Sorry

You don’t even need to go live somewhere else; just visit.

I’m from Canada and went back to visit Germany and Belgium a few months ago. I already went to Germany and the Netherlands a few years ago and just used the trains. I had no fixed itinerary and was deciding where to go a day in advance before buying a train ticket to go there. It was obviously fine (most of the time) but because of how trains “work” here, I was anxious about buying tickets a day in advance, thinking it was “last minute”.

Then while I was in Belgium I had to plan a train ride in Canada a week later, and there was no affordable tickets left. I was sitting in Liège, and just bought a train ticket to Bruxelles that was departing in the next hour… while trying to book a train a week in advance in Canada, and failing to do so.

Every time I have to use a train in Canada, or just any kind or intercity service, even a coach, I’m painfully reminded of how bad it is here.

I go camping for an additional night. I already planned to bike and camp to the closest national park one last time before winter, this weekend, but I would gladly add one night to the trip and go right now instead of tomorrow.

Nah. Not good enough for me. I thought I would just do that but the thing still has to boot android in order to show you the HDMI input. So it has to constantly suck power like a vampire in order to keep a SoC running, and if it loses power, it has to boot the system again.

I got a cheap TCL and it smells like burning plastic, even when its “off”. I suspect it’s because of that SoC constantly running.

Next time I’m buying a computer monitor instead of a smart-but-not-connected TV.

I don’t know for dogs but I read that other species have different “accents” depending on their group and where they live.

Apparently, animals like dolphins, orcas and whales have different “accents”. And birds apparently also sign differently depending on their group and location.

Like, some ducks quack differently, from one region to another. I don’t think this can hamper simple communication, but there is apparently variation in their calls.

I face the same specific issue. I started with the French (Canada) layout years ago but now Windows sets the default to Multilingual/CSA because it has been made the official one by the government a number of years ago.

So now everyone that got used the “old” one has to fiddle with keyboard settings every time they use a new Windows session/computer.

And it’s not exactly a breeze to switch, as Windows often keeps the multilingual one and switches back to it when you use a different application. Gotta make sure to delete the multilingual and leave only one layout. It’s a real annoyance.

Well, the tower was also supposed to be temporary and yet, it’s still there 137 years later.

Why is it sad? No lawn to care about. No snow to remove in winter. No garbage day. No electricity bill. No roof or windows to change. No water heater to worry about.

I much prefer to rent than be stuck owning a condo where I have to deal with the other owners and plan maintenance. And I wouldn’t want an “affordable” house that is much too big, in a suburb or in the middle of nowhere, where a car would be a necessity, and another thing to own (or rather pay for).

As far as I am concerned, owning a home is a social construct. A goal imposed on us by capitalism. Our collective dream, should be to own a home in the middle of nowhere before we’re too old to have a family, with obviously, a car! But I never wanted to have a “death pledge”, nor a family, nor a house, nor a stupid condo. Renting is perfectly fine for a whole lot of people. It’s not something to be sad about. The only sad thing is that we don’t have enough cheap housing of any kind for everyone.

Around here we have “half furnished” apartments that include appliances.

I’ve always lived in a place where they are included with the rent. So I don’t have to move them up and down the stairs or the elevator every few years. Also, if they break, the landlord just change them.

To me, winning a refrigerator would be a burden. I’d have to store it and sell it. I’d prefer what it’s worth in money.

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Four to five weeks of vacation is pretty standard in Europe and I don’t think it has anything to do with productivity. AFAIK, a German or Belgian would pretty much get the same amount of vacation. I’m in Montreal and the standard by law here is two weeks but my contract with a local employer is giving me four weeks. And, I’m still working when I’m working, even if I have some vacation time at some point?!

I took eight weeks this year. So you’re saying I (or a French person?) am not getting anything done when I work, because I took some extended vacation time?

I know this behaviour from big corporations is not exclusive to French companies but my type of work allows me to work from home and I’ve never seen a company despise WFH so much than my once French employer.

This was before the pandemic and I had the habit of working from home with my previous employer when I was sick. When I changed employer to work for a French hosting company in Montreal, they were adamantly against WFH. Even if sick. They preferred that you missed a day (or two, you know, take your time to recover!1!!) from work, taking “generous” sick days, than letting anyone from the lower ranks WFH. This was a pretty big red flag for me. Anyway their work culture was pretty toxic and I ended up quitting after a few months, but the “no work from home even if sick” policy is the first thing that hit me when I started there.

My current employer allows me to WFH and I’ve been looking a bit around to see if I could find something else, but they mostly all seem to require some sort of hybrid schedules at the office now, which obviously sucks.

And those motocross. My family lives in a rural area with a rail trail. So to go there I often just cycle on the rail trail.

Unfortunately it’s also used by a local motocross group. They’re not supposed to but they obviously don’t give a fuck.

At least you can hear them coming from kilometres away. Which is interesting because the police or whoever is supposed to enforce “bicycles only” on that bike path doesn’t seem to hear them. Nor see the very obvious tracks.

The most insulting part is that they close the path in fall, winter and spring because they don’t want CYCLISTS to damage the bike path, yet there’s assholes on motocross driving on it.

The one about the memorial built in advance for a damn disaster that they all saw coming but did nothing about, except for the memorial of the future victims.

This disaster will have been preventable. All of the warning signs are here now. Yet, no one will have fucking done anything about it.

If you want to commit murder without consequences, do it with a car.

Unfortunately this one depends a lot where you live.

I never owned a car but I live in Canada and public transit sucks. Our provincial government is actively cutting funds to cities’ public transit. And intercity routes are detained by VIA Rail or coach buses >!!<that sucks.

It’s easier for me to go to the airport and in another country than move in my own province.

VIA Rail trains are infrequent, always late, pricey and most employees are jaded. They also don’t take bikes. It’s a problem. Sometimes you can get stuck as a prisoner on the train, without food, water or toilets for multiple hours.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/via-rain-passengers-stuck-1.7311176

Another one was stuck for 12 hours last year.

Coaches are cramped and also have very limited intercity services. The city I need to go to frequently only has three coaches a day at inconvenient times. They are usually full and they charge $15 to bring a bike.

I’ve been car free for 20 years but I’ve come to hate taking the train or coaches here. I’m slowly realizing that my province really really wants me to get a car.

PeOpLe On BiKeS dOn’T StOp On rED LiGhTs! HueHehUhEHUhE!

Meanwhile people driving multi-tons vehicles are not coming to a complete halt at every stop sign and it’s completely fine. People in cars are important. They have places to go. Not like those idiots on bikes that may start ahead on a red light not to get hooked by a car turning right.

Look at all those damn people on bikes not stopping at stop signs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUDIwZWh91s

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7yd5pRyrsF4

This thread is giving me flashbacks to the times before Unicode, when swapping files between Windows and Linux partitions would have a good chance of fucking up every non-ASCII characters in their names.

There was ways to set it up so the ISO character sets would match, but it was still a giant pain to deal with different ones.

Blessed be Unicode.

Microsoft uses some of these. I remember having to do something like that to setup a minecraft account and at some point I thought I would just give up and lose my money.