🇨🇦 tunetardis

One last point he makes is the personal savings rate soared during lockdowns, as key costs like childcare and commuting vanished. “When the world reopened, the costs returned, but now inflated by 20%. The rage we feel today is the hangover from that brief moment where the American Option was momentarily back in the money,” he says.

So people were actually better off during the pandemic. smh

A little follow-up on this. Tonight I had a look at what it generated. It produced 2 files: a .wav and a .ass. The latter apparently contains subtitles that sync to the audio. But how do you play them together?

After searching around online, the general consensus seemed that you need to make a video file that throws it all together. For the background image I used a still of the book cover art. Then I ran an ffmpeg command that looked something like this:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i cover.jpg -i abogen_file.wav -vf subtitles=abogen_file.ass -shortest audio_book.mov

It sounds pretty awesome and looks like this while it’s playing!

I installed it yesterday and started having it chug through the Murderbot series I got in epub format. It seemed to be taking forever, but then I checked a system monitor and discovered it was using the GPU to do most of the work. So whenever my GPU-heavy screen saver kicked in, it slowed to a crawl.

At any rate, it was done this morning but then I forgot to bring the files to work, so I can’t say at this point how good a job it did? It was a bit of a pain to install because it needed Python 12 and wouldn’t accept Python 14 for some reason, and pyenv on my Mac is a bit of pain because it hates tkinter. Go figure. But I got it working in the end.

The carbon tax was revenue neutral. It came back to you in the form of rebates. If you were an average Joe and did absolutely nothing in response to it, you’d still break even.

But if you did do something to lower your personal carbon footprint, you’d get ahead. You’d be getting back more than you were paying. And the higher the tax went, the bigger the payout would become. That was the point of it. It was an incentive to lower your taxes and emissions at the same time.

But all people with half a brain could hear was TAX TAX TAX. And so here we are…

I was renewing my CAA today (Canadian equivalent of AAA motor club in US) and they mentioned they do roadside assist for bikes now. So I looked it up and among the FAQ it said:

Do we cover motorized bicycles? Yes, provided they are conventional bicycles with standard pedals and chain and mounted with an external electric geared motor. Motorcycles, electric scooters and mopeds are covered under Plus and Premier Memberships only.

That’s interesting that scooters are only covered by their higher tiers while e-bikes are fine with the basic plan I have. Bikes are looking better and better at this point.

How is the center of mass is lower on a scooter? It is the same or higher.

I guess I was thinking in terms of the contraption itself. The battery and the bulk of the weight would be down near ground level. But that’s a good point about the rider’s position.

The tiny scooter wheels will react enormously to tiny disadvantages in the road surface and the consequences of it. Hitting an tiny rock on the asfalt with a e-scooter will result in way nastier accidents than hitting a similar rock on the asfalt with a bicycle.

Yeah, this was main concern. There are potholes around here that are so bad your teeth may clunk together if you don’t have any sort of suspension, and I can’t help but think it would be difficult to steer your way out of those if you hit one on a scooter?

My main reason for considering a scooter was for hybrid trips where you drive to another place and then ride around. But if anything, the by-laws are even more vague around e-scooters than e-bikes in a lot of cities, so that makes me a little reluctant to take one on the road. Folding e-bikes are getting much smaller now though, so that might be the better option?

I am curious about e-scooters but have never ridden one. They have a lower centre of mass which, in theory, would offer some advantage over bicycles in terms of the severity of collisions.

Otoh would you not tend to have more control issues over uneven terrain? I think about my inline skates from the 90s. The streets suck here, and I had one too many an instance of a pothole or a bump sending me flying to keep that up.

Scooters have bigger wheels than skates, of course, but much smaller than bikes and they seem to have very low ground clearance. This makes me a little edgy.

My coworker who switched to one after riding an e-bike to work said the brakes were weaker with the e-scooter. That could just be a workmanship issue. I’d have to think about whether physics would play a role there?

C’mon this totally rocks! Seriously though, I like it.

I’ve been thinking of late that his tweets look AI generated. You just enter something like: take today’s news from a reputable source, invert all the facts, add lots of hyperbole, and capitalize words for emphasis.

That’s good to know! Actually, now that I think of it, my wife and I visited the one and only mosque in our home town during a public event in a show of solidarity after it got vandalized. And I have to say, it was an absolute food fest in there!

I once had a conversation with my boss who was well-travelled. He said the secret to Europe is to eat in the Catholic countries. If you must spend time within a Protestant country, look around for a Catholic enclave within it. Not only will the food be superior, but people will be falling over each other to make sure you are well fed.

I looked at him incredulously. How can you say that? It’s such a sweeping generalization! And then I went to Europe…

Yeah, I know what true shepherd’s pie is made of thanks to Denis Leary.

I always wanted to see what Florida Man actually looks like. Dude’s been through a lot!

I got a twinge of sympathetic lower back pain when I saw this, so your art has real power!

I don’t know about the AI projections, but the idea that the current US administration would have a reasoned, thoughtful response to any emerging threat from AI or react in a constructive way to widespread public protests over it is what strains credulity for me.

That’s interesting. I hadn’t considered the efficiency aspect. L2 would be a pain to install where I live, I’m thinking. It’s a bungalow and the breaker box is about as far from the driveway in the basement as is humanly possible. So lots of wiring and drilling to bring the power out to where it’s needed seems likely.

From what others are saying, I probably do not need L2 for my modest driving needs, but the efficiency aspect could imply it would eventually pay itself back in energy savings. But if I have essentially what amounts to the worst case scenario in terms of upfront installation cost, that could take a long time…

Thanks that was very informative!

I’ve never owned an EV but have been casually considering what it would entail. Like would I really need level 2 charging at home? I’m sort of thinking not at this point. The commute for me or my wife would be something in the 20 km round trip range. We don’t live in a big city. Errands could increase that somewhat. But if let’s say the charger could add back even 5 km/hr, which I think is a pretty conservative estimate. That should be plenty to handle our needs with overnight charging on 120V.

As for intercity, well, you’d likely be using some public fast charger right? So that’s kind of a moot point as far as what you need at home.

I don’t know if I’m missing something though in this analysis? Like I’ve heard winter driving affects range fairly considerably. And that’s unfortunately also the time I’d be more tempted to drive over riding the e-bike everywhere. But even so, I doubt I’d ever exhaust the battery in my home town?

This looks fascinating! Definitely signing up for the early access.

Here in Ontario, I think we have 16 reactors spread across 3 power plants? And more are purportedly on the way.

The CANDU reactors use heavy water and should, in theory, be safer than light water designs since they can function with unenriched uranium. OTOH the nearest reactor to where I live is in upstate New York and is rather Fukushima-like from what I’ve heard. Also, I don’t know what the new reactors will be, though the provincial gov seems to be pushing SMRs for whatever reason.