Sask also has our own network, and it seems to help things a lot. Been a while since I’ve shopped for plans, but there was a time when the big 2 charged about 25% less in Sask because they had to compete with Sasktel. They’ve also got their own MVNO now, Lum Mobile, which is the first to have a vastly different pricing structure than the other options. Buy 3 month/1 year plans up front, and the data bucket is an until you use it thing instead of being a monthly bucket. For about $450 (including all taxes/fees) I’ve got my cell service paid for the whole year, and will probably still have some data left to carry over then.

Supposedly there’s been some big discounts coming around with the newer MVNO’s, but its hard to gain traction when people are so used to just walking down to the nearest carrier store for phones/plans, and often choose an expensive monthly plan over buying their devices up front.

I heard there was a process for requesting additional data, but you have to actually pay for the 5 users and they’ll bump it a few TB every couple months on request. That’s from people reporting their experience with support, so it might not be totally consistent.

I kind of get it though, people hear “unlimited storage” and then don’t even make an effort to be efficient with that space, and just want to keep everything forever. There’s a real cost to that storage, and it’s higher than many think since it’s not just a single HDD like many would have sitting on their desk but a series of arrays/pools and all the related systems to ensure reliability and uptime. They probably did some calculation where 99% of users would be profitable even with their “unlimited storage” and eating it on the other 1% was a reasonable advertising cost. Over time that calculation changed and they had to update the service.

Presumably it was GSuite/Google Workspace. While they advertised unlimited storage if you paid for 5 accounts, it wasn’t really enforced so you could pay something like $20/month and get unlimited storage on G-drive. There was a daily cap on how much data can be moved, but that’s fine for hosting incremental backups like many that took advantage.

This is true in central Canada too. Heat pumps get pushed saying they put out 3 times as much heat as the energy they use, but electricity is 7x the cost of natural gas.

Canadian here, I guess offer directions to the airport so they can get a flight to British Columbia?

Even better would be if more devices used the lithium ion cylindrical cells. Higher power and energy density, while also being a standardized form factor that can be switched out as needed.

This is entirely regional though. The further you are from the equator, the more seasonal variation there is in sunlight levels, and heating/cooling loads. Around here our solar production is minimized during the season when our energy needs are maximized. We also don’t have variable rate billing, though we only get partial credit for excess generation, so battery storage will never pay for itself until something changes.

My utility gives a 50% credit on excess generation. Thing there is the utility is still the one taking responsibility for having the capacity and scalability to respond to variation in demand and production. When I was getting quotes, adding storage would have doubled the cost of the system for a day or two worth of storage. Probably would cost double again to have a system that would keep up through the winter.

I’m sure there’s applications where that’s true, but then you’re essentially talking about having a gas furnace plus a heat pump, so you’re installation cost is close to the sum of both systems. Energy rates vary by region, but around here electricity is about 7 times the cost of gas, so a heat pump running at a coefficient of performance around 3 would still cost twice as much to run as a natural gas furnace, it would be cheaper to just turn off the heat pump altogether and only use that “supplementary” heat.

I suppose if electric heat is the primary option then sure. Around here though natural gas is pretty much ubiquitous and the cost per joule is a heck of a lot lower than electricity. About $6/GJ for natural gas, compared to about $42/GJ for electricity. Would need a pretty efficient heat pump to see the cost savings in my area.

I’d be technically impractical, but I’ve always thought there should be a system for weighing of individual users feedback. I follow a lot of trade related communities and 100% see a lot of issues where bad, wrong, and sometimes just plain dangerous advice gets a flood of upvotes from the amateur community while the handful of downvotes from qualified individuals gets drowned out. I think OP’s idea of making upvotes easy and downvotes difficult exacerbates this kind of issue.

I can also see the issue where a mod team simply blesses the users that they agree with and it just reinforces the echo chamber effect that is already an issue in some communities.

Could be a larger demographic thing. Tech enthusiasts tend to have lots of devices(tablets, portable computers, etc.), so they tend to like the smaller form factor phones since they can always use their tablet/laptop when the small phone is limiting. Those people are also the ones you see in these kinds of online communities. For a lot of other people though, they’re getting the big phone and then not having a personal tablet/portable computer at all. Those aren’t the kind of people that hang out online and talk about tech stuff though.

Also agreed. However the manufacturers know how many of each device they sell and seem to think the smaller form factor devices aren’t very popular. I imagine there’s multiple reasons, like the smaller phones tend to also have lower battery life and lack other features due to size and they tend to appeal to people on tighter budgets that upgrade less often.

Canada recently stopped charging interest on their student loans, that goes a long way to affordability. The other thing though is just plain cost of education. It can be cheaper to get a 4-year degree from a Canadian University than take one year of a comparable program in the US.

Something kind of unique about UnRaid is the JBOD plus parity array. With this you can keep most disks spun down while only the actively read/written disks need to be spun up. Combine with an SSD cache for your dockers/databases/recent data and UnRaid will put a lot less hours(heat, vibration) on your disks than any raid equivalent system that requires the whole array to be spun up for any disk activity. Performance won’t be as high as comparably sized RAID type arrays, but as bulk network storage for backups, media libraries, etc. it’s still plenty fast enough.

I guess that works. There’s also Soda-Stream( and other carbonation systems) that just directly injects CO2 into a bottle. Then you can add whatever flavourings you like. Personally, I like doing something like 50/50 heavily carbonated water and fruit juice of choice.

Some of both. I remember a time where it felt like every time I got a new computer it had some different ports because they kept evolving. Modem/Ethernet, firewire 400/800, keyboard/mouse/USB, VGA/DVI/Displsyport(and mini versions of some). Sure, my old computer might have had a lot of different ports, but I might never have used some of them. For something like a laptop, I think 2x USB-C on each side is good for most, plus add hubbing to larger peripherals like HDD enclosures and displays and docks wouldn’t have to be so popular.

I feel like we’re just in the middle of a good transition period. Few years from now almost everything that can will be USB-C, we’re really just waiting out the replacement of all the existing devices and their incompatible ports.

While that’s true for taxes alone, there are income gaps where a small increase of income can result in a loss of various benefits that were worth more than the increase. This can be things like food stamps, subsidized rent/childcare, etc… People end up stuck because while they could potentially earn significant advancement and increased wages over a 4-7 year period, they’d have to weather a significant deficit through intervening years.

Ideally there should be no cliffs, and all these social programs should have a sliding scale of benefits so a person can always benefit from increased income. Part of the problem is they’re managed across multiple levels of government that don’t always play well together, and a sliding scale might mean more benefits paid out to people that don’t currently qualify. That’s probably actually a good thing, but gets spun politically as undesirable.

The bike thing is real. So often I hit my bell or call out “on your left” when about to pass people from behind. About 50% of the time those people immediately move to the left, which is why I always try to indicate far enough in advance for them to get in my way, realize their mistake and move back before I catch up to them .

I used to have the opposite issue. It was always the wire right near the jack that would wear out from having my phone in my pocket so my wired ear pods would always wear out in less than a year. Then I got a set of Bluetooth earbuds that had a wire between them. They lasted 2-3 years before the wire wore out. Now I’ve got a set of fully wireless buds and they’ve so far lasted longer than any other ones I’ve had.