I would say: Tariffs are almost always automatically bad. The only IMO valid use of tariffs is when a foreign country is dumping goods or services on you below cost in order to destroy your domestic industry. Which is actually the business model of a lot of Internet companies, actually... get the people hooked on cheap or free producs/services and then when there's no competition, raise prices.

Reminds me of this French commercial. You don't need to understand French to get it.

Libertarian tech bros justify xenophobia. Film at 11.

I still send and receive lots of emails from friends and family. Could be my demographic as a late-50s Gen-X type.

The other main use is, as you say, as an identifier for logging on to various online services. My spam software blocks close to 100% of spams, which average about 5 per day... (241 spams in the period from 2025-12-05 through 2026-01-20) which is certainly nothing overwhelming.

Yep. If the US continues on its current trajectory, it would not surprise me if most/all European countries boycotted the FIFA World Cup.

My guess is greed. Hosting email today is not any more difficult or expensive than it was 5 years ago. I know this because I've hosted my own email since about 2002.

Anti-spam isn't more complex today than it ever was. I know this because I ran an email security company from 1999 through 2018 and I still use our anti-spam product, and it still works very well.

So yes. Greed.

No.

Email is great. Everyone bitches about it, but nothing has come along to replace it and nothing will, because it has a unique set of features that no other messaging platform has.

I don't think anyone asserted that the messages weren't sent by the people who purported to send them. In fact, Steven Fennel, for the trustees, said: 'The fact the identity of the sending account is clear does not mean that messages from that account are "signed".'

So it was only the second of your reasons that kicked in... not any doubt about the validity of the sender's identity.

Netflix is too "woke" [sic], so you switched to Disney+?

I suffered through having to read LoTR in Grade 12 English. Of course any movie based on that would have to be interminably long.

Tolkien is one of those authors that you either love or you hate, and enough people love his work to make the movies a success.

However, IMO movie-makers should shorten their damn films and cut out so much fluff. I maintain that if you can't tell your story in 100-110 minutes, you don't know how to tell a story.

I really don't know where to begin to respond to this nonsensical article. But somehow, I managed to live about 75% of my life without a smart phone (and indeed, probably 60% without a mobile phone) and my cognitive abilities are OK.

There is one kernel of truth in the article, though... it's getting harder and harder not to have a smart phone. For example, if you want to see a concert, a lot of venues require you to have the Ticketmaster app for those annoying mobile tickets with the moving blue bar. That's super-annoying and a giant imposition on the public.

I've already reduced the amount I buy online, having canceled by Amazon and eBay accounts. This crap will just push me even harder to shop in person at real stores staffed by real people.

The number of people in the US might be the highest ever, but is the number of college-aged people the highest ever? I doubt it. The US population, like populations pretty much everywhere, is aging.

Yes. I think Canada should follow the European model for tuition, but that's not a popular opinion here, unfortunately.