Well, you can always make a point of buying direct from China. That isn’t necessarily better, but it does greatly lessen the chances of Americans in the supply chain.

While it’s possible that they’ve changed procedures, I seem to recall reading somewhere that after Nixon made some problematic drunken phone calls, the US arranged things so that actually launching the missiles has to go through the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not just the president. Trump may only have the safety in his grip, not the trigger.

Even if he does have the trigger, I’m betting someone would wrestle it out of his hands at that point—not because any of them give a damn about us, but because nuclear fallout in southern Ontario would likely devastate New England, given the general tendency of weather on this continent to move eastward. So you wanna have a revolution? Sending nuclear fallout in the direction of your largest population center is probably a good way to start one.

First of all, we don’t actually have to win the trade war. We just have to hang on for a few years. Trump is an old man. Even if he somehow manages to suspend elections in the US, he’ll drop over dead soon enough.

Secondly, do you really think he can hold even Panama long-term against a hostile local population? I don’t. Greenland would be even more amusing, since I expect the entire EU would back Denmark. Up here, the weather is still plenty dangerous to anyone he might send—global warming hasn’t changed things that much yet. Plus, I don’t think his own troops would be too enthusiastic about conducting a war of aggression.

Thirdly, I think you’ll find that most of this country wouldn’t sell Trump a load of organic fertilizer at this point, much less a substantial chunk of our territory. Not at any price. Everyone except a handful of Albertans is pissed off at him and his government in a big way.

Well, part of the reason. “Canola” is really only the edible variant, which is now a bit more than fifty years old. Older cultivars contained large amounts of erucic acid, which apparently is neither tasty nor very good for you.

I don’t know whether anyone still grows the non-canola rapeseed cultivars as a cash crop.

And the same thing will happen to Americans and American companies, and to Mexico and Mexican companies.

Trump has just decided he’s going to trash the entire economy of North America, and destroy any chance of anyone being willing to make a new trade treaty with the US for at least the next twenty years, because the US can’t be relied upon to actually hold up their end of it.

We can’t fix what he’s broken. Best we can manage is to diminish the chances of anyone trying it again.

Usually when a company says something like that (doesn’t matter what they’re trying to peddle or what the statement was about), what they actually mean is that they were on the wrong side of morality, common sense, and/or the law.

The thing is, would they make the connection? Some people aren’t very good at linking up cause and effect where the link isn’t practically screaming in their face.

As someone who finds that most “dark mode” offerings aren’t dark enough, I don’t understand how they can tolerate it either. I suspect it’s rather like spicy food: given enough exposure, you don’t notice it’s spicy (or bright) until reaching a level far above what people who aren’t exposed to it on a constant basis would think was acceptable.

They’re just not letting their eyes get dark-adapted in the first place. They can’t see anything but the phone screen, but they also don’t care.

You think that an unelected body in the government is better than being able to vote for different representatives?

It doesn’t have to be better, it just has to be not significantly worse (because switching systems incurs a cost, and the expected improvement has to be sufficient to justify that cost). As far as I can tell, the Senate here in Canada hasn’t been significantly worse for the population than comparable elected bodies that exist elsewhere in the world. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t run off the rails in the future, but it could just as easily do that if it were an elected body (which is where the example of the States is relevant).

In general, it’s better to leave things that work alone, unless you have a better reason for changing them than, “This doesn’t match up with my ideology.”

My bet would be, convenient and intrusive. The two are not mutually exclusive—in fact, they very frequently go together.

Well, yeah, but obeying robots.txt is only a courtesy in the first place, so you can’t guarantee it’ll catch only LLM-related crawlers and no others, although it may lower the false positive rate.

And this specifically target AI training web crawlers.

There’s no way to distinguish between an AI training crawler and any other crawler. Per https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/ :

“This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it’s targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM’s - but really, like the plants it is named after, it’ll eat just about anything that finds it’s way inside.”

Emphasis mine. Even the person who coded this thing knows that it can’t tell what a given crawler’s purpose is. They’re just willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater in this case, and mess with legitimate crawlers in order to bog down the ones gathering data for LLM training.

(In general, there is no way to tell for certain what is requesting a webpage. The User-Agent header that (usually) arrives with an HTTP(S) request isn’t regulated and can contain any arbitrary string. Crawlers habitually claim to be old versions of Firefox, and there isn’t much the server can do to identify what they actually are.)

Japan often continues to use tech beyond the point other developed countries consider it obsolete (their government only recently transitioned away from floppy discs). It wouldn’t surprise me if Sony was manufacturing the Mini- formats in small quantities for the Japanese market only.

There’s a subset of Americans who are rather like ostriches: heads so deeply buried in the sand that they forget anything exists outside their immediate surroundings. Reminding them that the rest of the world is out there rarely has any positive results, however.

It’s . . . arguable. The Alberta oil and gas industry doesn’t really benefit “all Canadians”, just the ones working in that industry, and most of us who whose paychecks don’t depend on Alberta oil think the environmental oversight needs to be tightened up. In terms of advocating for the short-term interests of the subset of Albertans that elected her, Smith could be said to be doing her job. Problem is, she’s doing so in a manner that goes against the long-term interests of everyone in the country, including the people that elected her.

Ultimately she’s a whore for Alberta’s oil and gas industry, and Trump is just a means to an end. She’d put out just as readily for a Japanese tentacle monster if it promised to buy oil from Alberta. So this isn’t really about Trump or the US at all.

If I recall correctly, what they stole wasn’t even worth that much. Definitely not worth starting a high-speed chase over, and you can’t have a chase without a pursuer. If it had been a multiple murderer fleeing the scene, the risk might have been acceptable, but not for this.

I don’t understand how what once was rare in foreign tuition, then was a cash cow, and is now limited (but not eliminated) is now responsible for the total collapse of some schools.

They overextended themselves during the years the money was coming in, most likely, and now can’t afford the remaining payments on new buildings or equipment or the current staff salaries or whatever without the extra financial support. (There’s also the possibility of outright embezzlement having taken place, as at Laurentian U, which ended up axing a couple of programs.) Wikipedia suggests that Algonquin’s been building or renovating a fair amount of stuff on their main campus in Ottawa over the past fifteen years. If they took out loans to finance some of it, it would make sense that they’re short on cash now.

One of two things is the case:

1. The numbers are in the paper, and the person who wrote the article could have transcribed them but is too lazy.

2. The numbers are not in the paper, in which case I would class the article as inflammatory and irresponsible.

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Do I trust the journalist? Not in the sense you mean, but I expect them to act responsibly and make a minimum effort.