You might be right, but our southern neighbours also have a Senate and it doesn’t seem to help…

I am one. I’m a pretty weak monarchist, though, it’s just that I look south and I’m glad that there’s a “higher level” looking over our politicians. Even if the GG nominations aren’t always ideal, at least in theory they aren’t beholden to popular opinion. The fact that they’re nominated and not elected ensures that they don’t have the legitimacy to push their own agenda either. So it’s a powerful position, but mostly symbolically and there would be a lot of backlash if some ambitious GG tried to use this power for anything other than extreme cases.

In my opinion, this is partly why our politics haven’t yet devolved to the point of getting a Donald Trump. You can say what you want about Trudeau, but at least the government doesn’t shut down every so often just because they can’t agree on a budget.

Enel is currently doing exactly that with their electric car chargers (the Juicebox), they’ve decided to pull out from the North American market and just shut down the servers. Like WTF, at least open-source the thing…

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

Hay is basically cut grass, straw is the part leftover from harvesting wheat and taking the seeds. Both are baled, but they’re used for different things. Hay is food for any animals that eat grass like horses and cows, buy straw is not edible so it’s used as bedding.

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)…

Gen Alpha’s main influence for slang is Cocomelon.

Owner of 2 pinecils here, there are buttons and a display that shows the current temperature and other stuff. I only just learned that there’s an app, it works more than fine on its own, out of the box.

I got that specific iron because I needed to power it from 12v, and it works very well on the USB PD power supply I already have for my laptop.

Well, someone did it at least partly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdPRhkbeQJk

Altough in this case it’s to improve acceleration, not anything related to privacy.

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

Buttered white bread dipped in stew is the best way to eat bread. You should try it before you diss it

Québécois here. My mother in law served us something very similar for lunch today. It was very good!

Looks like we kept the french language but not the french cuisine…

Have you watched Idiocracy? I consider myself a smart guy, and having children is my way to fight against the world getting stupider.

Also, it is a joy. Yeah, it’s expensive, and yeah, it’s a ton of work. But it’s like working on a very big project that you know you’ll be proud of when it’s done. I didn’t understand it before because I only experienced other people’s children, but it’s different with your own children in a way that’s hard to explain.

Oh, my sweet summer child…

From this thread, looks like you’re right, sadly…