Allow me to posit the following: we could very well be minding our own business but still strongly influence the rest of the world. For example, if a company wishes to do business in America -- the world's largest and most lucrative commercial market -- they must comply with US laws. This is no different than any other country. You may not like it, but that's how commercial business works, and it'd be no different if someone like North Korea had the market everyone wanted. You'd just be complaining about a different country.

Don't like it? Don't do business in the US and you're free to do whatever you want. You'll be excluding yourself from probably 70% of the available market, but you're free to make that choice.

Don't forget, your argument can be turned around quite easily: you could mind your own business and stop trying to tell the US how to do business according to your wants/needs. Funny how that works.

You're blissfully unaware of how national sovereignty works.

Good luck getting the US to accommodate an Interpol extradition request for 4chan and its personnel. There's no reason the US would agree to it since 4chan has violated no US law. So long as 4chan operates in the US exclusively and violates no US laws, they are effectively beyond the reach of the UK government. They could presumably nab some 4chan executive if they ever visited the UK, but all one has to do to avoid that is just not visit the UK.

This is how international legal disputes have been handled since the dawn of international legal disputes. Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

It's about time they admitted to something that was obvious to almost everyone: nuclear power is the only effective path to carbon-free base load power generation. Wind and solar make good intermittent sources, but base load has to be utterly reliable regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That's nuclear.

Getting rid of the nukes was a knee-jerk reaction, not a smart technological decision. The pivot to depending on oil and gas from a potential hostile neighbor just added to the madness.

He financed, produced, starred in, and distributed the film completely independent from the "Hollywood System". For God's sake, how much less "sucked in" can a person be and still have the means to do it at all???

Give the man some credit.

I presume you're referring to the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal? I'll point out this was something perpetrated by the Chinese industry, not American. It was knowingly covered up with the complicity of the Chinese government to prevent it from embarrassing the ongoing Olympics. Only when the scandal became impossible to cover up did the CCP take any action.

As of December 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed have both expressed praise for China and the relationship between San Francisco and Chinese cities.

It's subjective.

My wife and I went to see a couple of movies last year because they were big deals to us (Terrifier 3 and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice). We enjoyed the recliners, the limited edition popcorn bucket merch, the time out together, the reclining seats and the big screen.

What we didn't enjoy was the other people in the theatre talking through the movies, using their cell phones, coughing, breathing loudly, chewing food loudly, opening wrappers etc.

I'm with the parent, personally. If other people still enjoy the theatre experience then there's nothing wrong with that and theatres certainly don't "deserve to die." But there are those of us who don't consider watching a movie to be a social activity, and get extremely resentful and triggered when the presence of other people in the space pulls our heads out of the film we're trying to feel immersed in.

More people die in the aggregate when censorship is status quo. You start by censoring things you feel are absolutely justified because, allegedly, those ideas "cost lives." But then someone comes along with different ideas as to what is justified. Maybe they are threatened by ideas that challenge their power status. Soon enough science, research, innovation, investigative journalism .. .things that objectively improve people's lives and save many more lives than a virus has ever taken are silenced out of fear of repercussions for saying the wrong thing.

Freedom of speech is not a "laudable ideal". It is a fundamental human right that exists because reason is our primary tool of survival as human beings. But like with everything, there is good and bad to be found. There are bad actors out there who will lie and cheat and steal. The solution is not to prevent people from being able to share information, no matter how justified you feel in doing so. The solution is to counter bad ideas and lies with better ideas and truths. Individuals will make their own individual choices and face the consequences accordingly. Reality always wins.

My wife recently bought a new laptop and, to both of our surprise, it was configured out of the box to save data to OneDrive instead of C:. She's not particularly tech savvy and one day Chrome complained that storage was full. She did a web search of the error and it recommended deleting data from OneDrive, which she did, assuming that her family pictures were only backed up there - not primarily stored there - and ended up losing important data as a result of this.

Thankfully it must have been that particular OEM that chose to do this. I had installed "vanilla" Windows 11 on a custom PC build and that didn't happen - and we just bought a new laptop for our new business, different brand, and that was the first setting I checked (not an issue).

Still... companies pushing this type of crap on users is just batshit. Offer as an option, sure. But fundamentally re-configuring core functionality that people who have been using the OS for decades take for granted is just madness.

No it's not "obvious." My wife and I own 3 properties. One is commercial, the other two are residential. That might paint us as extremely wealthy but neither property is huge. We're fairly middle class. We use both residential properties interchangeably because they're not huge houses and we like our space. We could sell both and move into a single dwelling but we like things the way they are. Especially now that our daughters are adults in their twenties, who still live at home for the time being, but have their friends & significant others stay over quite a bit. I'm too much of an autistic introvert to live with that many other people in the same house 24/7 even if the house were a mansion.

The only reason I pay for the highest tier Netflix account is because of the number of devices allowed. Basically for my wife and daughters. I almost never watch it myself. Every time I open it up I feel like I spend more time scrolling to try and find something to watch than actually watching content. So if Netflix comes after us for "account sharing" I'm cancelling our subscription immediately without thinking twice about it. We're a single family, we just occupy multiple locations most of the time.

And our case is a bit more complicated than people who are talking about paying for a family account that includes kids who are away at school or camp or what-have-you. Or families who travel a lot. My wife and I are magicians (our commercial property is a small theatre and magic shop). This gets me thinking about families that travel for work. Army families or entertainers. Imagine being a Cirque Du Soleil performer - many of whom have kids ... they live on the road most days of the year.

The point is that there is no one-sized-fits-all "family" and it's more common for a nuclear family to occupy multiple locations than many would think.

A lot of us are old enough to have worked through the dot-com bubble and crash. The AI boom over the last year or two feels a lot like the late 90s leading up.

That said, if the market hadn't gone so all-in on the Internet and world wide web, investing stupid amounts of money into so many idiotic crackpot ideas that were doomed to fail, we arguably wouldn't have the Internet that we enjoy today.

In other words, you have to throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what will stick. 90% of just about everything we humans create is unremarkable. It's the 10% that we end up with that matters.

And we will get the 10% out of AI. Which is another way of framing what you are saying.

I've been a pretty big skeptic when it comes to the hype vs actual productivity gains, but that doesn't mean I haven't found a few areas where it has been useful in my workflow. LLMs are a cool magic trick. They can create some breathtaking illusions and are exceptionally useful at a few narrow applications such as searching and pattern matching.

While I don't want to see the ugly side of the crash (layoffs and unemployment), I am looking forward to when the hype train is over so everyone shuts up about their overstated fantasy and we can get on with doing actual work. The blockchain hype was annoying too, but since it wasn't obvious how blockchain could be applied to all types of work we didn't hear every single CEO at every single company talk about how AI is going to fundamentally change the way we work.

I use LibreOffice writer all the time, have for years (I'm old enough to say that I've used Star Office), and wish it all the success in the world ... but it has issues.

The thing that drives me crazy the most is when I select [highlight] some text in order to change the formatting (make it bold, italic, underline etc.) and it changes the formatting of surrounding text. Lists have similar issues when you're trying to add some preexisting text to a list but not other text.

The only reasons I have for reaching for a word processor over a text editor is a) rich text formatting b) print features c) embedded images, tables etc. and d) import/export of other document formats.

If a word processor can't make text styling/formatting painless then it is not ready for prime time IMO. That's one of it's most primary basic features that people just take for granted in any WYSIWYG editor.

Right, just like it's impossible for an English speaking Canadian to communicate with people from Japan or Germany. I mean ... no one has ever solved that problem *rolls eyes*.

To me the fundamental issue at hand is the role of the government and individual freedom and liberty. My operating definition of liberty is an environment in which all interpersonal relations are consensual.

In order for two parties to communicate with each other, there must first be an intent to communicate. When that intent exists, the mechanisms will be negotiated between those parties.

For a 3rd party to enter the picture and dictate the mechanisms under threat of force is morally wrong in my opinion. There is no justification for that.

The only narrow area that I can think of is when government adopts a policy that says "For the purposes of communicating with the government, specifically, these are the languages that we promise to support."

That is no different than private individuals saying "If you want to communicate with me, these are the languages and tools that you can use to reach me."

I don't know what makes business so "special" or different that you would hold them to a standard above that of the government. Food labels? You might as well say that a company is required by law to print food labels in every single language that exists on the planet... as their may be some customer that walks into the store that doesn't speak English or French (to keep this within Canada). That would be absurd.

Government's job is not to "protect" a language. Government's job is to protect the rights of each and every individual that exists within it's operating jurisdiction. Those rights include the right to express yourself freely and to associate freely. Compelling that communication between private individuals take a specific form is to infringe upon the rights of those individuals.

There is no "middle ground" here. Either two parties are able to communicate using whatever means THEY chose, or some other 3rd party is interfering forcibly under threat of punishment. That latter scenario is not "middle ground", it's the illegitimate initiation of force against individuals who are just living their lives and going about their business. The fact that they are choosing to do so using a language or tool set that you don't like or approve of is none of your business and doesn't hurt you in any way. Go read a book or something and stop worrying so much about the private lives of others, you authoritarian nutter.

You're not missing something. Much like Disney's "Snow White" was called a "success" despite bombing both at the box office and on streaming, the corporate media stooges will blithely state the complete opposite in an attempt to hide abject failure. Ubisoft is no different.

AC fans waited years to get a game with samurai's based in feudal Japan. What they got is a "samurai" game with no actual Japanese samurai protagonist. Ubisoft's reason for this is painfully obvious to everyone. This is why Japanese consumers have largely rejected it and has a lot to do with why sales have tanked overall.

There's a saying for this that ends with "go broke." It's slipping my mind at the moment, but I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.

If more companies would not only put a monetary bounty on these crooks but also specify "dead or alive," perhaps it would start to put a dent in their activities. They're already operating from countries that either look the other way or actively assist them in their activities. Putting a death mark on them ups the stakes considerably and allows the use of...ahem...alternate actors...ahem...that can operate beyond the law to get actual results.

[Citation Needed]

I'm Canadian. Private practice is ILLEGAL here. I don't even want to jump in to the argument about whether single-payer or multi-tier or the Canadian vs the US system is better or worse. I'm just stating the facts as I know them to be as a Canadian. At least it is in Ontario, it might differ for other provinces, there are no private options. I get to choose the public one or the public one. If I wanted to pay out of pocket to go visit a private clinic somewhere, that doesn't exist.

Stop spreading misinformation.