Yes, clearly every trade agreement must benefit our local Canadian oligarchs – Irving, Weston, Rogers and Patterson. We certainly can’t use free trade and human dignity to work towards fairer, more equitable societies - that would be too logical right?
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The daily unlock code thing is a myth. The grain of truth is that the F-35 relies heavily on mission data files (MDFs), which are region-specific software packages that enable the jet to recognize threats, navigate, and employ weapons, and we depend on the US being willing to supply those updates voluntarily for our fighter jets to be useful.
Don’t these petitions get dropped when an election is called? Unlikely that it’ll ever actually hit the floor.
It can technically be used to extend your stay in Palau long enough to establish tax residency since it would allow you to stay in Palau for longer than 183 days a year. Not unusual for people sitting on big crypto stashes to move abroad or buy citizenships in order to cash out their crypto without capital gains tax (or at least that’s how it goes - I imagine the IRS doesn’t go down that easily).
The whole point of this card is basically to bypass KYC requirements for crypto exchanges that don’t allow US customers. They are very explicit about this in their marketing.
This has been the playbook from day one—Trump throws out an outrageous statement, his lackeys rush to ‘clarify’, ‘negotiate’ or downplay it, and then, surprise, he meant exactly what he said.
The real problem is the constant gaslighting: pretending he’s just posturing when, in reality, he’s dead set on pushing his reckless, authoritarian agenda. At this point, anyone still treating him like a rational actor is either delusional or complicit. No rational actor would casually equate ethnic cleansing to a real estate transaction, or try and take over a sovereign state as though it was a ruthless corporate takeover.
There is no future in negotiating with the US - the only way out of this mess is to do what we should’ve been doing for the past 30 years - diversify our supply chains, build resilient trading relationships and establish the infrastructure to insulate ourselves from the whims of volatile US policymakers - even if that means cozying up to global partners with historical animosity.
Canadian tariffs are targeted in a number of ways. One of the ways is targeting American goods that have Canadian alternatives. So the goal is to make American products less attractive by making them more expensive, damaging the US economy while bolstering our own.
I feel like it’s often missed that it isn’t a binary Buy US/Buy Canada dilemma. Most goods have substitutes - there are other countries that can produce most consumer goods. It’s only when you start getting into high-value-added goods like turbines, flash memory, missiles and planes that there’s difficulties in import substitution. A 25% retaliatory tariff doesn’t mean your canned tomatoes are definitely going up by 25%, but you’ll likely start seeing Mexican, Peruvian, etc. canned tomatoes on Canadian shelves that weren’t there before.
And while patriotism is great and all, buying goods from other countries that we don’t have strong established trading ties with is a good way to make the case for closer bilateral cooperation and even future free trade agreements that exceed most-favoured nation benefits conferred by the WTO. When countries start building export-driven industries that give dignity and economic self-sufficiency for their citizens, that’s a future tiger worthy of negotiating a free trade agreement with.
I’m doubtful full membership will ever happen, and even an EEA Norway-style agreement where we adopt 75% of the EU’s laws without representation but keep our fishing and agricultural policies (pre-requisites for the Atlantic and Prairie Provinces to agree), would take decades to be negotiated, signed and ratified with all the dysfunctional, proportional representational governments in Europe right now.
There’s been discussions about “associate membership” in the EU to bypass the European-ness requirement, but I don’t think that’s gotten any traction.
I would be grateful for any kind of free movement agreement that gains traction right now, even with CARICOM or MERCOSUR.
This isn’t the major issue it’s being portrayed as.
Under Canada’s free trade agreements—including those with the WTO, CPTPP, and the European Union—Canada is obligated to allow foreign companies from these partner regions to compete for large government procurement contracts (typically valued at ~$230,000 CAD or more). These agreements ensure fair access without protectionist barriers and, in return, give Canadian companies access to similar opportunities in those markets.
Given this context, it’s not surprising that a significant portion of federal procurement contracts go to companies headquartered in the world’s largest free market economy, the United States. The fact that nearly 25% of federal government suppliers by total contract value being U.S.-based is not unexpected under these trade arrangements.
Consider the cost of inaction. A decade of lost economic growth, fewer jobs, and diminished competitiveness – all because we lacked the leverage to counter these blatantly unfair tariffs. Can we afford that?
Either those tariffs come down quick because we fight back, we massively expand our trading relationships with countries we don’t get along with (China, Russia, India) Erdogan-style, or we experience what could amount to a Great Depression once Trump escalates further again knowing we’re an easy target.
China scary tho
If you’re okay with older homelab-esque equipment, the ERA, also on eBay as Calgary Computer Wholesale, often has really cheap rack mount stuff. This being said, the ERA is a pretty sketchy organization overall (it’s closer to a small e-waste recycling business that takes advantage of its status to reduce liable taxes (with variable employee salaries equivalent to dividends) and take advantage of free volunteer labour, than an actual non-profit organization). Sometimes, provincial government surplus auction sites have rack mount equipment as well.
The X3 CPUs were essentially quad cores where one of the cores failed a quality control check. Using a higher end Mobo, it was possible to unlock the fourth core with varying results. This was a cheap consumer Acer prebuilt though, so I didn’t have that option.
I had a old Acer SFF desktop machine (circa 2009) with an AMD Athlon II 435 X3 (equivalent to the Intel Core i3-560) with a 95W TDP, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 2 1TB hard drives running in RAID 0 (both HDDs had over 30k hours by the time I put it in). The clunker consumed 50W at idle. I planned on running it into the ground so I could finally send it off to a computer recycler without guilt.
I thought it was nearing death anyways, since the power button only worked if the computer was flipped upside down. I have no idea why this was the case, the computer would keep running normally afterwards once turned right side up.
The thing would not die. I used it as a dummy machine to run one-off scripts I wrote, a seedbox that would seed new Linux ISOs as it was released (genuinely, it was RAID0 and I wouldn’t have downloaded anything useful), a Tor Relay and at one point, a script to just endlessly download Linux ISOs overnight to measure bandwidth over the Chinanet backbone.
It was a terrible machine by 2023, but I found I used it the most because it was my playground for all the dumb things that I wouldn’t subject my regular home production environments to. Finally recycled it last year, after 5 years of use, when it became apparent it wasn’t going to die and far better USFF 1L Tiny PC machines (i5-6500T CPUs) were going on eBay for $60. The power usage and wasted heat of an ancient 95W TDP CPU just couldn’t justify its continued operation.
I really liked Miniflux and its clean design too too, but I found without an adequate categorization functionality, it quickly became overwhelming. Since I don’t check my RSS reader as often as I should, it eventually got overwhelming and I had to switch to FreshRSS.
Dogfights aren’t a thing anymore in modern aviation. There’s a reason it was barely considered in the procurement process that led to the F-35 acquisition. Sure hope other countries step up to the plate to build viable exportable alternatives to the F-35.