Random Dent

Imagine if the future of your country and the lives of millions of people who live there all hinged on you having to fly half way around the world and be filmed trying to be polite to two gibbering morons, and not even in your first language.

Mad respect to Zelenskyy for keeping it together as well as he did TBH.

As a person from Europe living in Canada, I’d say it’s not that we hate Americans, we know there are lots of nice people there and a good chunk of you hate Trump as much as we do. But unfortunately we just kind of have to treat America the country as a hostile nation right now. Given that the US government is directly threatening Canada and actively betraying Europe, there’s not much choice. It just is what it is.

Disclaimer: I don’t speak for all Canadians and Europeans obviously, there are some Trumpy people in Canada and Europe too for some fucking reason. But amongst the people I’ve spoken to about it, that seems to be the general vibe.

Brit here. It’s always been like this, at least for my whole lifetime. I remember in the 90s they were trying to get biometric ID cards going with people’s fingerprints and retina scans on them, and the government has been pretty consistent with trying to undermine encryption, harvest everyone’s metadata etc. Best I can tell, we seem to be the testing ground for any Orwellian nonsense that gets dreamed up, before it gets shipped out to the States and other places.

Presumably his companies must just run themselves, because we seem to be expected to believe that he’s running a rocket ship company, an electric car company, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, moon-lighting as the de facto President of the United States, while also dicking around on Twitter all day long and being one of the world’s #1 gamers and parenting like 15 children or whatever it’s supposed to be now. (Or at least, the ones that are still talking to him I guess.)

Yeah even if they did actually repeal it, which they won’t, it’s really closing the stable door after the horse has bolted at this point IMO.

Because with the current administration, you can say it’s illegal to accept money from so-and-so, and they’ll just go “fuck you” and do it anyway and nobody will will stop them or bring consequences, so … yeah. This is kind of doing time, not talking time.

As someone currently living in Canada, the US is badly fucking up a lot of it’s international relations too. I’ve heard several people here say that even if if the US unfucks itself right away (which it won’t), it’s still going to be a long time before things will be right again.

You don’t go around threatening neighbours and allies like this and then expect to be able to just walk it back overnight.

“We gave him root access, then waited for about the amount of time it would take him to copy off everything he needs, then took it away again so its all good now.”

“Applicable” doing a lot of heavy lifting there

As a European living in Canada, it seems like outside of the States there’s a lot of talk about figuring out how to just carry on without America. And this is going to sound harsh, but TBH even when the US being more chill it’s still kind of a pain in the ass to other countries around the world. There’s always some war that they start and expect everyone else to get involved in or something like that, and for the last decade or so they’ve been flipping between sensible people and Trump every 4 years which makes the whole country wildly unpredictable to deal with. It’s hard to get any sort of international agreement going when it takes a year or two to negotiate, and you know it’s just going to get tossed out a couple of years later anyway.

Also, as a non-American if you complain about the president or say something like “You guys should vote for Harris” during an election, there’s always a swarm of Americans who show up and tell you to butt out and mind your own business, but they don’t seem to get that it is our business because when you elect someone like Trump it fucks up the world. I’m sitting here in Canada, wondering when the tariffs are going to kick in or if America is going to try an annex us, whether the US is going to start a war with the EU over Greenland, or if they’re going to seize the fucking Panama Canal in the next couple of years, which are all things that the president of the USA has openly talked about doing. Not to mention there’s an unelected ketamine-addicted billionaire Nazi running around installing servers in all the government offices with nobody stopping him, who’s also talking about overthrowing the UK government and trying to get the AfD elected in Germany, so who knows what that’s going to do around the world.

Yeah as a non-American, it certainly does look from the outside as if a ketamine-fuelled Nazi is going around just taking over government offices largely unopposed.

I did poke around a bit more and found that I didn’t have the direct mode on, so it was hopping around. Switching that on and doing a direct connection made it much better, like 50Mbps. But that’s still only 25%-ish of the regular speed, whereas I thought it’d be about 50%. But way better than like 2% of the original speed which is what I had before lol.

As a side note, I don’t know if I maybe have something configured wrong but is DAITA supposed to absolutely massacre your connection speed? I assumed it would be slower but my connection goes from ~190Mpbs to 3Mbps when I enable it.

All the more reason this is going to get ugly, even when we wiped them off the planet it only took a century or so before they came back because people are mostly nasty idiots who don’t learn from history.

I suppose the revised plan is going to have to be to wipe them off the planet again and then make sure they stay scared forever.

I think maybe Multihop is the Mullvad equivalent?

Yeah I like my Kobo too. It’s never done anything sketchy as far as I can tell, plus you can sideload things, and if you plug it in via USB it just shows up like regular drive so you can do what you want with it. And also Libby is awesome lol.

Also, Operation Paperclip. A good chunk of post-war US prosperity was built on the work of Nazis who escaped justice and moved there.

I find it’s great for doing all the piddly day-to-day crap that I don’t want to put much brain power into, like writing cover letters and emailing the bank or whatever.

I think as long as it’s used sparingly it can free you up to do stuff you’d rather be doing, but IMO where people go wrong is when they use it to do the stuff they want to be doing as well.

I will say, the timing and the way that all panned out was awfully convenient.

Oh yeah that’s way better lol

Yeah I think the Democrats would have lost no matter who they ran IMO. I think Trump won the second that assassin missed and he did the fist pump in front of the American flag. That’s exactly the sort of shit people eat up.

And it’s funny that Biden’s all pissy about it because I think he actually did play it the best way he could to benefit himself personally - by dropping out he wins no matter what. If Harris had won, he’d have looked heroic for stepping aside and ‘putting country before himself’ or whatever, and now that she lost, he can just say “well I would have won if I’d stayed” which you can’t really prove definitively one way or the other.