I kind of wish that multi-unit housing came with sound isolation ratings. That’d create an incentive to have better isolation and help customers weigh the tradeoffs.
Uniquely, the Norwegian special territory of Svalbard is an entirely visa-free zone. No person requires a visa or residence permit and anyone may live and work in Svalbard indefinitely, regardless of citizenship. The Svalbard Treaty grants treaty nationals equal right of abode as Norwegian nationals. So far, non-treaty nationals have been admitted visa-free as well. “Regulations concerning rejection and expulsion from Svalbard” are in force on a non-discriminatory basis. Grounds for exclusion include lack of means of support, and violation of laws or regulations.[52][53][54] Same-day visa-free transit at Oslo Airport is possible when travelling on non-stop flights to Svalbard.
That’s not citizenship, but it’s living and working there without restriction, which is probably about as good as someone’s going to get in the present day. But it’s probably colder than most people would like.
Approximately 60% of the archipelago is covered with glaciers, and the islands feature many mountains and fjords. The archipelago has an Arctic climate, although with significantly higher temperatures than other areas at the same latitude. The flora has adapted to take advantage of the long period of midnight sun to compensate for the polar night. Many seabirds use Svalbard as a breeding ground, and it is home to polar bears, reindeer, the Arctic fox, and certain marine mammals. Seven national parks and 23 nature-reserves cover two-thirds of the archipelago, protecting the largely untouched fragile environment.
EDIT: And income looks pretty solid, even by Western standards:
In 2006, the average income for economically active people was 494,700 kroner, 23% higher than on the mainland.
Converting to 2006 USD and then rolling forward inflation to December 2023, that’d be ~$110,463.54/year.
But part of the reason that they’re gonna be paying that is because the people living there are gonna have to be living in polar twilight for a hefty chunk of the year.
Dark Reader. This does a pretty technically-impressive-to-me job of making reasonable dark versions of pages. It’s not perfect – there are a handful of sites that it needs to be toggled off for, makes something hard to read – but I’m amazed that it does the job it does.
Blank Dark Tab: Replace the new tab with a blank page matching Firefox’s built-in dark mode
Stylus: Doesn’t do anything on its own, but permits collections of third-party themes to be applied to websites to fix annoyances.
Greasemonkey. This doesn’t do anything on its own, but it permits people to publish little modifications to be applied to webpages, permits for a lot of little scripts that fix annoyances on websites. There were a number of useful scripts that I used on Reddit.
Misc
Edit with Emacs. Permits opening the contents of a textarea in an external emacs instance. Nice for things like, say, writing a large lemmy post in Markdown. I vaguely recall that, at least some years back, there was a way to embed a version of vim in Firefox textareas, so if vim’s your cup of tea, that might be interesting, if it’s still around.
Instance Assistant for Lemmy and Kbin. A variety of quality-of-life fixes for lemmy and kbin. Lets one open a given lemmy/kbin post on their local instance if they wind up viewing a page on a remote instance.
Reddit Enhancement Suite. If you still use Reddit, this has an enormous collection of quality-of-life improvements for Reddit.
EDIT: I don’t know if this is the embedded vim that I recall, but Firenvim seems to do roughly the same thing, if not.
EDIT2: There’s also some “overlay remover” plugin that can bypass a number of obnoxious overlays that I use on my desktop, but I don’t have it installed on this machine. I think that it’s Behind the Overlay.
I’m skeptical that it will scale – it costs to host video – but it’s there. You can host something on any PeerTube host willing to serve your content and link to it from the Threadiverse, same as you could on YouTube.
Mine is that I can’t stand the Deadpool movies. They are self aware and self referential to an obnoxious degree.
I haven’t read the comic books that they’re based on for a long time, but as I recall, they also break the fourth wall. I don’t think that that was introduced specifically for the movie.
Marvel’s Deadpool is known for his over-the-top violence and crude and crass humor, but perhaps his best-known character trait is his penchant for repeatedly breaking the fourth wall. Deadpool talks to the audience in comics, films and videogames - but he didn’t always have this power. In fact, early Deadpool was known for being quite serious and firmly rooted in the fictional realm…so when did the Merc with a Mouth first break the fourth wall - and how did he insult editors everywhere by doing so?
Deadpool and the assassin with superhuman accuracy Bullseye teamed up in previous issues, and in Deadpool #28, the two are reunited after a long absence. “How long has it been!?” Bullseye exclaims. Deadpool simply states “Issue sixteen.” It’s the smallest of fourth-wall breaks (he hadn’t even began speaking to the readers yet), but it shows that Deadpool is doing more than acting out - he’s acting as his own editor. Considering convoluted comics continuity, it’s normal for editors to occasionally place footnotes in certain panels, specifically when characters reference past events. Perhaps Kelly and Woods considered the old method, but wanted to try a new technique. Whatever their reasoning, Deadpool’s fourth wall breaks became a staple of the character.
Looks like Deadpool #28dates to 1997, though, so Deadpool breaking the fourth wall has been around for over a quarter of a century.
The Svalbard Undersea Cable System is a twin submarine communications cable which connects Svalbard to the mainland of Norway. The two optical fiber cable consist of two segments, from Harstad to Breivika in Andøy, and from Breivika to Hotellneset near Longyearbyen in Svalbard. The segments from Harstad to Breivika are 74 and 61 kilometers (46 and 38 mi) long, respectively, and the segments from Breivika to Hotellneset 1,375 and 1,339 kilometers (854 and 832 mi). Each consists of eight fiber pairs and there are twenty optical communications repeaters on each segment. Each segment has a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s), with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s. The system is now the sole telecommunications link to the archipelago.
The company began Scandinavia’s first 5G pilot back in November 2018, conducted Norway’s first 5G video call, and launched the world’s northernmost 5G pilot in Svalbard. Telenor chose Nordic company Ericsson over Chinese firm Huawei to supply the critical infrastructure for the rollout.
I don’t know whether Starlink orbital paths can cover that far north.
googles
Apparently so, and they started service about five months ago.
Depends on the implementation, and I think that that’s something of an issue in discussion about it – because its effects depend a great deal on the specifics.
There is a portion of the small government conservative crowd that sees it as a replacement for welfare programs where the government mandates policy. Like, instead of getting, oh, food stamps or such, where the government precisely spells out policy in each area (“this is what you are permitted to buy with this”), people who are poorer than a certain amount would simply get a flat cash payment and choose how to use it. In that sense, it’d reduce the degree of control that government has, which is a goal that they’d like to see.
There’s also a portion of the redistribute-more-wealth crowd on the left that sees it as existing alongside existing welfare programs, rather than as a replacement. For them, if the government has progressive taxation policy (like, income tax brackets or the like), a flat benefit to everyone will tend to redistribute more, which is a goal that they’d like to see.
Both implementations would qualify as UBI – they both provide an unconditional basic income. But the actual effects depend on the implementation.
So when someone says something like “sign this petition for UBI”, I think that a really good question is “tell me what sort of UBI you are aiming to have implemented”, because the details have a very considerable impact on what it is that you’re signing up to support.
I rigged up a simulated sunrise about 20 years back with a regular light, a computer, and an X10 controller back when I slept in a room without windows and wanted a more-gentle way of waking up than an alarm clock. So I totally get wanting to simulate a sunrise.
But why do you want to simulate a sunset?
Also, you might want to ask on !homeautomation, as they specialize in this sort of thing.
Also, in general, if you have legal residence long-term in a country, most countries do permit a route to obtain citizenship. Norway does appear to do this too (though it’s not a guaranteed right, and you need to learn Norwegian as part of that process). Thing is, I don’t know whether legal residence in Svalbard – which is a Norwegian territory, but not part of Norway proper – counts as legal residence in Norway for naturalization purposes, and I could very much believe that that is not the case.
Foreigners may become Norwegian nationals by application after residing in the country for at least seven of the previous ten years, while holding a work or residence permit valid for at least one year. Applicants must be at least 12 years old, demonstrate proficiency in the Norwegian or Sami language (or alternatively complete 300 hours of Norwegian language courses), intend to reside in Norway permanently, pass a good character requirement, and not have a criminal record.[11]
Thinking of an analog, I know that in the US, American Samoa is unusual in that while it is a US territory, American Samoa wanted to run their own immigration policy (because there are people in (non-American) Samoa who they wanted to be able to move in). Both the US and American Samoa were willing for American Samoa to be a US territory, but the US wasn’t willing to have American Samoa just be a back door to general entry to the US if they had different immigration policy. Normally, in an American territory – like Puerto Rico, say – the residents are American citizens. However, because of this independent immigration policy that American Samoa runs, based on the arrangement that the US and American Samoa worked out, American Samoans are not actually American citizens – they are American nationals. While generally they can live and work in the rest of the US, just the fact that American Samoa is okay with someone moving to American Samoa and has the right to let people in as they choose doesn’t necessarily mean that the same person can use that status to just bounce from there to legal status in the rest of the US.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Norway has similar restrictions on people bouncing via legal residence in Svalbard to broader Norway, because the situations are somewhat-similar.
It’s also important to understand that time spent living in Svalbard does not count towards residence in Norway. That means that if you’ve lived in Svalbard for two years, those two years will not count towards a permanent residence application in Norway.