There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
With 40M people, Canada is about half the size of Germany in terms of population and GDP. Also smaller than France. Canada is more similar in GDP to countries like Italy. The Spanish economy is a bit smaller but it has slightly more people (48M). The EU + UK is a bit over half a billion people.
The thing with Zoom, Meets, Teams, etc. is that these aren't that hard to replicate. There is not much of a technical moat. It doesn't take a very large startup to create your own version of that. And given what a basket case teams is, it's also not that hard to do much better. There have been plenty of alternatives over the years. Network effect is what drives the growth there, not technical quality.
So if the French want to use something else, all they have to do is pick something and they might get the network effect through mass adoption. That would work better if the whole of the EU does it of course. We'd still need a solution if we want to talk to people in the US. The reason why US drives the network effect traditionally is its trade relations. It's convenient for everyone to use the same tools and solutions.
Indeed, and the IM space is a good example of an unfinished job. IMO it's high time that Brussels stepped in and picked a winning protocol, i.e. Matrix, and mandated that public bodies use it.
I'm not sure I agree about the lack of a technical moat. While spinning up a basic WebRTC wrapper is trivial, the real challenge is the global distributed systems engineering required for low latency and reliability at scale. You need a massive edge network to handle routing, jitter buffering, and packet loss effectively across continents. It seems like the hard part isn't the client, but ensuring it actually works reliably when you have millions of concurrent streams on flaky connections.
This stuff was state of the art 15-20 years ago, it's more of a commodity now.
That doesn't mean it's easy or cheap. The moat is more in the installed base of data centers, edge networking, etc. US cloud providers undeniably have a bit of a head start there.
But the EU has a lot of domestic infrastructure as well. And the US outsourced a lot of things as well. E.g. mobile infrastructure and networking is now dominated by Chinese (Huawei) and European companies (Ericson, Nokia). Former telecom giants like Motorola seem to have faded away. Nokia actually owns Bell Labs currently. And of course a lot of the software involved is open source with a very international developer community. The hardware comes from Asia or in some cases Europe. ASML is Dutch, ARM is nominally still headquartered in the UK. Ownership of these companies is of course more complex.
> The moat is more in the installed base of data centers
For Slack and Teams, I'd say not even that is necessary. They're not meant as broadcast tools, even if they could be used as such, they're tools for… well, for teams. Either within a single company or B2B stuff. Given how powerful all the client devices are, the remaining work of the server to coordinate them all should, in 99% of cases, be so low that you can offload it to someone's bluetooth earbuds (as per recent story of Doom being ported and the conversions it led to about the typical modern embedded processor, and what we could do back when servers were that powerful).
It's not like every Slack/Teams instance is also running some clone of Google's Page Rank indexing of the entire internet locally.
That seems like a downside to me, but as a Linux user, I tend to shun Microsoft products.
I do have to use Teams occasionally for work and bizarrely the web client in Firefox works far better than the native Linux Teams client. Not particularly difficult as the Linux Teams client wouldn't do anything except display a blank box (this was on Ubuntu).
Yeah, I did notice an issue with feature parity with their application.
I hadn't heard about PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) before, but it doesn't look like they're commonly used on Linux. At a first glance, they look a bit similar to ActiveX to me.
I would imagine that many EU governments would like to replace MS Office too. EU sponsoring open source development for a mandated replacement would be a huge risk for Microsoft.
The European Economic Area + UK also have a lot of telecoms and networking experience. If they have to pay for improvements to edge networking for a reliable replacement for Teams they could easily bring farm that work out to their telcos.
With enough political motivation barriers will be removed one way or another.
Or so the theory. But what is that specific functionality that I get from this integration? That I can preview an Excel attachment WITHIN Teams instead of starting another Excel instance? The only useful thing is that Teams calendar is the Outlook calendar, definitely not a reason I'd use Teams if not forced to.
It should also go without saying that Canada already had a vertically integrated telecoms giant in RIM/Blackberry that handled end to end smartphone comms globally in the 3G era, right down to compressing emails through their servers so they could be transmitted efficiently over 2G data networks.
Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
Canada's telcos are a "narrow waist" for a lot of software licensing.
A lot of business customers bundle their business/productivity software with their phone and Internet services. Did you know you can buy Google Workspace and/or Microsoft Office through your telco? I was shocked to find out how many do this when I worked for one of the telcos.
Just like how consumers bundle their streaming services with their home Internet plans.
One bill for all the things is convenient.
I would bet it's the same in EU (but can't say for sure, I only have first-hand info about Canada).
If there was a real push to move companies away from these platforms, it would probably start there, mostly because the telcos are typically very government-aligned due to regulatory and spectrum concerns, and would get in line with government efforts to promote non-US alternatives, if they decided to.
Getting the majority of consumers to ditch their US-based streaming and entertainment is another thing though, I can't see that happening ever, no matter how at-odds the US and Canada become.
Threats only works if the threatened entity thinks they can avoid them via compliance.
Tariffs come anyway, both Canada and Denmark are under threat of annexation, and ICC suspensions of Microsoft emails show that governments cannot rely on US tech.
Yes, or as Cory Doctorow put it: "So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don’t have to keep following their orders."
The British and the Russians also had a COVID vaccine (and much cheaper), and the French cancelled theirs because they realized it would come too late to be competitive.
So if they were restricted to some reason to use their own only, they would be fine.
The technology and vaccine design comes from BioNTech, a German company. Pfizer did the phase 2/3 clinical trials, worldwide regulatory expertise and manufacturing outside of Germany.
I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of them I'd say 100-1000x as many). When Trump leaves the stage, those who replace him will either be Democrats sprinting at full speed from all his policies to demonstrate how not-Trump they are, or Republicans who want to grow the economy. Either way, the stupidity in a lot of his policies is a temporary condition.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
The decades long level of trust in the US and its institutions was unprecedented and built off of the tremendous goodwill and momentum post WW2.
It was an unusually high degree of trust, and now it's unusually low. Even if the US reverses its policies it will take a very long time to rebuild trust, and even then the historical warning marker of the Trump admin will be studied as a reason to never return to the prior level of trust.
Without total trust software products are a natural target for any country that's thinking more about how to defend its own sovereignty. Policies and subsidies for locally built software that previously would have seemed frivolous or wasteful now seem prudent and badly needed.
The higher the risk of e.g. a loan, the more interest it has to pay out to be worthwhile. The exact amount* is, as I understand it, governed by the Black–Scholes model.
* probably with some spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum assumptions given how the misuse of this model was a factor in the global financial crisis.
One should not overlook the human/emotional aspect. Decision-makers are not immune from it.
Hegemony comes with a certain degree of humiliation. Socially, it means accepting that a foreign language being taught in elementary schools becomes synonym with intelligence and eloquence, or protecting a copyright/taxation regime that go against your interest, or accepting that manslaughters perpetuated by troops stationed in foreign military installation on your soil will go unpunished, and so on. There's always been creeping resentment towards the US in any given European nation.
However, resentment is not a concern when "adults are in the room", even if not explicitly in charge. Economic prosperity is great, no one wants to break a good deal. But now those safeguards are failing on the US side. There's suddenly room to rationalize any hostility.
Sure, the extent to which this is a factor vs rational analysis is arguable... but I don't find it mere coincidence that France is the nation spearheading this.
My fear as a Briton and European is that even when Trump departs, the distrust remains so long as the US continues to be so politically divided. The chance of Trump being replaced by someone similar or worse will make most European politicians (incl UK ones) throw their hands up in despair.
The UK seems a lost cause though, even under Starmer it has been far more appeasing than any (West-)EU country. And as right-wing as Starmer is, your next PM will inevitably be even moreso and more buddy-buddy with the US. Perhaps even a personal friend of MAGA.
Yes, as an American, I could point out that the side of US politics represented by Biden, Obama and Clinton is very real. It's internationalist, cooperative, and reliably so. Clinton was, in some ways, more willing to intervene in Eastern European crises than the EU was. And Biden came in early and aggressively to support Ukraine (though the EU eventually got there, and we can't decide who's side we're actually on, now).
But the problem is, internationalist Democrats are not the whole story of the US. There's another faction, one which our allies used to be able to work with. But that half of our nation's politics has been on a long, ugly moral slide. We are imposing ridiculous and destructive tariffs based on the personal grievances of one man. But a duly-elected Congress absolutely refuses to stop him. We are still covering up massive amounts of information about pedophiles in positions of power, but Congress hasn't done more than hold a vote and refuse to follow up. And we now have masked Federal police just murdering people in our streets for peacefully exercising their 1st and 2nd amendment rights, but a significant minority of voters are still cheering it on. If the moral trajectory sinks much lower, I'm not sure there would be any sins left to commit except public devil worship.
So no, you really can't trust the United States. Not because nobody here understands honor, alliances, or even practical business. But because that's not the whole story of the United States right now. We can't even get the Epstein files released. Which, admittedly doesn't affect you much. But it's clear sign of who we're becoming, and what a critical mass of our voters will ultimately accept.
Trump is not the reason for the current disdain for the American state - he is merely the latest excuse that Americans make for the disastrous state of their country.
The rest of the world started being disaffected by America's actions in 2003, when it launched an illegal war based on utter lies, which murdered 5% of Iraqs' population.
This act and the following acts of war and funding of terrorist groups that the American empire decided was 'necessary' for its survival, have been noticed by the rest of the world, even while Americans' themselves do not have the temerity to confront the issue.
Blaming Trump is just another excuse Americans make for the mess that has been being made by their state for decades before he walked down some elevator somewhere.
> Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
It is debatable if everyone but John Bolton and Donald Trump knows this. After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.
Anyway, it is smart policy to expect the worst and plan for it instead of being surprised by another insane president voted in by the people of the USA. Call it risk management if you like. It would be negligent of the leaders of the EU and its member nations to not account for that. The EU has to reduce dependence on unrealiable trade partners, this is true whether we are talking about warmongering Russia, dictatorial China (probably the most reliable of the three!), or unpredictable USA.
So, let's hope for the best and prepare for the worst. The EU can't change it if preparation harms US economic interests in the long run. That's on Trump.
They won't. This is the same line of people that voted for Reagan and Bush II. I used to be one, most of my family still is. Whatever Democrat gets elected (if we have reasonable elections) will get the blame from them and it will be used to fuel the election of the next populist.
This is the mistake a lot of people made with Bush II and Trump I, thinking that "this will all go away" when the man at the center goes away. It won't, no man rules alone, they represent a large population of anti-intellectual isolationists who are not going anywhere. At best you can hope that the intellectuals will govern in a way that helps everyone next time they get a chance, leaving less fuel for the next populist wave.
> After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.
For sure -- the bottom 41% of economic literacy are so misinformed that they have no clue what they're talking about. But those voters aren't picking the nominee for President from among a circus of general morons, the party elites are, and the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age. Without Trump just flailing around like an idiot, they'd be content to do things that preserve the status quo in a lot of areas. They pander to the unsophisticated Trumpists where needed, but it's lip service, since a lot of them, for instance, love open borders because of how it depresses wages and gives them a compliant workforce. They talk a big game about the debt or the deficit, and also work to make sure we increase defense spending and funnel as much healthcare spending as possible through a bunch of private insurers who add a huge margin to our healthcare costs.
> the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age.
They said that about Trump I. The Republican Party elites have power, but they don't have all power on the conservative side of American politics. They contend with the Religious elites and various conservative cultural elites and the libertarians and so on. Trump didn't get elected by accident, there are a lot of people who love what he is doing, what he represents. They will happily vote for "the next Trump" when the time comes, and their elites will bend the Republican or the Democrat elites with tax cuts just as easily as they did for Trump.
MAGA will likely not die with Trump, and the Democrats have done their fair share to shaft Canada too. (If Jimmy Carter were still alive you could ask him about his family tree farm and what he thinks of softwood lumber tariffs.) As our PM recently said in Davos, the U.S.-led rules-based world order was a bit of a sham from the get-go. Certain countries were more equal than others. The rules were always flexible and they bent in favour of the U.S. most of all. Canada and other middle powers got an okay deal nonetheless, so we went along with it. That's over now, and "Nostalgia is not a strategy.".
Now that we're always going to be four years or less from the next potential bout of American insanity, it's time to build a new order that is less vulnerable to big powers and more equitable for everyone else. An order in which the rules are applied more consistently and have teeth. That doesn't necessarily mean breaking out the feather quills and having a big shin-dig at Versailles though. It's doing lots of little things that shift our dependence to like-minded middle powers whenever and wherever possible.
e.g. The white house has threatened other countries (including Canada) with tariffs in order to deter regulation or taxation of american software giants in non-U.S. jurisdictions. That makes dependence on these companies an exploitable (and already exploited) weakness. This is why governments, like France, want alternatives.
His family farmed a few things, including trees. Carter was on the record as a fan of soft-wood lumber tariffs, even though his term had come and gone by the time the softwood lumber dispute arose.
There are democratic presidents who have done worse things to Canada than Carter. I singled out Carter because, today, he seems to be viewed as left-leaning (for a POTUS) and un-Trump-like.
Left leaning in the US has not meant international trade friendly, historically it’s the opposite. The Clinton/Obama branch of the democrats who were pro free trade are really the exception.
That the Republicans sold out their business branch for cronyism and populism with MAGA may end up being the negative outcome of that movement with the longest negative ramifications (my thinking being administrations can change immigration policy easily and Trump is more the final nail in the rules based international order than the initiator of its demise)
Americans elected trump not just one time. They did it twice.
They all knew who he was by the end of the first mandate yet they still elected him again.
Why wouldn’t they find another « trump like » when trump goes away ? Vance or someone else, the list is long.
I see no reason for things to change and that’s if the USA doesn’t become an autocracy in the meantime. Trump already did so much in a year, that’s fascinating. He just need to boil the frog a bit longer but everything is in place.
Exactly. Trump is just a symptom. If he disappeared tomorrow, the people who elected him are still here, and they still want the same things: Belligerence, Cruelty, Isolationism, and lots of other terrible things. When Trump is no longer in the picture, they'll find a new candidate who offers this.
Well, the isolationism is dubious. Trump and his followers (with a few exceptions, granted) seem happy to throw isolationism to the wind as soon as there's a chance of wielding power over a defeated enemy.
For sure. Isolationism is a far distant third when it comes to what they value. They just want someone who is belligerent and promises to grief people they don't like. Any ol' candidate who fits that pattern can be next in line.
You don't have to convince every Trump voter. The margin who swung from Biden to Trump and elected Trump aren't all those things. They just don't want what the Dems were selling in 2024, specifically: the dems' adopted ideology surrounding gender, plus using race and gender to pick who gets jobs and into schools, rather than merit. If they removed just those two planks from the DNC platform, (1) Harris would have never been nominated, and (2) Trump couldn't have won.
Who was the moderate candidate? We had Trump and a candidate who wanted to continue the open borders policy and racial quota system in hiring and university admissions.
Moderate/smoderate. There was an insane choice, which people chose to vote to the detriment of most, and a sane candidate, which people rejected due to misinformation and bigotry.
No, they lost because much of the population is bigoted and did fall for misinformation. People started sharing the nonsense about Haitians eating cats and dogs, they fell for the transpanic ads...and many were still not comfortable with a woman in charge. Misinformation and bigotry, and it's not out of touch to recognize that.
The problem is with the people more than the party, and fighting that so we can actually progress the country out of the dark ages is an uphill battle.
No, it seriously was not that. We didn't refuse to vote for Harris because of the idiotic cats nonsense. It was in large part her and the whole DNC's explicit embrace of DEI (note: "i don't like DEI" isn't anti-minority. Plenty of minorities also want to get jobs and admitted to schools because they qualify for and earn those things and not as a free handout because of their skin).
Not 20 years ago, like 90% of Americans would have agreed that it's insane to use racial quotas and different standards of qualification for different groups. Today, the 20% or so who disagree with me on that have dragged the DNC into this unpopular position, abandoning a lot of their previous voters. This has consequences.
And for that you threw the entire country away? Based on mostly fear and misunderstanding? There was another user I saw on here who defended voting for T because, despite apparently having always voted D in the past, he "could not look his white teenage sons in the eye and tell them he voted for people that would make them the enemy" - what absolute nonsense.
DEI may have gone too far in some areas, but that would largely be corporations trying to cash in, not anything planned by the possible Harris administration, and nothing demonstrable by the Biden administration.
DEI went too far the second it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which explicitly bans all discrimination based on race in hiring. It doesn't matter if Biden or Harris or any other democrat leader didn't explicitly initiate any of these policies. Their failure to prosecute for these obvious (and sometimes even publicly bragged about by the companies) violations of civil rights law that is supposed to protect me is more than enough to lose any chance of getting my vote. I am willing to watch quite a lot of things burn if the alternative is a racist regime against me.
The fact that you are white and claiming to be a victim of racism because minorities are getting more opportunities is laughable, but also absolutely means you were part of the problem.
The only way for the US is to progress is to eliminate the electoral college so views such as yours count for as little as they should.
Yeah you're right, I'm gonna be a big problem for you because I'm going to keep voting for Republicans no matter how much I hate some of the stuff they do. And the more cruelty towards progressives the better because I have nothing but contempt and malice for the people who want to institute racism against.
> Yeah you're right, I'm gonna be a big problem for you because I'm going to keep voting for Republicans no matter how much I hate some of the stuff they do.
You obviously don't hate it that much lol, you clearly want white people to keep the unfair advantages they have had for most of modern history.
They wrote a book about people with you views: 'White Fragility' - you should check it out.
> And the more cruelty towards progressives the better because I have nothing but contempt and malice for the people who want to institute racism against.
Giving oppressed people equal opportunities isn't racism. We'll get rid of the EC eventually, and the votes of people like you simply won't matter.
Sure, go ahead and keep telling yourself that comforting myth that it was all because of lies and dirty tricks. But according to polls the general public, even during the chaos today, supports the Republicans over the Democrats on most of the major political issues: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-americans-trust-rep...
It was absolutely due to lies and dirty tricks at least in part - I'm sure I can find objective analysis of people who said they voted because they believed various lies and disinformation if you like?
But, let's say you're right to an extent, that's just incredibly depressing and shows that the problem ultimately lies with the people.
Listen, Trump won almost every single demographic. His numbers increased % wise among them vs 2016. To claim it was all lies, racism and sexism is just wrong.
Now you can claim that Trump is bad, we'd agree with you. We're saying it's VERY dangerous to state why people voted for him because it enables it to happen again!
DO not double down on the mistakes of the Harris campaign again and then put fingers in your ears and blame the voters for being misinformed, please.
> Listen, Trump won almost every single demographic. His numbers increased % wise among them vs 2016. To claim it was all lies, racism and sexism is just wrong.
I'm not claiming it was all that. For example, some people are single issue voters on abortion, so of course they are going to vote R. But a lot of people bought into the trans panic ads, the xenophobia, etc.
> DO not double down on the mistakes of the Harris campaign again and then put fingers in your ears and blame the voters for being misinformed, please.
The voters were misinformed, though. Without a doubt the last election showed the people are much more of a problem than any party.
> They just don't want what the Dems were selling in 2024, specifically: the dems' adopted ideology surrounding gender, plus using race and gender to pick who gets jobs and into schools, rather than merit.
Except that, none of this is true. Democrats did not run on such policy at all. They heavily tried to appeal to center.
Republicans run on culture war. And won, because it literally did not mattered what democratic party run on - republican lies won. And they will win again with the same tactic.
I don't think we conceptually live in the same universe if you think those things about the democratic 2024 messaging. I just don't understand how you and your opposing commenters can have any meaningful discussion if you're so wildly differing in interpretation of such a public topic.
It is simple, what "opposing commenters" are talking about, is what REPUBLICANS said that democrats are saying. You know, what Trump, Vance and the rest of Fox news were accusing democrats of. I would note that these are not exactly notorious truth tellers.
The person I responded to likely never listened to or cared about what democratic politicians are saying.
But you could say the same thing the other way, that's the point. I.e. you're not listening to what Republicans are actually saying but rather what "Democrats" are saying the republicans are saying.
Even your response is oblivious to the point, and you're doubling-down on "only the other side (Republicans) is liars, my side aren't liars" as a way to address the fundamentally different realities you and them seem to occupy.
I am saying what republicans are saying and were saying. You are either not listening to them or just lying about what they said.
> I.e. you're not listening to what Republicans are actually saying but rather what "Democrats" are saying the republicans are saying.
You can do that, but you would be lying.
> you're doubling-down on "only the other side (Republicans) is liars, my side aren't liars"
Yes, republicans lie more. That includes situation around the two murders in Minnesota. That includes claims that European NATO members never helped USA.
> as a way to address the fundamentally different realities you and them seem to occupy.
There is one reality and one "side" is lying about it a lot. Starting to lie the same way as they do wont solve the problem, it will make it worst.
It's straight from the horses mouth mate. Plenty of dems were on social media vocal how the issue is many white men.
Here:
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) "I would say our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country. And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe, Americans safe inside of this country, we should be profiling, monitoring and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men."
Krysten Matthews (D-SC, U.S. Senate candidate) "Treat [white people] like sht... I mean, that's the only way we're gonna get concessions out of them... It's like that white woman in that movie 'The Help,' you know, she nice as hell to them white people, but she a btch to that girl."
Adina Weaver (Housing official appointed by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, D) Described homeownership as "a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as 'wealth building public policy'" and called for political action to "impoverish the white middle class."
Point to where she blamed straight white men for all social economic issues in the country (OP's words), or where a similar phrase exists in the Democrat party platform, and I'll take back my comment. There are a small handful of wacky politicians who are indeed on this "straight white man" kick, but it's not even remotely a position accepted by the broader party.
I think that your outlook on US politics and future leadership is naively optimistic (though I very much hope to be wrong).
First and most importantly, I don't think it should be considered a given at this point that there will be a democraticly elected successor to Trump. It's clear from past attempts and current declarations and actions that the Trump regime will try to maintain power instead of ceding it at future elections - whether they will succeed or not will depend a lot on American institutions and the power of the people.
Secondly, your assertion that only Trump and Jon Bolton agree with the current policies seems deeply wrong. First of all, the VP (with a real chance to be President, given Trump's age and apparent health), seems very much on board. Secondly, much of Trump's policies are based on the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 document, including at least some of the foreign policy decisions. Thirdly, a desire to re-orient US foreign policy away from Europe (and thus NATO) and towards China exists in a large part of the traditional foreign policy establishment. Fourth, the leaders of the Democratic Party seem to have learned entirely the wrong lessons from the last election, looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt rather than what alternative solutions they can promise to the American people.
Every official or aligned pundit in the GOP is obliged by Trump's universally-known vanity to make a show of supporting literally every dumbass thing he does, knowing he'll purge them if they even question things. So I will say we can't actually get a read on what they truly think until Trump is gone, preferably by passing away peacefully of old age rather than hanging around live-tweeting his takes on the next administration's actions. Of course this means I'm speculating as well, and I admit that.
I just think that I've never seen anyone approaching the Trump levels of pettiness, vanity, and most of all, what looks to me like pure foolishness. Including even his inner circle. Most of them are single-issue extremists.
I actually agree that re-orienting foreign policy and military toward China is just plain smart. But it's idiotic to do that by picking fights with allies, and anyone less dumb than Trump can accomplish a pivot to China while at minimum not causing hostility across the Atlantic. Ideally the West should instead be firming up our alliance and working together to counter Chinese influence, plus, it'll be better to have NATO intact leading up to a potential hostilities with China when they invade Taiwan. Of course, China is working hard on amplifying and promoting division inside the US to destroy NATO in the hopes that Europe will run to their arms economically and thus be unable to oppose China. Kind of like how much of Europe has/had dependencies on Russian petroleum which complicated their ability to respond to Crimea and the rest of Ukraine invasion.
> leaders of the Democratic Party ... looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt
I haven't witnessed any adaptation at all from the DNC. It seems that all their beliefs are still summed up as "We ran a perfect candidate and she ran a perfect campaign. It's the voters who are the problem!"
I can't emphasize enough how collossal the DNC's screwup in 2024 was. We have a system that has been running for hundreds of years where the idea is a primary election gets you two candidates who are at least spitting distance from electable, and then we have to pick one of those two in the general election. It's wildly imperfect in that it entrenches exactly two parties at a time. But the DNC in 2024 took this system and operated it with utter incompetence by just installing the biggest loser of the 2020 primaries as the only alternative to Trump. Many people were so disgusted they stayed home. If they've admitted this, it hasn't been publicly.
It seems optimistic to me at this point that he could be replaced by a Republican not largely crafted in his image. It's possible, but I certainly wouldn't take it for granted.
It's something of an open question whether MAGA will follow him or not. I would bet against it, for the same reason few of them followed Jeb after George. I would bet on some in-fighting between Don Jr, JD and some of the others, and a new MAGA champion will emerge (maybe not for a decade) who we aren't really paying too much attention to right now.
Neither did Biden, and he won. Neither did Clinton and she didn't, but still got more votes than Trump. And the Republicans are leading on the issues: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-americans-trust-rep.... In an election between a boring Republican and a boring Democrat, the Republican probably wins.
Vance will "have the charisma" of being the focus of the palace cult (around a quarter of the country) while Trump's corpse is still warm.
These people aren't people anymore, they're cultist NPCs. They have suspended personal agency and independent reasoning about their interests in favor of the vibes, in favor of the grift, and in favor of arbitrary Strong Executive Leadership. They will say literally anything Fox News et al tells them to say.
Vance's job was always to end democracy by replacing Trump with somebody more subservient to capital who could stay on-script, while seeming less crazy to liberals. He was practically raised for this. MAGA has been trained to water at the mouth when somebody jangles their keys, and will happily transfer their utter loyalty and devotion to somebody else who can jangle keys.
This reads kind of like you see half the population of the country as subhuman. This is often used by radicals as the first step in justifying extreme measures to achieve policy goals that would be considered unthinkable otherwise.
I know you think only the Right could be fascist, but most of the extreme left has become so distraught over their recent losses that they are losing most of their own ethics as well. "These people aren't people" is a shitty look when it's a white-supremacist saying it, and it's an equally shitty look coming from Team Blue.
I read the "not people" comment not as describing the general population but rather the collection of camera-seeking characters roaming around the POTUS. Obviously they are human beings but they do demonstrate a remarkable lack of personality and agency.
All administrations have toadies, but cabinet members and proxies now snap to the latest tweet without even a fig-leaf attempt to bridge obvious 180 degree shifts. Sometimes in the same sentence.
Part of what it shows is that traditional DC has debate-club graduates from a culture than prizes verbal fluency, and when you hire based on other criteria, the messaging is incredibly clunky.
I think every American needs to understand this quote:
> "We will never fucking trust you again."[0]
It doesn't matter that Trump will eventually no longer be President, and it doesn't matter that there are still members of the American political establishment that support the old way of doing things. Trump does not act alone, and there is rapid attrition of those older bureaucrats who valued the USA's allies. Trump's allies in the GOP will continue to be in power, and perhaps worse, the partisan appointees that have inundated the public service will remain.
The USA has burned its bridges. There is no more trust to be found.
Thanks for that excellent link. I suppose I have to remain optimistic here, but I think that you and I disagree on one really important thing and time will prove one of us right (I think we both probably hope I'm right): I think that Trump is too different from the others, even people he's ushering into the administrative state. That's my opinion because Trump seems to govern from:
- 1 part petty corruption: stupid stuff like deals that enrich Kushner, his Trump company itself, and that of his close personal allies
- 1 part vanity: stupid stuff that serves no purpose but to exact revenge against people who humiliate him. And let's throw in silly stuff he says just to 'troll the libs' to this group too.
- 1 part just pure inexplicable stupidity. Things like pointless tariffs, or the idiocy around Greenland, that hurt nearly everyone and especially the US itself. Honestly some of this may be just the petty corruption part, where someone who stands to make a fortune from the chaos has cut him in on a deal we don't know about.
I simply don't see that same motivation triad coming from anyone else, even among Republicans. Other Republicans are driven more by political ideology, their own goals, their own ideas about the culture, their belief that X policy makes the economy stronger, etc. So, while you should judge us by what we do in the future, and bearing in mind that more idiots of his caliber may be discovered, I think and hope that you'll find out that Trump was simply the perfect storm of moron, and can never be repeated.
That sort of corruption is endemic to the American political establishment. They profit from their inside knowledge of congress, wielding their insider knowledge to make themselves wealthy; not all do it, but enough do that it's nigh impossible to pass legislation to deal with it.
What you refer to as vanity I consider vindictiveness, and as evidenced by his continued support is something that appears strongly associated with Trump's supporters. Vindictiveness is the point, and it's what they voted for.
And stupidity, well, PISA performance doesn't bode well for most nations. There's a steady decline witnessed the world over.
Yes and no. West-Germany was not trusted enough to allow them to make nukes or to make a powerful-enough army. For a long time, Germany has pretty much been a vassal state of the US. I cannot see that happening the other way around (given the relative powers of the militaries).
Besides that, living in a neighboring country, the generation of my parents and grandparents had a deeply-rooted aversion towards Germans. They would communicate with Germans politely, but when no German was around, they would often use not-so-nice names or jokes. Luckily that aversion is gone with later generations.
When I was young (early 90ies), we would often go on holiday to Czechoslovakia (before the split) and the Czech Republic. The staff at restaurants and shops would be cold and distant until they discovered that we were not German, then they would be very warm and kind. At some point, we would always start the conversation in English. At the time most staff would only speak German, but we would use it as a signal that we were not from Germany.
This kind of distrust can stretch many decades. I think we have mostly healed as Europeans, but it took a damn long time.
That is a sound point. I don't think your comment should be grey. In practice, I don't think geopolitics is played in the style of "Yurusenai!" that a lot of online commenters make it sound like. The world wasn't in some benevolent kumbaya between the various players involved here.
America perhaps pioneered the mutual-defense agreement as an expansion of de-facto borders. America can attack you if you attack any of its mutual-defense treaty partners - e.g. Japan or NATO. This places an encirclement on other unaligned world powers: Russia and China. Smart, but they picked up on it, which is why mutual-defense agreements with nations near world powers are now fraught with danger.
But Europe is not an innocent led to her subjugation. Europe has always attempted to extract their side of the deal: they will buy American weaponry and host American bases but they will expect America to pick up the defense bill, including for things like access to the Suez Canal which is primarily (though not exclusively) a European risk and concern in that alliance.
Other powers have always used the push and pull of changing demographics and waxing and waning power to jockey for more control or more trade concessions, or lower spending on defense for higher spending on welfare and so on. The reason that Western Europe vacillated on Ukraine isn't that they were unsure who the good guys were. It's that it wasn't clear where the balance of power was and ensuring they were well aligned was their priority. Likewise, the participants who benefited from NS2 going up in bubbles were Ukraine and the US and one or both of them likely did what they needed to.
It is true. Germany did elect Hitler. It is also true that that Germany committed vastly greater crimes than Trump's America has. And it is true that Germany the country is not a civitas non grata (if you will) though one could argue that this was offered at the end of a gun (the persistent US bases). I think this point (delivered tersely and risking Godwin) is actually very strong.
I think Western bloc leaders are well aware of the strength of the Western coalition of Europe and the US. They are also well aware of their waning will to wage war as their population ages. I don't think Trump has a sound head on his shoulders - Americans will probably carry the memory of the danger of aged leaders at least one generation - but it is clear from the texts he has leaked of the other world leaders that they are pragmatic and intend to preserve the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen, and the resulting prosperity it has endowed its constituents with.
Any pressure will immediately be relieved if no actual irreversible damage (e.g. withdrawal from NATO or Anpo) is done and everyone knows it. But to make sure we get there, everyone has to apply just enough pressure to not break the machine. We can only hope they have the skill at diplomacy.
All this "Americans must realize you are now PARIAHS and will NEVER BE TRUSTED AGAIN" business will seem novel to people today, but this was true when I was younger and America had just invaded Iraq right after Afghanistan. People were talking about how they pretend to be Canadian and so on. America was supposedly a pariah then, which makes any threat of "you are now a pariah" not particularly meaningful.
So long as Europe benefits from America and America benefits from Europe and both can put in changes that cement such commitment in the future, I think we will return to a powerful Western bloc - which I (personally) think is good for all humanity.
1. Suez Canal: UK, France, and Israel attacked Egypt for control of that. This stopped very quickly once the USA threatened to turn off the money, and by some measures marks the point where the British Empire became obviously a paper tiger.
2. Iraq/Afghanistan and Americans pretending to be Canadian: yes, I remember this too, but this time Europe and Canada are worried about taking the role of "target", so it hits harder.
The USA can only be trusted by its allies* once again *when we are confident the USA won't turn against us, your allies*.
* NATO and EU definitely; and I assume similar feelings in Japan, Philippines, Australia, South Korea etc.
> All this "Americans must realize you are now PARIAHS and will NEVER BE TRUSTED AGAIN" business will seem novel to people today, but this was true when I was younger and America had just invaded Iraq right after Afghanistan.
Nobody really cared about Iraq or Afghanistan. Sure, it was fashionable to pretend to care, to get on a high horse and tell the USian rabble how immoral they were. But at the same time, people on their high horses also were glad that there was no Saddam Hussein anymore and that the Taliban were beaten (seemingly, back then).
It's different now because the US threatened to invade the Kingdom of Denmark, a supposedly very close ally. Even the threat of doing that is a red line that will be very very hard to uncross after Trump.
Yes, and I'm sure that the next time the US does something against European interests it will again be the case that the last time was just pretense but this time is real. The thing with terminal declarations is that there is no pathway back. If the US was never to be trusted again after the Iraq War, we are never to be trusted again now, so telling us that we are never to be trusted now is not of any significance. We're now post that declaration. That's what the word 'never' means.
The US-Europe military-economic bloc is a strong structure, but of the two Europe is weaker and the participants in Europe stand and fall according to weak ties. Without NATO, it isn't even clear if Poland will have allies. Each of the constituent countries have leaders aware of this. And I'm sure they'll attempt to keep the structure intact. If they fail, they fail but all these dramatic declarations won't have been significant either way. The declarations themselves are just emotional outbursts without even the semblance of even self-interest.
I mean, think about it. If the US has no pathway back to normalcy in relations ("never be trusted") then the cost for all future Presidents to militarily intervene is low. After all, trust is at its minimum value and guaranteed not to rise. If Greenland is core to US interests and Denmark has decided there is no pathway back to normalcy, invasion is on the table for all Presidents, Democratic Party or Republican Party.
Essentially, once you decide that you will never normalize relations, then you're just an adversary: not even a potential future ally. And those who pitch themselves as guaranteed adversaries had better find allies quick.
Just think of the relations the US has with the British. Back in the day, after the independence war, I'm quite sure that there were quite a few people in the US who said something like "never will we have cordial relations with the Kingdom of Britain"...
I guess that's just the usual hyperbole in these kinds of heated talks. I mean, it is basically the same as all those instances of TACO: Propose something outrageous, outlandish and absolute, later compromise to do something lesser.
> So long as Europe benefits from America and America benefits from Europe and both can put in changes that cement such commitment in the future, I think we will return to a powerful Western bloc - which I (personally) think is good for all humanity.
Problem is, right now America is the biggest threat to Europe. And there is no way to cement the commitment you talk about with America as is - regardless of whether Trump goes. Without Trump, you still have one major party actively hostile to Europe.
Trumps policies are not some kind of aberration, they are exactly what conservatives worked for. Republican party clapped threats to annex Greenland. Without trump project 2025 will be updated to project 2029 or whatever, with more lobbying and "lessons learned" strategy. The threat of this happening again, but this time causing even more harm will be there for foreseeable future.
Preface: Trump's idiocy with Greenland is inexcusable and nonsensical, with NATO already having access to build bases all over that island with barely more paperwork than building them in Alaska. So don't read this as a defense of that BS.
1. Greenland isn't even in Europe and America has no designs on colonizing actual Europe
2. Even Trump in his syphilis-addled head knows that the moment he rolls tanks into a territory with basically no military and a peaceful non-threatening citizenry, his credibility. And this sure isn't Venezuela, where the Nobel Peace Prize winner thanked him for removing the criminal Maduro from his post. He let his dumb mouth get ahead of him when he didn't rule out force, and he was forced to walk that back, a remarkable thing considering his pride. Now, even if he does want to try to use more dumb tariffs, those will hurt the US as much as it does Europe. I wouldn't say these are any major threat to Europe.
On the other hand, Putin would very much like to expand a couple countries over, and geopolitically anyone will tell you that Russia "needs" that in order to have a defensible frontier. America is not a threat to Europe the place. Trump wants to cosplay as a threat to Europe the technical political entity, mainly because our map projections make Greenland look so big that he thinks it will make him a "hero President" in the history books forever, but even most Republicans know this is a stupid and pointless ambition.
The Republicans who make up a lot of the party are not interested in Greenland being US territory, they don't even give a shit about territories we already have like Puerto Rico. They just hate the DNC, whose idea of campaigning is saying that everyone who disagrees with them is a bigot.
Trump has done/is doing generational harm to the perception of the US worldwide, to say nothing of US soft-power influence. It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone, and we still have a couple of years of his term to run yet.
> I see this over and over again, wish there was some way to bet on it.
One can play with bond markets and various ETFs or other derivatives, depending on what you envision. But even if your bet is qualitatively correct (that trust in the US ebbs for decades), it's hard to get the timing right to make an actual bet.
Given that a sizeable percentage of U.S. people seem to still support Trump, I don't think trust is going to be rebuilt. There's also the massive issue of the U.S. political system that has been shown to have a fatal flaw - that would have to be fixed along with the broken two party system.
I liken it to Germany rebuilding trust after WWII.
Trump is just your latest excuse, American, but its not working.
The rest of the world saw what Americans did to Iraq, and it has been downhill since then. You don't get to be the #1 funder of terror around the world and keep demanding glory and respect from the lackey nations you push around with those terror networks...
The US may believe the US gets no benefit from defending Ukraine or Europe, but that belief is false.
Even with greedy short-term thinking: The economic connections between the US and Europe are a big part of US wealth, and failing to protect your market and your investors is bad for business.
Ukraine… Europe supports Ukraine to keep Europe safe. Ukraine is not in NATO, nor is it covered by the EU treaty's mutual defence article.
But they EU doesn't make any software... So unless Canada is willing to go with Chinese software which would kinda invalidate any "moral" ground they have and well frankly the USA wouldn't allow it seems like the USA can take it for granted.
Am I missing something when I go to the companies here all of them except SAP are USA companies? So this research is just pointing out that Canada spends all it's software money in the USA?
I'm in public sector IT and yes, Microsoft Canada is considered a Canadian company. And yes, it's dumb as hell.
As a response to the tariffs we were told to use Canadian companies, and lo and behold, all of our big name software companies were magically Canadian.
It feels like France is actually leading on the infrastructure side of things right now. With Mistral and Hugging Face both in Paris, the open source AI ecosystem is pretty heavily concentrated there.
Having worked extensively with OVH and Scaleway, I find it to be a far cry from what American hyperscalers offers. The cloud offering is just too thin and brittle as of now, though I think they will eventually get there because of the CLOUD Act which in the long term might prove to be a gigantic own-goal on the part of the US.
Europe makes lots of quality software, it just doesn't scale economically. And that's an issue with access to capital and to a lesser extent legal fragmentation, not talent or willingness. That's why there's a constant push for markets reforms in the EU, on top of unified corporate structures (one might even call them "federal") being in the pipeline.
No. You're wrong on all counts. That was not a "huge deal". Canada reduced tariffs on EVs to get reduced tariffs on some agriculture items. This put things back to where they were a few years ago. Canada doesn't have a free trade deal with China like it does with the US and Mexico.
Canada has been extremely closely aligned with US vehicle manufacturing for over a century. I'm not sure if Canada has a bigger lever to shoot american auto manufacturing in the leg. Opening the door to Chinese electric vehicles rattles the very foundations of American manufacturing. If anything, "huge deal" was an understatement.
There appears to be a few factors combining in the U.S. right now that make protests less effective than they once were.
1. Politics are religion more than ever before. There is a solid MAGA core that will not turn on Trump for any reason. When confronted by uncomfortable truth, they dismiss it as lies. When they can't dismiss it as a lie, they choose not to care. The Democrats have people like this too, but they haven't been hired and turned into a paramilitary goon squad the way ICE has. Yet. The "unreasonables" on both sides of the spectrum are not going anywhere. After Trump dies they could easily be harnessed by someone else. When so many people cannot be swayed, the impact of protests are dulled. The "unreasonables" aren't swayed when the other side protests, and the mushy middle will tend to dismiss many protests as products of people they view as extremists.
2. There is a ruling class (i.e. Billionaires) with a firm grip on power (through both parties) and complete insulation from the public. In his discourses on Livy, Machiavelli observed that Roman officials who protected themselves from those they ruled with forts or castles tended to rule in a more brutal and less productive manner than those who lived among the governed. If you want good government, those governing should feel vulnerable enough to behave reasonably. U.S. billionaires, and the politicians they own, are completely sealed off from public wrath. Minnesota could burn and none of them would get more than a warm fuzzy watching it on the news. If a protest doesn't scare billionaires it will have no impact on how the U.S. is governed.
3. "Flood the zone" is just one of the tactics being used to numb people and encourage them to switch off from politics. The nastiness of hyper-partisan politics is, at times, a distracting entertainment, but it's fatiguing the rest of the time. People rightly observe that both of the U.S.'s diametrically opposed parties tend to do similar things (e.g. tax breaks for the rich) and are funded by the same billionaires every election. If people will scream at you for picking a side in what looks like a sham of false choice, why not just stay home, plug in, and tune out? When a big protest happens, people who are numb and tuned out are just going to change the channel and consume some more billionaire-produced pap.
As a Canadian, what's going on in the U.S. has been terrifying to watch. We're so culturally similar that what happens in the U.S. could easily happen here. Even if it doesn't, we're still subject to the fallout. A classic pattern of authoritarian regimes is to lash out at allies and neighbours in order to give their people threats to fear more than their own government. Well, that's us. If MAGA isn't checked, Canada will likely be subjected to far more than tariff's and threats.
It's hard for Canadians to appreciate how nations elsewhere in the world can harbour such bitter and long-lived enmities against one another. We're now experiencing how they're created. It's not hatred yet, but the trust we once had for Americans is gone and won't return for generations. For the rest of my life, we'll always be four years or less away from what could be the next round of American insanity.
Well also the old school civil rights stuff didn't have supporters needing to engage in linguistic gymnastics in order to drum up support. Which makes just drawing attention to the issue rather more effective.
While I understand the frustration with bad reports, this is how you get more of them (from the spiteful) and fewer good reports from the people you just threatened.
"Today, opening social media often means seeing startup and mid-sized tech CEOs and executives eagerly praising, defending, or desperately seeking the attention of Elon Musk. It has become very difficult to work in tech without encountering leadership that is openly racist, sexist, or aligned with white supremacist ideas."
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What might have happened at Tesla if they had limited Musk's compensation to a few million dollars? Musk wouldn't have had enough money to buy twitter or buy his way into political power. He likely wouldn't have a cult of followers/imitators trying to cash in on the cult of the CEO and he'd likely still be showing up to work at Tesla a few days a week. With actual work to do, Musk might not have spiralled down into Ketamine fuelled fascism. Also, Tesla would have several tens of billions of dollars to spend on the people who actually design and build things. That probably wouldn't hurt.
1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used to metric, 70 F is meaningless, but you intuitively know what 20 C feels like.
2. "Metric leads to lots of awkward numbers." All systems will fortuitously have round numbers in some contexts and awkward numbers in others. Customary units are different in that there are awkward numbers baked into the system. e.g. 5280 feet in a mile. 128 ounces in a gallon.
3. "It's too much trouble to change." You're already using metric units. U.S. customary units have, metrologically, been defined in terms of metric units since the Mendenhall order of 1893[1]. i.e. A meter is defined in terms of how far light can travel in a period of time defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium. If you needed to know exactly how long a meter is for a very precise measurement, a reference meter could be produced in a lab by aliens who have no idea what a meter is by using this definition. No such definition exists for a foot or yard. Nobody maintains physical reference yards (the old-school method) anymore. If you want those aliens to measure out a yard precisely, you tell them how to measure out a meter and then tell them 1 yard = 0.9144 m.
Temperature is the worst metric unit to pick for this. Both the imperial and metric versions of temperature are completely arbitrary. It's really baffling to me that THIS is the one that most people talking about metric superiority cling to. Where metric shines is when you talk about subunits like mg vs g vs kg. You don't do that with temperature almost ever. So so what if water boils at 212F vs 100C? Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse.
Otherwise I agree with you. I just wish stronger arguments would be made. Measuring distance, speed, weight, volume in metric makes a lot more sense and is more intuitive. It's easy to relate 300mL to 1L. or 1cm to 1m to 1km. And that is where most of the value of metric comes from. The fact that we basically never think in terms of kC or mC is why using temperature is very weak.
I mean, say what you will, but a horse is likely to have a similar body temperature regardless their location on the planet. The same can't be said of boiling water. Pretty normal elevations make pretty big changes in water boiling temperature.
You can ultimately also average out temperatures for multiple horses to get pretty close to that 100F.
A better pin would have been something like the melting point of Gallium. Something that hardly changes with a change of pressure.
>Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse.
I mean, every unit is arbiturary. But we need to pick something.
I don't have any love for either, but F is the easiest to pick fun at when none of the standard temperatures make any sense. 32 for freezing water, 212 for boiing, 98.6 for human temperature? The 0 and 100 scale were based on the freezing point of some particular saltwater mixture and 90 degrees for human body temperature (which was corrected and then the scale updated to get to the modern temperature).
> none of the standard temperatures make any sense. 32 for freezing water, 212 for boiling, 98.6 for human temperature?
None of those attributes matter much. F is great for talking about the weather in the US, where 0 to 100 is approximately the experienced range through the year. You don't need to know the exact boiling or freezing points of water to know how cold or hot you'll be each day.
100 was the internal body temperature of a horse. The thought for both the brine and horse was that both were more stable temperatures than something like a human and pure water.
As you can imagine, it was harder to obtain pure water and back then they noticed water freezing at various temperatures.
I read a study many years ago, I haven't been able to find it for awhile. It took people who had grown up using each system, and asked them to estimate things just by guessing. For example, "How long is that wall?" or "How far is it from here to the post office?" or "How heavy is this paperweight?". People who'd grown up using customary were significantly more accurate in their guesses.
The study surmised it was because those units had been developed over millennia to be useful at human scales. When eyeballing the length of a wall, centimeters are too granular and meters are to course, but feet are "just right". You might guess a wall is 12 feet long, and be pretty close, but 3 or 4 meters aren't that accurate, and nobody really guesses 3.5 meters.
Same with temperature. 0 - 100°F is about all we as humans will usually experience, so its very convenient when talking about the weather or HVAC thermostats.
They are worse when doing math or conversions, and while that's annoying for scientists and engineers, in most people's everyday lives it comes up so infrequently it doesn't really matter. If something is less than a mile, you don't suddenly convert to feet and do math, you just say "about a half mile".
Personally, I do woodworking (which in the US is always imperial) and 3d-printing (which is always metric), and often combine the two. When doing woodworking or carpentry, its nice that a foot is evenly divisible by 3 or 6, or that half of 3/8ths of an inch is 3/16ths.
It makes sense. Curling my finger it is pretty much dead on 1 inch from the tip to the first joint. My foot is a little shorter than 1 foot, but in shoes, pacing it out one foot after another, it is nearly dead on as well. A lot of people measure using anatomy with conventional units.
Counterpoint to #1, celsius increments are too large. I laugh every time I see a thermostat in a car or home that needs to have steps like 20, 20.5, 21, 21.5.. :)
How is that a counterpoint to #1? By that same logic, inches are too big an increment so it's hilarious every time fraction of one is used. 15/16ths? lololol!
Do you honestly notice the difference in comfort between 20°C and 20.5°C? I suspect even the heating element is not that precise, let alone the actual room temperature.
They only case in daily practice where 1°C is too large is the difference between normal body temperature (36.5°C) and mild fever (37.0°C), but thermometers have to be graduated in much smaller subdivisions anyway.
> Do you honestly notice the difference in comfort between 20°C and 20.5°C?
Yeah, it's noticeable. That 0.5C move is roughly a 1F move. And there's definitely a noticeable difference between 71F, 72F, and 73F.
But I'd say that it ultimately only matters in human comfort and only when you are talking about room temps. Once you get outside that 70->75 range the exactness starts mattering a lot less. 80 and 85 both feel hot. 65 and 60 both feel cold.
I mean, it's arbitrary. I've lived in a Fahrenheit country and a Celsius country and both systems work fine. Resolution issues exist for both systems (you can still benefit from decimals in Fahrenheit for coffee and tea brewing)
I prefer Fahrenheit because it's based around the human, but it really doesn't matter, and it's probably better long term to have measurements that are not based around the human condition, but we're talking about benefits to society tens of thousands of years from now, rather than today.
In many cases we are, though. A ton of machined things use metric units (and thus need metric tools), and that’s spreading into a lot of other areas like medicine and food packaging. It’s nowhere near absolute but the trend is noticeable.
A slightly more esoteric Imperial unit is "mils", for thousandths of an inch. 1 mil = 0.001 inch. Which means 1 mil = 25.4 micrometers if we also want to use a non-traditional meter measurement.
The inch-foot-yard-mile scale are not uniform, and not easy to calculate. Their only convenience is easy divisibility by 3. The practical example of uniform scale of this kind is seconds-minutes-hours, which, I suppose, go all the way down to the Sumerian 60-based scale. The mm-cm-m-km are much easier in practice.
Sub-inch units are an honest binary system, and as such is pretty practical. The fact that it's written as a ratio of decimal numbers is sometimes unhelpful though, comparing 7/16" and 1/2" takes either mental gymnastics or memorization. Millimeters are somehow more convenient here, but not by such a large margin as with inch-foot-yard scale.
The Fahrenheit scale is uselessly arbitrary; 0°F does not match anything useful, and 100°F is not that useful either.
The only mile that makes sense is the nautical mile, 1 nm matches 1" of arc on the map / globe, the same way as 1 km is 1/40,000th of the arc.
0F is useful in areas where they salt roads because thats the temperature many salts stop being effective and previously good road might turn to ice sheets.
How hard is it to remember -17° C when that's something you grew up with since childhood though? As a trade off, you get 0° C for water freezing and you don't have to remember 32°F for water freezing instead. Or you remember all 4 of those if you leave near a borders.
I would argue that -17C for brine water is far more difficult to remember than 32 for pure water freezing, 32 is an incredibly common number in fractional measures, but I will concede the point because that seems like more of a happy accident than intent.
The biggest problem I have is I don't see either as inherently better, both are relative scales defined by easy to setup but completely arbitrary measures that lacks any real relevance to modern life. We could of defined or scaled our thermometers based on the boiling and freezing points of mercury and nothing would really change, just shifting some numbers around and then still making another absolute scale that can actually be used for any sort of decent thermal calculations.
The Theucydides quote Carney leads with, of course, recently rolled off the tongue of the white house deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. The days of might making right are, apparently, back.
Just in case anyone thought the genie could be stuffed back into the bottle once Trump is gone, Carney goes on to state that the rules-based world order we've been living under since WWII is somewhat of a sham. The rules have not been applied equally. Some nations, the powerful ones, have been given much more latitude to do what they want. Middle nations have gone along with this to avoid trouble.
The reward for avoiding trouble for so long is... big trouble (e.g. invasion threats for an ally of a big power and economic terrorism applied to its allies). So, why pretend the old system works to avoid trouble if the trouble lands on your doorstep anyways?
The answer seems obvious. Middle powers of the old rules-based order need to band together and put bigger powers in their place. It's not impossible. Just very, very difficult. France and Germany may be sticking up for Greenland, but where's Hungary (another EU member)? For this to work, you need everyone. Also, looking ahead, how would you prevent such an alliance of smaller powers, were it successful, from behaving like a bigger power?
Trump is currently showing off AI photos where he's meeting with world leaders in front of a map where both Greenland and Canada are a part of the U.S.[1]. As a Canadian, I think Carney gave a stirring speech here, but I suppose I'm biased given that he's our PM and his vision is one of the few things between us as being swallowed up by Trump's MAGA empire while the other big powers fall upon the respective apples of their eyes.
The fact we have a system that produced a Trump-like figure, and once in power, haven’t checked him internationally, shows the US will continue to be an unreliable partner.
We have kinds of political problems, and it’s not clear they’re going away post Trump.
The funny thing is it’s all cultural. It’s not some intractable thing, the path to fixing all this has been available for a long time. It’s a well studied domain with practical solutions abound.
But enough of the US citizenry that I share the nation with seemingly can’t see beyond their own horizons. No matter how bad it is, there is still enough people who can’t possibly see the value of the government doing anything useful. Government is exclusively the enemy. And in turn those who seek to ransack the system do so under the guise of pushing back against so called “government overreach” (a deliberately vague term) and continue to give the general public the raw deal
All because the elites got too greedy and decided to destroy the only successful labor movement in America (the New Deal coalition) because they wanted more money.
A full analysis needs to look at the downstream effects as well. e.g. Exports and retail.
As a Canadian, I now avoid American products and retailers as much as possible. This isn't just political (Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada). This is about filthy lucre too.
Anything manufactured in the U.S. with tariffed inputs (e.g. Steel, Aluminum, softwood) is more expensive now. Foreign goods that merely pass through the U.S. on their way to Canada are not supposed to be tariffed, but many U.S. retailers simply don't do the paper work necessary to make that happen, no doubt because the Trump administration has made that paperwork so chaotic and difficult to do.
The upside is that Americans aren't just paying for 95% of these tariffs, they're losing export business from the rest of the world too. On top of this is the additional cost of unpredictability. Is the U.S. about to slap additional tariff's on the EU because of Trump's Greenland ambitions? If you're planning a project in Canada, you'd be wise to avoid any U.S. products that use EU inputs for the foreseeable future too.
"As a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to the city of Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino.[13][16][d] Michelangelo showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of other painters."
It seems like this painting would be from his time at Urbino's grammar school. His first apprenticeship started when he was 13. You might expect a renaissance artist to do a lot of work on their master's paintings (detail work, etc.) before ever putting their own name to a canvas, but this is, apparently, Michelangelo doing his own thing before ever being apprenticed.
So, while he likely did paint things before this that didn't survive, it's pretty amazing that this is the work of a kid who has yet to be apprenticed and is just pursuing it on his own with nothing more than the advice of people he was hanging out with.
There's a reason why historians tend to view anything more recent than 10-20 years ago as politics. If you don't want to get embroiled in political debates, stick to stuff old enough to be history. There's still politics there, but it's less raw.
Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going to be viewed as political.
e.g. Wikipedia has a stand-alone page on Elon Musk's Nazi salute[1].
{Edit: It's worth noting here that Wikipedia also maintains separate pages for things like Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein[3].}
This particular page is very interesting because of the sheer amount of political blow-back it's caused for Wikipedia. If you're a Republican, this one page may be the biggest reason you might view Wikipedia as having become "ridiculously partisan". As a direct result of this page, and the refusal to remove or censor it, Musk is now taking aim at Wikipedia and calling for a boycott[2]. He also had his employees produce Grokipedia which, notably, does not include a page on his Nazi salute.
Musk may have had a public falling out with Trump, but he is still very much plugged into the Republican party. He's about to throw a lot of money at the mid-term elections. So, naturally, one hand washes the other and Wikipedia is on every good Republican's hit list. The kicker is that a lot of Republicans, who don't like Musk and think he's a Nazi/idiot, are going to feel a lot of Musk-instigated pressure from their own party to target Wikipedia.
This is the price Wikipedia pays for including recent events and refusing to bow to demands for censorship.
I'm also not American so I'm not well-versed in this topic, but perhaps to raise the obvious:
Does Wikipedia really need a page running for thousands of words on Musk allegedly making a Nazi salute?
It's longer than some of the content on major historical figures, yet this is a subject that I'd be surprised to see mentioned again after a few years have passed.
Considering that the subject matter is highly sensitive and concerns a living person I'm surprised that such an article was allowed at all.
It shows a recency bias, which is probably unavoidable. I'd hope that, as time passes, there are mechanisms to archive (not delete!) pages that seem unimportant. However, while this level of coverage may present a noise problem for average users, it will be a gift to future historians. How much material about the historical figures you mention was simply lost?
That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person. He is a public figure wielding a ridiculous amount of resources to reshape the world as he sees fit. Regardless of his virtues or shortcomings, his power makes him somebody that should be watched closely. He helped shape the last U.S. election, played a key role in this presidency, and promises to continue his influence in the mid-terms. It matters if he's a Nazi.
To my view it looks more like an attempt to inflate a minor controversy by excessively documenting it. If this much effort were being put into writing about government policy I'd totally agree with you, but this level of detail is uncharacteristic even for Wikipedia.
> That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person
Wikipedia always had particularly strong rules about how living persons are supposed to be covered. I wouldn't agree with making exceptions just because I dislike a powerful individual.
In terms of leaving the page up: I don't expect Wikipedia to be censored, but looking at this page the content unavoidably comes across as something that'd only merit a couple of lines on the main article. Instead you have a literal essay just to record "those aligned with the left believe that Musk made a Nazi salute, those aligned with the right say that he didn't".
> If this much effort were being put into writing about government policy I'd totally agree with you, but this level of detail is uncharacteristic even for Wikipedia.
Honestly, I think you're very much underestimating how much Wikipedia writes about government policy - but perhaps more to the point, it's trivial to find articles about controversies regarding the "other side" that are also quite well furnished, e.g.:
So I don't think there's much of an argument to say that they're being particularly biased in doing this (you might believe that none, or almost none of these articles at all should exist, but that's a different issue).
I live in a city of one and half million. There are two "local" newspapers with histories that, in one case, reaches back over a century. One used to have offices across the street from city hall and regularly broke stories when somebody stumbled out of city hall and into their offices to report dirty deeds. The other paper was of an opposing political slant and the two papers used to fight like cats and dogs. People would read both papers to get a handle on local political winds.
Today, both papers are owned by the same Toronto-based, American-owned media conglomerate. Both papers have lost their local offices. Some work-from-home types produce localized content. Just enough to make the papers look somewhat local. Much of the local content is lazily scraped from reddit, showing up in the city's subreddit one day and appearing in the papers the next. However, 99% of the content is the same as the "local" paper in Toronto runs. The former disagreements over politics are over, and both papers run the same ranting opinion columns.
And yet... You can still walk into any convenience store in town and buy a paper copy of these two "local" papers. My parents still have both papers delivered, and haven't seemed to clue into the fact that they're both the same, American owned paper.
It's not just a loss of ad revenue that have killed local news. It's media conglomerates who are hoodwinking people into thinking they still have local news coverage when they really don't.
There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
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