The states has been moving towards authoritarian corporate control for a long time though. The freedom cities controlled by big tech, setup in whatever country they want, operating outside ‘local’ regulations, with services via satellite and protection via US military, very much fits with what Starlink has done. Techs push for ‘rare earth’ (uranium) is likely about powering these sorts of cities, without needing to rely on a ‘countries’ power grid – to make them autonomous and impervious to local issues.

A few big military powers to allow for the “constant enemy” setup similar to 1984, with a corporate backend to prop up oligarchs that can act based on the whims of the oligarch without fear of repudiation.

Authoritarianism is on a big upswing lately, and egalitarian ideals are busy eating themselves alive – mired in demographic politics. And the conspiracy gremlin in me says it’s been intentional on the part of the democrats/progressive sorts, as they’re just as beholden to ‘rich’ authoritarian leaning tech people as the right wing/republican sorts.

I’d agree to some extent, but I honestly think it’s a bit more nuanced than a direct “He’s doing what Putin wants” situation – as it’s also what the various groups backing Trump in the states want (the folks who were all in on Project 2025). I find it easier to understand as a conflict between an “egalitarian” world view, and an “authoritarian” one. Putin, and Trump’s crowd, are clearly on the authoritarian side.

Someone recently pointed out to me that this view of it also aligns to the difference between the greek orthodox church and the roman catholics. In the latter, the translation of the bible into different languages meant individuals were encouraged to read the bible, and determine (in part on their own) how best to avoid hell; in the orthodox approach, it was entirely up to the priests to inform the masses what they had to do to avoid hell, as only the priests could read latin. Russia’s still very much of the orthodox approach – and in the US, many of those mega pastor sorts have pushed in this direction as well. So their interests line up.

That authoritarian mindset also lines up with big tech, and the whole Yarvin nonsense. It lines up with the blanket firing approach and terrorization of the federal work force, to make them more subserviant/compliant. And it generally lines up with the Russian view that the world should be cut up into like 4 blocks, with a ‘strong man’ leading each block. That division that was pushed forward by Dugin, generally “gives” north America to the US.

I recognise the benefit and purpose of unions, but recently I have to admit I’ve been a bit conflicted over them.

We frequently see stories about pending cuts / budget shortfalls here in BC, for things like Teachers and Transit workers. The news releases always phrase the issue as the amounts the govt gives these orgs having ‘failed to keep up with inflationary pressures’. They’ll very rarely also note that a huge % of that budget goes directly to salaries… where we’ve heard unions in past years negotiate fairly huge wage increases. Leads to a fairly simple conclusion that the “inflationary pressures” that are causing things like after school programs to be cut, are the union’s negotiated salary increases.

The wage increases that they negotiate, are also way higher than most of the increases I’ve seen / heard of in the private sector. The economy’s so bad, some jobs have even been unable to provide regular CPI increases… yet union workers still get their ~20% increase over 3-4 years or whatnot. The bank of Canada had cautioned people not to setup high-multi year increases due to the market uncertainty around the time covid restrictions were easing – private sector generally listened, unions/public sector did not.

The public sector also now employs more people than ever before – skewing statistics significantly. A recent stat I saw placed it at about 1 in 4 workers in Canada work for the public sector, where these sorts of increases are more standard. As a result, lopsided increases in public sector wages skews national numbers in regards to aggregate stats on wages. However, public sector funding comes from private sector taxes – and without gains in the private sector / productivity to fuel increased tax revenue, how exactly do unions / govt think we’re going to pay for those “inflationary pressures”? The private sector workhorse can only survive so much flogging.

When I was younger, govt work was viewed as lower pay, but far greater job stability. Now, it’s higher pay and greater job stability. And the amount of govt workers has increased dramatically, making it all the more obvious that it’s a golden ticket. When interacting with govt workers, there’s also a sense of ‘waste’ from the private side – like seeing 6 workers at a govt dispensary just standing around with no customers for hours, as they collect higher pay cheques than regular retail + have better job security. This creates animosity towards what’s essentially a privileged worker class. Govt workers in the states faced a huge backlash from the public, in part because of this sort of disparity, I imagine. I hope that the progressive folks are keenly aware of that gap, and are mindful of what may result if they leave it to fester. It’s the sort of situation that makes people vote in favour of things like DOGE, and allows more extreme folks to co-opt that message for far more nefarious purposes / more extreme actions. There needs to be an alternative, or a shift to more practical budgetary sanity.

This is dumb. Only a small % of the goods in alaska are brought in via truck – the vast majority is via boat.

Meanwhile the ‘obvious’ response from the US would be to toll trucks carrying goods from Mexico to Canada. Which is a much bigger trade route.

Russia’s objective isn’t tariffs – it’s to splinter/decouple international coordination and cooperation amongst western nations.

So, yeah. The faster Trump can accelerate that, the happier his boss’ll be.

Like the buy[local] type campaigns are most likely getting a bit of a bump from Russian propaganda agents – even if they are ‘real’ sentiments to some extent too.

Many/most of Canada’s government agencies are entrenched in Microsoft products. Our financial regulators in many provinces have their data portals, to which Financial Institutions submit significant ‘customer specific’/private information, hosted in Microsoft365 sites. Payments Canada, a government org, requires that our ATMs run on Windows.

Many/most Financial Institutions also run their online banking on non-Canadian company products, hosted or managed by foreign actors. Central1, the primary trade association that previously hosted about 80% of Canada’s Credit Union websites, recently exited the hosting business – and transferred those sites over to a company from India. This company also provides the sites for a few of Canada’s Big Banks. The CEO of Central1, having failed to deliver on one of her 3 primary functions as the industry’s Trade association, was given a business award for it – in part, because Central1 has become largely x-banker run, as required by Canada’s regulators recently, and as a result C1 lost sight of what it means to be a cooperative. As part of their exit from hosting online banking, Central1 also indicated that they’ll support two other recommended options if people don’t want to use the default – one that’s in Microsoft365 (US controlled), and another from Portugal. No Canadian owned/accountable org was part of the short list that the majority of “small local” credit unions could go with. So even if you’re banking with a tiny credit union, you’re likely exposed to the risk of foreign manipulation / privacy issues, and your banking services are beholden to a foreign country’s whims. Some CU’s even run on Microsoft365 extensively internally on their back end, meaning their services are all totally down whenever Microsoft has an outage – which, given that Microsoft is beholden to the whims of the orange man as a US company, could mean that Donald and crew could effectively “turn off” your ‘small local’ CU.

When raising questions about the US’s access to Microsoft’s cloud data through their “National Security Letter” approach previously, I’ve heard lawyers comment that it’s not an issue, because realistically we’d hand the data over anyway if it was requested – so it just cuts out some bureaucracy. Admittedly, this was at a time when trade relations were more amicable – but it implies heavily that, frankly, yes, most of the data that’s held in US cloud products is already accessible to US interests/government agencies. And yes, that continues to apply even if the physical servers are located in Canada, as per government regulations – the Control centre is still foreign. Extending the cloud act just makes it more official, in my view.

The solution, if we Canadians want ‘real’ autonomy on this front, is that you need companies that will be wholly accountable to Canadian laws and regulations, and not interests owned by foreign adversaries. Any “Critical” service, such as our Banking Infrastructure and Government Agencies, should be required to use Canadian made products / host assets within Canada, with control of those assets also being within Canada. The EU’s GDPR blocks them from using US cloud services on security/privacy reasons, for certain areas of the economy/government. Countries like China use Linux as their official govt operating system. There’s no specific reason we couldn’t do the same, we just need the govt to recognize the risk and take some action on it.

I’d disagree. I know it’s often interpreted along those lines, but it seems a misread on the situation to me. There are quite a few literary critiques on Hamlet that view him and his dilemma as existential angst – a hero torn between ‘duty and doubt’. I think that reading is far more apt than viewing Hamlet as a suicidal emo fop. The very next lines after the famous intro are literally:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them

So… Whether it’s nobler to sit there and get fucked by ‘chance’, or to take up arms and oppose the status quo/issue. That opening clearly establishes the two sides of his deliberations: to suffer the situation, or to take up arms and opposed it – neither of these is equated to dying until the next part, which pivots to death, because he was opposing the king / considering killing his usurper uncle. Not only would that potentially result in his death, but the act of killing in the ‘christian’ mindset would result in his soul being damned in the next life. He spends a huge amount of the play humming and hawing about this sort of stuff, like when he has an opportunity to top the guy, but stops because his uncle is mid prayer – and he doesn’t want to kill him in a way that might accidentally send him on to heaven, if such a thing existed.

Anyhow, the next part supports my read, I think, where he goes through a list of “mundane” offenses. Thees offenses are basically all sleights that someone would be ‘suffering’ as a result of actions of another - they have an external locus, and there’s no explicit reason to think that the ‘response’ with a bare bodkin (dagger) would be directed internally: the oppressor’s wrong (tyrants), the proud man’s boasting (we hear alot of boasting from certain folks…who are blind to the impact on others), the pain of being shunned romantically, the slowness of the law to achieve justice, the insolence of office (putting up with an idiot in a position of power), and the general pain of generally having to put up with those ‘unworthy’ of your efforts. His bridging line there is to finish the list with a note that you could fix most of those situations with a dagger, before finishing it off with:

Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death,

That’s pretty explicitly saying “why would anyone ‘suffer these slings and arrows’ (mundane offenses) if it weren’t for a fear of death by ‘taking up arms against them’ with a dagger?” (to reference it back to the earlier start for cohesion in the reading, which works just fine).

In the speech he also equates inaction to cowardice, and that to effectively being dead. Near the end:

And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

Ie our fear of dying, the uncertainty of what’s next, makes us bear those problems / put up with a lot of crap – it makes us into cowards. Our resolve is diminished by the thought of the challenge / potential death, and the possibility of going to hell if you murder the source of these troubles, to the point that we lose the ability to take action.

And again, a huge amount of the play is literally all about Hamlet, trying to sort out the morality of whether he should kill his usurper uncle – an act which he knows would put his own life in jeopardy and cause potential chaos - let alone put his own ‘immortal soul’ in jeopardy of going to hell, if he accepts the idea of heaven/hell. Not so much Hamlet debating if he should kill himself, but rather if he should kill his uncle. He’s out for revenge, he’s not out to be an emo baby.

Reddit’s seeing membership outflows resulting from their more draconian policies. Reddit boss restarts a competitor platform so that he can try and recapture users by owning his own competition, while trying to pretend like there’s no conflict.

idk. Seems pretty suspect to me. Lemmy seems ‘ok’ for news aggregation, and it has a more community / local vibe to it. For example, I can have more confidence that the feeds I see on Lemmy.ca are more controlled / accountable to Canadians, rather than the heavily Americanized subs that exist in Reddit. And I can pick and choose which other subs to see, with better understanding of the likely biases that I’ll encounter. This sort of end user transparency is really refreshing, especially given the burbling propaganda war being waged by the Americans at present against Canada.

I’m historically a green voter – but honestly, I get “the defectors” point on this one, and am a bit surprised that there’s so much drama over it.

Like the news stories about her saying there were no child bodies at one site – people comment how what she’s saying is disrespectful to survivors of the residential system, but they aren’t saying she’s factually incorrect. The articles highlight that even the first nation “revised” their wording over the years from “remains of 215 children”, to “potential burial sites”, to eventually just “anomalies”.

So she’s correct in her statement on that front, no?

This sort of situation alienates moderates. The extreme backlash against anyone who asks questions in this area makes it impossible for moderates to engage with it without being labelled in some way. When moderates are unable to even ask questions/discuss the topic openly, well, they tend to become less moderate. So her going from questioning / highlighting objective truths, to experiencing a huge backlash, to doing a stupid mocking voice on a podcast, isn’t really that surprising a trajectory. The federal government making it a “hate crime” to question this stuff, is just amazing to me – and it’d be a huge point against the Liberals staying in power, if the alternatives weren’t so gross.

I don’t condone wanton violence either, of course… but at the same time I recognise someone like Hamlet as a tragic hero. His most famous soliloquy, the “To be or not to be” one, is largely about whether you should stand up to tyranny, even though it may cost you dearly to oppose tyrants, or whether you should try and keep your head down and try to profit personally as a coward.

Yes, it’s better to achieve those goals through non violent means, but you need to draw a moral line. Luigi drew his.

Yeah, Google’s monopoly is a problem. Wonder if there’d be any real appetite for a (potentially govt supported) index for Canadian businesses, which could link through to those businesses public websites (if they have them) — and/or just serve as a host for a basic business brochure / info set.

I mean, businesses need to register within jurisdictions in order to operate – why not have those jurisdictions have a semi federated setup of sites to host indexes for consumers / b2b. Publicize it to the general public, and ensure that businesses let their own employees know about it (so that local workers, know there are local options to look up shops / businesses). You could connect the jurisdictional sites via federation to make it a “one stop site” for Canadians to go to for local business references/info, even as they move around to different areas.

If this lemmy site is legit in its costs being like $1.10/user/year, I imagine our govt could do similar for similarly low costs – and offset it by having some modest local advertising options on the sites. You’d basically setup a class of ‘business’ users that’d have a bit more of a portal, and a landing page associated with their brand, where they could post basic information up / connect with potential customers. Have the business registration process in different municipalities / jurisdictions be involved in administration of those business accounts. Regular consumers could either be left as read only, or could potentially have accounts setup for more engagement – perhaps with some method of checking the person’s general geo location to root out some malicious sorts / potential foreign influences.

I don’t think we have anything like this, but… I’d love to see it pushed by some politicians, personally.