Not when the goal is to use the casinos to commit fraud and hide the money before running it to the ground. It’s much easier to run a business for a few years, over evaluate everything, pay employees like shit, not pay the contractors, funnel and siphon the money somewhere else, then eventually declare bankruptcy, making it nearly impossible for everyone he’s owing money to get paid. And you do the same thing with another casino/business/building.

Maybe I’m giving him too much credit. Maybe he’s really really a moron, but grifting seems to be the only type of work he’s ever done.

That’s the scary part to me. Even though lots of conservatives are currently shitting on Trump, they still like the underlying policies and vote for politicians like Pierre Poilievre, Doug Ford, or François Legault. It’s not just a Trump thing. People can hate him for multiple reasons, but where I live, they still vote for politicians that are shitting on immigrants, say they want to help the poor but favour the rich, are being protectionist, nationalist, and promise pretty much the same shit than Trump. And it’s spreading worldwide.

I struggle to find anything. Maybe affordable housing, but that’s a thing of the past. It changed a lot in 20 years and everything that I may have been missing at some point is long gone.

The people there proud themselves in being a rural region with a small town surrounded by close villages, but everyone knows everyone and if you don’t fit socially with the others, mainly conservative, they will all bitch and talk about you in your back. Also, they take their cars to go literally anywhere. The next town is 7 km away, there’s a dedicated bike path, and they whine that “everything is so far away in the countryside that you absolutely need a car”. Yet, I moved in a metropolis where my work is 9 km away through dense urban landscape, and I can cycle there just fine.

I’m glad I left and I don’t really miss any of it. I don’t even like going back there. In fact, I prefer the services, and geographical features, of my new home.

The practice must vary depending on the region and the tolerance level of the local police and parking enforcement. Around Montreal, when there’s no parking near a work site, some construction workers just abandon their pickup trucks anywhere there’s any amount of space, often in crosswalks because that’s where there’s “space” left, and jam a high-vis vest in their window to show “who they are”, hoping they won’t get a ticket. And apparently it works or they wouldn’t be doing it that much.

I find it dangerous for pedestrians as they are now emerging from both sides of a pickup truck higher than they are, making it difficult to see them from the vehicles passing that crosswalk, but it’s unfortunately a frequent thing here.

I had those when I was a kid a few decades ago and they had the tip coloured in red. They were designed to look like fake cigarette, but in candy form, for kids. However because of anti tobacco movements, they renamed them to “candy sticks” and removed the red tip.

I think OP is trying to recreate the old ones.

EDIT:

Less annoying than construction workers leaving their pickup trucks in pedestrian crossings with a high visibility vest jammed in the window.

It can be expressed by a graffiti that I saw on the side of a bike path in Montreal, in French: “L’humanité ne court pas à sa perte, elle y va en voiture”. Or something like “Humanity is not running to ruins, it’s taking a car”.

As much as I want to blame giant corporations and capitalism for a lot of our societal problems, this sentence resumes so well how common people also enable all of this by refusing to change and just going with the easiest option. I know we won’t reach our climate change goals. I know because when I say I organized my life around the fact that I don’t need a car, everyone tells me that they couldn’t live without a car, that it’s very useful, and that I should get one. I’m not even a real adult as long as I don’t have a car. I’ll feel so much freedom when I’ll have a car. I should just get a car! Just get an electric one! Like, instead of encouraging people to live without a car, the vast vast majority of people will actually encourage others to get one.

So yeah, we’re not “running” to our loss. We’re wasting energy to move our fat asses in individual motorized multi ton metal cubes to go there faster. It’s so useful! So practical! So fast! There’s no time to waste. Like Marge Simpson once said: “Outta my way, Nature!”

It’s a giant metaphor for the rest of our society. Same with all the AI hype, food delivery apps, and over consumption in general. We’re digging our graves out of excessive “convenience”, and cars are one example of this.

Yes because I come from a rural region where most people can only speak French, and I’m the only one of my family that can speak multiple languages. Sometimes it feels like I know different worlds unbeknownst to them.

No because the languages that I know are not rare. There’s millions also speaking those languages so my perspective and experience is far from being unique.

“They’re eating the pets”.

I started tinkering with computers a bit before the 2000 and floppy drives were common at that time. Well, there is a right and a wrong way to plug the power cable, and the wrong way emits smoke.

I now have assembled enough PCs to know what I’m doing, but I had to learn.

And that’s how you learn that Lemmy is full people that can’t tolerate diversity. I can read that person’s comments just fine but apparently others downvote and whine.

And they don’t even need to learn another language, just a letter. But alas, I guess this is very hard to do.

The Democrats, left? As someone not living in the US, to me, Democrats are just a light right wing party. At best they might be considered centrists, but left?! Sorry for your “choices”.

No. Nothing matters. He said it himself.

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?

When I started to use Linux more than two decades ago, Qt’s license was not considered free software friendly. Because I didn’t want proprietary software, I avoided KDE and Qt applications. I know the situation changed after a few years but it stuck with me.

Controversy erupted around 1998 when it became clear that the K Desktop Environment was going to become one of the leading desktop environments for Linux. As it was based on Qt, many people in the free software movement worried that an essential piece of one of their major operating systems would be proprietary.

Plus, it was much easier at that time to have themes and “rice” my desktop using only GTK apps.

So it’s petty but even to this day, I kept the old habit and still avoid Qt applications.

It depends a lot on what you do and how chill your employer is. This one was an IT outsourcing company and I was taking support calls from multiple other companies. Officially calls were routed to an office with a call centre, and that’s what clients were shown, but most of us preferred to WFH. The clients obviously knew it’s outsourcing but sometimes their employees didn’t. Sometimes I had to make them think they were calling ABC Inc’s tech department. So the only “rule” was not to openly talk about it. We could be in “another building” but still be working for their employer. Just don’t say that the “other building” is your summer house. Being in IT with that outsourcing company have let me get away with a lot of things that normally wouldn’t be allowed if I would have been an employee of their clients.

Why are you trying to convince me that cars are awesome and for adults that needs to get stuff done?

You think I go shopping using a kayak? There are literally the biggest retail stores of my country a few street corners away from where I live. There is a grocery store on the other side of the street.

And you know, people without cars have nothing to do all day. They don’t work and don’t do anything important. Only people with cars are busy people getting stuff done. It’s impossible to get stuff done otherwise.

Not to mention that peole without cars will never feel like real adults.

I’m not an adult and I don’t get stuff done because I don’t have a car? I can’t go shopping? WTF?

Keep your “freedom”. I don’t want it. There’s already enough cars in the streets. You don’t want me driving. Stop trying to convince people that don’t want to drive. You have nothing to gain. Everyone already loves cars. I know that.

I’m glad that you love your car. You’re not the only one. Now can some people actually want to live without one or are you going to force yours into my living room to tell me how useful it is, and how it makes you feel mature and important?

And people actually use that as an insult. “You’re not an adult until you own a car”. Which is a sad way of seeing millions of people that have been living without a car for their whole life.

And the freedom feeling depends mostly if you live in a region that is offering you ways not to be car dependent. Where I live, we have a very decent network of bike paths in the city but also going into the countryside and traversing the province. I live on the island of an archipelago and can pull my inflatable kayak with my bike trailer, explore the islands around, access nature nearby. I can also go camping and hiking and into the wilderness 200 km away by using this cycling network. I often go visit my parents and family 140-170 km away by cycling there. I could have start to drive and bought a car 25 years ago but I moved somewhere I wouldn’t need one, and my bike represents freedom. I’m free from having to pay big oil to fill a tank to go anywhere. I’m free from monthly parking fees. I’m free from paying the plates and the insurance.

Over the years, what I learned about cars don’t make me see them as freedom. I see them as a way to keep people perpetually paying for gas, sending billions to big oil. I see them as an endless sea and stream of pollution. They pollute the air and the sound. They are bad for mental and physical health. They take an ungodly amount of space. They kill about a million people every year. On the planet, every 30 seconds someone is killed in a car related “accident”. Every year, two billion animals (yes, billions) are killed by cars.

Going to see my nephew for his birthday in the suburbs where my sister lives is comical. Twelve people invited to go park their cars around a house that only has space for the cars of the occupants. You have to find parking everywhere you go for this thing, then whine that there’s no parking anywhere. Going to a funereal is also depressing, but even more so because you can see the traffic and congestion created by someone that died.

Cars are a horrible for humanity. They’re like a drug that everyone tells you to try. You’ll see. They’re so useful. Of course you can’t go back.

By law the minimum is only two weeks though. My contract gave me four weeks of paid vacation after a few years of employment. The other six weeks were just out of my pocket. I wasn’t paid and just took this time off. And that’s when my employer started to suggest that I could, maybe, work from remote places.

It’s kind of the same in Canada even if we have mandatory vacations. At some point could WFH and had about a month of vacation every year. I love bike touring and travelling in general, and one year I took about 10 weeks of vacation in total. My boss started to suggest that I could also bring my computer to other countries and work from there.

I must say it was tempting to continue earning money while being able to live in another country. I could have spent a few months in some places, instead of a week. But I wasn’t a fan of having schedules while “on vacation”. Also, more paperwork.

Yeah. I moved into a city and region with enough transit for my needs but my family still lives in a place where there hasn’t been a coach or trains in 30 years. There were before but not anymore. And going to other regions or cities without a car is also becoming more and more difficult, if not impossible.

Unfortunately my province and country only care about cars. I really don’t want to drive but I fear that I won’t have any other choice at some point in the future because my other options are actively deteriorating.