jadero

Wikipedia has a pretty good article.

To summarize, "humanism" is an umbrella term that includes many different philosophies that share the common idea of promoting the well-being of people during life. There are religious humanists from different faith communities (and Religious Humanists, a specific community of early 20th century naturalists who treated their humanism as a religion), Marxist Humanists, etc, but right now, "humanism" and "secular humanism" can be treated as synonyms.

This site has a good explanation of sovereign citizenship. Specifically:

In the 18th-century colonies, nouns were usually capitalized, although the practice was going out of style by the time of the Revolution. Based on that, sovereigns see secret meaning in the use or non-use of capitalized letters. For example, a "citizen" is a sovereign citizen imbued with all natural rights, whereas a "Citizen" is a 14th Amendment citizen subject to the rules and regulations of government.

While that is specifically American in context, I think the principle is the same. It's basically a kind of numerology but with the conventions of written language.

Speaking of numerology, I can't wait for them to discover that, in ASCII, adding or subtracting the value of a [space] (decimal 32) converts between upper- and lowercase. (A=65, a=97; B=66, b=98...). Surely that gives the [space] a special magic, but is it good magic or bad magic or can anyone use it? And the fact that lowercase uses bigger numbers than uppercase must also carry some significance, right?

For a fun time, use the phrase "sovereign citizen capital letters" in a web search.

Because the electricity itself is produced at coal and natural gas power plants, I guess. According to this, about 80% of our electricity comes from fossil fuels.

I don't know how other provinces operate, but I like Saskatchewan's actuarial model. Instead of a bunch of demographic slicing and dicing, the only thing that matters is your driving record.

No record means you're a new driver. Whether you're 16 or 80 doesn't get considered, just that you have a "new driver" risk profile. There are also a variety of driving restrictions that gradually come off over a few years of driving with a good record.

Build up a bad record and your premiums climb pretty rapidly. Depending on the nature of the infractions, even your driving license itself can start getting pretty darn expensive and possibly even revoked.

Build up a good record and your premiums go down and your driving license stays inexpensive.

Well said!

Whenever I read something like that, I can't help thinking of my son, who has paid zero attention to any advance since first hearing about the EV-1 or some shill with an agenda.

Personally, I'd love to have a business taking batteries no longer fit for purpose in cars and building off-grid wind and solar systems. That'll never happen, though, because at 67 I'm too old to ever see used batteries in enough volume to justify trying it.

My personal opinion is that the need for large scale recycling is still decades away. If a vehicle's battery pack isn't completely physically damaged, it is more likely to end it's life in use for stationary power or split into smaller packs for short range, occasional use vehicles, like boats, ATVs, small farm and yard equipment, and, of course, golf carts and "city cars".

Yes, I wondered how to express that. I settled on "registered". Where I live, the vast majority of on farm vehicles that can be are formally registered for use on public roads and streets and must display appropriate plates or permits. The vast majority of the rest are some combination of expensive to operate, slow moving, or not permitted to park in town.

As with all edge cases, some are worth dealing with and others can just be left as cracks in the system, at least until we see how things play out.

I think one place to start would be with ownership.

Make it illegal to sell a vehicle to someone without a valid license.

Make it impossible for someone with a second conviction to be the registered owner of a vehicle for 5 years. Lifetime for third conviction.

There are already ways to charge registered owners for the infractions of those they allow to drive their vehicle. A few tweaks should be enough to make it virtually impossible for a repeat offender to gain access to a vehicle.

Heh. I agree. My only experience with Xplornet was in trying to support people who had it. No internet is far preferable.

We bought a cabin at the lake with an eye to retirement. Dysfunctional workplaces led us to move there nearly 15 years early. We figured that if we were going to work anyway, we might as well do it in a restorative environment.

There is no cell service, landline service is noisy enough that my very nice modem is lucky to hit 20 kbps, and I knew too much about ExploreNet to tolerate their "service". I'm no fan of Musk or the concept of Starlink, but the price/performance is stellar (sorry) and it's nice to be able to get stuff done without having to drive in to the library, especially given that it's only open 15 hours a week.

I spent a decade without internet. I never did figure out how to get Chromecast to work. Even for plain screen casting it insisted on needing an internet connection. Most of my stuff at the time was YouTube rentals that allowed downloads, so I got the hardware that let me use HDMI to connect my phone to the TV.

Yes, good points.

I was born during the baby boom era. I've concluded that "boomer" has long since lost its literal connection to "my" generation. It is now used as a metaphorical disparaging label that means "selfish and clueless because of age."

It's kind of like the trope of technologically clueless grandparents. At this point, the only grandparents who are technologically clueless are those with the same mindsets and experiences as all the GenX and Millenial people who are technologically clueless. And there is certainly no shortage of them.