I like living in Red Deer, but it means a 1.5 hour drive one way if I want to see the Flames beat the skates off the Leafs when they’re in town.”

Many of these folks also watch prices of scrap metal. If it gets high enough, you’ll see lots of that disappear and turn into money in their pocket. Prices for scrap, especially steel is extremely low right now compared to a few years ago. Many of them are waiting on the price to recover to cash in.

Long ago I ran a Windows Media Center PC in the living room and used the hell out of it. When WMC finally went EOL, I look for alternatives and found Plex. I never got around to setting up a Plex box, and now I see it too is ready for the scrap heap. I think this is what getting old is. You plan on doing something and never get around to it. Time passes much faster up here in age.

Does that mean that Canadians in Alberta, Quebec, and Ontario simply don’t drive long distances inside their provinces? That doesn’t track with what I’ve seen when visiting all three provinces.

If the ending of my story was too abrupt, and you wanted to spend just a bit more time with Touchdown Jesus, here’s the video a passerby caught of Touchdown Jesus burning. You can see the fire fighting vehicle on the left hand side, and the occasional flashes of lighting as the storm that started the fire rages on.

Not far away we had what everyone called “Big Butter Jesus” or “Touchdown Jesus”:

The “Big Butter” part comes from the region’s fascination with making butter sculptures:

The “Touchdown” name, for those that don’t know USA Football (Grid Iron), this is the same gesture the referee makes to signal a valid goal:

However, after being around for years, Touchdown Jesus is no more. I’m not making this up, it was struck by lightning and being made of fiberglass, burned to the ground.

said Sahakyan. "I think it will resolve a lot of issues because we’ll know exactly who’s in here for what reasons, even though I miss [my wife] dearly. I think we could have a faster process [where they determine] she’s not a radical, or tied to the crazies, let her out."

He’s rationalizing what’s happening. They are never letting her out. They are going to take her out of the country and she will never be coming back to the USA again. I wonder if that is what it will take for him to change his opinion.

In the USA I use a Zooz Zen15 on the power plug for my heat pump dryer (120v). This works very well to notify my Alexa system that the dryer cycle is complete, and turns the dryer off. The Zooz is a zwave device connected to an Aeotec zwave hub.

I do try to contribute to making the world better.

I do this too, but I’ve found that the far more accessible and long reaching positive impacts are actions of little nudges from a slight negative state to a slight positive one. The mental visual I use is like a meteor is on a collision course with Earth, if you change its path ever so slightly when its far far away from Earth, you’ll avoid the catastrophe. The amount of effort and energy is tiny at that point, but the benefit is immeasurably large.

So what do these nudges look like? It could be as little as thanking someone for something they don’t expect to get thanked for. It could be being a customer and calling a manager over to compliment a worker’s efforts and make sure they get recognized. It could be stopping on the side of the road when someone is having car trouble. It could be seeing someone left some personal belonging when they left, and call out to them or chase after them to let them know, or even just turning in a valuable item to lost and found fully intact. Sometimes its just letting someone know that they’ve been heard or that they’re not alone, or that you appreciate that they exist in this world. None of these things require superpowers or immeasurable wealth. Its little nudges you can push the universe back toward the positive against all the negative going on today.

I wonder how the typical conservative voter thinks this kind of thing is going to help them?

Many are older without children in schools anymore and are happy they are not “paying to teach other people’s kids” even though they themselves were the recipients of older Americans paying for them to go through public schools. Others are rich paying to send their kids to private schools or rich enough to pay to send them to religious school so they too are happy to not fund public schools. The last group are poor conservatives that can’t afford private schools and have children in public schools. This group are “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” that aren’t bothered because they’ll be sending their kids to private schools “real soon now”. They are just happen to be invited to the meetings tearing down society and the safety nets that sustain them everyday.

then evened out to ~$35,000 once I found my flow.

How much of that was tips?

When did they become human remains? Before or after launch?

Long before. Its a company that, after your death, will fly some of your ashes to space. For orbital services, the ashes are then returned to your estate, and in this case that can’t happen because the vessel wasn’t recovered. They also offer deep space launches where your ashes never come back.

The actor that played Scotty on the original Star Trek has his ashes flown to space, as an example.

Your description sounds like you’re a parent and she’s a child. That may be accurate in the sense that all her life she had other people providing for her, and now she’s make you be that person without your consent.

It sounds like you’re past the point you need to make a change. A hard conversation with her has to be hand. Something like:

“I love you, but I simply don’t have the resources to support two adults, and in trying, I’m drowning. As much as I love you, I can’t afford this place we live in without a paying roommate. I’ve used all my resources to buy you time to become that paying roommate again, and I’m running on empty. I have to ask you to move your stuff out of your room as I’m advertising for a new roommate this week. Right now you still have a roof over your head. I can let you sleep on the couch for the next two weeks to give you some time to sort out a path forward for yourself, but you’ll have to move most of your stuff out of the apartment and store it elsewhere. If there were another path I could see how we could keep doing what we’re doing, I’d take it in a heartbeat, but I’m this close to being homeless myself even while still employed. I’m sorry it has to be this way and I’ve done everything I can to make it not so, but we’re at a point where we have no other options.”

I’m sorry you’re going through this.

I wouldn’t be so sure of that. trump is paying fast and loose with the standards of law and he has a history of going after his opponents. There are already grounds that can be exaggerated to strip Musk of US Citizenship. At that point a foreign national would be owning a company that has national defense impacts. The government could force a sale just like they are with TikTok.

Now he’s going the other direction to act like the good guy and fighting against Trump.

Who will believe he is the good guy? He pissed off liberals when he abandoned green initiatives and threw his lot in with climate changers. Then he pissed off conservatives when he had his war of words with the orange turd. Moderate Republicans that may oppose trump are put off by Musk’s antics and insistence of introducing internet humor into business dealings and products.

He has no supporters anymore and any group he’s trying to court wants nothing to do with him.

Dying by exposure to the nature or elements is very natural. Living a long and healthy life is a social construct.

Are World of Warcraft gold farmers still a thing?