What Canadian industry? How could it become "more balanced?" And if US industry has been failing as you suggest, how would Canada fair any better? Canada does have auto plants, true, and that is a part of the overall economy. But they are all foreign owned; we have none of our own. No car companies either.

Economic interdependence isn't inherently bad. The US and Canada have been interdependent for a hundred years or more, to each others' benefit. Granted the relationship has always favored the US at some expense of Canada, like all of the US trade deals, and all deals between parties with very unequal power. But it was still a net positive for both countries and makes sense to continue it, if that were possible.

Really only Tesla (reminder to Trump: an American company owned by your friend who benefits from this) will really benefit from the drop in tariffs. Tesla was importing approximately that many cars per year from China before the tariff. Also they are one of the few companies that can even sell cars in Canada from China because they already meet North American standards. As for the flood of cheap chinese cars, it's not going to happen. Canada is way too small a market for Chinese companies to customize their offerings to meet safety crash test standards here. If the US started importing them, that would be another story.

Now of course if Canada could change the rules to allow vehicles that meet European standards, that would change the landscape pretty significantly.

I wasn't happy with having to use the Java sledge hammer (and all the maven-downloaded dependencies) to make such a simple thing work, so I had Claude make a simple python equivalent, which only needs odt2txt. It seems to work nicely, but probably has edge cases I haven't addressed yet. https://github.com/torriem/rez.... Claude produced some rather reasonable documentation for it I thought. Use at your own risk of course, but works for me!

Yes there's no way I'd let Claude anywhere near my github account. I can't fathom why anyone would want to connect Claude Code directly to github. Note that Claude can do a bit of its own revision history and roll back things if you ask it to.

There's nothing like posting to slashdot to get one to do some research after posting!

There's a utility called ReZipDoc to assist in using git with OpenDocument formats. By converting the file to an uncompressed zip file, git can deduplicate the parts of the file that didn't change, even though they are still inside the zip file. And it sets up git to give you a plain-text diff for human consumption. Pretty slick. And on a modern filesystem like ZFS, BtrFS, or BCacheFS, you get get compression at the file system level so you don't need zip compression anyway.

When working with AI, the first thing to always do is commit everything to git, then make a branch and see what AI can do. Once it's done, merge it back in. While the concept of diffs don't make as much sense when it comes to spreadsheets and documents[1], git is still a decent framework for managing projects with them in it. If you use LibreOffice you can store in "flat" versions of the formats (such as .fodt) which are single-file, uncompressed xml files. But the diff won't be very readable to humans.

[1] I've long thought git should be able to better deal natively with modern document formats that are really just xml inside of zip files. Although a diff of an XML file is probably not too useful for humans. Still, it would be nice if the parts of the document that didn't change (style sheet etc) would be stored in a way to avoid duplication. Can anyone point me at resources to do this better? Surely there's a git-based utility out there to make this happen.

So much there in that short paragraph. Saying Canada shouldn't antagonize Trump is fine, but the problem is there's *nothing* we can do that *won't* antagonize him and nothing we can do to placate him, short of inviting him to come be a king. What can Greenland do to not antagonize him (what can Ukraine do to not antagonize Putin)? See the problem?

The last trade agreement trump himself signed granted quite a bit of access to the Canadian dairy market up to a certain cap, which has never been reached, so those high diary tariffs have never been levied. Trump is lying about them. But even further, if Canada opened up the the entire dairy market, while it would destroy the entire Canadian dairy industry in one fell swoop it would hardly register as a blip on the scope for the fortunes of American dairy. A lot of American companies don't realize how small the Canadian market is compared to the entire US market. Canada is littered with the corpses of US companies who tried to enter completely unprotected markets. Lowes and Target to name two. Besides that, to eliminate the trade imbalance Canadians would have to buy 10 times the number of US products. How many cars does Trump want us to buy? 10 per person?

As far as tariffs go, you want the US to reduce its "subsidization" of Canada by... taxing Americans? It's absolutely bonkers to me how GOP voters are so excited about some of the biggest tax raises the US has had in decades. Yes tariffs hurt Canada and drag our economy down. Congrats on that. But they are a tax on US citizens!

As far as broken relationships go, so many of my friends and relatives in the US think that things will go back to normal after Trump's done in three years. But I just don't see any possible way that's going to happen.

No big deal. The big AI companies access it using IP address to train their models on books and music.

I get what you're saying, but it's not like there are lots of ready alternatives to the products we all need and use daily that we can switch to tomorrow, EVs, solar, wind, and nuclear notwithstanding. Until we make changes to our societies and develop more new technologies, we are still dependent on oil and will be fore some years yet, even as we advance quickly in renewables (and many oil companies are invested in renewables too).

And how will forcing the oil companies out of business help with that?

Doesn't seem to matter to them as along as the money rolls in, which it is.

I mean kind of works on YouTube. Silly brain auto word suggest failure.

Firefox and uBlock origin kind of works on slashdot. You still see the ad but uBlock prevents it from playing. Some times the ad doesn't show or play but you can't watch the video itself for a short time, 10 to 20 seconds. Often I reload the page and then I can play the video quicker. And about half the time the ad loads but won't stat playing because uBlock blocked that. And they wonder why FreeTube is so popular!

Trouble is AI slop is making YouTube a ton of money showing ads. Even if all the real creators were driven away, AI slop would still be bringing in the money. The trouble is most of YouTube's users don't seem to know or care that it's slop.

Very disheartening article on this: https://fortune.com/2025/12/30... . There's no way YouTube will pull the plug on this. If it's making this kid $700,000 a year, YouTube themselves are making far more, despite having to store all that slop.

Seeing as he's living and working the US, and has for decades, and is unlikely to move anywhere even after retirement, so was probably a good move. And he can add his voice to other voters in their attempt to change the collision course in this year's elections.

That said, anyone who is seriously thinking of returning to their places of origin after acquiring US citizenship, be aware that you will have obligations to the IRS for the rest of your life, and those obligations can really cause issues when owning a business. And also inheritance and capital gains issues. Many Canadian dual citizens are stuck with these problems, particularly those who happened to be born and were young children while their parents were at school in the US but have never lived there since.