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  • Canadian politicians "can't" say that the USA is the largest security threat, because our market is so highly integrated, and the baby in charge would throw a pant shitting tantrum. Canadian politicans are often bad, but they're not complete idiots on that front. Carney came so close that it was clear though, in his Davos speech. Spavor and Kovrig's detention was largely the result of Canada detaining Meng, at the request of the USA. A request that was taken by the USA explicitly to sour relations between Canada and China -- which worked for years, until just recently due to the shift in the US posture. So the USA overtly meddles in Canada's relation with China to sow animosity and disadvantage Canada, but the USA ain't a big threat huh?

    Canada supports Ukraine. Both China and India have been trading with / supporting Russia throughout. Canada has significant trade with India. India has allegedly conducted assassinations on Canadian soil using the Bishnoi Gang as a proxy to go after political dissidents of Modi. Indian students were constantly in the news in the past few years, as the 'foreign student' programs were shown to involve significant fraud from that particular region, with an assumption that Canada will just accept the people once they're in Canada -- not exactly the actions of a friendly nation. Especially when a bunch of Bishnoi gang members / Indian foreign agents were likely in that mix too. One report at the time had noted that like 15% of the people from one of the fraud investigations, were shown to be known criminals who should never have been admitted. Even with that backdrop, we're fine trading with India, I don't see why we wouldn't be fine trading with China.

    There are risks in dealing with any large nation. But we're literally next door to the most militaristic nation in history, which has gone authoritarian/fascist, and has made overtures of destroying Canada. Not just overtures, but they're taking steps to try and achieve that goal by funding separatist movements and sowing discord through our USA-controlled media.

    Carney's Davos speech highlighted how Canada's approaching trade, and it makes sense given our position in the world. We can't dictate terms to super powers. We can't demand that all our trading partners agree with everything we value, nor is it reasonable for Canada to try and dictate the foreign policy of foreign nations in terms of who they trade with, or the actions they take. We can work on smaller deals for specific goods, keeping value-based virtue signaling trade nonsense to a minimum.

    Freeland is a relic of Trudeau's "Virtue signaling" government approach, where the environment minister literally said shit like "Just lie often, lie loud enough, and people will believe you!". Freelands prior negotiation of the CUSMA stuff was also really weird -- in that the initial coverage before the deal listed various items that were 'critical' to get in the negotiations, which she failed to do, but they still ended up pretending like she'd done a great job. That again, was part of the Trudeau governments obfuscations -- likely done in part because the Liberal brand required that they prop up all of their 'star' women candidates, regardless of performance. They moved that environment minister into a cushy high paying ambassador gig -- just like they moved the woman who was responsible for the phoenix pay system fiasco into a high paying government gig as a reward for costing tax payers BILLIONS, rather than highlight that she was incompetent at her job. There're good reasons Freeland didn't win the Liberal leadership, and why that party's now veered significantly away from the Trudeau style.

    Whine about trade with China all you want. At the moment, they're more consistent in their actions, leading to more predictable trading outcomes. And when you take a look at what the USA is doing to Minnesota, if you're wanting to deny trade based on value mis-matches, we should likely also clip all trade with the USA. But that's pretty much impossible at this point. So you gotta chill with the virtue signaling nonsense, and find win win situations where you can.

  • Washington: *declares Canada a 51st state, openly discusses annexation via economic warfare, routinely attempts to undermine Canadian sovereignty and overtly meddles/funds/supports groups seeking to dismantle Canada as a country (alberta separatists as an example).

    Freeland: "But what about China? They might do something bad too!"

    Sure Freeland, obviously, especially since our closest/most trusted trading partner has become hostile towards us, it's really clear to almost every Canadian at this point that ANY foreign partner can go 'bad'. But she and hers lead the country into an intolerable situation where we're overly dependent on a singular, and now hostile, neighbour.

    Her comments sorta feel like an Arsonist, mocking people trying to escape the building that's been set ablaze with statements like "Why try to escape? The next building you enter might catch fire too!"

  • I've been to a Shen Yun performance before, it was pretty good, light entertainment -- was a great date.

    I'm not overly familiar with politics internal to China, but my impression is they're sorta like Jehova witnesses over there, except the government also tries to stomp them out of existence fairly explicitly. But with more ties to pre-communist China culture (and Id 'guess' taiwan? idk).

  • Honestly, seeing these players, as a Canadian, I'm even less interested in supporting the NHL in anyway shape or form.

    I mean, I'd say I wasn't going to go to any game in which an overt supporter of a fascist regime was going to play, as I didn't want my cash going towards that sorta stuff... but I already don't give a shit about hockey. And the idea of a 'national' league in which its two nations, that shit should get put in the past given their overtures of conquest.

  • You may think the take is wrong, but it's basically what Posobiec and them attempt to argue in "Unhumans", a political ideology book that's been lauded by Vance, Trump Jr, Carlson and so on. It is rather overtly what their more "intellectual" (debatable!) contingent paint as the ideological justification for their actions. What they describe there also explains what they're "trying" to do with some of their other shenanigans, like the supreme courts overturning of women's rights -- or more specifically, why they wanted to push that down to the state level as part of their broader objectives.

    That it gets implemented in a fear mongering way that attempts to rile up the uneducated common US idiot is a secondary 'thing' -- as is the common US idiots take on it in the "They gonna fuck our kids/jobs!". The ideology not matching the implementation isn't a 'new' phenomenon, nor is it restricted to fascists -- communism is an easy example on that front, where the 'ideology' rarely matches the implementation, even if you can 'see' elements of the ideology underpinning the movements justification for their actions.

  • I'll take a stab at this rhetorical question, even though I'm not a right winger nor an American -- just been reading up on their 'theories' and wackiness a bit.

    From their ideological perspective, I imagine that the more nuanced response (ie. not the base's "GAY BAD!"), would be that the issue of crime/outliers exist in any group, but that the existence of a trans-interest specific movement is dangerous to the broader community/stability. Do republican pedophile incestuous mayors exist? Yes. Are they lobbying to change how government treats them / trying to get more privileges and special treatment to support their pedophile incestuous mayor collective? No. So the 'risk' to society of a one off criminal, is far less than the risk of a collective movement intent on dismantling social norms in favour of norms specifically beneficial to their niche members, and generally detrimental to the interests of non-niche members.

    It's similar to Dave Chappelle's comments, about how he knows/likes trans people he meets on an individual/personal level, but he hates the "trans community". It's the collective community that they take issue with, as it aims to dismantle what they consider the norms of social life / public interactions.

    To try and frame their issue a bit differently using a recent example: most educated folks know about people with Tourette's, even if they don't fully understand the condition. But there's a significant difference between understanding it / tolerating it within a limited context, and inviting someone with Tourette's to sit within mic shot at the BAFTA's and pretending everyone should be comfortable with it just because it's a disability. Being at a black-tie type event, and hearing someone scream the N-word at a couple of black presenters is uncivilized, but it's "tolerated" under the guise of these niche special interest groups. Just like everyone's been forced to "tolerate" fent users collapsed all over the place in many metropolitan cities, under the guise of "drug user rights advocacy groups" -- do people understand folks are addicted? Yes. Does that understanding make seeing them flopped out, shitting in public etc, a "civilized" experience? Nah.

  • Yeah, though I think the best current example is likely Trump's speech, and how it gets translated into other languages. I recall non-english speakers being absolutely stunned when they saw literal translations of his speeches at first -- cause, of course, all the translators would translate him sounding more "presidential" for official clips.

  • I've read that one too -- not sure if it was the fault of the translators, but it had better structure to it. Like the ideas were still half baked nonsense, and the rhetoric was very blood and soil ish nationalist plonk. But it's rhetoric/prose was more convincing/plausible.

    But the American one is just... like it isn't even consistent with its self... it's just utter trash.

  • Yeah, but this breach is specifically about KYC, about financial industry stuff. The company that got porked, was the company the banks used for their KYC stuff.

  • That poor cat, are you forcing it to play EA games?????

    Animal Humane Society operates the primary animal cruelty reporting line in Minnesota: 612-772-9999 or report online at investigations@animalhumanesociety.org.

  • KYC is typically a due diligence process tied to regulated financial industry participants -- the restaurant example has a much different function. Banks and FIs have much broader retention (and disclosure) obligations.

    Here, let's put it slightly differently. I'll reference Canadian regulations/processes more, as those are the ones I'm most familiar with. If you're a bank, you're required to flag suspicious transactions related to the customer -- and in order to know when those transactions are suspicious, you need some way of reviewing it within the context of the customer. You may even have an obligation to second guess / question / try and advise the customer 'not' to make a transaction, based on knowing your customer.

    The most basic example of that, is where Credit Cards will decline payments / request a call if you try and make a purchase in a totally abnormal location -- like you "know your customer" lives in Toronto, but suddenly see them spending money in Mexico? Or if they called you before they took a trip to mexico, that'd also go into a KYC type file to let people know to expect those sorts of charges and let em get processed. That's tied to KYC.

    The media will often run stories about seniors getting scammed, with the general message being "WHY DIDNT BANKS DO MORE TO PROTECT?". Well, that's KYC too. You gotta 'know' your senior members, and their spending habits to some extent, to find those outliers. You also need to be familiar with them enough to know whether its "normal" for them to come by and take out cash, and in what quantities and for what purpose, cause seniors will sometimes 'show up' with a person pressuring them to take out cash to 'pay a bill' (scammms galore!). All part of KYC due diligence.

    Or the somewhat obvious elephant in the room -- if you have a "personal" account member, who keeps receiving etransfers to his "jeevacation@gmail.com" account for some reason, you gotta look into it a bit and sort out what all those payments are related to, cause it isn't a business account. And if you see anything suspicious, it gets reported to the authorities, where, most likely, Trump shits himself and Americans ignore the crimes.

  • idk. I've heard we can still consume pussy.

  • It's worth a read.

    Like it's full of absolute horseshit and batshit takes on history. I spent the first couple chapters checking their citations / references. They were mostly misleading citations, and snippets of things, mashed very poorly into a shape that they then tried to wedge into their fascist manifesto. These shit heads literally quote twitter to try and prove points. At one point the author cites his own op ed. But like, even the stuff they're trying to cite to support their arguments, if you want to pretend that twitter was viable as a 'source', they're pointing at posts by ppl with 100k followers, which have just like 300 upvotes. So even in a captive audience that's at least in theory 'interested' in the drivel these guys spout, only 0.3% of the people agree. They even include things like twitter post grammatical errors that botch the message.

    A more concrete example: they claim at one point that Scott Adams (dilbert) was cancelled for saying (paraphrasing this): "Just one thing, that everyone agrees with: that you should avoid groups of people who hate you". I mean, a quick search finds a bit of controversy related to Adams saying something more direct/overtly racist, like "White people should just stay away from black people". He also had a history of similar such comments going back years and years before he lost a bunch of his distributors. But these neo fascists are just like "nononono, just look at this one thing, that we've totally reframed to try and make it less racist! Now pretend that single de-racist-ified comment was the only reason he lost work / people stopped wanting to see his stuff! See! Evil unhuman lefties!".

    It's really something else to see this sort of drivel, lauded by these core right-wing figures, be so shittily constructed. Like the most basic checking of their assertions, makes it fall apart. Every page would be filled with corrections, edits, issues, etc if this had gone through any higher level peer review. In that alone, its worthwhile to read it to get a sense of just how rigorously the "elite" of the USA actually think about .... anything.

  • So I just got finished reading Posobiec's "Unhumans", which's a book with a forward by Bannon, and shout outs from Vance, Trump Jr, etc etc. If I remember right, Vance's quote was along the lines of "Posobiec shows us what we need to do to counter the left".

    In the book they openly praise fascists and dictators, such as Spain's Franco. They openly call anyone who doesn't support fascists/dictators as unhumans, and basically call for unhumans to be killed "because that's what they'd do to us!". In their thinking, Donald is a 'great man' that upholds "human civilization", and anyone against him in any way is an 'unhuman' looking to destroy civilization. Why shouldn't the great people of the nation get to molest children, as they're the reason we have civilization at all!

    I think that book was published in 2023 or 2024. So the elite / upper class of the Republican party and of America more broadly, have been openly, vocally, and emphatically supporting Fascism and Dictators, as well as treating regular 'citizens' as enemies/threats that need to be stomped on, since before the election. JD Vance, the VP, and Trump Jr (so the trumps who maybe can read) openly support moving to a fascist dictatorship. Project 2025 was a more 'operational' plan, but these people have been openly broadcasting this stuff for a long time now. And Americans voted for them all the same, and haven't revolted against it or anything.

  • People want surveillance options. One of the highest/most obvious features required, unsurprisingly, is the ability to see your cameras on your smart phone -- which generally means you need a Smartphone App + a centralised server/system connecting the different ends. The alternative being that end users would likely need static IP addresses / Dynamic DNS setups to have a Smartphone app point "directly" to their exposed CCTV ports -- which I don't imagine regular consumers are keen on, likely why basically no such options seem to exist in the retail space (afaik - if there are widely used brands i dont know about, by all means clue me in).

    Options that are fully local/closed/under user control, are almost impossible to find. This isn't so much a consumer-specific problem, from my perspective, at this point -- there aren't enough options for consumers to choose differently. It's sorta like how you're generally 'stuck' with US-tethered Smartphones. It's not so much a 'choice' that consumers get to make, as it is that these big businesses have effective monopolies and consumers are stuck.

  • People are still playing EA games after the take over by Saudis/Jared Kushner??? Sorry, I feel no empathy for these gamers.

  • KYC isn't evil. It's literally the operational piece that says stuff like "If someone named Vladimir Putin tries to open a bank account with you, you should know if he's THAT putin or not, especially as it may get your business in serious trouble related to gov sanctions etc". The government, quite literally, sends auditors to Banks and Credit Unions every 2-3 years to make sure you do this sort of due diligence.

    The issue with KYC is that it's farmed out to third parties that focus on scale and cutting costs. It's in the same general space as something like Credit Scores -- Banks/Credit Unions don't maintain their own credit scores for people so much, as they just buy that score information from Equifax / Transunion etc.

    Really, what I imagine people should be pushing for instead of this piecemeal whining, is something closer to what Estonia has for its citizens. A highly integrated government-based portal that allows citizens to do things like Register a New Small business in 15 minutes, and to see which organisations have access to their gov ID info. From what I understand, citizens basically get given PINs as part of their gov IDs, which they can disclose to banks/businesses, who can subsequently access basic required read-only details about that person via the gov portal. So your bank needs to know who you are? No problem, you let them know your pin when you setup the account -- and the banks system is then able to pull just the basic info from your gov account to meet the banks operational needs / regulatory obligations whether you're there in person or not. And as a citizen, if you want to check your privacy disclosures to third parties, you just log in to the gov site, and see a list of which businesses have access to your data -- and I imagine you'd get the option to cancel their access if you wanted to (so when you close an account at a business, you pop in to the gov site and also clip their ongoing access). From what I gather, that sites a one stop shop for all gov stuff, so it's also where you go for tax stuff, drivers lics, the works. Makes it a LOT simpler for citizens, as you don't need to sort out what esoteric stupid sub site / domain you need to visit to see if you qualify for a rebate or whatever -- so it seems like a big improvement from a user experience side.

    ALL THAT SAID, that shift would put more onus on the consumer in some ways, as they'd need to log in to a gov site etc -- like it's bad enough trying to explain MFA to old people, imagine trying to make this shift! You'd also need a government that was willing to actually do stuff for the people -- I think Estonia only went that way, as an attempt to shield themselves from massive attacks from Russia. They want their gov fully functioning in the cloud, including elections etc, so that even if they end up like Ukraine, they can still "function" remotely. Consumers are a big issue for anything security related too, as practically no one changes banks / FIs based on security -- it's almost entirely rate oriented for mortgage holders. Tell a consumer they can get a 0.2% better rate by going with the bank that doesn't fuss security, they'll take it. Try and market your bank/FI as being more security conscious, it won't generally draw in new members based on that alone.

    Like, again using Canada as an example, we've had a year of the US antagonizing us and threatening economic ruin / annexation. Lots of Canadians are keen not to buy American products as a result. Almost all of Canadas banks/CUs use US partners/outsourcing within their stack: places like Vancity Credit Union, for example, are using Intellect Design's product for their online banking, which is a partner owned by an India parent company (with little/no presence in Canada), which hosts its stuff on Microsoft's cloud. Most Credit Unions in the country are likely going to go the same way in the next couple years -- even though it's a huge security risk, and highly likely that both India and the USA will gain access to all your data, let alone sketchy third party's like India's fraud centers. There are a couple Credit Unions in Canada that actually maintain stuff (almost entirely) in Canada. But that's not enough to entice people to use those organisations, so they're all dying out / merging as a result of a lack of members (and regulatory overreach / decrees).

  • Tax records are required to be kept for 7 years in North America (generally, as far as I know - def in Canada). So you order something online from a business, they have a business need to keep your data on hand for 7 years in case an auditor / tax person comes asking about it. Be that someone auditing the business, or someone auditing a customer. That's a requirement from the government.

    I've seen customers ask for tax stuff going back up to 20 years from a business. In those cases, if there's demand for data going back that far for whatever reason, the business can internally say "We have a business reason to retain data longer" because people ask for it -- there's demand. So they can justify to auditors/legal sorts retaining that information indefinitely, based on user demands/requests.

    In some cases when I've seen those ancient requests, it's also tied to legal disputes from customers -- eg. Trying to prove in a divorce that such and such was bought by party A in 2005 for X amount. In some cases, there're class actions that go outside the 7 year window, and require data from further back to sort out -- for example there's a case in Canada currently where a financial lender is paying back ~$2000 per person that took a loan from them from 2016-2021 (so ~10 years of personal data needs to've been kept, to verify early claimants). Part of needing to keep data so long, is that the court cases are often so drawn out that the 7 year window would make some crime/wrong-doing much more difficult to prosecute due to a lack of evidence. I know of one class action lawsuit in the Financial Industry that's been ongoing since the 90s, and still isn't fully resolved -- most of the potential class action recipients are deceased at this point, and the only people profiting are lawyers, but still. Lawyers are a part of the problem, and a reason why data is often being held longer and longer. Honestly, Lawyers are also terrible at securing their data --they tend to rely on paper-controls to prevent their unsecured data from getting used, rather than actual hardening. Like there was a guy who spent a few years in Colombia or something, his personal laptop being used for all sorts of nefarious stuff, and when he came back to Canada and the border people took his laptop, it was totally unencrypted/unsecured. They guy just argued it was his "legal work" laptop and everything on it is confidential and can't be used in court.

    Idk. I think your approach is overly simplistic for the issue. There's a lot of "stuff" related to corporate data retention policies and methods, and I don't really see much nuance in what you're proposing. Hell, if they only kept your data till you got your item, youd NEVER be allowed to get a refund, cause they'd have no record of you purchasing the item.

  • So Canada's already had trade delegations in Mexico, very recently even, discussing 'things' with their partners. Both Mexico and Canada could easily read the room as soon as Trump was elected, that 'nafta' was toast -- and have likely got their own bilateral agreements shelf-ready for when Trump shits himself during trade negotiations later this year.

    Trump throwing a pants-shitting hissy fit isn't a surprise to anyone. Nor is him responding with more threatening bullshit, when people are shying away from the US because of their threatening bullshit.