So in regards to payment cards etc… the CC’s basically have three primary benefits to them: 1. They can do ‘quick’ settlements for in person POS services. 2. They are generally accepted for online payments far more than other methods. 3. They provide access to credit / funds that the customer/user may not normally have access to, in exchange for a high interest rate on amounts owing each month. This also allows people to make larger purchases periodically, and pay off the purchase price over a slightly longer period.

For item 1, the physical cards are not that different than the regular debit cards that get used. There’s nothing ‘technically’ stopping a debit card from being mapped to a line of credit account on a banking system – such a card would be able to get used anywhere debit cards can get used, so pretty good market penetration off the bat. Only thing potentially stopping the tech side would be ‘paper’ agreements with interac etc… but those are ‘easy’ to change with enough demand. So you’d potentially need some adjustments from industry to accommodate this, across the payment switch providers and back end orgs.

For item 3, the availability of credit on those cards / accounts is entirely do-able through a small FI – historically, they offered lines of credit based on ‘signatures’ / ‘a promise to pay’ and good general payment standing at a credit bureau. Canada’s regulators changed much of that, forcing industry to heavily preference real estate backed loans – debt servicing risks for cc ‘personal’ locs are generally offloaded onto the credit card company directly. So the govt would likely need to relax their regulations on this front, otherwise its untenable for a small FI to provide credit based on signatures. In some ways this would likely be better for the end user, in terms of rates and limits, as a smaller FI, especially one that’s cooperative in nature, is less likely to push exploitative rates/conditions.

To clarify how that’s controlled by regulators: in BC as an example, the BC FSA regulates Credit Unions, and it also oversees the Credit Union Deposit Insurance Corporation – the thing that insures the CU’s deposits. Credit Unions pay premiums to CUDIC based on the “risk assessment” of the FSA. The FSA rates you very risky if you do signature loans / stuff not backed by RE or other ‘fully funded’ types of securities (eg. a $5k line of credit, ‘secured’ by a $5k term deposit). The annual cost difference can eat up like 30% of the small FI’s profit, if they’re deemed risky. Unless there was some way to ‘make up’ that loss via the ‘risky loans’, it’s not a viable business decision for CUs to take – especially when you add in the need for slightly increased monitoring for more ‘fluid’ payment accounts. Best to keep the regulators happy, to keep your insurance costs as low as possible. So you’d need govt to change its approach.

For item 2, there are lots of viable options for online payments already – the issue is mostly user adoption and business standardization / app availability. For purchases that aren’t ‘in person’, having a slightly longer settlement time isn’t a big issue – if you’re buying a thing online, in general, who cares if the payment is ‘instant’, or if it takes 15 mins to clear. Things like the interac e-transfers are able to route payments to people in this fashion, and are heavily used in some areas currently – paying trades, paying rent, paying kids extracurricular, and anything where ‘cheques’ use to be a norm. AFTs are also still used for many ‘bigger’ bills/companies, but they’re decreasing in popularity – there are fewer millenials/genZ who are using AFTs for payments, and fewer businesses that go through the process of getting it setup on their end to allow for it. That last parts a similar impediment to adoption of etransfers more broadly – you see CC payment options for most online purchases, but you almost never see e-transfer options… even though they’re functional for regular person to person payments. Having a business email setup with an auto deposit isn’t too difficult – as noted, many small contractors go this route – but its not common at larger businesses… for no particular reason.

All that on item 2, is basically to say you need to get most businesses to adopt a ‘standard’ method for online payments. If every shop you went to had a different ‘payment app’ you had to download, create an account, transfer money to the account, to use the account… it wouldn’t have general end user appeal due to its burden. Credit cards have a simple, ubiquitous standard that’s got a ton of apps and plugins to accommodate – we’d need similar embracing of a, general industry/economy/nation wide approach.

All of these things are do-able, if there’s political will. But only if there’s political will. If you look at the financial industry, they’re generally in bed with US/foreign tech companies these days. Even our govt is run on Microsoft. Getting people to move away from American options would require clear messaging from regulators of “critical infrastructure” industries (like banking), and potentially options for government support as part of those tech migrations (tax breaks to hire specialists/retrain people/develop different apps). Like a positive step would be seeing the BC FSA charge huge “insurance” premiums for Credit Unions which are almost entirely in Microsoft’s cloud / US controlled infrastructure. We don’t see any of that currently – instead, we see regulators like the BC FSA shrugging as the industry debates whether online banking portals should be outsourced to a company in Portugal, one in India, or one in the USA (the Canadian CU Trade association, central1, recently walked away from this service area – with their CEO even getting a bloody business in vancouver award for abandoning it). We likely won’t see anything ‘material’ on this front until after the next election at the very earliest, is my guess. But even then, I doubt they’ll put the kind of urgency on it to avoid this sort of thing becoming a potential issue in trade talks.

pot -> kettle

That was the brits. People always say it was Canada, but it wasn’t. The guys in charge of that raid were in Canada for less then a year, and died later on in the same year they burned the WH - the leaders had spent most of their time on campaigns in EU / northern africa. The troops were all trained in the uk. Canada wasn’t even a ‘country’ for decades after that event – there’s no way we had our own trained army/generals involved. Hell, the (great?) granddaughter of one of the two generals who did it, is Olivia Wilde – from her scottish roots (Cockburn). So not even the guys kids/descendants were Canadian – they became US people in Hollywood.

Lotta Canadians like to take credit for it though, but realistically it wasn’t us.

It’s starting to seem like Canada should issue a travel advisory against going to the USA.

In some ways I hope it doesn’t come to that. In others … I mean, I’d win a friendly bet if it happened, so there’s that.

The states has been moving towards authoritarian corporate control for a long time though. The freedom cities controlled by big tech, setup in whatever country they want, operating outside ‘local’ regulations, with services via satellite and protection via US military, very much fits with what Starlink has done. Techs push for ‘rare earth’ (uranium) is likely about powering these sorts of cities, without needing to rely on a ‘countries’ power grid – to make them autonomous and impervious to local issues.

A few big military powers to allow for the “constant enemy” setup similar to 1984, with a corporate backend to prop up oligarchs that can act based on the whims of the oligarch without fear of repudiation.

Authoritarianism is on a big upswing lately, and egalitarian ideals are busy eating themselves alive – mired in demographic politics. And the conspiracy gremlin in me says it’s been intentional on the part of the democrats/progressive sorts, as they’re just as beholden to ‘rich’ authoritarian leaning tech people as the right wing/republican sorts.

I’d disagree. I know it’s often interpreted along those lines, but it seems a misread on the situation to me. There are quite a few literary critiques on Hamlet that view him and his dilemma as existential angst – a hero torn between ‘duty and doubt’. I think that reading is far more apt than viewing Hamlet as a suicidal emo fop. The very next lines after the famous intro are literally:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them

So… Whether it’s nobler to sit there and get fucked by ‘chance’, or to take up arms and oppose the status quo/issue. That opening clearly establishes the two sides of his deliberations: to suffer the situation, or to take up arms and opposed it – neither of these is equated to dying until the next part, which pivots to death, because he was opposing the king / considering killing his usurper uncle. Not only would that potentially result in his death, but the act of killing in the ‘christian’ mindset would result in his soul being damned in the next life. He spends a huge amount of the play humming and hawing about this sort of stuff, like when he has an opportunity to top the guy, but stops because his uncle is mid prayer – and he doesn’t want to kill him in a way that might accidentally send him on to heaven, if such a thing existed.

Anyhow, the next part supports my read, I think, where he goes through a list of “mundane” offenses. Thees offenses are basically all sleights that someone would be ‘suffering’ as a result of actions of another - they have an external locus, and there’s no explicit reason to think that the ‘response’ with a bare bodkin (dagger) would be directed internally: the oppressor’s wrong (tyrants), the proud man’s boasting (we hear alot of boasting from certain folks…who are blind to the impact on others), the pain of being shunned romantically, the slowness of the law to achieve justice, the insolence of office (putting up with an idiot in a position of power), and the general pain of generally having to put up with those ‘unworthy’ of your efforts. His bridging line there is to finish the list with a note that you could fix most of those situations with a dagger, before finishing it off with:

Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death,

That’s pretty explicitly saying “why would anyone ‘suffer these slings and arrows’ (mundane offenses) if it weren’t for a fear of death by ‘taking up arms against them’ with a dagger?” (to reference it back to the earlier start for cohesion in the reading, which works just fine).

In the speech he also equates inaction to cowardice, and that to effectively being dead. Near the end:

And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

Ie our fear of dying, the uncertainty of what’s next, makes us bear those problems / put up with a lot of crap – it makes us into cowards. Our resolve is diminished by the thought of the challenge / potential death, and the possibility of going to hell if you murder the source of these troubles, to the point that we lose the ability to take action.

And again, a huge amount of the play is literally all about Hamlet, trying to sort out the morality of whether he should kill his usurper uncle – an act which he knows would put his own life in jeopardy and cause potential chaos - let alone put his own ‘immortal soul’ in jeopardy of going to hell, if he accepts the idea of heaven/hell. Not so much Hamlet debating if he should kill himself, but rather if he should kill his uncle. He’s out for revenge, he’s not out to be an emo baby.

Reddit’s seeing membership outflows resulting from their more draconian policies. Reddit boss restarts a competitor platform so that he can try and recapture users by owning his own competition, while trying to pretend like there’s no conflict.

idk. Seems pretty suspect to me. Lemmy seems ‘ok’ for news aggregation, and it has a more community / local vibe to it. For example, I can have more confidence that the feeds I see on Lemmy.ca are more controlled / accountable to Canadians, rather than the heavily Americanized subs that exist in Reddit. And I can pick and choose which other subs to see, with better understanding of the likely biases that I’ll encounter. This sort of end user transparency is really refreshing, especially given the burbling propaganda war being waged by the Americans at present against Canada.

I don’t condone wanton violence either, of course… but at the same time I recognise someone like Hamlet as a tragic hero. His most famous soliloquy, the “To be or not to be” one, is largely about whether you should stand up to tyranny, even though it may cost you dearly to oppose tyrants, or whether you should try and keep your head down and try to profit personally as a coward.

Yes, it’s better to achieve those goals through non violent means, but you need to draw a moral line. Luigi drew his.