Show newer

@freemo I find it rather odd. At least for a place where it snows 50 days out of the year and 120cm per year. If sidewalks are important enough to have bumps smoothed and other maintenance done every summer, why do we just ignore them in the winter?

Every year I see people in wheelchairs (we have a decent elderly contingent) on the street because that gets cleared the day after it snows. The 3 day requirement to shovel sidewalks and the $100 fine if you don’t isn’t enough to motivate people to keep up with it!

@Bishop considering they haven’t yet done so it’s not like I’m expecting a change. I just want them to tell me, in writing, why they won’t do it.

Really just looking for more reason to dislike them!

@Bishop
There's other nearby towns of similar size and resources that clear all the sidewalks. And the town does have some equipment already, maybe even enough to handle the work…

But I don't have very high hopes.

Here's a wild idea: how about the municipality takes responsibility for keeping the sidewalks that it installs — and maintains in the summer months! — for the sake of the people who travel on them instead of guilting the townsfolk into helping people so they don't get fined?

Did some back-of-the-napkin maths and it might require a town budget increase of 3-4% to have them cover the cost of keeping sidewalks usable. I'd be fine with that.

Maybe I should write to the mayor and ask if they've considered it.

The "TurboTax" thing blows my mind. Basically in the US there's no way you can just do your taxes online on the revenue/taxation department's website like you can in every other grown-up country. Instead, there's commercial software called TurboTax which cut a deal with the US government that they'd offer a free version for PAYG income tax provided the goverment didn't build a tax filing portal for people to just use like would make the most sense. Anyway, Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, made the free version online but it disallows crawling through robots.txt, and does a whole bunch of other dark shit to try and hide itself.

@geordie This just in: Canada is also not a grown-up country.

No one is surprised.

We do have a few solid free web-based options for personal tax prep now, at least.

Long shot but who wants to dox themselves so I can send them a 35mm film canister opener? I have an extra one. Message me.

@mike I'm very curious if it'll actually happen… but it seems like it's inevitable at this point. We all just might need to find friends in the EU to buy us gift cards with 😝

@mike Maybe like the iTunes store did (does?), based on the region in the billing address attached to the Apple ID

It’s fascinating to me how several weeks of very subzero weather can make 30°F feel “pretty nice out.“

@freemo that’s a good point.

To be fair, I’ve only visited houses like that and not lived in them. But living in a European row-house for a year of college was lovely… though we did make the neighbours complain about noise more than once haha

Separate houses being built so close together that they can’t have facing windows does not make any sense to me

We have visual interfaces and we have tactile interfaces even though they are usually just tactile things to enhance the visual, but we don't have very many audio interfaces and we should have more them

I'm willing to bet that if we banned the use of leaf blowers for clearing snow, the ability to travel through urban environments without a car would not be worse than it currently is.

"You should be proud to be an Australian!" Not really. There was an Australian man and an Australian woman, the woman just wanted a back rub, and now here I am. I didn't do anything to become Australian, it just turned out that way.

@SirHendrick What I really want is a map where I can click a point and it tells me the approximate year when that area became dry usable land.

@mdacre @Johncdvorak I drive either of those highways a couple times a year… It would be nice to have an interesting stopping point when stranded due to mountain weather

New Hunger Games prequel movie: 2/5.
Meh story (spoiled by knowing what happens in the trilogy).
Way too many wide-angle closeup shots.

I had high hopes.

I don't care if it's A Thing, holding a microphone half the size of one's finger on camera is dumb.

Show older
CleverLibre Social

CleverLibre Social is an inclusive social instance for open discussion, learning, and community.
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.