The telcos had a brief opportunity to repair their reputation in Canada by riding a wave of patriotism. But no…

Well I guess he’s effected some change there in that he’s got me working hard to avoid reddit.

I saw a meme going around about our guy in Canada who met a similar fate. It compared him to a toilet, noting that while both are full of shit, the toilet at least has a seat.

Oh wow I hadn’t realized that!

I checked on their web site. They say it can handle up to 140W for a 3-hour charge, which I assume means 28Vx5A. The minimum is 30W (20Vx1.5A).

That’s interesting. I wonder what the battery voltage is? Since most ebikes are up in the 36-48V range and USB-C maxes out at 20V, they’d presumably need to do some step up transforming in there?

That’s cool that the connector is bidirectional for charging portable electronics off your bike. I discovered my bike has a stealth USB-A output hidden behind a rubberized cover under the instrument panel. I didn’t even know it was there for like a year, but it’s awesome!

That’s an interesting idea of having swappable battery packs rather than sitting around waiting for the thing to charge. I remember in the early days of EVs, there was some talk about that but it’s much harder to pull off with the huge batteries in a car.

Yeah, I suppose they could also be useful for translation when travelling someplace where you can’t read the language, provided it’s reasonably accurate and not too laggy?

In terms of occasional use, I was thinking they could be good for loading speeches or music/lyrics when you’re up on a stage. But while that seems like it ought to be a fairly trivial feature to implement, as both a software developer and performer, I could see this being more challenging than you think to get a good experience out of that sort of app.

This seems like a tech that would be hard to get right? There are a lot of trade-offs involving cost, weight, resolution, processing, battery life, etc.

For my part, I would probably use AR features rather sparingly to maintain my sanity, but they could be very useful in certain narrow applications. Whether these would be sufficient to justify the price tag is uncertain. I also tend to be rough on glasses, so that would be a worry.

Huh. I always thought he was from Aurora, Ontario.

I guess if you look at the track record of how tariffs have played out in the past, there has tended not to be a lot of price relief in going with domestic producers.

Take something like aluminum. While the US does have a domestic industry, it couldn’t possibly meet demand in the short term at least. So industries hoping to source aluminum may initially flock to the domestic product, causing a run on it that raises prices. At the end of the day, they’ll wind up paying something close to what the imported aluminum costs. This is the new price of aluminum. Live with it.

In the long term, the domestic industry may grow to the point that it displaces the imports. Will that lead to price relief? Again, uncertain. There are reasons why certain parts of the world produce much of the world supply of X, and cost of production is one of them. Also, counter-tariffs may reduce the growth potential of a domestic industry, leading to less investment.

It’s not just the US of course. Everyone everywhere will be paying more for everything. Tariffs just suck.

Can’t say I’m surprised by the push to plastics given the 25% tariff on aluminum.

That’s cute!

My daughter has a chinchilla who likes to hold up signs like this.

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Climatology and meteorology are separate disciplines with their own very different modelling. I studied the former way back when, and it wasn’t even in the same department at my university (geography vs physics). Climatology is about long-term trends and focuses more on energy fluxes, general circulation patterns (both in the atmosphere and oceans), the hydrological cycle, the carbon cycle, etc. Meteorology is about the near-term. It focuses on the fluid and thermodynamics of specific weather systems, and how to process/interpret real-time data.

I can’t find where I read this now, but my recollection is that in the previous round of tariffs, China not only implemented tit for tat counter-tariffs which I imagine Trump had been expecting, but took some additional measures like export controls on rare earths. Like it or not, they basically own the global market and Trump had no answer to that other than to threaten even more tariffs. And here we are.

It sounds like they did some gene editing to select characteristics the dire wolf supposedly had, as opposed to finding an ancient DNA sample somewhere and working from that. So it’s more of a genetic simulation than the real deal right?

Like just because you know of some gene that happens to give people pronounced brow ridges doesn’t mean you can bring back the Neanderthal. Or am I not understanding this correctly?

About a year ago, there was a boycott on the Loblaws supermarket chain in protest of their boasting record profits at a time when grocery inflation was out of control. It lasted about a month before kind of fizzling out.

But I think by comparison, this buy Canadian movement has legs. It’s a major nationwide shift in people’s spending habits. And the key word here may be habits. Let’s say for argument’s sake that after 4 years of Trump, a new administration comes in and repeals all the tariffs. By that time, people will have settled into alternate brands across a wide range of consumer goods, and it may be difficult to convince them to switch back again. There’s a certain inertia in human behaviour. So the effects of this could potentially go on quite a bit longer than the tariff war.

I suppose if some sort of critical mass is reached, it could push the world from x86-64 to arm? Every modern OS supports it at this point and emulators have come a long way for older software that needs them.

They had that protest in every state did they not? But when I couldn’t find much on it in the Canadian media, I went searching CNN and other American sites and found very little also, which was surprising to me. Here on lemmy, there were all sorts photos being posted from various cities, and it looked like a pretty big deal?

We somehow have more than 2 parties in Canada even with FPTP. And yeah, it sucks. The left’s vote, in particular, gets carved up into tiny pieces and the conservatives take advantage of that all the time. We desperately need voting reform and it occasionally gets dangled in front of us, only to be shot down. Kind of like high speed rail, which is being dangled again of late.

This makes me think of my late grandfather. He had been a civil engineer for the US Navy who spent several years working in the Panama Canal Zone. He told me this story of a senator showing up one day with cost-cutting on his mind. He focused on one line in the budget: mosquito control. “Mosquitoes? There are no mosquitoes here! What a colossal waste of money!” The whole area became pretty much unliveable within a year of his returning to Washington.