Eh, I’m on the fence on this kind of thing at this point.

Personally, with the funding where it’s currently at, I don’t feel like I’m getting any real service – it’s gone significantly downhill since I was younger. I have family members who’ve waited years to get assistance with basic mobility issues, and being on wait lists for specialists for years seems super common in general.

I also hear stories from people who work as nurses, about the abuses of the system that commonly goes on. There’s one woman I know of who’s earning well north of $100k per year in the Vancouver region, who typically works like 4-6 days per month, due to how easily the system is gamed by health care professionals. Heck, our lack of doctors is in part the result of the doctors union/associations refusing to put effort into certifying foreign trained doctors, because in part they want to keep the talent pool small and the revenue high.

So I generally get this sense that the increased funding they’ve gotten over the years, has been completely wasted money. It’s managed to get us a less efficient and less patient-oriented system, while allowing union based workers to enjoy ever increasing benefits while providing reduced service. Sorta like how increases in education funding doesn’t help sort out the lack of teachers/marketable skills at graduation, it just pays the current teachers more to continue producing non-producing graduates in a flat market.

That’s great. But I work adjacent to the financial industry, and the govt is forcing that industry in the opposite direction. Payments Canada mandates all ATMs be on Windows. Regulators, even the provincial ones, effectively force mergers + cloud adoption, in part because our government regulators are all in the cloud and it’s “easier” to integrate / less risk from their POV. Almost all your ‘scanned’ cheques, go through Microsoft’s cloud.

Most banks use FISERV for their backend, which runs off an Oracle database – both US companies. Some use Temenos, an EU company with all its development in India, and fully in US clouds. Big CUs like Vancity use Intellect Design for their Online banking, an Indian Headquartered company, with most of its developers in the UAE, running the application via Microsoft Cloud. Some orgs like First West use Veripark, an app so nested in MS cloud it can’t be moved to another hyper scaler. The big banks are 100% captured.

Even many smaller “community” credit unions have these entanglements. There’s only 1 CU in BC that I know of that uses a Canadian back end (made by a Canadian company, in Canada, with Canadian devs, hosted in a Canadian private cloud - runs on SUSE and postgres if I recall right). But even with them, they’re stuck using services like Equifax which are entangled in US shit, because the gov/regulators view getting Credit Score information as more important than handing over people’s personal information to the US. And even with that Canadian stack, they ain’t growing – they’ll likely be killed off by regulators soon enough, forced to merge and send more data to the USA by govt decree. David Eby doesn’t give a shit, nor does Carney. Hell, Carney was a bank regulator type, who basically pushed this shit forward. Guy basically dug our grave, and we’re hoping he’ll dig us out.

Long and short, it’s great that your business is protecting itself, or trying to. But if all of Canada’s critical industries are as captured as the financial sector, it won’t really matter much what we do in other industries. If people can’t pay for your businesses goods, because all of our digital payments go offline due to the US’s interference, having a linux server won’t save you.

To your question about exchanging for travel etc… huh? Like your conversion sums are basically both just saying the exchange rate is 61.8% either way, there’s no difference in the rate of exchange, so no, I don’t really see the difference. If I’m going to a foreign country, I exchange for that country’s currency. I see no practical purpose for doing an intermediary step. If you’re trying to “play the exchange market”, you can try to exchange into various currencies if you think they’ll fluctuate in relative strength, but you generally need a lot of money to make anything with that approach, and it’s pretty risky. For that, you’d also need to hold on to the different currency types for longer than just a vacation or whatever. Ie. Canada’s currency typically floats around 70% of USD. If you see a period where it’s trading at a high rate, say 75%, you could exchange $10k CAD into $7500 USD. Then if the exchange rate dips down to like 68%, you could exchange that $7500 USD into $11030 CAD for a profit of $1030 CAD. Timing that sort of thing is pretty dicey though, and making significant money from it would require investing a significant amount. There are various institutional players that do that sort of thing though – banks for example, will often play the currency exchanges to try and generate a bit of revenue.

In terms of the strength of various currencies, it depends on things like international trade / demand for that currency. People in the thread commenting on the continued strength of the USD, for example, don’t seem to have registered that the US/Kissinger (I think), back in like the 80s or something, convinced a bunch of the big oil nations to only settle oil transactions in USD. One reason BRICS is so hated by the USA, is that they’re basically a group of countries who don’t use USD for oil trades. But generally there’s huge demand for the USD as a result, globally, even with president pant shitter in charge. That is shifting a chunk, evidenced by the reduction in nations holding USD as a reserve, France repatriating their gold holdings, etc etc. It’s not a fast process to excise the states, but it’s underway, and will likely lead to more volatility in their currency (though it’ll still be worth more than CAD in general, due to the relative sizes of the two nations and productivity outputs).

Having a lower dollar value in Canada is partly a result of the population size / productivity, but it’s also partly intentional as it generally helps with exports. Eg. A USD can buy more lumber in Canada, than it can in the USA, so they’re enticed to buy Canadian lumber. Or like our Film industry – our crews labour is cheaper than the labour in the USA, so they film a lot of shows up north. And, realistically with our size difference, without that enticement they likely wouldn’t come north, they wouldn’t trade that product/service/labour with us, and those industries would likely contract due to decreased demand. See BC’s closing saw mills as an example – if we don’t have enough population to maintain demand for a ton of lumber products (and/or we import all we need from elsewhere for cheaper than we could get them locally), and foreign interests don’t want them due to trade issues/tariffs etc, there’s no point keeping mills open. Govts will apply things like tariffs to try and force local markets to sustain local industries, which is what the US is trying to do across the board these days (particularly in manufacturing, as the govt views the manufacturing gap between the USA and China as a huge security weakness I reckon), Sectors that get protected are typically ones defined as critical industries by the govt, and are defined as such in large part because they’re viewed as critical to the ongoing sustenance of a country/state/group of people. So like almost every state protects their financial industry/banks, because having control over the currency/flow of currency trades within a country is pretty important for the country to function – if a foreign nation could flip a switch and suddenly none of your people could exchange currency for goods, and you couldn’t collect taxes, you’re sorta screwed as a country. That’s another big reason there’s a push for things like Data Sovereignty amongst western democracies these days, and you see France moving to Linux. The US had been so trusted for so long, that they’d been given a lot of tech in-roads to critical industries – exposing countries like Canada to HUGE risk from US aggression, even without ‘boots on the ground’. That leverage/control, is also why the US is so belligerent towards any data sovereignty movements – they have power/control of captured nations, and don’t want to relinquish it. They view other nations taking back control/autonomy as a national security risk for them, as it translates to those other countries being able to say ‘no’ to the US’s demands with less fear of repercussions. But I digress ;p

The US administration quite explicitly leaked, in the chat discussion between Gabbard, Hegseth, Vance etc while they were bombing Yemen last year, that they wanted to exit the middle east. They complained that they were policing the strait to keep it open, while not getting paid appropriate amounts by the Gulf states and by European beneficiaries of that trade route. Some of the moves the US made with regards to transferring missile tech etc to places like Saudi Arabia, are part of this plan to try and pull back from the gulf – they want those local players to take on the burden of maintaining order.

The US’s goal in this conflict hasn’t been to liberate the Iranian people, nor has it been to establish any sort of order/function in that region of the world. Its broader goal was more likely to trigger the exit of US military assets from that area, or to gain significant financial contributions from gulf states to remain, either would likely be acceptable. Their goals generally align with Russia’s view of the world, in which there are like 4 major powers each controlling a region – with the States controlling all of the western hemisphere (the greater technate of America that Hegseth likes to go on about).

The humiliation of US forces in the gulf, will likely result in the states’ administration invading Cuba next, is my guess. Cuba is less likely to be able to defend against US aggression, and proximity makes logistics much simpler. Plus its distance from Europe and other regional powers, makes Cuba a target they can, and have been, bullying with general silence from the international community. If/when NATO nations are appalled by the actions, that’ll give the administration justification to seize part of Greenland from Denmark – “They clearly aren’t our allies anymore”. That’ll potentially set Canada up to be blockaded similar to how Cuba is currently, forcing Canada to capitulate due to economic isolation.

Just a guess, obviously, but I imagine that’s the sort of ‘plan’ they’re aiming for. The USA is overtly hostile to democratic principles, their administration members have literally published and endorsed books/strategic plans that praise fascists/fascism. They see things like the French revolution as a lesson that the rich should make sure the poor are never able to rise up again, even if it means butchering poor people… “cause that’s what they’d do to us if they could!”. Attempting to parse the USA’s actions based on the ethics/messaging of the “old” USA is misguided. They’ve clearly announced their new motives, the media should be evaluating their ‘war objectives’ based on those new motives, not the US’s motives under past administrations.

*just an edit to add that the conflict also achieved another broad objective of the administration – by disrupting the oil trade, while simultaneously lifting sanctions on Russian oil, the USA is working to destabilize the European Union, whom the USA views as an enemy now It also helps to bolster Russia/Putin, whom the administration views as an ally. You don’t need to look further than Vance attempting to meddle in Hungary to get the pro-Putin candidate elected, to see other examples of this very blatant, and intentional shift.

Nah, the computers are evolving to become more resistant to meat sack interference.

Yeah, let’s invest in a small number of expensive as hell fighter jets. They’ve worked really well in recent conflicts against drones /s.

May as well be debating whether to buy swords or cannon balls.

Build up our biotech industry, and our drone industry. Biotech to help with vaccines and research during peacetime (especially with the US pulling back), other tasks during conflicts, with delivery via drone. Use the money to build a series of hardened drone manufacturing sites, underground to avoid bombing where possible, for larger scale higher quality drone production. They’d likely also provide a boost to locals, providing things like more optimized delivery for remote communities. They’re also far more useful for things like humanitarian missions supporting people during times like natural disasters – more versatile, and way cheaper per unit, and proven to be pretty damn effective in recent conflicts in general.

There’s also the humanoid robots / robots in general. That’s effectively fixing to become a nearly instantly deployable, versatile task handling (and doing so without question/human hesitation for genocides), global force – one who’s size is only limited by manufacturing capacity. Which Canada currently has zero manufacturing capacity, as far as I know.

I imagine our continued focus on super expensive, small quantity jets is just sunk costs and a military set in its traditions.

Products like Interac Konek provide financial institutions with the ability to have a fully Canadian payment stack already, and online functionality with a more traditional debit card - from what I understand, it’s basically an ISO20022 compliant setup that bypasses the larger international payment networks/settlement approaches, allowing Point of Sale systems to communicate directly with banking system providers/financial institutions (for older models, POS purchases go through payment networks that are usually US based – for CC’s they add in another layer for the funding). To turn that into a credit card, it just needs to get connected to a bank account with a line of credit on it, the technology is pretty simple, and arguably available today.

Bigger rub is likely our regulatory environment and the risk allowances that the government permits FIs to take within Canada. Every bank/credit union is heavily pressured into having real estate as a security for all credit/loans – because the govt views it as the ‘safest’ security, and therefore the only one they accept without punishing organisations for “taking too much risk”. Go back to the boomer / gen X days, and it was incredibly common to get a ‘small’ “signature loan” from a local community credit union – like 10-25k in funding, based on a signed doc saying you promise to pay it back, with the security being just your word.

If the regulators changed their risk tolerance to allow FIs to serve retail credit customers more in Canada, and Interac was cool with konek connecting up to accounts with LOCs, this sort of thing ‘could’ roll out super easily/quick. A local community credit union could get you setup with a signature loan for your credit limit / interest rate, connect the interac konek card up to that account, and you could use it online just like a credit card. They could even tie that package to a Home Equity LOC for a lower rate, if the person has that security available – basically ‘building in’ some better debt consolidation than traditional cards.

That won’t likely happen though, especially with the market all in the shitter at present. The regs are watching housing flatline due to things the gov has done – such as an over-reliance on immigration and international trade, both of which went splat in 2024-2025, after already suffering heavy issues during 2020-2022 due to COVID. So the one security they ‘thought’ was super safe, is floundering – they aren’t likely to open up ‘higher risk’ options as a result. The fintechs will likely circumvent all regulation, as that’s basically their role at this point – they come in to the banking market, and declare they can do all sorts of things that are against banking regulations, then they pretend they aren’t banks and get to avoid those regulations entirely. They play by completely different rules, which they tend to set themselves, yet compete for market share with existing players who are limited by gov restrictions. Sorta like how Uber/AirBNB comes in as an illegal taxi company/illegal hotel services, but rather than being banned/fined to non-existence, instead we just change laws to make it sorta legal. Any attempt to regulate them, meets push back from US interests, where the vast majority of these companies are based/funded. You’re more likely to end up with a Google/Apple-Credit account, because they won’t care about Canada’s laws, and Canada can’t stop them from introducing these sorts of higher risk products.

And as for the whole foreign dominance of the financial space – it’s completely captured. The regulators are 100% reliant on US tech companies, with people like the BC FSA hosting their operating environment in MS Cloud, requiring all industry players to submit detailed personal information reports about borrowers into that space for ‘oversight’ and ‘risk management’ purposes. The FSA literally cannot regulate BC’s financial services to avoid US tech, because the regulators themselves are wholly captured. BC’s regulators have openly stated they think we should have just 4 or so credit unions in the province, and has been taking steps for the past 10-15 years to achieve that goal by smothering / forcing smaller credit unions to merge. Look at something like the BC Rent bank – a $21 million dollar hand out by BC’s government to Vancity, the largest CU in the province, to provide rent-assistance to communities across the province. A service need that would previously be met ‘naturally’ (without huge investments from gov) by small community credit unions, the gov instead funded the biggest, giving Vancity a leg-up in eroding small CU markets / value propositions. Vancity’s also been in the news, saying they’re gonna abandon that whole thing if the gov doesn’t continue funding them – the govs approach pretty much eliminated that financial assistance option for small communities, and worsened the playing field for individuals. BC has only 1 credit union that I know of, that is open bond (open to the public), with its banking system made in Canada, by a Canadian company, using Canadian developers, and hosted on a Canadian cloud. Only 1, and it’s likely gonna go poof in the near future is my bet, cause it isn’t really ‘marketed’ that way, and there’s not enough interest in this sort of thing for people to give a shit.

Likely not, though there are always exceptions.

Friends for sure. The big difference to me, between dating and being friends, is the level of physical intimacy and sexual attraction between the people in the relationship – and ideally, you want that to be a strong enough bond that you can rely on each other for those needs almost exclusively. I can’t realistically picture such a bond with a non binary person, similar to how I don’t think such a bond can be as exclusive/strong with someone who is ‘gender fluid’ (as it’d feel like I’d never live up to the expectations of a partner that wanted to physically/materially play around with both men and women, seeing as I’m just one of the two). I also find myself more attracted to certain generally more feminine characteristics, which would likely not work out well if the other person is non-binary – I wouldn’t want someone I cared about, changing/masking who they are, just for my benefit, so I wouldn’t want to put them into that sort of dilemma by pursuing a relationship.

There’s nothing wrong with being non-binary. There’s also nothing wrong with not being attracted to non-binary people.

Then again, my viewpoint has resulted in me being a single middle aged person with no real immediate family, and few close friends (they tend to go ‘poof’ once they find a wife/husband and start families). So being somewhat mindful of these things, may have negative results in the long run for most cis-folks. May be better to just hook up with anything with a pulse, and try to get some kids/connections by any means, if you don’t want to die alone. Throw every relationship at the wall and see what sticks – any hole’s a goal.

People claiming the US is getting nothing are again ignoring what came out in the Chat leak from last year, involving Hegseth, Gabbard, Vance, and so forth. One of their complaints was that the US was policing the region / ensuring trade routes for EU allies and Gulf states, without getting fully paid for the assets deployed in the region.

If Iran’s plan says the US leaves the region, and/or if the result is that Gulf states/EU take a more active role in the region going forward, and/or it results in those parties paying the US more to maintain a security presence in the area, those are all things that align to the objectives of the current administration. The media really needs to update their expectations / get a better read of what the administration’s objectives are – the right-wing is quite explicitly publishing things like Project 2025 / other ideological books that paint their roadmap in brutally plain terms, it really doesn’t take that much effort to dig up.

Another fun side thought, though entirely conjecture, is that the last time there was a major iranian conflict, it triggered significant recessions in many western nations. Canada, for example, had three things in the 80s that triggered interest rates to climb to 20%: Iranian energy crisis, US protectionism hammering the Canadian auto industry, and a softened global Canadian dollar/export problems. Almost seems like America’s attempting to force a similar issue. If their current gong show in the middle east triggers similar issues globally, it’d potentially even serve to help the states with their stated ambition to annex Canada via economic warfare.

To your immediate question – I’m guessing there’s some activity that’s holding you together with these online friends? Difficult to say where to find more tolerable folks without knowing a bit more about how you’ve met these people so far. My assumption would be that it’s a gaming community of some sort, though that’s not always the case these days – if it is though, maybe look for games with less toxic bases. Another thought is that if it is tied to games, many people go there for escapism (even if the idle chatter sometimes veers off-course) – like my weekly gaming night has a general rule of no politics discussions, cause the doom-feeds are depressing enough. Depending on how often you meet with them, I’d possibly suggest working on filtering your comms a smidge – you don’t necessarily need to share every thought/opinion with friends, especially if the friendship is based more on something frivolous in nature. Again, RL friends may be better for that sort of more fulsome rel.

In terms of them getting offended, I think it’s natural that people translate negative discussions about their race from ‘others’ as being personal attacks, even if there are attempts to phrase things ‘politely’ (which rarely work, and come off preachy/condescending in most cases). For example, commenting on the history of colonial Canada / the Church’s treatment of FN to a newly immigrated white person, often comes off as essentially accusing that person of having a had a hand in the abuses – FN seem to use ‘colonial’ as a slur about ‘any’ white person, even though many/most of them showed up far later than what’d gone on, and their families/histories have nothing to do with it. I guess it’d be somewhat similar, for comparison, to commenting that when white people showed up, FN on the West Coast were well known slavers, or that they didn’t really have a form of written language, and how that could be construed as impolite/offensive to someone with that heritage if you constantly brought it up to them. Or if you translated things like DEI practices into authoritarian-imposed state charity for personal disabilities/failures – “You get preferential hiring treatment/benefits, because FN are statistically poorer, less educated, less productive than other races on aggregate”. Even if somewhat accurate, it’d be hard to encounter that sort of comment regularly, and not take it personally if you were a part of that demo. I imagine that’s one reason Canada’s spent so much effort trying to frame our DEI stuff in a more positive light, shifting almost all accountability off of individuals and on to ‘systemic’ stuff, heh.

These types of articles are annoying at this point – the sort of appeal to morality things, based on essentially dead ‘world order’ concepts. Even when there was a quasi functional set of agreements in place, America just veto’d any attempt to hold it accountable anyhow. International law, or any law really, is largely based on some sort of ‘force’ that gives it authority – in a country, that force is generally the state/police, and internationally it was generally the US-lead coalition of western nations. That authority died in 2025.

We’ve already seen the USA/Hegseth drag all his generals into a room and tell them to not be ‘burdened by rules of engagement’, encouraging them to commit war crimes openly in order to instill terror in others. Anyone who disagreed with his speech was basically shown the door. This was like a year ago even, it’s not ‘new’.

The USA basically shredded any moral dilemmas/debates in the process, and burnt the soft power they’d been cultivating for decades/generations in early 2025. What’s the point of saying it’s wrong based on an old, defunct system that they’ve already abandoned? If anything, the American right wing will likely cheer that they’re getting these sorts of angsty pearl clutching responses from the left / foreign liberal powers. Trump quite literally bragged about America’s war crimes in Venezuela during his state of the union address, cracking jokes to which all the republicans laughed and applauded. Trump’s threats about Iran’s civilian infrastructure, and the bets on whether he’ll drop nukes – these are things that the right wing / Americans want to see happen. They think it’s right to do it.

So really, the article shouldn’t be about “Oh No!! International Law may be violated!”, but rather, “Why should people care about international law being violated, when they’ve already asserted that they disagree with that law and its results?”. Like if/when Trump drops nukes on Irans civilian power plants/water desalination plants etc… what then? Is there some sort of accountability that’s gonna suddenly show up? Prolly not.

That’d seem likely, though there’s one particular anecdotal encounter I had that goes against that thought. The Iranian woman I’d mentioned, was a hairdresser who’d come over from Iran in order to go to university, and then she stuck around – she was in her mid 40s, had been in Canada ~20 years. I didn’t probe too much in the convo, cause that’d be weird I reckon, but what she had said was something along the lines of here in Canada, she’s had no luck dating, and she’s stuck working day after day in a generally low income job. Part of her dating issues seemingly stemming from an assumption that women don’t work, and men provide everything. Back home, she’d have been a ‘respected’ housewife at her age, or live independently as a ward with her parents – either way, nothing but spare time and freedom, so long as you don’t want/care about the freedom to do stuff in public. Instead she ended up as a wage slave, with basically nothing to look forward to but another 20+ years of being a wage slave.

Alberta was the location of choice for US draft dodgers who fled to Canada. They have a natural synergy with the president on this front. They’re also largely captured by the Oil industry, which is primarily US interest backed. Danielle Smith was quite literally employed as an oil industry lobbyist prior to becoming premier. The Federal conservatives have support from this region, likely because of PP’s alignment with Trump, and the money in the oil industry being in line with Trump. It’s why PP’s sham of a leadership review for his failures as a federal leader, was based on in person votes at a small gathering in an Alberta stronghold. PP’s playbook is practically the same as donalds in the states, with his “Only my plan can save this industry!” sort of dictator authoritarian bullshit.

Most local-born Canadians I know drastically cut all services related to the states after 2025, and have sought out Canadian options wherever possible, and have foregone some things when it’s not. That said, the people I know aren’t necessarily representative of the broader whole. Most major industries don’t care what customers seek anymore, as everything’s been driven to the bottom / driven by ‘scale’ type discussions – it doesn’t matter if you want a “Canadian” Smartphone, Bell, Telus and Rogers can make enough profit just acting as resellers for Google and Apple, so why would they bother trying to listen to the local market?

And to your point about locals v immigrant behaviours – I’ve noticed more of my immigrant friends don’t care as much. Our government boasted under Trudeau, that we have no unifying Canadian national identity, that we were some sort of post national multicultural state. Most immigrants I’ve met in my adult life have basically spoken about how much better things would’ve been for them, had they not left their country – including some women, working basic service jobs, who came from places like Iran where they’d have far fewer freedoms/rights. A lot of them actually look down on Canada, referencing stuff like FN issues, cost of living, etc, while exempting themselves from any atrocities/issues of their home nations (Canadian culture lets that slide). The number of immigrants who I’ve met, especially recently, that’re optimistic/positive about Canada is incredibly small. So why would they care if something is Canadian or not? Hell, a lot of them immigrate to Canada, as it’s thought to make immigrating to the states easier – having the states take over Canada would help them cut out some paperwork.

During a past major Iranian conflict, in the 1980s, a near worldwide recession was triggered, which saw interest rates spike to around 20% in Canada for a while, hovering over 10% for 3+ years. The basic triggers were the energy sector disruption from the conflict in Iran, US monetary policy screwing trade partners, and rising unemployment (generally resulting from softened export demand). Here’s a snippet from Wikipedia about the period, which sounds awfully similar to what’s going on these days…

Canada had higher inflation, interest rates, and unemployment than the United States during the early 1980s recession. While inflation accelerated across North America in the late 1970s, it was higher in Canada because of the US decision to switch to a floating exchange rate, which lowered the value of the Canadian dollar to US$0.85 by 1979, which made US imports more expensive for Canadians to purchase. Canada’s inflation rate was 10.2% for 1980 overall, rising to 12.5% for 1981 and 10.8% for 1982 before dropping to 5.8% for 1983. To control its inflation, the US introduced credit controls producing a slump in demand for Canada’s housing and auto industry exports in early 1980 thereby triggering the early first portion of the recession in Canada. Most Canadians were also hit hard financially by a steady rise in oil and gas prices during the 1970s, especially their acceleration in 1979 when the worldwide oil supply was disrupted by the Iranian revolution, with the price of oil reaching almost $40 a barrel compared to $3 a barrel at the start of the decade.

So, yeah. Things could get messy. The boomers and GenX saw the 1980s recession, noted that it was triggered by Canada being so entangled to the US, and then they just kept on with the status quo. This time around the states may even be hoping/planning on it getting messy, with the idea that they can basically use that recession to take over. They’ve explicitly noted they view Canada as a target they can “acquire” through economic warfare, without needing military involvement – all it’d potentially take is a recession, and a cuba-style trade embargo (made easier if they ‘get’ greenland, which they haven’t ruled out ‘force’ to take).

Heh, anyone pointing out the Trump’s are birthright citizens seems to’ve missed the Trump gold card citizenship racket that’s paired with anything related to citizenship revocation. If they change the law, rich people just pay some money to buy a gold citizenship card. Trump’s family would likely get theirs paid for by tech bros, wouldn’t even need to pay out of pocket.

While white nationalist racists are a part of Trump’s base, and are likely in favour of this law getting changed, thinking it’ll help their agenda… it’s really just another attack on poor/middle class people.

At this point, as a non-American, I’m fine with them disenfranchising most of their population and declaring them non-citizens. For regulated industries, it’d make things like FATCA reporting much simpler, and it’s not as though those ‘citizens’ deserve any respect/special consideration – look at the guy they elected as their leader. Who they still follow. Even as he openly makes moves to strip them of their rights.

It’s impractical/implausible that we could at this stage. Even after the elbows up stuff, our government hasn’t pulled back its entanglement with US tech giants – if anything, it’s gone further on that front, considerably. Things like our financial regulators, banks and basic government services all run off of Microsoft365. Microsoft365 is a ‘subscription’ services that can be cancelled / impacted by US govt trade dictates. The US can literally ‘shut off’ Canada’s government, or at least many of its functional/operational wings.

The US listing Canada’s push for data sovereignty as a trade irritant, as well as Rubio’s memo last year noting foreign countries seeking data sovereignty equated to a national security risk for the USA, basically confirms that they’re misusing/misappropriating the data held at US companies for things like AI and their authoritarian surveillance programs. Even the mention of a country pulling back from this sort of dangerous entanglement, gets the US trade teams up in arms / ready to heavily sanction former allies. Carney and crowd will almost definitely cave. He’s an ex-bank regulator type, and the banking sector has been one of those most heavily pushed into using US tech giants, essentially by regulatory decree – he’s not just drunk the koolaid, he was the guy serving it up.

Point being, that even if by some bizarre situation Canada went that way while somehow avoiding getting attacked as a result, it’d still be an absolutely catastrophic hit on things like productivity and basic government function.

Big banks having shitty investment approaches shouldn’t be/isn’t a surprise, I’d be surprised if anyone thought they were going to be following some sort of ethical code on it.

Community credit unions exist(ed). Community based credit unions tended to invest more locally, in smaller businesses. Even their partnerships were with smaller businesses. Big Banks and Big CUs like Vancity just outsource everything to large international companies (like Vancity’s online banking is hosted in Microsoft’s cloud, and its run by an Indian firm called Intellect Design, which has most of its development work done in the UAE/Middle East). Banking with any of them, there’s absolutely zero chance of having ‘privacy’ from foreign snooping/pressure. The US has backend access to/the ability to control all our bigger financial institutions, it’s one reason their claims of Canada being totally dependent on the US is quite legit. There’s been no talk from regulators to try and address the situation – in fact, BC’s regulators want CUs to chase scale/merge together, which puts them all more and more into US clouds – which is cool with our regulator, seeing as our provincial financial regulator, even, is run via Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem.

Those smaller, locally focused, and generally more ‘ethical’ smaller organisations are basically all toast though – like I think there’s only 1 small, open to the public, non-ethnic based community credit union left in Vancouver. Cause no one cares how a bank invests/partners, all they care about is getting the best rate. And if you get that rate by going with an organization that supports ICE, so be it.

It’s funny seeing the various negative posts/stories in the news about him. Like I’m still scratching my head wondering whether this editorial I saw claiming to be from a liberal, going on about why it was a bad move to go with Avi, because policies like “sanction Israel for conducting an ongoing genocide” won’t play to the masses.

Like, do the libs really think Canadians are as blindly pro-Israel as America, just because Israel gives a ton of money to American politicians, and is friends with Donald Trump? They think siding with a genocidal regime that’s bombing school children, threatening to blow up things like water desalination plants, enabling ‘legal’ death sentences for just a persecuted minority, and so on… is going to get them votes? They don’t think having a leader with a sense of morality will win over a chunk of Canadians? I… I mean maybe they’re right, but I sure as hell hope not.

Honestly, we need a new option, other than the obviously corrupt and captured PP/conservative northern trump party, and “the other guys”. Especially when, so far, most of what the other guys have done seems to be to enrich their friends, cut services, enact bills and policies that go along with the American authoritarian agenda, and deliver very little to regular every day Canadians. As an undecided voter who’s voted the whole range of the political spectrum (excluding the most extreme sides, like the people’s party hah), I’m glad to see him in the race and look forward to what they might bring to the next election.

Best of luck to the NDP and Avi.

I dunno, with the AI surveillance state “improving” the kill chain in US wars (you all can bomb school children super effectively now, since AI tells you to! Can’t hold AI accountable!), and the arrest chain of “terrorist” protestors, I imagine that the cell phone location data from these protests could lead directly to certain changes in the USA. Certain changes that will help to populate all those new concentration camps with cheap prisoner labour to replace all the immigrants on the farms etc.

I agree to some extent – I kind of look at the socialist democracies that’re around and think of them as a step in the direction of having a ‘functional’ version of a “libertarian socialist” setup. However we’re also witnessing these fail almost in real time as a result of the global turmoil currently on-going, with rights erosion and increase in authoritarian tendencies on both the political left and right.

I do think there’s a fundamental issue that is a nearly impossible hurdle for ‘proper’ anarchist states of any meaningful size to arise, which is somewhat exemplified in that Spain example. In order for a ‘state’ to exist, it basically needs to have a “force” component. People don’t always want to accept it, and it’s often an open debate on what level of force and how that force is structured in democratic setups. In Anarchist setups, it’s nearly impossible to implement, as there’ll always be dissenters from any use of force, which pretty well blocks that whole function of the government in a consensus based decision model. There also needs to be a method to incentivize/organize large groups of people to complete increasingly complex tasks the larger and more complicated/advanced the tech level of the country may be. Anarchism, from what I’ve read at least, tends to work better in smaller community setups, because there’s less need for either of these things, based on those small community goals. Sorta like the old (and horribly flawed) Marxist refrain of apple farmers and orange farmers swapping produce in a system without capital, it doesn’t really translate to something like making computer chips for advanced tech, or trading direct unskilled labour for something like a surgeon’s services.

Like for the force thing – take something like minority rights. Say some minorities decide to protest in a way that shuts down major streets in a city, demanding special treatment. In a democracy, they get given some media attention, can schedule marches etc, but they can’t illegally shut down businesses / regular day to day life, without running the risk of having the state apply force for their illegal behaviour – cops should show up and force a resolution. If those cops could only show up after a consensus is reached by all parties, including the protesting minorities, then a group like MAGA could basically sit there not compromising on their demands, and inflicting pain on their neighbors/others without a care in the world. Spain’s inability to mount a defense against fascists in the 1930s, was basically the result of them not being able to get a consensus in this sort of regard – you couldn’t get them to all agree to defend the country against franco/hitlers invading force, because some were in favour of it, so no action was taken (except by Durruti’s militia). (and yes, that sort of thing clearly happens in failed democracies like the USA still to some extent, so it’s a problem that goes beyond ‘just’ anarchist decision models – but it’s yet to hit them in an existential way)