Addendum: I was offered a (very small) discount on my insurance if I agreed to load a spyware app on my phone and keep it running while I drove. Of course, I declined. But this is the direction the industry is heading.

"We're looking at this in extremely high resolution, where we see every minute, every second that you drive your car, your Tesla,"

Translation: "Now that we can surveil you, we can sell your personal data to subsidize your insurance rates. We'll pass along some of that money to keep you happy and to continue to allow us to surveil you."

I don't live in the USA, so I'm watching the shitshow there from somewhat afar.

I do think non-USA countries are going to have to start demanding proof of vaccination from travelers arriving from the USA. What with the vaccine "recommendations" barfed out of the stupid pieholes of this administration, the USA is going to be the new polio and measles epicenter.

Better hope it doesn't hallucinate too badly. Explaining second-degree burns on your family jewels might be a bit difficult.

They're the #2 company in the business!

It seems the official White House account also thinks there are penguins in the Arctic.

Honestly, what saves the world from the fascist Trump regime is the staggering stupidity and incompetence of the clowns running it.

It doesn't matter what Canada does. Trump will throw a hissy fit.

If we try to appease him, we look weak and he punishes us.

If we act in our own interests, he has a tantrum and punishes us.

So fuck it. Canada should do what's good for us and do our best to decouple from the United States.

Carney provisionally accepted pending more details, but then was uninvited by the Toddler-in-Chief who had a hissy fit at Carney's Davos speech.

Hegseth is too busy at the Department of War Crimes.

Edit: Almost no country in Europe. Monaco is a real outlier.

More than 80% of Americans live in urban areas.

And of course, no country in Europe is as densely populated as New York City. The average population density of Europe is about 630 people per square kilometre and that of NYC is over 11,000 people per square kilometre. There's only one country in Europe with a higher density, and that is the tiny country of Monaco.

I guess they caught him because they could.

I don't think the presence or lack of a Constitution is a problem. I just think the US political system has a really terrible design compared to a Parliamentary system. Additionally, the fact that judges are partisan appointments rather than being recommended by a non-partisan committee of jurists is a huge problem.

In the US, there's an election every two years (for the House) which makes representatives in perpetual campaign mode. And because election dates are fixed, campaigns for President also last the better part of a year. And if you elect a goof like Trump, even if the House and Senate show some backbone, there's no realistic way to get rid of him short of impeachment. That's not likely at all.

Most US tech CEOs have strong antipathy to anything like the EU. Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Ellison, Zuckerberg... they all hate the idea of voters and government actually having a say in anything that doesn't align with their financial interests.

I don't use anything from Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram or Apple. No Amazon, Netflix, Paypal or eBay accounts. I do have an Android phone, alas, but I'm not really dependent on Google for anything. I have a few offline games and other than that, it's just texting and calls. My next phone will be an open-source one.

As for email and calendar, I am de-Googled. Basically, all the big American tech firms could disappear tomorrow and my personal computing environment wouldn't notice. (There'd be worldwide chaos, of course... but my little corner of the Internet would be just fine.)