There’s also a Kirkland near Montreal, so it could be Canada. But as it’s already been mentioned, it has nothing to do with location in this case.

In theory, the government is elected by the public. Not a given these days, I know.

That’s a house hippo!

I’d be okay with the govt owning shares, honestly. That way the public would get a voice in how these megacorps operate, and that voice would get bigger the larger the company becomes.

They always force me to get the 80$ lenses… Still pretty cheap, but it ends up more around 100$ so I only change every couple years.

The store nearest me will deliver whatever you want for a $30 flat rate. I have a minivan so I can still carry a lot of stuff myself but for that price it lets me avoid messing with removing my seats so it’s worth it

Funnily enough, in my town there used to be a Future Shop, and then a Best Buy sprung up in the new commercial district, but apparently couldn’t compete because it closed 2 years later. Then about a year later Best Buy bought Future Shop and they re-branded the existing Future Shop to Best Buy.

Yeah, ToysRUs is alive and well in Canada. I have no idea that the bottom-right one is.

Connecting more people to the Internet, giving more options in rural areas.

I’ve personally been a Starlink subscriber for about a year while I was traveling, and it really was a game-changer. Rock-solid internet in remote places, fast enough to have Zoom calls on, all for a price that’s only about twice what I currently pay now that I’m back home (people complaining about Starlink’s price don’t know what they’re talking about, this is 100+ Mbps statellite internet we’re talking about. Other options are ten times the cost for less than a tenth of the speed).

It just drives me nuts when I see progress being blocked for stupid reasons. Examples in other areas would be wind power (“but what about the birds”), electric cars (“but cobalt = slave labour”, “akschually, when you charge the car with the dirtiest fuel possible and take into account all externalities it’s less green than just the tailpipes of a gas car”), space exploration (“the potable water sprayed on the launch pad leaked into the environment, here’s a fine”). There’s some stuff that’s been disproved years ago by anyone with half a brain that keeps being repeated, it’s infuriating.

“Just asking questions”… It’s just a bit suspicious that as soon as the safety aspect was proven to not be an issue, you immediately switched to another angle.

But to answer your question, yes, vapourizing someting made of metal and plastics in the upper atmosphere could certainly count as pollution, and we don’t really know the effects it might have on it because no studies have yet been done.

What has been done, though, is a study of how many meteors fall on the earth every hear: early estimates in the 60s were of about 100,000 tons per year, but further studies (1) showed this was grossly underestimated and more accurate values would be about triple that.

Starlink has launched 6,054 satellites in orbit (2) that total about 3,838,042 kg or a bit below 4000 tons. Even if they all fell in the atmosphere tomorrow, it’d only amount to less than 2% of this years’ “stuff” that burns up in the atmosphere (the rest coming from natural sources). Honestly I don’t think that’s significant, but I’ll concede that we don’t really know for sure. I just think that there are other more immediate, much worse sources of pollution that people should direct their anger towards.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110512174406/http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Moon-Dust-and-the-Age-of-the-Solar-System.pdf 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches

Man, you really are looking for any excuse to hate on SpaceX, right?

If you’re that worried about pollution, just look up the mass of a starlink satellite vs the mass a coal plant burns every hour… Even if the satellite ends up vapourizing as 100% pollution, I’m pretty sure it’s orders of magnitude below other industries like coal power or aviation.

They’d burn up / vapourize. This is partly why it took them so long to get their space lasers to work (for satellite to satellite communications); these things usually are usually based on a crystal that wouldn’t burn and could hurt someone when the satellite falls.

Shortest answer is that even if all Starlink satellites suddently exploded at the same time for no reason, they’d fall back to Earth in a matter of weeks. They’re waaaay lower than the other satellites you’re thinking of (see discussion on geo-stationary satellites for why), so they need to be actively pushed every few days just to stay up. They’re so low they’re still subject to atmospheric drag.

Respect has always been at the core of my wife and I’s parenting philosophy. Children are fully-qualified persons in their own right, they’re not an extension of their parents. They have their own tastes, dreams and aspirations. They’ll test to find the limits of what they can do, and it doesn’t really matter where it’s actually set but it’s really important that they do find it. They can understand why we have to say no to them, and if you communicate the reason they’ll respect it.

All of this continues well into their teenage years, BTW.

I keep telling my wife we have to write a book on parenting, but she thinks it’ll be too controversial (especially our views around daycare and schooling)…

I own a sailboat, and let’s just say that it’s not as simple as it looks. If you want to have good sailing performance you can’t just weld a mast to the deck and call it good: Half of what makes a sailboat go happens underwater, so it has to be designed as a sailboat from the get-go. Not an impossible task, but it’ll need new ship types and perhaps new construction methods; it’s not something you can just retrofit onto an existing fleet.

All sailboats large enough to sleep in also have an engine, and most of the time it’s a 20-60HP diesel depending on the size of the boat. There’s a lot of buzz currently around switching to electric auxiliary propulsion, but the benefits aren’t as big as you get on cars. Main “issue” is that marine diesel engines already spend most of their operating time in their most efficient range of RPMs; you don’t get stop-and-go like you get on cars. Given that, there’s no regen braking to be had on a boat. Regen can still happen when you’re sailing, but the available energy from that derives from the velocity squared or something, so you only get something negligible like 200W when sailing at 5 knots (which is the common case for most 30-40 ft sailboats). You see, the main limit to speed on a displacement hull (like sailboats or container ships) is hull speed, which is mostly a function of hull length. Longer boat, faster boat.

This is good news for a container ship, though, because they’re much bigger and thus tend to operate at much faster speeds like 12-16 knots. I know some bigger sailboats in the 50-60 ft range routinely see 2kW+ of regen when sailing at 7-8 knots, so a containership sailing at 12+ knots could conceivably generate in the tens of kW, which could recharge batteries for when they’re becalmed or in confined waters where they can’t sail.

Also, a lot of newer ships already use diesel-electric drivetrains with AziPods, where the powerplant is actually a big generator, and the propellers are attached to electric motors mounted in rotating pods under the hull. Helps a lot with maneuverability and is actually more efficient. It’d be relatively easy to add batteries in there, but the main obstacle here is that it substracts available mass for cargo.

Other main point about sails on a boat is that it’s very labour-intensive to manage, so I don’t think current ships with their skeleton crews could do it without almost double the people.

Yeah, there’s some stuff on the side, but get a can of chef boyardee, a sealed packet of crackers and a pop tart, and that’s pretty much it. Add some Qwik and Gatorade powder for hydration, maybe. At 250$ per 12-pack it’s more expensive than eating out.

I’m involved with the Canadian cadet program, and these are the exact ones we eat when we go on expédition, they’re nothing fancy. They are convenient, though.

It’s still basically canned food, it’s just that the can is a pouch. It’s more expensive too.

He meant 3/5 (the mother) plus 3/5 (the child), so a total of 6/5.

Canadian here. It really depends on if it’s a cultural use or something the government might have an influence on through legislation. They can force industries to label packages in metric, but they can’t force grandma to change her manually-transcribed recipes. The other big influence is obviously our neighbours to the south. A lot of industries haven’t switched over there, and we get their products. Main culprit here would be the construction industry, lumber and hardware is all in US customary units and I hate it.