According to Wikipedia, the mean daily minimum of Helsinki in January is -5.6°. In Quebec City, it’s -17.7°. Not the same, at least according to Wikipedia.
Bike paths don't have to be dry though, you can sweep them and it's fine. If you use studded tires, you can ride a bike in places where you can't even walk. Source is I used to do this when I lived in the middle of nowhere in Sweden. I agree with you that infrastructure is key though. The temperature doesn't really matter, if you're good to go on a walk, you're also good to go for a ride.
I see bikes in the summer here. I dont see almost anybody biking in the winter here. Like 100:1. The winters here are not mild (like in vancouver). This is basically artic-like weather. People also tend not to walk. The very poor take the bus. Most drive.
The problems this article outlines are very real, but the explanation for the underlying mechanics doesn't really pass any kind of a sniff test for me. The central thesis is that real economic growth is stagnating because the overhead for producing energy grows with time. But this is not the case! Fossil fuels will run out eventually, yes, but nearly every other type of energy production does not suffer from this, and is in fact getting better over time. Solar panels of today are miles ahead of those of yesterday. Similarly we're building out more and more wind and thermal energy. Nuclear is also fine, if we don't account for the regulatory difficulty in actually getting new plants up and running.
Yes, any shortage of energy we have today is more or less entirely voluntary on a species level.
You can blame Moloch or wall Street or whatever for making it functionally impossible for whatever multipolar market-actor reasons, but with the right choices we could have plenty of energy today, just as we could (but don't) feed everyone on Earth.
Eventually the will bea point where it does actually become physically impossible to generate that much power without melting the Earth's crust or boiling the seas, but that's a long, long way away.
Seems more correct to say with different choices rather than the right choices.
For example plenty of energy likely means far more nuclear reactors, and the unfortunately truth is that most can be used to breed plutonium, so while we could be living with energy abundance, we also at least slightly increase the chance of global nuclear war. (IMO probably still worth it but it's no longer a super clear right/wrong).
With food, the problem is not producing it, it's the distribution. You aren't going to get it distributed in many countries that need it without overthrowing governments which will include lots of killing and bombing. Now it being the right choice to feed everyone is much murkier.
It points out a problem but ignores the obvious solution. We want the nominal value of stocks, houses, and essentially everything to continually increase. The escape hatch is that these can increase in value slower than inflation and thus be reduced in real value.
Everybody assumes that correction will happen via crash. And perhaps that's the case for stock market prices. But while we have had housing price crashes in the past, that's very much the exception. House prices are very sticky, people are irrationally unwilling to sell their houses for a loss. I've seen several markets where real estate nominal prices stayed roughly flat for a couple decades, moving the market from "overpriced" to "underpriced" without anybody really noticing.
"Just build more houses" is the fix for many (but not all) of the US economy problems. Not sure about the UK, but I wouldn't be surprised if it applies there too.
Home building is indeed the solution, but it can never outrun the printing presses. Ultimately there is a bare minimum cost of a house too. If people are too poor to pay for that, the home building pipeline will have to stall. People need to be productive and competitive enough in the economy to be able to pay for all the new houses being built.
People want absolute values to be ever increasing too, but they'd settle for nominal values to be ever increasing. This violates the law of supply and demand, and common sense about depreciation and changing demographics. We should experience falling prices as material wealth increases in the world. Governments and money lenders hate this because they want to print off as much money as they possibly can get away with (as if they know how much that amount even is). They can't stand the idea of someone being rewarded for conserving their own resources, when those resources could be siphoned off for some other bullshit.
The more infuriating part of that remark is when its due to you pointing out something really dumb, then you ask yourself, why didn't it ask this in its reasoning? lol
While I understand the author's frustration, I think they should take a moment and look in the mirror. A perpetual license doesn't mean that Filezilla should be a free hosting provider for installation media for eternity. Their reasons really aren't that relevant here. Likewise the rant about Mozilla is completely unfounded. There are many things to be upset at in the modern software world, this is not one of them.
I disagree. Hosting licensed copies of software is the norm. Steam does it, Google does it, Apple does it, EA and Ubisoft do it, and all of them host much larger software (including free updates) than FileZilla. Maybe hosting 5GiB image downloads on a dedicated web portal the same way Microsoft does is a bit much to ask, but this is nothing.
We're talking 50 megabytes of storage here, per version. They can save themselves a lot of hosting money by letting lifetime subscribers download the latest version, but that'll cut into their profit margins of course. Even if they don't want to host the setup on their website, providing a 50MiB installer file on request has to be the bare minimum customer support I'd expect.
My experience is that some people do confuse FileZilla with Mozilla. That said, everyone I know just uses the free version, despite the spyware that's bundled with the installer.
Based on this post, I wouldn't buy their professional subscription.
If you have an iphone on an old version of ios, you can install the latest version of some software you bought/downloaded for free compatible with that ios version.
This is a little tangent, but up until somewhat recently Apple hosted ftp servers with old versions of Mac OS available. So you could get system 7.6 (released 1997) straight from them for a new install on your old machine. I think that is no longer the case, but within the last decade you still could. (I think, idk, time flies)
Amusingly, download.info.apple.com still appears to serve all the files that used to be on the old FTP site, including a small and somewhat random subset of old system software versions for Mac and Apple II, Newton firmware updates, etc., but directory browsing isn't enabled, so you need direct links, which you can get from the Wayback machine[1].
But once you have the links, you can download the actual files directly from Apple, e.g., if you're ready to upgrade your Mac Plus to the latest and greatest version of System 6, download
That's because they allow you to download new updates with your existing license.
In this case, the existing license is only valid up to a certain point, after which you need to buy a subscription (because the perpetual license wasn't quite so perpetual).
This is irrelevant since your steam game license applies to all subsequent versions. The argument is it's immoral sell version specific licenses with no way to get to said specific version.
>A perpetual license doesn't mean that Filezilla should be a free hosting provider for installation media for eternity.
It is however, quite reasonable to expect that downloads will be available as long as the vendor is still in business, especially if the cost of hosting is marginal. Apple could theoretically sell you songs/albums on itunes, and tell you to rebuy if for whatever reason you lost your phone and didn't back up the file, but most people would think that's a dick move.
FileZilla explicitly and emphatically sells a license, not a download. In fact, technically not even the initial download is included in the purchase. They’re technically within their rights to never even give you the software, just say “all we ever sold you was a promise not to sue”, but we’d all agree that’s a scam, right? So, where’s the line?
Point of comparison, Steam, CodeCanyon, and Gumroad all let you re-download the version you licensed indefinitely.
Think about how little it costs to be a free hosting provider for a handful of 15MB downloads, maybe one per major version, and just for people that paid you in the past. It's next to nothing. In particular, cloudflare will give you 10GB of free object storage with unlimited bandwidth and 10 million downloads a month. So yes, they should host the installer forever.
To put it another way, the cost to provide downloads forever instead of just once is less than a penny. It should be built in to the purchase.
Good faith ended at sale and support. Common sense isn’t at play because who is going to host installation media for eternity? No. There’s a nothing burger here.
It's 2025, not 1995 or even 2005. Installers for apps like this are tiny for cloud storage today. Cloudfront's recent flat tier pricing would even probably do the trick. free tier is 100gb data transfer a month, 1m requests. If that doesn't work, Pro is 50 tb, 10m requests, that's 15 bucks a month.
> A perpetual license doesn't mean that Filezilla should be a free hosting provider for installation media for eternity.
Thank you.
This is like people who think $5 is too much for an app. We've become entitled to think software is free because giants pour lots of ad-riddled software in our laps.
You bought the car. You can use the car forever. If you lose it, that's on you.
> This is like people who think $5 is too much for an app. We've become entitled to think software is free because giants pour lots of ad-riddled software in our laps.
Your complaint is misplaced. Software takes work, and updates take work. Hosting <100MB installers doesn't take work.
It basically is zero cost to keep those files available somewhere.
> You bought the car. You can use the car forever. If you lose it, that's on you.
If the manufacturer had a button that could summon the car I lost, and refused to press it, that would reflect extremely badly on them.
> It basically is zero cost to keep those files available somewhere.
You don't know that.
Maybe it was put in a bucket or host that died when the company switched to a subscription model. Maybe they don't have copies on hand. Maybe it was a previous team that owned it. Maybe a different owner.
You're assuming a possibility space of zero chance of work on their behalf. There are lots of things that could have happened.
Some of those errors would be understandable (but still reflect pretty badly on the company), but given they said they refuse to allow downloads it doesn't sound like they lost the data.
If they don't have copies on hand, they could fix that with a one time effort that still comes out as negligible overall.
Also if they can prevent just a few support tickets, they'd save money from the effort.
Filezilla is horrible software compared to software like Transmit. What you have to understand is that someone with no artistic vision sat down and decided to build an FTP client for the masses. Fortunately, vibe coding will fix this. We will have much better software in the future. It will be free. It will be a commodity.
The whole technically zero emissions bit is not really convincing. Cattle makes up a considerable part of global emissions, to the point that there are entire industries focused on bringing that down. Surely the same would apply here?
The thing is it depends on how you define your numbers. Personally I'm a fan of the carbon-above-ground accounting, where if you grow a tree it counts as 0 emissions, and if your burn the tree for fuel it also counts as 0 emissions since there wasn't any new carbon being dug up not was any carbon permanently sequestered.
Giving credit for the tree and taking it away when it is burnt is another choice. It shifts the focus to short term effects over long term ones. Which has both pros and cons.
> if your burn the tree for fuel it also counts as 0 emissions since there wasn't any new carbon being dug up not was any carbon permanently sequestered.
Ok but ... that definition makes not a whole lot of sense, right?
The only thing that should be considered is CO2 in the atmosphere / troposphere.
I think the idea is that the CO2 emitted from burning the tree is the same as is removed by the tree growing, so it cancels out. The tree is effectively a capacitor.
Fairly irrelevant when it comes to cattle though, as it's the methane that's the problem there.
Well, yes you would be doing that, unless everyone stops eating for example soya.
Soya's actually quite a good example because something like 80% of the mass of soya grown is only suitable for cattle feed, and we need to grow insane amounts of it for human food because it has basically no nutritional value for humans.
What are you going to do with all that? Pile it up and let it rot, emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane?
Not the only emissions too. Faecal emissions (sorry if you're having your lunch) are locally polluting and unhygenic. It's not often recorded the mass rejoicing when cars replaced horses in cities. No longer having to step over/round piles of sh*t was a major improvement in everyone's life.
I remember some years ago waiting on my bike at some traffic lights behind a pair of police horses, which then proceeded to decorate the road in front of me with their emissions. No apologies from the officers, no attempt to clean it up. Disgusting stuff.
They don’t wear “diapers”? There’s quite a few horses in my city (used for tourist entertainment) but they all have bags strapped to their behinds catching all the “emissions”.
This is an easy argument to make, but I don't think it actually applies in any way. Roblox is just as popular in countries where these things have not disappeared.
All the listed countries have low fertility rates, increasing screentime rates, etc.
I suspect if you cornered a parent of a 2yo in any of those countries, they would not say it is meaningfully more social and child-friendly TODAY that the USA is, or Australia (for which I can speak) is.
I'm a parent in Norway (though not of a two year old). Children really do have a great deal of freedom and the country is very child friendly and safe. But still online games are displacing physical outdoor play. However the majority of children attend barnehage (kindergarten) where there are no screens and outdoor play is strongly encouraged (and only lightly supervised) so at least for pre-school children there is still a lot of physical activity.
We have evidence for that. There is no hard evidence for purposefully model degradation for cost optimization after the initial release, other than a lot of emotional discussions in vibe coding subs.
Upgrading once a month is insane at any rate, I could see the point in upgrading maybe once a year. For stable projects, you're very much fine upgrading only when there's a vulnerability or you need something from a newer release. Upgrade when you actually need to and use stable versions that have been out for a while, no need to hamster wheel it.
When I worked in commercial aerospace, before we even shipped live there was an incident with a CERT advisory against the XML package we were using. But the fix was only added to the current major version and we were stuck one behind. It took ~3 of our best problem solvers about a week to get that damned thing upgraded. Which put us behind on our schedule.
This made some of my more forward thinking coworkers nervous because what if this happened after we went live? So we started a repeating story called “upgrade dependencies” and assigned it round robin once a month to someone on each application. Every time someone got it the first time they would ask me, “but upgrade what?” Whatever you want, but preferable something that hasn’t been in a while.
For IP and security reasons we were already on vendored dependencies, so it was pretty straightforward to tell what was old. But that made “upgrade immediately” problematic if fixes weren’t back ported far enough and we didn’t want that live.
reply