How should I be fixing it?
I’ve already written an email to the CRTC about this. Should I also write to my provincial MP?
What’s the “correct” way to decide if I want my phone to randomly blast an end-of-the-world alarm or not?
And for anybody finding this, uninstalling the cellbroadcastreceiver package via adb finally worked for me. If successful, the emergency alerts menu on your phone should crash, and no more end-of-the-world alarms.
Good opportunity to test if my phone will now ignore those alerts, after the modifications I had to do using adb because it’s not permitted to disable those annoying alarms on my own devices.
I don’t have much faith since none of the modifications I tried ever worked and the alarms kept blasting, without me wanting to, but maybe one day I’ll find THE thing that finally disables those.
Otherwise I’m thinking of ditching phones completely, since I can’t control when it’s gonna blast an end of the world alarm for a silver alert about an old person 100 km away from me. So far my only solution is to keep my phone muted al all time. I’m missing calls but at least my phone is not hurling a nuclear type alarm whenever the government feels like it.
I’d like to slap the person that decided to send everything in Canada as presidential alerts, even for silver alerts. Or is it just a Quebec thing?!
Have you already tried to use VIA Rail to go somewhere once in a while? It’s absolutely not a commuter service. Tickets have to be booked days in advance, and the cheapest ones are non-refundable and non-changeable. So a person commuting to and fro would need two very specific tickets every day, or pay more to have “flexible” ones that can be used with any departure. Otherwise if a person has a cheap ticket and misses their train, that ticket is now useless.
The argument of living in a suburb where housing is cheaper can be understood if there are real commuter services, like trains from GO or Exo, but otherwise, commuting regularly with VIA Rail sounds like a real nightmare. They are rarely on time, there are even fewer departures than commuter trains, and their ticketing system is totally inappropriate for every day users.
I had to make a similar choice many years ago, with a job in Montreal and me living 60 km away. There were commuter buses in the suburb but it was taking nearly 2 hours to go to work, and 2 hours to come back. To each their own but I most certainly prefer paying more to live closer to work, than having to deal with commuting with Exo or heavens forbid, VIA Rail.
Seriously, I want to reiterate/ask again, do you use VIA Rail often? Because as someone that has to use it a few times a year, the idea of commuting with them, even just a few times a month, is horrifying.
Commuting:
travel some distance between one’s home and place of work on a regular basis.
If we’re comparing the price and convenience of “commuting” by plane versus VIA Rail… erh… do people regularly take a plane to work?
I mean, yes, it can be in competition with planes for this kind of distance but… commuters?! Like, going to work a few times a week using VIA Rail, and we’re comparing it to taking a plane… to work?! And even if we compare driving the whole road instead of driving to a station; who is going to bother booking tickets days in advance for a few times a week in order to be able to drive to a train station? If you just buy the cheapest ticket for going to work one morning and miss your train, you can’t even use that ticket for the next train! Gotta pay extra for that privilege!
I really, really can’t understand the “commuting” part. Maybe if someone goes to the office once a week and doesn’t mind having like, 2 or 3 departures to come back home, it can be a nice addition… but… relying on VIA Rail to go to work, on a regular basis?! What kind of mad person would do that?
Someone on Twitter (I know) said this was mainly for commuters, but as someone using VIA Rail in the Corridor, I can’t imagine commuting to work with their services. Unless it’s for wealthy commuters…
AFAIK VIA doesn’t have monthly passes or any kind of rebates on tickets for regular users (aside from accumulating points and “preference”) and it’s necessary to book multiple days in advance. Otherwise it costs way more if trying to buy last minute tickets. I really don’t know who would commute this way.
I asked the person that said this but never got a reply. Maybe we have a different definition of commuting.
Anyway, one nore departure is good news. It obviously cannot hurt and only add more options, even if limited or slow.
The local grocery owmed by Loblaws is not taking bottle and can refund tickets/coupons at cash registers from their own machines now. You have to go to the customer service counter with the damn ticket and they refund you in POCKET CHANGE right away so THEN you can give it back to them in a few minutes while paying for groceries. But you can’t use the ticket from the machine!
They refuse to honor and refund their own tickets/coupons from their own machines at cash registers because apparently, there’s been too much fraud. It’s such BS.