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.

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.

There’s also smart chargers that will scale the charging speed based on the rest of the house’s demand. High power chargers are nice sometimes, but most of the time people’s cars are parked at home for 12+ hours per day and they’re only driving a few km to work and back each day.

I do wonder what this means for businesses that offer powered parking stalls. Having someone charge their vehicle at work could be an extra few hundred per year per stall.

It’s a shitty game. The worst part to me is that there’s a whole culture of avoiding credit card debt(which is good), that cut out credit cards altogether and many are never even aware that they’re leaving those rewards on the table let alone the other benefits (fraud protection, extended warranties, price protection, etc.) that are commonly available for credit card purchases.

I think the fee structure could be better, and that would change a lot. In many ways, the merchant fees are worthwhile as the transactions are easier to process than cash, there’s merchant side protections from fraud, it reduces crime(businesses having less cash on hand), etc… The issues are that pricing is negotiable so companies that do the biggest volume pay the lowest fees, its percentage based which hurts companies that tend to have higher transaction values, and bigger companies get more benefit from being able to track customers by their card.

The way I see it, the bigger the whole Lemmy community is, the more people can make smaller communities around niche topics. Steady, continuous growth is a good thing. What can be troublesome is rapid/inconsistent growth.

True, but a slow, steady growth is going to result in a better platform than having a flood of old redditors that take over. And that’s coming from a Reddit refugee, which I’d guess is a pretty significant portion of the user base these days. I saw a thread about Beehive considering leaving the fediverse altogether because they can’t keep up with all the fedderated content coming in that doesn’t meet their standards. I also think there needs to be further development of the software, things like users being able to block while instances(I’m fine with porn instances existing, but I don’t want them showing in my main feed and I don’t necessarily want to block everything labeled NSFW), as well as something comparable to the multi-Reddit system that lets me make groups of communities to browse together rather than just subscribed/home/all. The second would go a long way to getting that niche content communities up and running. The few niche communities that I have found seem to get buried under the more popular ones(which was an issue on Reddit for a long time too), so some method to bring that niche content to the surface on par with the bigger communities would go a long way too.

While I think what you say is accurate, I think the main issue here isn’t just the housing crisis being manifested, it’s the part you hinted at where our economy is so dependent on non-essential spending to keep it running. On one hand you have people overspending and going into debt to have new vehicles, RV’s, McMansions, and we have people complaining that this rampant consumerism is killing the environment because people keep spending on single-use items, or trashing otherwise serviceable items to keep up with the Jones’s. On the other hand, if that consumerism goes away, people pay off their debts and don’t buy all the new toys, then the economy and those of us in the working class section of that economy, struggle.

Not just personal, but work/community. We had a year at my work with just a handful of staff cases, then got smacked last April with about 25% of our staff all testing positive over a week or two, plus a few not-COVID sick calls. After about 5 cases in 2 days most people masked up again until the sick calls stopped.

“Save the Children” has been considered the cry of people that can’t put forth a reasonable argument for the thing they want for decades. Right up there with the people that like exclaiming “muh rights” and then either complain about something that’s never been a right, or immediately following up by trying to remove other people’s rights. I feel like using “save the children”(or similar variations) is a pretty good indication that I’m not going to agree with most of what follows.

Definitely a good idea to reduce plastic waste, but I think that putting too much emphasis on grocery packaging can miss the mark. For things like food, it is important to be able to have things sealed for freshness or food safety. The unnecessary waste in my mind comes more from things like packaging of other products, like showy retail clamshell packaging that’s significantly larger than the item being sold, or that only exists as a marketing gimmick to make things look good on retail shelves.

A good model is some things from Amazon that just gets shipped in plain cardboard because that’s more recyclable/renewable than plastic. I also feel that the efficiency of having large warehouses, even when the items are shipped individually is better than having to have a whole retail supply chain that involves creating an appealing retail space. Especially if someone is making a trip in a vehicle to pick up just a couple retail items. Another good example is something like the Lee Valley model where many items don’t have significant packaging at all, and they use a smaller show-room style retail space supplemented by more efficient warehousing storage in the back. Lee Valley even has a program to collect and re-use shipping boxes so they can be directly used multiple time before getting put through a recycling process.

In a lot of ways, it’s up to the consumer to make buying choices based on the sustainable practices of the business they choose to frequent. Just blaming the business for the waste created by the service that their customers choose to use is just kicking the can down the road. If we chose to shop at businesses with sustainable practices or buy products with more sustainable packaging it would create a clear financial incentive for other businesses to follow suit.

Just starting an electrical apprenticeship in a couple weeks. I’m very interested to see how this plays out. Seems to me like there’s a lot of complaints on both sides between “nobody wants to hire apprentices” and “nobody wants to work anymore”. From my experience in hospitality, I feel like there’s a feedback loop of people don’t want to invest in real training because they feel those staff are just going to move on and staff keep moving on because there’s no room for advancement within an employer so they have to jump somewhere else to get ahead. I imagine a similar thing happens lots of other industries.

Which kind of mandatory apprentice ratios are you thinking of? Many trades have a cap so you can’t hire more apprentices without first bringing in more journey persons to train them. If you mean the other way where a place would actually have to be bringing in apprentices, I don’t think that’s practical unless you can perpetually grow your business exponentially as those apprentices are being trained.

On the other hand, making it expensive to be a landlord also drives up what people need to pay for rent to cover those costs. There should be options for people to get housing without having to commit to owning it themselves. Income from rental properties is subject to income taxes, and there’s lots of subsidies/incentives that reduce housing costs that only apply to a primary dwelling, not rental properties.

Personally, I’d like to see a crown corp that does housing. Set reasonable pricing and a base standard of what people should expect from a rental property and the private industry has to compete with that.

That’s fair, but it’s not the whole story. Fact is things were more affordable then, particularly for people in entry-level type jobs making near minimum wage. Look at things like median wage vs median cost of housing, and you see a very different storey, even with high interest rates.

That median household income doesn’t go very far these days. It’s only manageable for many because they get support from family/friends or have a big chunk of unreported income that doesn’t meet the statistics. I’m looking at changing careers and the idea of our household income dropping to only a little above that median is scary as hell. An increase of 10% of 10% of one’s budget doesn’t sound crazy on its own, but when lots of other costs are going up too good might be one of the highest $ value changes compared to things like fuel or individual utility costs.