I agree with you, uber is a good 1st option. In my previous comment I wanted to remark that it's not flawless, but I think we are on the same page about this as well. It pays off to keep alternatives in mind when things seem to go sideways (request another driver, use a taxi, be more vocal ...). Also travelling makes me tired and then I just let issues slide
Regarding Uber, I agree that their price transparency is very much appreciated.
However it's not rare to find bad drivers on Uber. On Christmas this year I took an uber from the airport, the driver had supposely arrived but he was nowhere to be seen. We called each other and I could hardly hear anything. After wasting about 30 minutes (and battery almost depleted) we finally found each other. It turns out he didn't know how to speak English or the local language. He had two phones, one he used to call a colleage who could (barely) translate english for him, the other phone he used to talk to clients, and both phones were placed mic-to-speaker to bridge the calls. What about the extra time that the driver wasted? I was billed for it and I had no way to dispute it. I could only report this behavior in a review to a driver that didn't seem to be him (was the main driver subletting his account?).
I disagree. Mercedes used to be well known for reliable and easy to repair cars among the general public, or at least that was true among the people I know. E.g. there are stories about old mercedes with millions of kilometers, some of them in remote places and owned by workers (e.g. taxi drivers). Of course, this is no longer the case and newer models are very disappointing in this regard.
Also the right of repair is orthogonal to the concept of luxury. What is relevant here is whether mercedes is leveraging their market power during the car's design phase to hinder competition in after-sales services and profit from that. Those decisions could have negative externalities for consumers and the environment.
Yes, system upgrade is the main maintenance task. With some monitoring, security updates can be automated but after system upgrades I must check manually that everything is working. E.g. incompatible configuration files, changes in 3rd party repos, errors that surface one week after the upgrade, ...
There are also smaller maintenance tasks that are tipically ad-hoc solutions to unsolved problems or responses to monitoring alerts. One of this ad-hoc routines was checking that logs do not grow too large, which used to be a problem in my first systemd centos, although not anymore.
PD: thanks for the bluefin read, it made me discover devpod/devcontainer as an interesting alternative to compose files
I totally see the advantages of immutable distros, particularly in a professional or cloud environment. Even as a hobbist, I feel tempted to use immutable distros if it were not because of:
- Learning. Figuring out how to migrate a setup even to the most mainstream-like immutable distro (fedora silverblue) can take a while, and to niche distros like talos even longer. However, a k8s-friendly setup with low customization requirements would help to speed up the migration (but it requires more powerful machines).
- Long term support. Regular distros like Debian and AlmaLinux offer free 5 and 10 year support cycles which means maintenance can be done every 1 or 2 years. On the other hand, immutable distros would require much more frequent maintenance, once every 6 months. A weekend every 6 months is a sizeable part of my time budget for hobbies.
One aspect in which immutables distros have improved a lot is in resource usage. They used to require significantly more disk space and have slightly higher minimum requirements than regular distros, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
I am surprised this policy makes sense, but somehow it seems to be the case, since they have been doing since the 80s.
My concern is that, to produce a single antivenom dose, they need about 150 spiders, which are collected as grown up spiders or eggs. Telling regular citizens to try catch some spiders on their own puts them at risk. In case of something going south, the worst case is death and the best case is an antivenom dose consumed. So by promoting this campaign, the ARP organization assumes that the average person is a highly skilled spider catchers and benefits outweight risks.
Instead I would have expected that antivenom producers would breed the spiders in captivity. This would be a safer alternative for regular citizens. If they really need to catch live spiders in the wild, I would expect some kind of public service in which individuals place a call and then a professional comes to safely catch the spider. In absence of such a public service, my instinct tells me to kill the spiders in the fastest and most reliable way.