You really can't weaken Canada much more than it is.
466 karma · joined February 9, 2022
And, if it wasn't a joke, then that's even more of a reason to consider meeting your 2% NATO agreement instead of just phoning it in.
Canada has relied greatly on the United States providing a blanket defense guarantee of the continent. The Canadian military is currently operationally worthless across the board, save the cyber domain. There are many reasons for it that I'm not here to list out. However, that does come with grave consequences geopolitically and the Canadian government has been living in the 1900s.
The USA, via Alaska, provides Canada against Russian provocation on the West Coast[0]. This is similar to the near constant probing of NATO states airspace, especially countries near Ukraine [1][2]
The Canadian Navy is severely underfunded (along with the rest of the Canadian Armed forces)[3] with not enough ships to actively patrol and protect it's waters, especially in the North.
The North passages are incredibly important, and will become more important as trade routes. The entirety of the US wanting to buy Greenland is as a part of having an Atlantic outpost to control those shipping lanes. Those trade lanes can be significantly shorter than routes using Suez or Panama canals.
In addition to the trade routes, the US fears a Russian and Chinese alliance because of the access that grants to the North Atlantic. Point blank: Nato cannot build ships anymore, and the PLAN capacity is staggering. This is already independent of CN and RU intelligence probing of the entirety of the west coast.
The world has changed dramatically, and the only thing that really changed in November is that the USA is no longer pretending it can defend the mainland, defend NATO countries, and police shipping lanes on their own. The USA doesn't have the capacity to replace ships, nor do they have the knowledge anymore to do so.
[0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-planes-alaska-us-fighter...
[1]- https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_237721.htm
[2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Russian_drone_incursion_i...
[3] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-greenland-panama-canal-wh...
Generally the government (as of now) is not paying private (but maybe some Critical Infrastructure companies) companies to secure things. We are in the very early stages of figuring out how to hold companies accountable for security breaches, and part of that is figuring out if they should have stopped it.
A lot of that comes down to a few principles:
* How resourced is the defender versus the attacker? * Who was the attacker (attribution matters - (shoutout @ImposeCost on Twitter/X) * Was the victim of the attack performing all reasonable steps to show the cause wasn't some form of gross negligence.
Nation state attacker jobs aren't particularly different from many software shops.
* You have teams of engineers/analysts whose job it is to analyze nearly every piece of software under the sun and find vulnerabilities.
* You have teams whose job it is to build the infrastructure and tooling necessary to run operations
* You have teams whose job it is to turn vulnerabilities into exploits and payloads to be deployed along that infrastructure
* You have teams of people whose job it is to be hands on keyboard running the operation(s)
Depending on the victim organization, if a top-tier country wants what you have, they are going to get it and you'll probably never know.
F5 is, at least by q2 revenue[0], we very profitable, well resourced company that has seen some things and been victims of some high profile attacks and vulns over the years. It's likely that they were still outmatched because there's been a team of people who found a weakness and exploited it.
When they use verbage like nation-state, it's to give a signal that they were doing most/all the right things and they got popped. The relevant government officials already know what happened, this is a signal to the market that they did what they were supposed to and aren't negligent.
[0] -https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/earnings-q2-f...
It's also about the market accessibility and penetration. When the base level MBA at it's lowest RAM settings is reliably running AAA games is when you might see more interest in the platform from those studios because much like the iOS market, people running Mac tend to be more readily monetized, especially through things like in-game cosmetics.
We have decades of training in the consumer market for very simple install patterns using UIs, and minimal messing with configurations. The people in gaming who overclock and tweak their settings are a huge minority in gaming. Those people are the ones most likely to be able to grok switching to Linux, but when they get there and find that most of their favorite apps don't work like they are used to, they go back to Windows or Mac.
My hypothesis is that for Linux Gaming to truly take off, you'll need a true desktop (not steamdeck which i use weekly) that makes it a handful of "clicks" to get whatever they want installed working. That means you'll need a commercially backed OS where developers maintain all the things needed to support near infinite peripheral connections for a variety of use cases, clear anti-cheat interfaces, and likely clear DRM hooks as well.
This is partially why major (effective) anti-cheats have migrated to the Kernel. Windows allows the big-budget games, which are often competitive games, to operate with a higher level of game integrity, which leads to more revenue generation.
MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series or similar quality device which prices a large part of the current windows gaming audience out.
As an example: it's not too expensive to buy a laptop that runs valorant, and then be funneled into the skin shop. You can get a lot more sales that way than you can through the crowd of people who are on MBP, though perhaps the MBP crew is more likely to be a whale.
note: Valorant is not supported on MacOS due to the anticheat requirement, but the hypothetical still stands.
This was only really doable because Riot has invested significantly in buying dark fiber and peering at major locations worldwide [1][2]
[0] - https://technology.riotgames.com/news/peeking-valorants-netc... [1] - https://technology.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-t... [2] - https://technology.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-t...
New activist ownership has pushed to diversify frames and phase out reliance on the 737 frame which is significantly more inefficient than modern frames. Boeing doesn't want to make 737s, but they are locked in because of this demand.
Source: Family member trains pilots at Southwest after retiring from a major airline carrier after a career as pilot/check-airman.
Marine Corps order for MP and armed guard standard is round in chamber, weapon on safe, slide forward, hammer down. It stands to reason that is the standard case for all military LEO.
All that to say, anyone who says you shouldn't have a round in chamber is living in a fantasy world.
That said: this mite problem is because of our industrial agricultural practices by bringing invasive species into the country to create a honey industry. The solutions to this are generally a combination of the below (at a high level):
1. Evolutionary arms race where scientists in academia and industry consistently try to find or invent new molecules that will harm nearly exclusively the mite, or perhaps genetically engineer a more resistant honeybee
2. Improve sterilization practices and protect existing swarms, and quickly identify mite infestations that could wipe the colony out.
3. Change of keeping practices to more accurately mimic nature, which is a challenge, because these bees are not native to the ecosystem, and native bees do not face these pressures because of a variety of reasons in the colony life-cycle.
This article is not about how impactful the "efficiency improvements" the government did by removing stability and the ability to plan long-term that occurred earlier this year. That was, at best, a drop in the bucket for this specific problem. You gotta stop looking at who is currently in charge when you're looking at a problem that initially was identified in 1987[0].
[0] - https://tsusinvasives.org/home/database/varroa-destructor
"Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal."
This is to be expected, eventually evolution will produce a small amount of a species that is resistant to a chemical, then those will likely be hyper successful at breeding. Honeybees are not native to the Americas, it seems like we've imported a major feast for these mites. Perhaps there's another organism that preys on these mites. Nature often provides the a cure with the poison.
[0] - https://choosenatives.org/articles/native-bees-need-buzz/
Also, the incentive structure for reward (stock price etc) is predicated by squeezing every last bit of monetization out. They already know ahead of time how much money a new feature could bring in, and the potential litigation cost before hand. If revenue > litigation/fine expense, they are going to do it.
When the Republicans eventually lose power, a more refined version of this playbook will be executed by the next team.
I literally just finished up writing up something that does supply chain provenance checking across 9 languages and still have a lot of edge cases to handle. It's not fun, but it's honest work.
China doesn't want USA doing that, and banned their social media. USA doesn't want China doing it because they've been doing it all over the world to everybody since Radio Free Europe, and likely before.
Much more emphasis on "homework" being readings to prepare for lecture. Lecture to cover salient points, but then to reinforce with in person labs, and then the actual "lab" credit in an isolated environment with access to AI tooling network blocked.
I think AI is forcing us to think about what learning actually means, and to rethink how much the ability to think matters, what understanding means, and what knowledge we need to operate in today's world. It will take some getting used to.
You can sit around and wait for "The Science" or you can be a data point for yourself.
Assuming that's true, TikTok, at the behest of the CCP, can (and will) amplify the reach of that outrage to an outsized impact. If the outrage is 5% of TikTok users in the given nation, and that 5% is thrown into the FYP of 50% of the users in that nation, that's an impact that any power that be dreams to have.
1.) How Chinese companies interact with the CCP: they are 100% subservient with a CCP party member who can pull the CEO in at anytime and assign them tasks related to studying Xi thought and other party material, as well as demand the company do anything for the state.
2.) What great power competition looks like including economic warfare (tariffs, massive state subsidies to protect national defense, influence operations for allies, securing raw materials, reducing reliance on rivals, etc).
3.) How espionage in general works in support of political aims, and especially how each nation uses it to further their goals. For China, it's always been about vacuuming up as much data as possible, and then later on finding use cases for it. The disruption side of their practices are successful if they make chaos in an adversary that forces them to spend time on dealing with that instead of confronting them. Each nation acts in their own interest and are absolutely ruthless here in a way the average person rarely can comprehend.
4.) The free pass given to China related to tech and social media industries. American Social Media is banned in China[1]. Why do you think that is? There are many reports/cases of American intel/military use cases of social media to influence outcomes worldwide[2]. China wasn't going to allow this. But we are supposed to allow them access to us? We know this is the case because we would do the same in their position[3]. There's a reason it's banned in India[4].
5.) We know China influences the Douyin algorithm[5] locally to promote behaviors the government perceives as healthy or important to state interests. This often manifests in pushing more STEM related content and suppressing the ragebait content that flourishes in other nations[6].
Even if the leadership of Bytedance were 100% on board with not pushing CCP interests to the USA and world, there's no mechanism of protection or redress from them. The CCP can, and will, disappear high profile people at will with no repercussion, and replace you with someone who will listen. Any smart nation who wants to protect the minds of their citizens would do well to extremely regulate social media in their country.
In your case for "Americans upset over Israeli treatment of civilians". Assuming that the American outrage is 100% organic on it's own: It is in the best interest of China to amplify that outrage and make it seem stronger than it is for a variety of reasons:
A. This will have knock on effects for policy makers and their aides who are hyper-tuned in because if their constituents want something, voting for that is how B. Anything that disrupts American foreign policy and allies is an asset at weakening the grip the dollar has on international markets C. Israel is an extremely talented producer of technical people. If the relationship between the USA and Israel sours, then suddenly a pathway opens for China to get access to the incredible tech that Israel develops for various US programs. (This is also ignoring their incredibly advanced spyware capabilities in their private sector, which is morally repugnant, but it does exist).
[0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07663 [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma... [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.reddit... (look at the most addicted cities) [3] - https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-... [4] - https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-bytedance-ban-china-india-... [5] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j0xzuh-6rY [6] - https://networkcontagion.us/reports/the-ccps-digital-charm-o... [7] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/25/the-growing-li...
Gaming was not socially acceptable for a long time. This lead to people who play games being ostracized, and then moving into the gaming industry. Here they find others who were ostracized for gaming, and it becomes an island of "misfit toys" so to speak. These people who were likely bullied or otherwise harmed for the formative years of their life don't want others to experience the things they did.
This is why "DEI" took off so heavily in games. The workforce by and large had shared experiences of being outcasts. This new mindset claims to elevate those who are marginalized. It created a galvanizing effect where the people genuinely believe they are fighting for whats right. Now they belong to a team, when they really haven't belonged to before.
This workforce is also highly likely to be online more than normal people. People can self select into their echo-chamber of choice which reinforces these beliefs. Now they can say "we are putting {representation} in {game}" and they will be cheered by the groups they've self selected into.
I cannot stress enough, these are almost all genuinely good people, who are convinced they are doing the right thing. Combine this with the way that gamers/internet people give opposing view feedback, and you can see why some dig their heels in. It's not something that's a simple solve socially as "creating an AI game studio".
This also ignores most of the economics of generating good games, especially anything that becomes an online service. There's a reason Tencent has their hands in everything.
Legal basis is ever shifting based on the regional locale. As n+1 requirements pop up, it's only natural to release things like GenChess in the place that requires the least friction, especially when it is not a revenue generating event.