Who’s idea was it to have busses replace trains on the weekend when RailEx is on 🤦

The others I’m aware of (that still seem to get updates) are Stunt Rally and TORCS.

Anyone else usually have DNS ad blocking but suddenly the Metservice app is full of ads?

Just normal Google ones. Did they change something or is something broken on my end?

Edit: I seemed to have solved it by disabling Private DNS on my phone. Not sure why it was working until now.

Haha does that actually work? I would think you’d see them in quite different places, and depending on the time of day you might not see a dog very often at all!

I don’t think anyone really knows. It’s the single person issue, that Ernest was the only person to have access to do anything. It seems something is personally wrong for him, maybe unwell, maybe something else, but no one hears from him for months. The flagship kbin instance run by Ernest, https://kbin.social/, has had an error and hasn’t worked for months.

To my knowledge, this is the last anyone has heard from him:

I have been away from home for a long time now and do not have all accesses. I will try to restore access in the coming days. The care of the instance will also be handed over.

That was 5 months ago.

It’s clear something is very wrong, but because Ernest is the only one with access that means no one can help. Mbin forked Kbin and have been actively developing Mbin. Many, if not most of the sites called “kbin” are now running Mbin.

Yip, Sublinks.

I’m not sure how far along they are, I don’t think I’ve seen a sublinks instance in the wild. Their demo seems to be running the Lemmy frontend still, if I’m understanding things right. But it’s basically a community project to build lemmy but in java instead of rust and they have a lot more moderation tools. It’s what Beehaw are planning to migrate to, but I think it might not be ready yet.

Kbin is dead, Mbin is good but different to Lemmy. Also see PieFed and Sublinks.

The wonderful thing about federated services is that you can have fun with all the users on Lemmy and see all the content but not have to actually use the Lemmy software. You can even follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon and interact with posts from there (just in a Mastodon way).

Heathcote resident, Thomas Healey said he was against cycleways in general but he was circulating a petition at the rally to submit in opposition to KiwiRail’s move.

“The safety is more important than the cycleway [itself].”

He didn’t use the trail, but its sectional closure would force cyclists onto Port Hills Rd, a 60km zone which was “a number one hot spot for speeding”.

This bloke is against cycleways, except this one that helps keep the cyclists out of traffic. Unlike the intent of all the other cycleways 🫤

Yeah, based on the link in your first comment the answer is that there is basically no way to test impairment without just giving people impairment tests. So even though we may have moved to this because saliva tests are a bit dodgy, it’s probably not much better.

Honestly, I think we should just throw loads more money into getting self-driving cars sorted. Well, I guess there is already loads of money being thrown at it so we should wait it out. Then we can just ban driving and solve the whole problem.

I wish that would work, but I need a credit card with a billing address in a supported country!

Or I can spend $4k+ 😯 on the only one that’s on Trademe right now, but that defeats the purpose of having an upgradable laptop!

It can be cheaper, but it’s well known how hard it is to attract skilled workers to the regions.

There is a certain lifestyle that comes with it, but that lifestyle doesn’t always appeal. There are far more people moving to cities than there are people moving out of cities, generally. Many employers in the regions find they have to hire from overseas, it can be quite a problem finding skilled staff at prices businesses can afford.

They only ship to specific countries. When they started it was US and some EU countries. Eventually they expanded, they ship to Aus now but not NZ yet. And it doesn’t seem likely it will happen any time soon. They are also oddly protective, actively preventing people outside supported countries from buying their stuff.

I know it’s a risk I took when ordering from them, even at the time they were not shipping to NZ and were saying you weren’t allowed to freight forward. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

I have actually done an order with some upgrades, I replaced the screen panel and hinges at one point, but that was probably a couple of years ago now. At that time I still managed to order with my NZ credit card, but it doesn’t seem to work anymore.

Not sure, I didn’t know that was a thing! I know that Framework have been known to audit orders and cancel ones that are going to known freight forwarders but I can give it a go.

It’s also not that uncommon for companies outside the main centres to have to pay more than the main centres to attract skilled workers. Why would they move to Putāruru to work for the same money they can get in Auckland?

I have a framework laptop that I bought a few years back via YouShop because they don’t ship to NZ.

Now I want to update the guts of it, and in the past few years it seems they have cracked down on freight forwarding and now I can’t order anything because I have an NZ credit card 🙁

Thanks for this! I read through a bunch of your link and had many of my questions answered. It seems pretty clear that people want a way to test similar to breath testing so some government made one up, despite marijuana impairment not being correlated to blood levels in the same way.

Was this legislation introduced by the previous government? Did it go through the select committee process?

If you have an original Framework (from memory, 11th gen intel 13 inch), there were hardware issues that I don’t thing could be resolved via software updates. I believe they worked in them for the intel 12th gen and later.

I run a fedora derivative on an original framework, and I used a command to disable sleep and go to a deeper state (hibernate maybe?) so it doesn’t lose battery while asleep. And if you take out your HDMI, display port, etc cards and just use USB (or none) that resolves another power drain issue.

But basically, it’s usable but not perfect. I’m waiting to see if there’s another gen of AMD card coming then might update my mainboard.

I dunno, I like it as a laptop but I’m also seldom far from a charger.

I’m curious to hear views from others on this. This article claims both that medical users are careful not to drive under the influence, then later claims they may drive under the influence of something else so as to avoid being caught.

Personally 50k a year seems like such a low number it’s barely a pilot (there were 3 million breath tests in 2023).

I didn’t realise the history! That’s really important context. I’m a big fan of coastal shipping because it reduces transport emissions, but the resilience factor is helpful too!

Personally i’d go back to the future a bit and look at reverting the 2014 changes to reduce weight and thus damage.

There’s a really key point here. Heavier trucks cause more damage, but the exponential increase is based on axle weight. If you spread the load out over more axles (keeping the axle weights the same as a smaller truck), then you no longer get the exponential increase in damage and are now in additive damage. Now obviously these trucks cause more damage than one truck (the same per axle, but more axles), but they also move the freight with a smaller number of trucks since each is carrying more.

There are other factors at play too (like the heavier trucks do need roads (bridges) capable of carrying all that weight), but I don’t think allowing the larger freight trucks is generally as big of a cause of massive damage as it gets blamed for. I think it’s reduced freight costs (one driver can carry more) which increases demand, and there are also other reasons I suspect freight has increased a lot, causing more road damage.

I also want to add that an under 3,500kg vehicle with two axles pays $76 per 1000km. Two axles up to 6,000kg pays $80, so you can already see something isn’t right (shouldn’t they be paying almost twice as much at a minimum, but as it’s double the weight across the same number of axles then 4 times as much). When you get up to larger vehicles things get super complicated and I’m out of my league 😆

Another thing here is weather. Weather causes a lot of road damage, more in some parts of the country than others. I’d guess it’s probably possible to estimate what proportion of road damage is caused by weather, if you had access to the right stats. Is it fair to spread this out across RUC bands by weight (heavier vehicles pay for more of the weather damage) or should it be per vehicle? I’m just rambling now, but my point is it’s probably not easy to put an exact number on how much of a subsidy trucks get, since a lot of the spread (like who pays for weather damage) is arbitrary. I think it’s probably fair to say heavier vehicles are getting more use of the road and so perhaps it’s ok for them to pay a larger share of the weather, etc, costs. Which leads me to your next point.

I would also start providing a similar amount of subsidy to coastal shipping as road freight gets and build the coastal network back up. I’m a huge fan of rail freight, and would like to see it used more as well but most of the existing infrastructure around that is ok for now.

A large amount of freight is between main centres. Imagine if you could throw a rail hub near Auckland and one near Wellington and then use container trucks to get things where they need to go. Easy loading and unloading of trains, no traffic, no dealing with driver rest breaks etc making stuff late because all the trips would be short and easy to schedule a different driver for. If you put some thought into it you could have it working really well. You could work you way to putting heavy electric capability into the line.

Coastal shipping is a great option too, and we already have all the infrastructure for it.

If we can reduce the speed & weight of trucks, plus the amount of them and the distance travelled then in theory (to a pleb) our roads aren’t as expensive to build, and don’t suffer as much pot-hole damage so the maintenance costs are reduced.

I think reducing the amount of freight going by road is the important bit here. It does cost more to build roads that can take the heavier trucks, but I don’t think we will stop building such roads even if we reduced the weights allowed.

All in all, this is a long rambly comment to say, other than some nit picky bits, I agree with you and it would be great if you could get this going for us thanks 😋