butteroverflow

This is totally off topic, but holy crap, first message in 11 years. I would have lost my password about a dozen times by now.

Maybe they already have? `youtube-dl` has been breaking a lot for me lately. I've been using the Fedora repo build for many years and don't remember it ever breaking, not once. Now in the last couple of months it had suddenly stopped working 4 or 5 times, which forced me to install the official build from `pip`, which is updated more frequently.

Greatly depends on the drivers around you. Here it'll definitely shorten your life expectancy if you're lucky, and will leave you with a nice whole-body paralysis, if you're not.

You know how motorists sarcastically refer to cyclists over here? "Crunchies", or something like that.

Thanks for the detailed response. I don't deny that it might be difficult for someone to work without ventilation. I simply find the air outside extremely irritating to my throat, nose, and upper airways. This "fresh air" frequently gives me headaches, which rarely happen if it is kept outside. I wasn't prone to headaches at all before I started working here. I rarely open windows at home and feel fine. It seems to be a no-win situation, and the better solution for us is to part our ways, which I am working on.

We have these old Windows admins now learning to work with Linux. What drives me insane is their habit of randomly rebooting machines if something isn't working right. There is a problem with a Linux box, they ask you to take a look at it, you SSH in, type "uptime"... bam, it's two and a half minutes. A lot of precious diagnostic information has been lost.

I am not sure about pensions, but we pay quite a lot for heating. We do it every month and all year long, actually, because money management is a problem for many, and if you shift all the payments to one season (which is 4-8 months, depending on the weather), each monthly payment would be a problem for many. So they stretch it out across the year.

Sure. They don't seem to have any problems in the middle of winter, when windows stay fully closed for at least 3 months each year.

About a half also smokes, and then they "don't have enough air".

By the way, the office faces an arterial road, as they are called, with heavy traffic right outside. When you open a window, it fills very quickly with traffic fumes. This gives me persistent headaches almost every day.

Is it really better than CO2?

> How are system failures handled?

By prayer. It happened a couple times, although not yet on the city scale.

I don't personally know anyone who was affected. What they did, according to the local press, was stuffing every crack and cranny with old rags and sleeping fully clothed (as in fur coats and the like) and under as many blankets as they could get their hands on.

Sorry, I've spent enough time on the internet to know never to share any specific personal details.

It's cheap low-quality coal with high sulfur content. The level of air pollution it produces is insane. In winter time you can feel the taste of coal on your tongue. The level of visibility is like 150-200 meters, after that it's a solid grey wall. Nobody here cares though, and if you do, you pick up your things and move elsewhere. That's what I am currently preparing to do.

Yeah, they've been talking about implementing something like that for as long as I can remember. The current system wastes so much heat that it's always 10-15°C warmer in the city than outside its borders.

I mean, how much coal do you have to burn to warm the air outside by 10-15°C?

I am from an ex-Soviet city too, by the way.

We have city-wide central heating system. If you don't pump (literally) boiling water into the system, it gets pretty cold in apartments furthest from the heating station. I live somewhere in between, so it gets even hotter the closer you live to the station. What do people do to combat this? They open the windows, and it's -40°C outside. This further lowers the efficiency of the whole system, so they get the water temperature even higher. Rinse and repeat.

Of course, instead of opening the windows, you could always install a gate valve (or whatever it is called in English) and close it to make the water go through your apartment's heating elements without actually (mostly) heating them, and that's what they recommend, but why bother? The level of self-entitlement of many people here, you wouldn't believe. I could tell stories all day long.

Like a caricature of a stereotypical American tourist.

The level of comfort also heavily depends on the level of humidity, doesn't it? Seems pointless to compare temperatures only.

Would love to get all the complainers here to spend one month in winter where I live. We frequently have -35 to -45°C outside, and +30-35°C inside. How about a 70°C temperature difference?

>The windows are small, and covered in metal bars or thick metal meshing

Shouldn't that be banned by fire hazard regulations?