Long lazy meandering answer.

My degree is in geophysics, so I’m somewhat professionally connected to the world of resources. So that’s where I get that angle.

Physics, as a degree, is somewhat of the universal bullshit detector, since you learn to take what people say and run back-of-napkin math to figure out what is or isn’t realistic. “Now hang on, that doesn’t sound right… let me check…”

Aside from that, I’m also a fan of historical fiction, geopolitical games (EU4, etc.), and my spare time pursuits tend to send me down research rabbit holes, disentangling the fiction from reality. Largely for my own amusement. But it comes in handy on trivia night if the topic is the Teutonic Knights or something.

In grad school I’d hang out with the philosophers, geographers, and others that were asking large questions with beer in hand. “I’ll buy you a beer if you can convince me the electron is real.” was not a pickup line, but the start to several hours of liquored debate.

I’ve been known to be mildly politically active, and sort of on top of the pulse. But never an activist or anything. Observing and predicting is fun.

Today I was in Google Earth just looking at the continent of North America, looking at it as though I were the US playing a strategy game. The major areas of contention right now for the US are: Greenland, Panama, Mexico, and Canada. It’s like he is establishing future boundaries at the edges of the continent – like it is an affront that borders exist on it. Upon further contemplation, Canada is fucked if this is what they’re doing. So I created [email protected] to start organizing – maybe the space will grow organically.

But, no, I don’t subscribe to higher end geopolitical info sources. That doesn’t mean I eschew them either (ISW was particularly interesting at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). I just integrate or search for info when questions are interesting.

You’re not wrong. I just like to point out the actual logical folly now and again so that people in the middle (if any are left) can see the folly.

And my axis?

And Kim

Not a bad take.

The problem here is that the US doesn’t need Ukraine for any of those things. They have their own deposits. The problem is that the US or Ukraine and everyone else does not have any significant capacity to process these minerals – China does. You’re not building a rare-earths refinery in Ukraine during a war or occupation – too easy of a target. So unless the US builds such a beast at home, it’s entirely irrelevant what Ukraine has or otherwise.

Furthermore, as a nervous Canadian, I worry about the same stupid rhetoric being used on us. We don’t produce rare earths, because we don’t process rare earths. But damn do we have a lot of potential deposits. Trump only sees the value of the potential deposit and not the actual produced products. It’s boneheaded but they don’t care.

No. She should see it through so we can see platforms and not get an acclamation. Politics requires platforms, not just name brands.

I also use canspace.ca for my personal and small business. Our only issue is that they have occasionally (due to their low cost) been used as a place to launch spam – by other customers – is sometimes our email gets lumped into an IP block or something. Other than that, it works reasonably well.

I’ll believe it when I see code written for it solving a real problem

Won’t happen. It was a pump and dump from the beginning and anyone who lost money paid the idiot tax.

Actually kind of an amazing read. I suspect it shall live another life on 3-axis router tables and such for a while. The mechanic is single stroke lettering remain the same

I concur. I saw a truck with a flag on it the other day, and my immediate thought wasn’t “antivaxxers nutcase” this time. Well, until I saw the bumper stickers. But the point stands – there’s been a really around the flag from the centre and it feels good to wash away the associated feelings.

Seize the memes of production!

The most ridiculous thing here is the assumption that Canadians would ever be more than Puerto Ricans in this scenario.

(1) We’d only ever join under duress

(2) If democracy still exists in the US, we wouldn’t be given the vote, because we’d vote against them

(3) If democracy doesn’t exist anymore, then whether we are called a state or not is irrelevant

(4) Canada gets turned into a strip mine with everyone conscripted to go fight against Mexico or whatever Roman Empire-style nonsense follows so that we can’t organize resistance

War of 1812 called

This seems to be mostly a problem for publicly traded companies. There are exceptions. But if you look at airlines, the pattern is there.

They should be considered infrastructure. Infrastructure can pay a dividend to shareholders, but you shouldn’t be able to speculate on shares.

We could stack export tariffs on there. Bureaucratically difficult since we currently don’t really do export tariffs. But it would be an interesting political response.

Canada wouldn’t be allowed to vote, presuming elections still existed. It’s just expansionism at the end of the Republic.

What’s the weirdest one you’ve tried? Most challenging? Have you found any really cool defining features in any distro?

For example GoboLinux and NixOS eschew the Linux file hierarchy standard (FHS), and that becomes their defining feature. But many other distros have some other defining feature. Slackware uses tarballs as package management and oldschool init. LFS has you build from nothing. Etc.

What algorithm should I use – oh shit, I just deflated

Eww. I don’t mean Eww because of shipping through the Hudson Bay. I mean, Eww because oil is the driver behind it.

Please let’s just stop building ways to get oil to market, and start building refineries that do value-add here in Canada. Make the aviation fuel and plastics and whatever else cannot be replaced with green energy. Reduce the export of crude and help wean the world off of the worst stuff by choking supply.

Bonus photo I took of the Hudson Bay railroad bridge in The Pas, MB, from a few weeks ago.