Just don’t leave fingerprints on the bottle :)

I just had a read through the bill and, as written, it would prohibit elementary school children from playing pretend as animals on the school playground during recess. Obviously, if a student were using that as pretext to, like, bite someone, you’d want a supervisor stepping in, but to straight-up ban harmless elements of play-pretend like this is frankly asinine.

Oh, the litter boxes are real…

It’s just that their purpose is to be used during a school shooting lockdown.

On average, disposable plastic bottles shed microplastics much more prolifically than plastic water piping.

I’m not Canadian but I greatly support these measures, so if I may I’d like to weigh in.

I think that manufacturing country and ultimate ownership are probably the biggest key factors, as they dictate most where the lion’s share of money flows in a consumer economy. For example, if there’s American investment/VC/private equity for a company but it’s like 10%, it’s not great but definitely not as bad as a completely international company with locations in Canada.

If you want to get super fine-gained, you can even dig into whether a company outsources a significant portion of its auxiliary labor (e.g. digital infrastructure, customer support, shipping) to international firms, as that can make a difference as well.

Component sourcing is also important but there are a lot of cases where domestic isn’t as feasible due to global supply chain reasons. That’s one that’s going to be much more industry specific. Like, if you’re buying furniture and the wood comes from abroad when there’s a robust domestic timber industry in your country, I think that should be a red flag.

Coming to a final determination on any company is going to be one of those things that exists on a sliding scale and probably would benefit from some sort of scoring effort. Either way, my verdict is that any measure that boycotts the US is worth the effort if it’s done by enough people. Even a few loonies per person spent on local vs international over a broad enough group will make a noticeable impact.

I wasn’t referring to the article, I was referring to what Senate Democrats can do in the current situation. At bare minimum, that can do what they were elected for as the opposition party. We don’t get even a noteworthy fraction of that, let alone extralegal measures.

We can take a look at what Republicans do without a majority: stall for time, attack the moral character of the opposition, find loopholes in the procedural process that you’re technically not disallowed to do but annoy the shit out of everyone, and generally be as obstructionist as possible.

It’s the same “I’ll respect you if you respect me” dynamic in an imbalanced-power system.

I’m screwing you over if I personally feel bad for what I’m doing to you (never happens, therefore I’m always fair). You’re screwing me over if you inconvenience me.

It’s just premusk twitter at this point.

I mean, given that Jack Dorsey founded it as basically the “not Twitter Twitter” after musk bought the main one, I don’t think it’s surprising to see it face basically the same moderation issues in the name of being “even-handed”

People only notice the generated works that they notice, they don’t notice the generated elements that they don’t notice.

Basically the Toupee fallacy

Consideration of this incident as terrorism is a great indicator of the position of private businesses within US policy. Corporations are, for all intents and purposes, a core contingent of the US government and its policy, hence why the corporate media+capital class+politicians are treating it as such.

I’ve heard Department of Government Elimination but that works too

That’s generally true under the paradigm of profit maximization unless you reach some sort of insane tech breakthrough, which deepseek seems to have accomplished

This is one of the reasons my main email is a (unique) password I still memorize, so if my password manager fails catastrophically I can still get in.

Eh, I’ve been a lot less tempted by steam sales lately. Better to get stuff off of sites like GOG where possible, because you can usually get a DRM-free, offline installer as a backup

The cherry on top is Trump rescinding the CHIPS act which was supposed to bring more silicon electronics manufacturing to the US, meant to make our microchip supply more resilient. Not only is it cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, it’s also shooting ourselves in the foot (and then blaming Woke when the obvious consequences come knocking home).

That doesn’t fix the out-of-the-box experience of the platform for millions, if not billions of people. Yes it’s a good step to take individually, but insufficient to deal with the broader issue raised of latent alt-right propagandizing

Desktop OSes, my bad.

iOS is still much worse than Android in terms of “walled garden” practices but Google has been slowly inching over that way, what with the recent crackdown on sideloading apps.

While the main quote I can find is like 6 years old at this point, Tim Sweeney directly compared Linux to a US citizen moving to Canada when they don’t like the political landscape. I’m sure his opinions have become more nuanced since then, but it’s still imo just needlessly antagonistic.

In that regard I think both Epic and Valve are trying to advance the industry in different ways: Steam trying to break PC gaming from Windows, and the EGS trying to free up restrictive mobile app store policies. We really should be able to directly buy and play mobile games from whatever storefront we choose, not being limited to Google Play or the App Store.

Since Valve and Epic are both for-profit companies, the advancements are largely for profit’s sake of course. I agree that we should take wins where we can secure them, but always be vigilant for how a company might turn the tables once they have the upper hand and try to mitigate that. We’ve seen the same anti-consumer practices happen many times over in the PC hardware market, such as with AMD v Intel or AMD v Nvidia, where a given company pushes for an open standard only when they are the underdog.

I wouldn’t dislike Tim Sweeney so much if he didn’t write off Linux so much.

He’s diehard on primarily having the Epic Games Store support Windows, which is ironically the most monopolistic and anti-consumer OS right now.

(minor edit to acknowledge Windows isn’t the only platform since the EGS is also available on Mac)

Tay? Yeah it did but that was mostly due to a 4chan ‘model poisoning’ campaign at the time.