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pedz

@ pedz @lemmy.ca

Posts
8
Comments
730
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • The winter bike is dead, and Zwift and disc brakes dug its grave

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  • This article seems to be from a European / mild winters point of view, and mainly for people training?!

    I live in Montreal and a winter bike is very much a thing. If not you have to prepare yours and spend much more time and money on maintenance.

    And since lots of us here are using bikes through snow storms, slush, ice, salt, calcium, you can be assured that most of us will not use a fancy road bike for this.

    I don't even use my hybrid in winter and have a cheap mountain bike just for this. But I must admit that I use it less and less, not because of disc brakes, but because we have a bike share system that is now working year-round. So sometimes I just rent a bike and don't have to bother with all the maintenance winter would be imposing on one of my own bikes.

  • Canadian Forces Scheduled Missile Training In Israel Last Year

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  • I cynically wonder what the "targets" could be for the training.

  • US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

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  • TBF it seems like it wasn't really useful in the first place.

    Or is this how the world learned about Abu Grahib? And wasn't Obama supposed to close Guantanamo?

    I'm sure those human rights abuses reports were taken seriously. /s

  • Being boiled by your bed. This is fine.

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  • Of course. My meat tenderizer connected to the internet has an accelerometer and sensors. For a small monthly subscription fee it tells me how hard I need to beat the meat, and for how long. All powered by AI for my convenience.

  • It's common sense

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  • There is a quote attributed to Voltaire that says :

    Common sense is not so common.

  • especially when you don't depend on a car

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  • The rural town where I grew up had passenger trains for 120 years but they were discontinued in the 90ies. My mother likes to say "when I was a kid we took the train to visit my uncle". But now getting in or out of there requires a car.

    So I had to move in a city for the "privilege" of having barely acceptable transit by European standards. And it still feels weird to take a train multiple times a week when some of my friends and family never did in their entire life.

  • What’s something you own that has truly paid for itself?

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  • A bicycle. No gas to pay, no parking fees, no insurance, and I can do most of the maintenance.

  • Kia Is Giving Away 'Nostalgic' Motor Oil and Gasoline-Scented Car Freshener to EV Buyers

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  • I wonder if those are more popular with men.

    Maybe they could also give copies of the song Benzin by Ramstein, to listen while you sniff your nostalgic gasoline scented air "freshener".

  • Google is redesigning the Play Store around AI

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  • I did tech support on the phone and sometimes I needed to guide people into installing the RSA Authenticator app for 2FA. I ended up describing the icon just to be sure people would install the right app, because even if they type its full name, the sponsored result will be first, and it's not what we want.

    I type the EXACT name of what I want and the store still proposes another app as the first result. Such a frustrating user experience.

  • [meme] A North America Classic

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  • Yeah. It's always a bit pathetic to watch or read about the efforts of cities to make things safer around here.

    The scheme that is very popular here to "secure" intersections is to add an exclusive pedestrian phase (a scramble) to the traffic lights cycle. So everyone has to wait for everyone. No pedestrians are crossing while cars are moving through an intersection, and no cars are crossing the intersection while pedestrians are. But it's tuned for cars and pedestrians have to wait an eternity to have their exclusive phase. So what happens? Pedestrians are eventually losing patience and cross traffic like chickens.

    Exclusive phases are also encouraging car drivers never to yield to pedestrians or cyclists, because they never have to. So in some cities where they mainly have this type of crossing, car drivers are not stopping where there's no traffic lights. Some cities even have to leave orange flags on the side of the road so that pedestrians can wave them in front or cars while crossing.

    And don't get me wrong, scrambles are wonderful for pedestrians when they are in the majority, and when they are configured for pedestrians first. It's just that some cities here put them at every intersection as a way to separate cars and pedestrians, for safety, and it's frustrating. And then they scold pedestrians for not waiting "their" turn.

    As a pedestrian and cyclist, it's one of the things I see when I change city. I really don't like walking in Québec City for this because you have to let cars pass in all the directions first before you are allowed to cross. In Montréal everyone crosses at the same time but they put straight arrows on green lights for a few seconds at the beginning of the cycle, so pedestrians and cyclists have a few seconds to start crossing before cars can try to crush them. And I prefer this. A lot.

  • [meme] A North America Classic

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  • It depends what we are talking about.

  • [meme] A North America Classic

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  • Why? It's made specifically so that cyclists and pedestrians can be at an angle where it's easy to see them from a car. Motorists have a better view of cyclists and pedestrians than in a + intersection.

    They are rare here in Montreal but we have a few like this on Nun's Island and they work fine without any traffic lights.

  • "United States" in French (États-Unis) would have made a very confusing acronym

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  • If you want to be serious, the word state and état are both coming from an older version of French when it was written estat. French replaced ES with É because it wasn't pronouncing the S, while English dropped the E and kept pronouncing the S. It happened to multiple words, although some also come from Latin.

    Étrange - Strange. Époux - Spouse. École - School. Épice - Spice. Éponge - Sponge.

    It also happened with circumflex.

    Hôpital - Hospital. Forêt - Forest. Pâte - Paste.

    Here's a whole video about exactly this.

  • "United States" in French (États-Unis) would have made a very confusing acronym

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  • The Netherlands, but in English the language is called Dutch.

    But I prefer when it happens to cities. Aix-la-Chapelle or Aachen. Liège or Luik or Lüttich. Ghent or Gand or Gent.

  • Passenger trains in the United States vs Europe

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  • And as a Canadian, I'm even envious of the trains in the US. Pretty much the only thing but here we are.

    Anecdote time: I was visiting Europe, sitting in Liège and arrived there from Aachen with a train ticket I bought the day before. My next step was Brussels or Ghent but I wasn't decided yet and didn't have a ticket, so I just bought one on the spot for the next train, in an hour. While eating fast food and waiting for that train, I was trying to book a train in Canada next week when I'd return, to go from Montréal to Drummondville. However I was already too late. There was still available tickets but there were over $100 CAD for a trip that would normally cost about $32 CAD if I would have booked it a month in advance. And the next departure was 3 hours later, still overpriced. So, no train in Canada for me, even a week in advance.

    In short, in Canada, there's only 5 trains a day between major cities, and you have to book weeks in advance otherwise the prices can triple if you're last minute. And they don't take bikes. And they weigh your bagage.

    So I was in Europe, taking trains last minute here and there, while unable to book a train ticket at a reasonable price for the next week in Canada. VIA Rail sucks so much.

  • Canada calls on its pension funds to invest at home in age of ‘economic nationalism’

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  • In short, Montreal gets a new metro (the REM), financed by a pension fund (CDPQ) in a Private-Public Partnership. But the contract makes it illegal for public transit to compete with the new metro, slowly cannibalizing the public system (the ARTM).

    Not even people in Québec are very much aware of this. It's pretty much only transit users and transit fans in Montréal that are aware of this, because it's affecting the quality of transit.

    I think it's what makes this model perfidious. People can only see the new shiny metro system and don't care how it's financed. In fact, they see it as a success! Lots of foamers/transit enthusiasts are skipping this part because we got a new metro built in record time.

    I'm not a fan of Cult MTL but they have a pretty complete article on the situation:

    It’s a private, for-profit system that eats away at public transit funding, saps consumer confidence and is designed not to complement public transit, but compete with it.

    So, of course it would be good for pension funds to invest in local projects. Just, please, not like this one.

  • Canada calls on its pension funds to invest at home in age of ‘economic nationalism’

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  • As long as it's not like the PPP with the CDPQ and the REM.

    The REM itself is fine but the no competition clause from public transit entities is unacceptable. The REM makes it illegal for public transit to compete with it. Everything must feed into the REM to maximize the return on the investment. And the return is coming from public money.

    If a suburb doesn't have adequate transit but is not projected to be a good return on the investment, no transit for the citizens. It now has to be profitable and it's going to slowly make Montréal/the ARTM dependent on an investment fund to get more transit.

    What a shitty way to invest in your own community.

  • [Text in comments cause fuck CNN] Canada’s ‘boycott America’ movement is hurting innocent bystanders | CNN Business

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  • Opinions are diversified, like anything else. It's difficult to generalize. My brother in law lives in a small town, doesn't speak English, and is a Trump supporter. But for me, I think at least half the US population voted for this. They are lacking education and as much as it's difficult to blame people for being manipulated, at some point, I can also see them as very naive and gullible. I'm not blaming all the population of the US, but there's a significant chunk of it that holds part of the blame.

    AFAIK it's also why some states were hit harder than others by the boycott, because Canadians targeted the red states first. And for the rest, you know, "collateral damage". Sorry.

    Also, you try not to have an "emotional over-reaction" when your country is threatened to be annexed or invaded. If Xi from China said a few times, just jokingly, that the US should be part of China, and that a few other Chinese politicians started to push the idea of annexing or invading the US too, I don't think most Unitedstaters would see the Chinese government, and a part of those people pushing for this, with a neutral view.

  • Kill Your Heroes

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  • But killing civilians wasn’t taboo at the time

    At the time?

    An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died “indirectly,” as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment.