Right, so here’s an article interviewing Gavin Newsom, one of the rumored potential democrat presidential candidates, which notes:

During his tenure, former Democratic U.S. president Joe Biden expanded on protectionist trade policies from Trump’s first term in office, by keeping most of Trump’s tariffs on China and even announced new ones.

When asked directly by Kapelos whether Canadians can expect tariffs to be reversed under Democratic leadership, Newsom said he “can’t guarantee that but I can guarantee you nothing like this.”

So my comment that dems are supporting tariff type moves, is supported by historical actions of Biden (expanding Trump’s first term tariffs), and Newsom’s statement that he couldn’t officially say he’d roll back any tariffs (he wants to keep the option open to just leave them in place / collect that revenue).

The main threat to Canada is the USA. China and Russia, while threats, aren’t generally imperialistic threats to Canada, in part due to distance – they’d disrupt the functioning of the country if they could, but something like land invasions/border redrawing are typically reserved for regional neighbours (ex. Ukraine, Taiwan, Tibet). Arguing that we need the USA’s protection, is like a bully telling their victims they need to pay a protection racket. Western provinces weren’t thinking of joining the USA – Alberta, ONE western province, had a vote recently on whether they wanted to have a vote about leaving Canada (NOT a vote about joining the USA), and that vote resulted in a resounding “FUCK OFF, WE’RE CANADIAN”.

If either of us are off base, I think it’s you.

Yeah, we’ll wait and see. But as your previous-worst Republican president that we thought you couldn’t go any lower from once said, “fool me once, shame on you… fool me… uh… um… you can’t get fooled again?”

As a Canadian, nah. America’s basically manic/unstable. You voted in Biden after the first Trump shitshow, and then went back to Trump. There’s absolutely no guarantee that America won’t just elect Donald Trump Junior to be dictator in a future election cycle.

Even more, many dems are quietly supporting the general moves of the government, in regards to tariffs etc. They just wanted the verbiage to be a bit nicer, as America went about fucking over their allies.

Our leaders will likely bend over at some point, because that’s what politicians seem to do. But for the rest of us, I hope we continue avoiding America, and continue pushing for separating our economies / cultures / critical industries. Only way I’d be enticed to consider moving closer to how ties were before, would be if we see America do what a “Leader” of the “Free world” should do: allow your war criminals to be tried in the international criminal court for their crimes against humanity etc.

Don’t impeach. Send Hegseth to the Hague, then we’ll talk.

Sounds sorta… silly, honestly. Yeah, we need a course correction on AI, or more, we need a significant course correction on big tech. But a city council ‘banning’ it, without understanding / clarity on what they’re banning, is nuts.

Like here they define a bit clearer what they’re banning –

ban autonomous systems that can modify their own core algorithms, run code outside their initial sandbox or perform complex tasks without continuous human oversight if those tasks could affect municipal networks, banking, financial markets or public safety.

Most enterprise firewalls would fall into this category, email filters too. Got an email system that automatically updates its algorithm to block malicious attackers? Banned. Even a simple script to help with sorting through financial data – like doing money-laundering/fraud checks overnight, with an outputed report in the morning for staff to investigate when they get in, would potentially fit the ban criteria.

Most 24/7 continuous monitoring systems that use algorithms to send alerts/notify humans would fall into this category – they’re specifically designed to watch for complex variable combinations, and then alert humans when potential issues shows up, so they’re explicitly designed not to be running “continuously under human oversight”.

“AI” is such a broad/undefined term, that blanket banning tends to also ban technology based on algorithms that’ve been around for multiple decades, without significant issues. Sorta like how the EU’s initial AI regulations had to make all these absurd carve outs for things like “Credit Scores”, because a credit score is technically an algorithm, and they were legislating algorithms.

The ban’s also nearly impossible to enforce, given its scope, and where “AI” has its hooks. Like if you ban AI, but all of Microsoft’s products have it entrenched at this point… while I don’t agree with it, I guarantee you the government / council would rather be in a state of non-compliance with their own law, rather than use Linux.

Yeah, they need to up their efficiency with more AI. 😄

Oh, I’m not saying to shorten it or clean it up. Have them read the whole thing, word for word, as best they can.

I think it was in his first term, for example, when foreign news translators were getting in trouble constantly for translating what he said directly – his drivel was such nonsense that people just couldn’t believe it, it all sounded so stupid. And without Trumps cadence, the stupidity stands out even more. If you add on to that an actor that’s the “wrong color” for Trumps pride, and make them stumble over his nonsense word choices, with the occasional “woops I’m shitting myself midspeech” facial expression thrown in for good measure…

I mean, I’d be laughing pretty hard. And I’m sure Trump, if he saw that on multiple stations, would go totally off the deep end. It’s petty, and low brow, so I’m pretty sure he’d be able to understand it.

It’d be hilarious if CNN and other news agencies did something that’d totally skewer and enrage the president in response to his bullshit: stop showing live footage / coverage of Trump, and instead just have either News anchors attempting to read his quotes word for word, or have something like a black lesbian actor portray Trump recreating his word soup speeches. Or maybe have it be cartoony animated re-enactments, similar to what we sometimes see come out of Asia. “Subtlety” emphasize things like his sleeping, shitting himself, hair issues, simp’ing for Harp, etc.

A narcissist, having his public appearance clipped.

Or maybe just officially partner with SNL to do skits for presidential news coverage. America’s a fuckin joke these days anyhow, may aswell embrace it.

You’re significantly over-estimating the significance of our exports to the USA, to the USA. Canada, as a country, is heavily reliant on trade One of the biggest problems “buy Canadian” movements have, is finding actual Canadian products – even if we ‘replace’ the USA as a source, we’re still heavily reliant on trade. It’s tied to like 2/3s of every dollar earned in Canada, or something ridiculous along those lines. Like Alberta’s busy cozying up to Trump, because more of Alberta’s GDP is based on US Trade, than it is on the Canadian market. We only refine half of the oil we use domestically, we import the other half we use, while selling something like 2-3 times the amount we use domestically to foreign buyers like the USA and China: ie. we don’t even have the refining capability to cover our domestic market, and instead we trade a huge surplus of crude oil, while buying our domestic mfg shortfall up on the market…so even one of our ‘bigger’ industries is unable to provide for the domestic market without foreign assistance / sources.

That’s not the case in the states, where they’re more self-sufficient overall, using products / services that they make themselves.

And really, that “services” part is the real major point that almost all of these ‘trade’ negotiations are missing. There’s a trade deficit on goods, but if services are included, we send heaps of money to the USA annually, and our service industry is absolutely saturated with US companies, who’ve killed off any real Canadian competition. Not only does bringing in the services trade numbers push things into the US’s favour, but it also highlights how boned Canada is in general, should we have a “hard cut” of relations with the USA. Our government would literally shut down if Microsoft were forced to pull the plug on the Canadian market.

Ah, then your card payments may also be generally ‘good’ for all I know, I’m not too familiar with how outsourced many European countries are in this regard.

Those still touch payment networks. Debit cards are basically cards from Payment networks that are partnered with Banks/Credit Unions. PSP/DC Payments is an example of a payment network, Everlink, Interac, Exchange, Cirrus, etc. Seeing as Carney/Canada are ok selling off those payment networks to US Private Equity, you’re going to always be somewhat dependent at this point on US services. Like I’d bet you that most of Interac, even though it’s “Canadian”, is running in US Cloud platforms like Azure and AWS, meaning it’s ‘realistically’ fair game for US AI harvesting etc. Canadian businesses that try to pretend they’re ‘good’ on this front will almost always cite privacy legislation compliance, to things like “Data residency” – pretending as though just because a copy of the data is stored in Canada, that it isn’t exposed/leveraged/dependent on US/foreign services.

Depending on the financial institution, that sort of app function would be outsourced to a third party anyhow. Payment networks are semi-separate from banks/financial institutions, and they’re generally involved in digital wallets. And those payment networks are separate – like how we recently saw the big banks sell Moneris, a payment network, off to US private equity. Or how Interac isn’t a ‘bank’. Even something like an ATM is a partnership between banks and payment networks – you can see the payment networks ATMs are a part of on the decals on the ATM, which generally need to match the decals on your card. Those are the payment networks the banks semi-outsourced / partnered with for facilitating ATM activities. The bank buys/owns the ATM (typically), and then has an agreement in place with those networks in regards to payments / transactions, and a defined data exchange between those networks and the banks systems for settlements.

Migrations to google wallet are generally cheaper than getting that sort of feature with one of the older style payment networks, you’re right about that. Cheaper by a fairly large margin.

One point I was making though, is that there are likely more companies ‘seeing’ the details of your purchase than you may realize. And many of those companies have significant ties to the USA, and are reliant on USA products/services. Even “local community credit unions” tend to use one of two networks, one of which has all its support coming out of the USA. Our government / regulators have made no movement to detangle any of that, and are, in fact, pushing more and more of your financial industry into offshoring services to the USA. Our government/Carney are all “Elbows up!” in the media, but “Pants Down!” in practice.

Canadians won’t do shit on this front.

I’m literally watching a “merger” in the financial industry, where the smaller player, who used a linux-based back-end stack for the banking system, is being forced to adopt the ‘industry standard’ of the larger financial institution – the industry standard being a US company system, running on Microsoft products, and using an Indian company, running the online banking in Microsoft’s cloud. Having a ‘sovereign’ local community credit union isn’t enough to get members/loans apparently.

Even had an opportunity to ask the new CEO about whether they thought it was a prudent move, given the constant news/trade tensions (admittedly, prior to the most recent issue) – and the CEO’s response was basically “I have a piece of paper from a third party that says there’s no risk, so shut up”. Also, the very accurate comment of “I don’t think the back end matters to people in general, no one is going to move their accounts just to be with a sovereign setup, if they can get a slightly better rate elsewhere”. And you can’t really argue that, seeing as the smaller company that’s being ‘merged’ couldn’t leverage it to gain memberships.

The regulators don’t only not care about this sort of thing, they encourage industry to move things into US tech giant clouds. It’s hilarious, the BC outsourcing regulations say to avoid concentration, but the regulators themselves practically disregard it and demand everyone use Microsoft, and FISERV (a US backend banking host provider that provides core services for like 80% of the credit unions around). The regulators themselves are in US tech giant clouds. There’s practically no chance that our government actually takes any kind of stand against Microsoft or US tech giants.