Kelsenellenelvial

I use the iCloud Photo Library, and seems worthwhile to me, though my photo library isn’t huge and has lots of stupid work pics. Frees up my phone storage, still have access anywhere I’ve got internet access. Big thing to me though is backups, iCloud is my really essential data, e-mails, contacts, family photos. That gets automatically synced up to iCloud, back down to my iMac, and that iMac gets backed up to my UnRaid server and a Time Capsule. So without any input from me, all my photos get backed up independently, with redundancy and versioning as well as to the cloud. That’s a pretty neat system to me.

Sure, the occasional customer gets into a cycle for credit card debt and ends up paying big interest. That’s not where credit card companies make their money though. There’s a fee for the merchant to process each transaction, that’s the main revenue source. Then if we’re talking about a store card, they get the ability to track your purchases everywhere you use that card, and use that info to do better marketing, merchandising, and just generally get better at selling people stuff. It’s nice to make a buck when people buy things from your store, but it’s even nicer if you can make a buck when people shop elsewhere too.

Common to get a big discount on the first purchase. That way it looks something like “just take 5 minutes to sign up here and you’ll get $30 off your purchase today”. I feel bad for the staff that have to push it, which gets me frustrated because I just want to buy my things and go, so I end up being rude to them.

I think part of the solution is to add some regulation that say that you should be able to close the account in the same way you open it. Let me sign up, get the $30 discount, pay the bill, close the account, and have them delete my personal information so I can do it over again next time. Few people doing that and it won’t be worth the effort for business to process everything.

Seems most of the mail I get is various spam. I’ll pay an extra dollar for the things I want to mail if it means that the credit card companies are paying an extra dollar to send me their crap.

I feel like this is just the effect of a new and growing industry. Gas stations are free to set their own pricing, but if it’s more than a few cents off the next nearest place they won’t get any sales. Reliability is also only an issue if there’s few stations, if there’s a station on every block, like we have gas stations now, then people will just go to the next nearest station, which gives companies a pretty good incentive to keep the chargers working.

I’m also okay with allowing different charging structures, but again I think that settles itself when availability increases. If charging per joule is cheaper for the consumer than charging per minute then that’s the station they’ll choose. Really, we just need to make sure it doesn’t end up an oligarchy like the cell networks where everybody just colludes to keep prices and margins high. Or put in some high marginal corporate tax rates to disincentivize those large margins.

I think that guy at the end has the right idea. If the employer wants proof of illness they should be required to pay for it. During the height of COVID in Sask, an group of healthcare providers published a generic note that said something like “it’s a pandemic, we don’t have time to create individual notes so this is our official recommendation that your employee stay home if they don’t feel well”. My last employer, we wouldn’t normally ask for a note, unless we noticed an issue or pattern(things like calling out monthly, or consistently calling out the first/last day of their week, etc.). Usually that involved a referral to a third party claim management company with the requirement that they consult with a doctor who determines if they’re fit for work, require accommodations, or are simply unfit to work. We should also expand protections relating to sick time to other emergencies like loss of childcare, failure of an essential appliance, etc..

Maybe it just changes the kinds of crimes committed and/or the reporting of those crimes. I came from a small town about 30 min from the nearest station. Police would maybe drive through for a couple hours every weekend or two, or when there was an actual call for them. There was a lot of drunk driving, stunting, petty vandalism and similar crime because for the most part people knew there wasn’t police around. You ado got occasional situations like someone from another area coming to the town and breaking into many sheds, or a business because they know the police response time is going to be so long there’s little risk of getting caught.

On the other hand, it was also the kind of place where people would mostly leave doors unlocked, leave things outside in an in-fenced yard, and similar things because those kinds of crime tend not to happen. In an urban setting it’s the kind of crime that people would commit in a neighbourhood distant from their own, but in a small town it’s all essentially the same neighbourhood, so it looks pretty suspicious if your new BBQ shows up the day after someone else’s gets stolen.

The thing to be careful about here is it only spans about 10 years, and it’s based on reported crime rates. That means you get somewhat skewed results because lots of people don’t bother reporting minor crimes thinking nothings going to happen anyway. You may not ever hear back about that police report for your stolen bike, but decisions do get made based on the aggregated reports. You also get things like they make targeted enforcement effort, maybe in a rough neighbourhood, or targeting a specific type of crime that seems to be on the rise and you see the reported crime rate rise because of that effort. We would also expect it to be a lagging metric, an increase in budget doesn’t always mean immediate results. It takes time to decide where to use that increase in funding, maybe time to source new equipment and train officers on its use, maybe they’re able to hire more officers but there’s a training period before you see the results of increased staffing. If budgets aren’t committed ahead of time the department might be conservative about spending on things like increasing the workforce that creates and ongoing cost vs programs that can be rolled back if the budget falls, or capital expenditures that provide value beyond the initial cost.

Cost is also a factor. A modern natural gas furnace is 90+% efficient and even an older one is going to be above 50%. When natural gas is 1/7 the cost of electricity that 50% efficiency is still 1/3 the cost. There’s an argument for using a space heater to heat just the occupied portion of the home, but at 3-6 times the cost of gas ones often just as far ahead to keep the furnace going. On that note, even if the heat pump gets a COP of 3 like your example, that’s still twice the cost of gas for the amount of heat put in the house and 3+ times the cost to install a proper ground loop and heat pump vs a gas furnace.

I suspect part of the issue though is shitty rental units that don’t give the tenant control of their heat and/or the landlord pays gas but passes off electricity on the tenant. Also. If it’s a poorly done build you can get things like the HVAC not being designed to match the floor plan, so you end up with some rooms being cooler and people supplement with electric heat.

Not too immediately. Take 3 steps back/towards the nearest exit, that’s where you want the extinguisher. Not right next to the stove that’s going to be on fire when you need to get to the extinguisher.

Keep in mind that a standard ABC extinguisher isn’t rated for grease fryers. If it’s just the fat needed to sautee something you’re good, but for an actual deep frying fire you want something in class K.

1 MB/min for phone calls and 1 MB/10 text messages. It’s regular SMS/voice calls, just deducted from the data bucket. There’s also an unlimited calling/text options but you’d have to be doing more than 1 h of phone calls or 100 SMS per day to make it worthwhile. The top data bucket is $200/95 GB of data.

Sasktel’s MVNO, Lum Mobile, has a relatively unique pricing structure where you pay for a bucket of data, and it lasts until you use it. You can have calls and SMS get deducted from that data bucket. Ends up a lot cheaper for me and it’s good for people whose usage might vary month to month since you don’t feel like you need a plan to cover your busy months, and you actually have an incentive to reduce usage rather than just having “unlimited” things.

Downside is to get the best rate you need to pay for the year up front, but for about $425 including taxes and fees I’ve got a whole year of service. Equivalent to about $30/month plus 911 fees and sales tax.