Ignorant American is proud of being ignorant. Typical.

“Liabilities” is a commonly used term to describe services or goods owed. It’s used in governments, in business, and in nonprofits, etc. If you ever are involved in planning or dealing with financials in any organization in the US you will hear it used in that manner.

Yeah I know what a liability is. The problem is that you consider humans to be liability. Oddly you don’t seem to consider the possibility of humans to be an asset in your everything is money mindset.

You are making some very broad assumptions with your comments on nationalism and patriotism in the US. Entirely glossing over my comment that there is a growing movement on both sides to not get involved in foreign affairs.

As you admit Americans don’t know anything about tariffs. Trump is doing a more extreme version of what all American Presidents do. The US is always doing shenanigans on trade.

Many foreigners re-evaluated their views when they visited the US for the World Cup this summer. One political party and its policies do not define an entire nation.

Two thirds of Americans either voted for Trump or didn’t bother to vote at all. You’re facing down fascism and y’all are like relax, everything is going back to normal soon.

You don’t realize that Trump isn’t the cause of your problems, he’s a symptom of a deeper cultural problem in the US. We all thought Trump’s first term was an aberration. Americans got scammed by a con man. After Jan 6 and Trump being convicted of 34 counts of fraud it would be impossible for him to be President again. Turns out, Americans want Trump. It’s just who you are.

When Trump is gone, there will be someone like him again. Probably worse. Trump is an idiot, a more competent fascist would be far more dangerous. We now know Americans actually want fascism. How else can you explain people voting for a criminal that tried to destroy democracy? If a fascist just kept the price of gas low, they’d be President for life. That’s 21st century America. Hell even with Trump being an incompetent fool, destroying the economy, his associations with Epstein, about a third of Americans would vote for him again. You keep telling yourselves “look at how unpopular he is now!” when about a third of Americans would vote for a goddamn child molester because he’s fascist and they want fascism.

You keep acting like the problem is that I’m “too excited.” Sorry but no, the actual problem is that you’re not upset. You see your country descending into fascism and pretend it’s all going to turn out fine. It’s not going to be fine.

I never mentioned taxes in my comment.

Yeah, I noticed. That’s the flaw in your thinking. You see healthcare as a business, not as a government service paid for by taxes. Which is why you think of it as a liability.

This is a major cultural difference between Americans and Canadians. Canada and the US cannot be the same country because the culture of the countries are too different. You’re struggling to understand the cultural differences because if it’s not something that can be expressed in terms of money, it doesn’t exist.

As far as your comments on money, I hate to break it to you but if Americans cared about money in the way you stated it we would probably not have the debt we have today.

You have that debt because a lot of effort is made so that the wealthy don’t pay taxes. That is because Americans (especially wealthy Americans) care more about their money than the well-being of the country.

The left in Canada seems to have this vehemently “we aren’t America” jingoistic pride.

It’s not a left-right thing. Again, another cultural difference between Canada in the US. Ironically, the United States are one of the most divided countries in the world. Everything has to be either left or right, you can’t understand people could actually agree on things regardless of party affiliation. Mark Carney is what we call a Red Tory, a conservative that’s in the Liberal Party. Doug Ford is in the Progressive Conservative (yeah, that’s what it’s called) Party. Wab Kinew is NDP, which is as furthest left of Canadian poltical parties. They’re all on the same side on this.

The outliers are the politicians that are affiliated with the oil industry. And there’s a significant amount of foreign interference coming from the US mostly directed at Alberta. It doesn’t seem to effective enough though, because even the oil politicians (Danielle Smith, Pierre Pollievre) are somewhat onboard with resisting the US. Doesn’t feel like they want to be, but they have to at least give some lip service to it because they recognize it’s what the people of Canada want.

Americans can’t understand the distinction between nationalism and patriotism. So of course you see this as just being “jingoism”, you can’t understand what patriotism is. But this really isn’t about nationalism or jingoism for Canada. This is about patriotism.

This isn’t just some politicians making a few remarks. The people of Canada understand what the US is trying to do and we want to defend our country. The US is all about nationalism, which is about dominating other countries. Canada is about patriotism which is about loving our own country, not dominating other countries. To an American loving America is centered around America dominating other countries. In America, rejecting nationalism means the same thing as hating the country. Nationalism and patriotism are inseparable for Americans. Even when Americans chant “USA USA” you hear a dominating tone to it. Which crazy when you think about it, how can you chant three letters in a dominating way? Americans found a way.

The honest answer to your trade statement is most Americans don’t care or know about the trade war with Canada. If they do then they likely don’t support it. I’m not a supporter of Mango Mussolini and the fact that he doubled the price of the hardwood floors I’m buying because of the tariffs piss me off.

Yeah, we know Americans don’t care about disrespecting other countries. In fact many actually like it when Trump does that. “USA! USA!” You mostly just care about how much your hardwood floors cost. You only really care about money. We understand Americans while you can’t understand Canadians.

They also own the Moncton Times & Transcript, Saint John Telegraph Journal, and Fredericton Gleaner. Fucking Irvings sold them.

I think they probably own all of the newspapers in Atlantic Canada.

They gutted a lot of those newspapers, it’s nearly killed local journalism. If it weren’t for the CBC, there wouldn’t be local journalism. Not good that it’s a crown corporation that’s the only one doing it, but it’s better than having nothing.

Well the Thomson Family is Canadian. They’re billionaires (so maybe not all that trustworthy) but they’re Canadian. So that would Globe & Mail and Thomson-Reuters (though that would be international, not Canadian).

The culture around guns in Canada has been infected by American gun culture. Used to be guns were for hunting or maybe some hobby at a shooting range.

If your identity revolves around being a gun owner, not a hunter or some other hobby that uses guns, then you’re in the group of people that is the the reason why guns need to be banned. The point of that culture isn’t to consider a gun a tool that’s part of a hobby, but a way to have power over others. People in that mindset are just one bad day away from using those guns to harm people.

You can print money out of thin air… but print too much and you’ll have inflation print waaay to much and you’ll have hyper inflation.

Or… pay taxes?

Healthcare costs an average of around $8K per capita per year in most developed countries. The US pays around $14K per year because a bunch of companies gotta make that profit I guess. $8K is significant chunk of the average person’s taxes, but healthcare is a valuable service so it’s worth it.

You seem upset that I’m saying that you’re thinking about government like a business, but you really are. You can’t fathom pay taxes for important services, but that is how it works in most countries. And most people are paying ~$8K in taxes per year for healthcare, while Americans are paying ~$14K per year in health insurance and medical bills.

I very much doubt Canadians would give up their free healthcare or retirement. Which means the US would suddenly need to take on even larger amounts of debt to fund it.

Again, you seem have forgotten tax revenue is a thing.

Also Canada’s debt to GDP ratio is lower than the US. So it would be Canada assuming US debt burden, not the other way around.

Germany spent A LOT of money over two decades integrating East and West Germany. But they had a common culture.

Yeah… there are some things more important than money. Not everyone makes every decision based solely on finances.

While I think America and Canada have similar cultures they aren’t nearly as close as Germany’s.

Yeah, Americans can only think in terms of money while Canadians consider other things (like our sovereignty) to be more important than money. Americans struggle to understand this, which is why we’re currently in a trade war.

I don’t even know what you’re complaining about at this point, this whole comment chain is talking about organizations switching between Windows/MS Office and Linux/LibreOffice.

Because you’re saying that it’s wrong to do that, and giving wrongheaded rationalizations in favour of Microsoft.

It’s also funny that you think rolling your own servers is going to be more secure than using Microsoft’s (or another cloud provider) at this point. Security through obscurity has never been a good idea, and AI has made that strategy 1000x worse.

It’s funny that you think putting everything on a MS cloud server isn’t security through obscurity. It’s just CYA security. Put it on a MS server, if it’s compromised blame MS. Enroll the employees in some anti-phishing training, if they get scammed, then it’s their fault. But at the end of the day, you’re the one that put all of the data on a server that’s accessible to everyone on the internet.

Do you even know of the boneheaded things MS has done like leaving backdoors in sharepoint that have been compromised?

And someone can just as easily misconfigure Azure to be insecure as with anything else. Putting stuff on the Cloud does not make it more secure. Where did you ever get that idea? From a Linked In course?

With the cloud, you still have to worry about both the boneheaded things someone at your company might, but add onto that the boneheaded things Microsoft employees AI might do. Pretending like a computer becomes magically secure simply because it’s been blessed by Microsoft isn’t just security through obscurity, it’s security through ignorance. A big problem with security through obscurity is falsely believing something is secure when it isn’t. Thinking “that’s good enough” and not putting the work in to make it actually secure. That’s what Microsoft is promoting. I guess you bought into it.

At the end of the day, someone needs to make decisions about who should have access to what, how to ensure everything works for the people it’s supposed to and anyone who’s not supposed to have access is forbidden. Sticking something onto the cloud doesn’t change that, it just means there’s a lot more potential points of attack and more things you have to verify is secure.

I think you’re too far removed from the jobs regular people, if they sit in front of a computer all day.

No, I work at a company that’s very dependent on MS. And I build software that the people that sit on a computer all day use. They use the software I’ve built every day in addition to various Microsoft software that are integrated. I have to sit on a computer all day at work using Microsoft products too. Microsoft is on a steady downward trend. When they had to entice people to pay for licenses, they had an incentive to improve their products. After they move people’s data to their servers, what incentive do they have to improve their software? Improving software is just a cost, and once they’re the landlord of your data, they’ll just collect the rent payments and never improve anything.

It would be a lot of work to transition from Microsoft at my workplace. More work for me than anyone else at my company, I’d wager. I’m willing to do that work because I can see the direction MS is going. And there’s a significant amount of work involved with continuing with Microsoft.

I’ve also worked with all of the big cloud services… AWS, Google, Azure. Cloud services really don’t improve all that much. Because why would they? They know it’s expensive to migrate to another cloud service, so you won’t do that. They’re better off spending money on marketing than improving the service.

They’re telling you cloud services are great, MS spent billions on Linked In so people will take training courses teaching them this is the best way to do things. But it’s really just what’s best for them, it’s not good for anyone else. You’re basically putting all of your company data on a fucking webserver and hoping MS knows what they’re doing.

Yeah I think you’re confusing countries with businesses. Any analysis from the perspective of a country being a business is inherently wrong.

Thinking money is real and people are abstractions has things totally the wrong way around.

If what you were saying were true, there would still be a separate West Germany and East Germany.

The reasons for Canada not being a part of the US or California separating from the US or it not making sense for California to be part of Canada has nothing to do with liabilities.

People aren’t liabilities. Thinking this way is why US doesn’t really have healthcare. Healthcare is a service, not a liability.

Do you consider infrastructure and the legal system to be liabilities because the budget of these things scale with the population size? Or are they just things the government is supposed to do?

So anyway, I don’t want to live in a country that thinks my health is a liability.

In Canada when a budget doesn’t pass, the government doesn’t shut down. Instead all of the politicians are fired and they face an election where they have to explain to the voters why they couldn’t do their fucking jobs and pass a goddamn budget.

The US would have to make significant changes to their political system so it doesn’t suck. Also change to the Canadian flag, the US flag is tacky as fuck.

Fuck developers, I’m talking about USERS.

Remember the Ballmer “developers developers developers” meme? Cringey as fuck, but MS did actually try to make things good for developers. Do you think they did that out of altruism?

Nope, it was a strategy. Obviously you don’t appreciate the people whose job was to make systems actually work, but Microsoft used to because they knew there’s a million different details involved with integration of a businesses software with their software. Make it easy for developers to make things work, then from the USERS perspective the software does what they need it to do.

They’re forcing people to the cloud, you’re right, but if they didn’t you would still want to force yourself into the cloud by running critical services in a datacenter for your organization.

Is it though? The Australian government lost a huge amount of data when they moved to the cloud. Someone at Google fucked up and databases were deleted and the backups weren’t all that good and so data loss. I’m sure mistakes like that won’t happen when they have AI making decisions about maintaining data, right? LOL

Also there’s privacy considerations. Maybe you work at a startup that sells customer data to whoever will buy it so that’s not a concern. But some places actually do have confidential data. Places like the government. These places forbid sharing data with third parties. Microsoft is a third party. So cloud isn’t going to work for those situations.

It’s part of the overall issue in IT security now. Just make security someone else’s responsibility so we won’t get blames if something goes wrong. People choose cloud not because it’s better security (it’s worse), but because it allows shifting blame.

Sorry buddy, but if you’re a user just that wants your shit to work every day, then you probably should listen to the developers who actually know how the shit works. Microsoft isn’t the same company it used to be. It was never all that great, but at least their strategy is all about making things work for businesses. Now they’ve shifted to making businesses work for them. Get everyone to do LinkedIn classes to train into you that Microsoft is the only way to do things.

Things will break and you’ll probably blame the developers for it, seems to be your attitude. Then the developers at your company leave because they’re tired of your shit. Then your job is manually entering data into excel because you refuse to question the direction Microsoft is going.

I think that used to be the case, but Linux has improved and Microsoft has really really declined.

I used to call MS the “backwards compatibility company” because they put a lot of effort into keeping their software with all kinds of old stuff. This made it difficult to argue against using Microsoft because as you alluded to, sticking with MS meant paying a licensing fee, but that’s small potatoes compared to migrating to new software and integrating all of the business applications with that new software.

Now Microsoft doesn’t support things very long. The Cloud makes them money, so they’re forcing everyone to completely move everything to the cloud. They’re ending a lot of old software “on-prem” software. Dynamics GP is complete dogshit but a lot of businesses are heavily integrated with it. They’re going to end that, but don’t worry you can pay some expensive consultants to help you move things to the cloud.

For .Net their concept of “LTS” is effectively 2 years. That means making changes to software every two years. Since it’s becoming required to run everything on their cloud services they could just shut down your applications even if you wanted to put off an upgrade… which would probably not be a good idea because you’d be running a webservice on an out of date and unsupported stack. Some application running on-prem behind a firewall you could get away with that. Now you have to do a bunch of work to keep thing updated based on Microsoft’s schedule.

The end result is sticking with MS means significantly more IT work than in the past. LTS on a MS .Net based stack is 2 years. In Linux land, LTS is typically 5 years. Microsoft doesn’t back-port things to their older servers to force you to buy new licenses or move to Azure.

If you move to Azure, you’re actually running your programs on Linux anyway (Note even MS wants to try maintaining Windows Servers LOL), you’re just restricted on how much control you have over it. So you’re spending a lot of time fucking around with some shitty web interface to do things on a Linux system that you could accomplish in minutes with bash on the same OS.

Company I work for is still in the “nobody ever got fire for buying Microsoft” mentality. Past six months I’ve made little forward progress, because I’m mostly figuring out how to make things work on Azure, updating to .Net 10 because support for .Net 8 ends in November. I’m forced to used VS 2026 (which still has bugs, VS usually take about a year before they work out all the kinks) because they don’t support .Net 10 in VS 2022. .Net 10 EOLs in 2028, so that means someone has to spend a lot of time every two years updating a lot of software. I’ve spent a lot of time migrating things to different servers because they didn’t backport TLS 1.3 to their older server OSes (even though they say they’re “supported”).

You may be thinking of how MS used to be, but they’re moving to be a cloud services company now. They’re not the “backwards compatibility company” anymore. There are massive costs with sticking with MS now. As the guy who’s job it is to keep things working, I’d rather do the work to migrate to a Linux system with a five year LTS cycle than migrating to Azure with a two year LTS cycle. I’m migrating shit either way, but with MS my job is becoming just constantly updating a lot of shit on the whims of Microsoft.

Contacting Microsoft about issues is a waste of time now. You may as well cut out the middle-man and ask copilot for help because it feels like there isn’t anyone actually working at MS if you ask them about anything technical. Asking copilot is useless, but at least you get a useless answer faster than asking anyone at MS.

You seemingly ignore the Palestinians that Hamas has killed. They are an oppressive regime, speaking out against them in places they hold power will get you tortured to death. When the ceasefire began, Hamas executed people in the streets to assert dominance.

And you should know Palestinian civilians are not bullet proof from stray bullets fired from Hamas guns. And Hamas IEDs do kill Palestinians at times. They started a war of choice in a densely populated area and it’s impossible to avoid civilian casualties in urban combat.

I think if you add up the Israelis and Palestinians Hamas has killed over the years, it’s fair to say they’ve killed thousands of people.

You could talk to your neighbours, go to a town hall, call your MP.

If you’re represented by a party that’s not in a ruling coalition, sure that party will tell you they care about you, but they’re powerless to do anything to help you. Y

You’re complaining about partisan politics but you also want to make the system even more partisan?

Israel uses proportional representation. To maintain power Netanyahu made deals with some far-right crazies.

The EU is proportional representation. This allowed Nigel Farage to make a name for himself, and ultimately the UK left the EU.

PR systems give all of the power to political parties. They have negotiate backroom deals so they can form a coalition and govern. Minority interests are often ignored. If some extremists want to harm minorities, and a party needs those extremists to form a coalition, the minority groups will be harmed. This is not a hypothetical, this has happened in Israel. Nothing anyone can do about it but hope in the next election Israelis vote for parties in the correct proportions to make a coalition like this not possible.

Yeah, PR looks better on spreadsheet. And maybe some people spread across the country with specific interests might get an MP in Parliament. But if that MP doesn’t get into the ruling coalition, their interests will be ignored.

Calling it a “first past the post” system is just putting the thumb on the scale to slant the debate by making the system sound arbitrary. Let’s instead call it what it is, a community representation system. In a community representation system, community leaders control the seats, not the parties. In the case where there’s a minority group spread across the country, they will be well represented. Not by a single MP that gets ignored by the ruling coalition. But by multiple MPs in representing ridings. A party may ignore the interests of a million people. But an MP doesn’t want to ignore a thousand people in their riding. If their party refuses to address the concerns of those thousand, they might cross the floor. If they don’t, they might lose votes to someone who will represent that minority group in their riding.

Community representation is bottom up. People in a community choose someone to represent them in Parliament. The parties need to keep those community leaders happy or they lose seats. And parties hate losing seats. The Liberal party of Canada has really worked on attracting community leaders into their party. This isn’t solely altruism, they do this because it gains them seats. So in a community representation system the most cynical strategy focused operatives are made to talk to community leaders and make compromises with them.

A PR system is top down. You have the party leadership, the MPs are just trained seals because they can’t cross the floor. They have to fall in line with the party leadership or you lose your job. MPs are basically pointless in a PR system, you’d save money by just having the party leaders declare what legislation they want, their vote is worth X votes (with X being the percentage of the vote their party got) and the legislation passes. We would find out what compromises they made with the other parties to form a coalition immediately and wouldn’t have to pay a bunch of MPs to vote the way their party requires them to vote. The only reason to have MPs in a PR system would be to create the appearance that communities are being represented, when really it’s just some party leaders making decisions in backrooms with zero oversight by community leaders.

A PR system only looks good on a spreadsheet. It’s actually terrible when power dynamics are considered. And we should primarily be thinking of power dynamics when discussing political systems. I don’t think numbers on a spreadsheet lining up don’t matter all that much when minorities are having their houses bulldozed by a country governed by coalition formed in a backroom.