Until the oil pump shaft broke: a 1965 Holder AG3 European vineyard tractor. Centre articulating, 35+ Hp diesel, close to 2 metric tons, and a third the size of a VW Beetle. We used it extensively on our orchards for a good four decades, or just shy of that.

Sucker was stupidly strong for its size, and could out-pull most tractors twice its physical size. Last I was using it for was some pretty extreme landscaping in the front yard. Another story, because it takes some explaining, but yeah.

So apparently the oil pump shaft broke late 2023, and we thought it was just overheating. Nope. Plus, the mechanic also found a rather severe hydraulic leak into the oil system, which was about the only thing that kept the engine from totally seizing.

Unfortunately, we are about three decades too late for most of the required parts. The engine place does a lot of remanufacturing and machining, so I did ask them for their “fuck off” price (gotta have a benchmark in that regard). But they did strongly suggest a Kubota engine as a replacement, primarily because the original oil pump required some pretty unusual maintenance to avoid breaking like it did. Whoops. No-one in my family realized that, least of all my father who had bought the tractor in the 80s.

Another tool is yWriter.

This isn’t a tool for everyone, because it is research-first focused.

What I mean by that is that it’s a little clunky because background/research data is meant to go into it first, and then you are supposed to lean on that content to write your book second.

So for a non-fiction book, you would add all the data and facts and references, for a fiction book you would put in all of the important characters and plot points and things that the characters interact with.

This is so you always have a body of references to work off of so you don’t introduce inconsistencies.

Some people might find this software useful because assembling and fleshing out the underlying data is loads of fun and/or how they prep. Others might need this feature just to keep track of everything that goes into their book, as they might not be able to keep track of things like character quirks very easily in their head.

YMMV.

I have heard that Classic Shell is once again functional under Windows 11, but it was critically broken and thoroughly unusable for too long for me, and I have since moved on to StartIsBack, which can do almost everything I found essential with Classic Shell.

but you’d already be hard pressed to read the data off a deck of punch cards or reel of magnetic tape

Even something like a 3¼″ floppy is getting hard to find a drive for, because not many USB drives were made, and non-USB drives need a motherboard with floppy compatibility. Which would be more than a decade old by this point.

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.

Follow the money. Some crony, somewhere in Alberta’s system, profited wildly.

the key is to simply seed all of your content for as long as you have it in your collection.

Tell that to TheGeeks. If you aren’t actively uploading - not just sitting there sharing, but actively sending data to anyone else - you’ll eventually be warned, then banned.

Back when I was trying to use their site, they had only one system: strict 1 ratio on a time limit. If you couldn’t maintain a 1+ ratio, and achieve it within a very limited amount of time, it didn’t matter what you grabbed or how long you shared back out, you got banned. At the time they had no other way to get ratio other than sharing back out - no freeleech, nothing. Which meant if you were wanting any content more than 2-3 HOURS old, you were looking at a ratio shortfall because there was no way to make up that ratio you were losing by downloading that content. There were simply too few peers after you to overcome the masses of seeders ahead of you satisfying peers.

It was absolutely brutal, which is why I now refuse to deal with any sites with that rule (1+ ratio with time limit) even if they have other ways (freeleech, etc.) to mitigate it. Like, f**k those sites. I’ve been seeding some torrents for close to 15 years, I have no problem letting shit remain resident in my client. So sites like MyAnonamouse it’s going to have to remain.

If you are talking about sites that have a strict, non-negotiable seeding ratio requirement, it is impossible. Your only real long-term option is to write a script that will grab everything that gets uploaded on a 30-second cadence, and then aggressively super-seed that content back out. And this is regardless of what it is - this script runs 24/7, doing about 2,880 hits on the website a day for new content. Still, even with the script it will be difficult to have your overall ratio exceed more than about 1.5-2, and you may still get banned for individual seeds that never exceed 1 because no-one is very interested in them.

I have tried to use sites that have strict ratio minimums, and long-term success is impossible without an edge like the script I mentioned. It’s why I now work with sites - like myanonamouse - that have minimum seeding times for everything you grab, regardless if anyone else needs it. They tend to be far less stressful and user-hostile.

We have high technology because we don’t have anything else to leverage.

I suspect a world with strong magic is liable to leverage that to the exclusion of technology.

A now-ended iseki story on Reddit’s HFY subreddit called “Wait, is this just GATE?” Asks the question of what would happen if a universe of only technology and no magic (ours) made contact with a universe of pretty much only magic and almost no technology beyond that found in the Middle Ages. It contains some tropes (used mainly as comedic relief or irony) and plenty of references to current magical-universe plot elements from games and novels, but is a surprisingly fresh and compelling examination of the cross-universe idea.

Invest the money, and use the after-inflation income to do the work.

That way, you have a constant and near-permanent resource stream with which to do the work. It’s only if the markets crash as a whole that you need to worry, and nothing says you cannot build additional revenue streams along side that wealth.

I would start with the most pressing issues for Canada - housing, and the homeless crisis that arises from shitty wages combined with exploding costs. Buy large tracts of land within each city, then economically force the cities to approve large arcologies that blend residential with business spaces. Make it super-attractive for even the wealthy to want to rent homes there, but turn around and then make assisted living units available in those same areas to low-income families and homeless people who want to get off the street. Have those communities to be tightly integrated across all social strata, so everyone benefits. Plus, actual social support that helps those traumatized by homelessness to get their lives together and return to being contributing members of society.

For the vast majority of flip phones currently available on the market, if they’re not running some version of KiaOS, they’re running stock Android - with all the Google spying that entails - under the hood.

• San Francisco
• New York
• Literally any other city with rent control

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/

New research examining how rent control affects tenants and housing markets offers insight into how rent control affects markets. While rent control appears to help current tenants in the short run, in the long run it decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative spillovers on the surrounding neighborhood.

Over the long term, rent control has never seen more positive benefits than negative ones, regardless of city.

Rent controlled properties create substantial negative externalities on the nearby housing market, lowering the amenity value of these neighborhoods and making them less desirable places to live.

https://iea.org.uk/media/rent-controls-do-far-more-harm-than-good-comprehensive-review-finds/

• However, 14 out of 17 studies found that rent control leads to higher rents in the uncontrolled sector.
• 12 out of 16 studies found negative effects on housing supply, while 11 out of 16 studies found negative impacts on new construction.
• 15 out of 20 studies found rent control leads to reduced housing quality and maintenance.
• 25 out of 26 studies found rent control reduces residential mobility.
• All 14 studies examining the issue found rent control leads to misallocation of housing.

https://financialpost.com/real-estate/rent-controls-hurt-rental-supply

We reviewed the studies cited by the author and found they all unequivocally demonstrated that rent controls contribute to a slowdown in rental supply, thus hurting the very people that rental advocates intend to help.

[…]

We were again surprised to discover that the IJHP paper painted a completely different picture. The authors said “more restrictive rental market legislation generally has a negative impact on both new housing construction and residential investment.” They concluded that the “received wisdom among economists of a negative construction and investment effect of rent controls seems to hold.”

https://capx.co/rent-controls-never-never-work

The issue with rent controls is not that they are novel or radical. The issue with them is just that every time they are tried, the results are exactly what the Economics 101 textbook would predict. They lead to a decline in the supply of rental properties, a decline in housebuilding rates, a slowdown in tenant mobility, a misallocation of existing properties, and a decline in the quality of rental housing.

https://www.economicsobservatory.com/does-rent-control-work

This study also sheds light on an important behavioural response to rent control by owners of rental properties: landlords substituted to other types of real estate (such as properties exempt from rent control). This lowered the housing supply and shifted it towards less affordable types of housing, leading to rents rising at an even higher rate.

This finding is largely consistent with the predictions of basic microeconomic models: rent controls lower the price of housing and at this lower price less housing is offered (Glaeser and Luttmer, 2003). Housing quality is also reduced as landlords can no longer make up losses from renovating properties by raising rents (Sims, 2007).

Reality doesn’t give two shits about ideology, it cares only about facts.

Anyone who is evidence-based as opposed to ideology based needs only to look at every single jurisdiction where rent controls have been enacted, to become a vociferous opponent to rent controls.

Rent
Controls
Do
Not
Work.

Not over the long term, and definitely not for new tenants.

Capitalism is expressly designed for neurotypicals.

If your particular deviancy cannot be monetized for the benefit of those who sign your cheques, you’re worse than useless - you’re actively dangerous to the profit stream flowing upwards to the Parasite Class.

Right now I’m taking a sabbatical for two main reasons:

1. My parents are reaching EoL, and as the executor of their estate I’m getting involved in them handing everything off to the rest of us. So this pause in my career couldn’t have come at a better time – how many kids have the opportunity to spend the last year or two of their parent’s lives with them to help them wrap stuff up? Not many.
2. My entire industry has gone koo-koo for AI. They are quite literally eliminating entire development divisions in favour of badly hallucinating LLM’s that create some of the shittiest code I have ever seen – it’s worse than having only juniors on staff with no-one else more experienced. So I am waiting out until the inevitable “ZOMG we need to hire everyone back” stage, just like Klarna is doing right now. Because as it is, 60+% of all job postings are ghost ads, with no intent to hire anyone, and the other 40% require applicants to go through 4+ interviews and have ridiculous requirements. Like, no. if the pope was appointed with only two rounds of discussions, your company doesn’t need to rope in 20+ people over multiple interviews and weeks of deliberations to hire my sorry ass.

But Sokets and wrenches?

For the longest time almost ⅓ of their Motomaster sets were rebranded Gearwrench. Especially the non-classic ones with extra features.

Now, Gearwrench may not be on par with Grey Tools or Snap-On. But it’s also significantly upper-shelf and definitely nothing to sneeze at.

Tools are pretty good bang for the buck

Don’t know what it is now, but for the longest time about ⅔ of the wrenches and rackets were rebranded Gearwrench, which is nothing to sneeze at. So OK, it’s not Grey Tools or Snap-On. But Gearwrench is solidly upper-end quality.

They exchanged a Motomaster battery charger that was almost 20 months old. It suddenly stopped working, and they didn’t even bother testing it to confirm my assertion.

The biggest headache was finding the purchase in my account’s history, as they can only search a month at a time, and not by product. Very bad usability for something that employees likely use on an hourly basis.

Not all of them. I fully agree that a traditional one has an inward-curving blade, but Sabatier (with the elephant mark) made a Bec Oiseau with a straight blade. It was marketed with that knife-type name in Canada, specifically through Lee Valley, for a good two-plus decades. I bought three of them.

There is one knife I find absolutely essential that is missing:

Bec Oiseau. Sometimes also known as a sheep’s foot knife.

It’s a paring knife, but one where the blade is absolutely straight and it’s the spine that curves over near the tip. It works far better than any curved paring knife at cutting apart small items in the hand, like fruits.