Back in the day (mid/late 90s), any download on Internet Explorer had a “file transfer” pop-up with an animation involving a planet (the Internet) sending flying sheets of paper (the download) to a Manila folder (the computer’s file system).

I legit had one client ask me why they couldn’t make the download go faster my moving the planet closer to the folder, or vice versa.

I recall just sitting there for a number of seconds while my poor brain tried to grasp just how badly out-of-whack their interpretation of the universe was.

Spoiler alert: they were a very poor client, and refused to relinquish an entire raft of very poorly thought out or even entirely wrong concepts of computing and the Internet. They were also credulous AF, and while I could have made an arseload of money correcting what they did on a weekly or even daily basis, I just didn’t want that kind of headache.

Sooo… he works multiple part-time jobs?

Weird how a forced technique of the ultra-poor is showing up here.

This pokes fun at German rule-following, but as a Canadian of German descent (both parents), I can absolutely confirm that this “joke” is likely not a joke at all. Or, at least, it was lifted almost verbatim from observing another German parent.

And this is why I will never own a vehicle manufactured after 2006.

I have just too little control with newer vehicles, be it having to auth with the mothership with every repair I do at home just to get it to start up, or even failing to start up in the first place when the mothership could not be contacted.

I start off with Win10Privacy (which also cleans 11) and then follow up with Win11Debloat. The two work pretty well.

And Microsoft is stuffing AI straight into Windows.

Betchya dollars to fines that this will happen a lot more frequently as normal users begin to try to use Copilot.

And alt-right conservatives continue to openly demonstrate why Canada so desperately needs a well-funded, nation-wide network of mental health sanitariums that can thoroughly protect the wider public from them.

I would take the top-5 languages spoken in Canada and make the country multilingual based off of that.

If that just so happens to include Cantonese and Hindi, so be it.

If it includes Cree and/or Inuktitut, even better.

Sure, have English as the baseline. A baseline should always be the most spoken common language. But having an few other languages as “official” - and supporting numerous others in the way Europe does - would make Canada far more inclusive and intellectually robust.

That’s what I am saving up for, actually. The numbers of surplussed high-end compute just in my sparsely populated region could probably let me open my own datacentre.

the rest will retire in Kelowna.

Fuck, no! Not my home town! We have enough jacked-up and lifted pavement princesses with red license plates as it is!

Whoever thought of putting an entertainment system right next to the waste disposal is a complete and utter moron.

I can’t even turn things on without wondering if the cleaners sanitized/wiped in the wrong direction.

So what? Most of us were never meant to be impactful, or even lack the ability to be impactful. I would posit that life in general was only ever meant for us to vibe with the universe for a brief time. In the span of epochs, and especially once humanity makes itself extinct, vanishingly little will have any material impact on even the planet, much less reality as a whole.

Unless you manage to trigger false vacuum decay. Then you have made the biggest possible impact by destroying the entire universe. Not sure this is an appropriate goal to reach for, but hey. You do you.

But somehow matter magically organizes itself into life?

There is a recent, decently-supported hypothesis that the emergence of life is a byproduct of entropy, and the need for a system as a whole to almost “self-process” itself from a state of high order to one of lower order. So life is an emergent “engine” that allows entropy to function more efficiently. Or, at least a more efficient path than non-life.

Downside is that life - as we understand it - is only possible under a narrow range of environmental conditions, and complex life even more so. So while “life” may exist throughout the universe in measured single-celled doses, complex life - especially sapient life - may be distressingly rare or even wholly absent except for us.

Which is a real kick in the nuts when you examine the scientific evidence of how fast we are hurtling towards our own extinction.

While it is incredibly difficult to keep the breast meat properly hydrated (even I find the best turkeys seem dry with their white meat), another commenter is absolutely correct - a properly done turkey will have absolutely succulent and tasty brown meat. To the point where adding any garnish or gravy is almost an insult.

Piracy is the response when companies refuse to serve market needs.

I mean, there will always be people trying to get something for free when they normally have no problem affording it or obtaining it personally. It’s why the Parasite Class continue to drive down wages while raising prices for that sweet labour-free profit margin, even though they already have obscene amounts of wealth. Their boundless greed demands they squeeze even more out of the Working Class whose labour is the source of all wealth.

So yeah, there we’ll always be some people who will pirate purely for the fish.

But in the end, any significant piracy is 100% the fault of those very companies that complain about it.

The “fuzziness” inherent in reality once you get close to the Plank distance is clear evidence that we exist in a virtual universe whose computing power goes only so far. Reality breaks down at the Plank distance because that’s the pre-programmed limit of detail in the simulation.

I am sometimes forced to wear size 11 shoes, despite having 9½ feet, because so few manufacturers put out 9½ size shoes in an EEEE (quintuple wide) or oversized EEE (quadruple wide) width.

At least a size 11 in a W (wide) is comfortable enough for me, and most shoes come in at least a wide.

I think out of all the shoes I have ever bought, only two styles in 40 years have been wide enough to allow me to wear a 9½. I recently found that second style in a work boot that was being surplussed (through Princess Auto) and no longer being produced, with the marketing that it was wide enough for any foot. Once I confirmed the comfort, I immediately bought three more pairs for a lifetime supply, clearing out the stock of size 9½ for that shoe nation-wide (I checked, as I wanted even more… would have gladly gotten a half dozen pairs if I could). That brand was Terra. Highly recommend, as the model I got have been fucking awesome work boots.

our telecom infrastructure is privately owned.

This is the crux of the matter.

You look at Norway, Sweden and Finland, and you will find geography on-par with BC’s west coast and then some. And yet, they have full wired Internet access and LTE data throughout the region.

So geography is not a viable excuse.

I’m mid GenX, and frequently have to trot out the saying, “regulations are written in the blood of innocents” to people a lot more ignorant than I am. And I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Am I unreasonably disappointed to not find “Correct Horse Battery Staple” - or some variation thereof - in that list?