I'm going to keep posting this every time I see a reference to US tariffs against Canada.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/

The TL;DR is that tariffs would violate the NAFTA / USMCA treaty in which Canada agreed to respect US copyright law in exchange for free trade. No free trade? Canada doesn't need to respect US copyright any longer and can become a flourishing economy of products to compete with US products that are massively overpriced. Think printer ink and other stuff.

This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we're not running out of raw materials; we're thinking about the problem wrong:

Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.

I read a paper a few years ago that basically said that food insecurity is not a problem with production, but is instead a problem with distribution. The USA throws away enough food to feed another good sized country. I don't know the exact nature of the distribution problem and whether it's a problem of resources or something else, like s political problem.

https://www.openra.net/

You're welcome.

Canada's boss move is to remove the intellectual property laws that the US asked for and let Canadian companies and consumers thrive again.

Canada shouldn't retaliate with US tariffs

It's important to remember that Powell himself does not set the rates, it's decided by a committee which he is currently the chair of. I feel like this fact is absent from much of the news I read/hear surrounding Powell & Fed interest rates.

From MSN:

Powell chairs the central bank’s eight annual meetings. But the other 11 voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, get an equal say on each Fed rate decision via a majority vote.

Also important:

the Fed’s four no-cut calls so far this year have been unanimous.

I realize that the chair is an important role, but am I missing something that replacing 1 person would change the interest rate voting outcome?

This is the FTC's rule, but nothing prevents each and every state from implementing a law to do the exact same thing, except slightly differently than every other state, making it extremely costly for the companies to implement.

An Aeropress. I bought it when work removed the free coffee and was super surprised at how good it tasted vs what they were serving. Later, I found a bean hand grinder that fits right inside the Aeropress plunger and now I take it on work trips, vacation and camping.

It's not fully inclusive for $20 because you need a cup, some way to procure and heat water and beans but still, it's served me well.

It's a super long read, but filled with nuggets that explain exactly how to hit the rich by taking away their money. The TL;DR is to repeal the country's anti-circumvention law then route the subscription money locally.

The Post-American Internet (permalink)

there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

It's hard to convey how much money is on the table here. Take just one example: Apple's App Store. Apple forces all app vendors into using its payment processor, and charges them a 30 percent commission on every euro spent inside of an app.. .. Apple makes $100 billion per year on it. If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.

Those competitors could offer a 90% discount to every crafter on Etsy, every performer on Patreon, every online news outlet, every game dev, every media store. Offer them a 90% discount on payments, and still make $10b/year.

I rather like what the Japanese do, which is to mask up if you are sick, thereby preventing the spread to others. I would like to see statistics to know if it is effective. This could have the same net effect, but impact a smaller population.

Slightly tsngental, as a severe allergy sufferer, I appreciate how the pandemic somewhat normalized masking in public so I can just wear one without people asking me prying questions, assuming I'm a freak (I am, but don't assume it until you get to know me), or moving to a different seat on the bus when I sit down.

This is too defeatist for me. I am upset to see these all over town, but too small minded to do anything about it. I want to start something to pressure community leaders to change, but i worry that i'll make a lot of noise then drop it like i do with everything. I'd love to join with a group.

Despite all the hate, I do have one of these. I used to have a box next to my furnace with a male end, wired up to the switch so that if the power went out for a longer duration in the winter, I could plug the furnace into the generator with an extension cord and heat the house. When the furnace was replaced, I was too lazy to wire up another. A friend who's dad is a master electrician told us that in an emergency, you could flip all the breakers in the box to off including that mains, use a male to male cable to plug the generator into a wall outlet and flip on the furnace breaker and the breaker where the generator is plugged in and power the furnace that way (so long as both circuits were amp rated the same).

Of course, it came with a disclaimer that he'd deny telling us this to the insurance company and a warning that "bad things would happen" if we somehow enabled the mains to the power company.

As a kid, me and a friend bought the game "Leisure Suit Larry" or one of the sequels. It included an age check because of adult content. After asking our age, which we dutifully entered as 19, it would ask questions that only an adult would know, like "who was the US president in 1962?" We would research these questions in my friend's encyclopedia to play the game.

Now, I have all this trivia knowledge in my head due to my childhood quest to see highly pixelated cartoon boobies in 640x480 resolution.

I read somewhere that the thought that you can vote with your dollars makes you feel good and empowered to make choices, but is overshadowed by the fact that doing so means that whomever has more dollars has more votes.

Regarding Congress, I was really hoping that this big fear of TicTok would result in some sort of GDPR type laws which empower the individuals to take control of our personal data, which could also be used to prevent our personal data from being used against us by foreign countries.

Check out the 6th frame again. That seems to be the author's viewpoint.

In my interpretation, it's less about "AI is bad" and more about an employer's need to turn employees into mindless instruction-following drones. It overlaps a bit with Doctrow's thought that your boss wants to replace you with AI not because it's better or faster, but because you will tell her/him that they're an idiot for doing something stupid.

TL;DR: humans have free will and were born to create and impart their ideas upon the world, not blindly follow instructions.

A port scan and then inspection of the ports is a great habit. Another fun thing to do is to set up WireShark to listen to what your fridge's IP address is doing. Who is it calling? How often? What services (ports)? While your fridge may have a DNS server, unless it's been pre-loaded with the internet, it'll need to query another DNS to reach the outside world. DNS is usually unencrypted, so you can see what it's asking to connect to.

Many of these devices announce their services via Bonjour or whatever protocol. It's a way for devices like Alexa to find out that you have a printer, interrogate the printer and then Alexa will tell you that your printer is low on ink and by the way, Amazon has a special sale, just for you.

If anything is unencrypted, check it out (with WireShark). If it is encrypted, there's a chance that you can hijack it with a proxy server. Set up a SOCKS proxy and add a DNS label (I can't remember what it is) to tell the devices in your network that you have a proxy. Block the fridge from the internet and see if it will autodetect the proxy. There are other ways to tell devices that your home network requires a proxy via autodetection & wpad.dat files in specific locations on your network. You can configure your proxy to log all traffic, like WireShark does and then see what's in the payload.

I've done this with limited success on various devices. More mature products like Alexa are locked down. Those cheap home cameras from China are pretty hackable.

Have fun!

I came here to see if it was the early signs of the demise of YouTube. I secretly want all these content producers to move to a privacy-respecting platform, especially those who produce tech or privacy related content.

Now, for why I don't watch videos anymore, the medium isn't as easily consumed by me. I prefer text. At home, it's noisy and I get interrupted every 90 seconds. I lose interest quickly and fast forwarding isn't as easy as scanning text for a topic shift. My mind wanders on some topics, internally exploring that topic deeper. With text, i can just stop reading. With video, i need to realize that I'm processing a thought and hit pause, then rewind a bit. I get interrupted a lot. On the bus, I need to remember headphones and I hate when people shoulder surf. That's harder to do with text. Give me a plain text RSS feed that I can read anytime.

I read an opinion piece that suggested that he is upset that Minnesota is the only blue state in a region of red. Given that Minnesota is primarily white, he felt that he could use the Somali fraud as a way to turn [white] people against the democrats using xenophobia.

Edit: I found the article.

That's a bit harsh. Like my old man always said, "you gotta know when to hold 'em; know when to fold 'em; know when to walk away and know when to run."

To MTG: you're white and white people owned slaves, so you're directly responsible for slavery.