danielquinn

I finally got around to watching this, and it's roughly what I expected: talented, passionate people wanting to do right by the world, being let down by the utter ineptitude of the people running the event (what the fuck was up with the sound???)

No matter how good the conversations were, this video never should have been permitted release. It makes these NDP look thoroughly amateur. A budget YouTuber has better presentation than this. If they can't figure out how to showcase their ideas with the amount of polish befitting some rando on Tiktok, why should anyone lend them their vote?

Oh joy, another rebrand. Maybe they'll redo the logo again too. Send like a reasonable use of time and resources.

I wanna say "duh", but Canada really does appear way behind on this so maybe it is still a revelation for some?

Your math is waaaaay off. Let me help you.:

Let's assume that you commute a rather conservative distance of just 25mi to work. That's 50mi/day, 5 days/wk, plus let's say half that over the weekend. Assuming an (again, generous) fuel efficiency for your truck at 25mpg, given a ballpark 300mi/week, that's 12 gallons of fuel/week. The current average price of gas in the US is a remarkably low $3.071, and that adds up to $36.85/week.

Now consider the costs of maintenance. If you've really had zero problems in the last 20 years on a pickup truck (honestly this is far from average), you likely did an oil change every 3 months at the very least. These days it'll run you about $100.

In terms of insurance, I asked this site for the average cost of insuring a Toyota pickup truck for one year: $1937. Let's be grossly optimistic and pretend that those rates will never go up.

Initial cost: (Provided)                    = 11000.00
Fuel costs: (50 × 6 ÷ 25 × 3.071 × 52 × 20) = 38326.08
Oil changes: ($100 × 4 × 20)                =  8000.00
Insurance: (1937 × 20)                      = 38740.00
Parking:                                    = ?
------------------------------------------------------
Total                                         96066.08

Excluding the cost of parking, the purchase of your miracle never-needs-repair truck if purchased today would be roughly $100,000. Note also how very conservative these values are. It's entirely possible that your real costs are well above what I've stated here.

The total cost of the rental was $1000 plus fuel costs, so using our above figures, that's a grand total of $1042.99 assuming you drove it roughly 50mi/day for all 7 days of the week. That's assuming that you don't opt for the much lower rates that appear to be available to you in the area of $250 - $350/week.

So, if you didn't own a car and instead only rented one when you needed to "move a couch", you would save just over $95,000. In other words, your insistence that you absolutely must own your own vehicle has cost you the equivalent of a downpayment on a house.

Car rentals are exceptionally cheap compared to paying to own and drive a car capable of hauling a couch for that one time 4 years ago when you needed that.

As a big car-hater myself, I can agree with most of what you're saying here (the "but it snows" argument is baseless though, see Denmark).

I think that if you've chosen to live in sparsely populated areas, then being car-dependent is your choice and you should be able to have that... but you don't get to drive your car into the city.

Cars ruin cities. They're loud, dangerous, dirty, and they kill millions. If you're happy to live like that, then that's on you, but you (I'm using the "motorist demographic" here rather then the personal "you") can't insist on having wide, multi-lane, high speed roads and plenty of free parking where most of the world's population actually lives. You park at the periphery and take transit or a bike into town.

"Oh no! Not Sandringham!" - Andrew, probably.

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the phrase "time theft", but I largely agree. The real benefit of hybrid work is flexibility, and I'd never want to take that away from anyone. I just object to the constant parroting of this lie that remote necessarily means more productive. I've never seen it, but I've seen many many cases of the opposite.

It's maddening that this is considered so novel and cutting edge. The fact that this hasn't been a standard for research for a hundred years is a mockery of science.

"Oh hi! Here's some code. I didn't write it and don't understand it, but you should totally run it on your machine."

I honestly remember it being good... in the 1980s. The doughnuts were gloriously big and fresh.