There are lots of ways to get satellites in polar orbits.

Of course there are, but the customers are mostly not at the poles, so any times the satellites spend at the poles is wasted.

and also allow as a path to reinvigorate our domestic aerospace defence industry.

Avro Arrow centenary edition in 2059.

Do you mean Thiel?

Vance may be much smarter than Trump (low bar) and have actual plans for evil, vs. doing awful things on a whim. But, JD Vance doesn’t have Trump’s cult of personality. Whoever comes after Trump will return to the same normal relationship that a president has with their party. With the modern GOP that means intense squabbling and infighting. I doubt a president Vance could get much if his evil plan passed, even if the GOP did still control all the branches of government.

Geostationary satellites orbit at a height of 35,000 km. That means there’s a huge lag, making the satellites unsuitable for interactive Internet, and it also means they’re far away, so you need a big directional antenna to send data to them.

Starlink is awful, but you definitely don’t want geostationary satellites for Internet.

Neither are satellite orbits.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/llustration-of-two-X-Y-paths-with-different-X-component_fig5_347273912

Canada doesn’t need satellites, Canada needs fibre. Satellites are a terrible idea.

So, this is some kind of “model UN” thing?

Apparently Trump of the North Poilievre has been trying out “carbon tax Carney” as a nickname. And this despite Carney saying he’ll repeal the carbon tax. (Probably a good electoral move, despite the carbon tax being a good idea).

Anyhow, I don’t think a guy whose obvious nickname is “little PP” should be opening the door to the nickname game.

The Liberals and Conservatives aren’t going to do election reform. First past the post is a massive benefit to both of them.

I hope the next guy who Luigi’s a CEO legally changes his/her name to John Smith or Jane Johnson or something extremely common.

I’m curious, what was hard to figure out? I assume it was something federation-related?

I never really had a problem figuring things out (though I’m sure there are still things I could learn). The only difficulty was that when I was subscribing to communities, it was sometimes hard to know which was the “main” or “most popular” community. For instance, there are half a dozen fairly big gaming communities spread across various lemmy instances. Some get more posts, some get more comments. Reddit also had a few different gaming-related communities, but it was easier to figure out which were the bigger ones and which ones had a slightly different focus.

My point that we’re never going to see another user influx on the scale of the summer 2023

You never know. When Digg did a redesign basically all the Digg users fled to Reddit. You never know what is going to be the last straw. And since we’re dealing with network effects, there can be this feedback mechanism where people leaving leads to more people leaving. It’s hard to predict when something’s going to tip over.

IMO, it’s just a matter of time. Reddit wasn’t profitable and now that they’re public their investors are going to demand growth and profit. That means enshittifying the site, and one of those changes is going to be too much. It could go on for years, but I’d be shocked if Reddit is still around in 10 years.

If you say so.

In the past this wasn’t true, but it’s definitely true for new tech products.

There are 2 reasons for that, IMO.

1. Tech investors expect year after year, decade after decade of serious growth
2. Tech these days is not something you buy, it’s rarely even something you rent, it’s often free and paid for by shoving ads at you

That means that they can’t just land on a good product and stick with it. They have to keep changing it to try to get more engagement, more use, more growth.

Why do you need all those things to be in one single app?

I really like the CBC, and it’s the news source I use most often.

But, even if the CBC isn’t your preferred source of Canadian news, you should still support their continued funding. They’re the only major news source that doesn’t rely on advertising or subscriptions. That means their coverage doesn’t have to be sensational, it doesn’t have to avoid offending advertisers. Some people might worry that it does have to worry about offending the government, but it’s been almost 80 years and they keep reporting the facts on the ground. That’s not like the Bezos-owned Washington Post who are having to completely recalibrate how they report things to suit his preferences.

Even if you don’t like the CBC, they keep every other media outfit in line by just being a facts-based alternative that people can switch over to. And sure, they have some institutional bias, they’re conservative in the old sense of changing slowly and respecting norms and traditions. But, personally I blame a lot of the chaos in the US on there not being a CBC-equivalent.

The US doesn’t have any calm, boring, state-funded national media outlet that everybody grudgingly agrees is more or less honest. Sure, they have NPR and PBS but those are not on the same scale per capita as CBC. And, while they’re publicly funded, they’re not proper news gathering and reporting organizations like CBC news.

It’s not enough to have news sources that are not biased towards left or right. Just look at CNN. It’s generally not seen as a GOP or Democratic news org. But, it’s still extremely sensationalist. Rather than covering important political news, they’ll show car chases or fires or whatever prevents people from changing the channel.

We lose CBC and we get the Fox-Newsification of Canada, misinformation and disinformation spreading so nobody knows what’s true anymore. That kills the country.

Any NATO member increasing their military spending would be idiotic to spend their money with US-based companies.

No, because Canada’s economy will collapse long before the US economy if each side just keeps increasing tariffs. What Canada needs to do is make things cheaper for Canadians, not more expensive.

Take any law related to US intellectual property and decriminalize that.

Violating the copyright on Hollywood movies? Go for it. No charge.

Something you want to do is covered by a patent held by an American? Do it, you won’t be prosecuted.

Want to bypass DRM on a tractor, a printer, an iPhone, sell or give away tools to allow anybody else to do it? Feel free.

The biggest advantage of this approach is that if the US did the same thing with respect to Canadian IP, they’d have so much less to work with. The US has geared its economy towards producing IP, and then used trade deals to demand that other countries respect that IP or the US will put tariffs on their stuff. Well, clearly the US isn’t holding up its end of that bargain, so fuck 'em.

Yeah, I remember watching speeches by Hitler back when I was in school. I didn’t understand German so I didn’t know what he was saying, but I could at least appreciate that the Nazis knew how to project power and competence.

I always understood the fascist aesthetic to be something very macho, very serious-seeming, etc. I always thought the idea was that you had an incredibly charismatic strong-man leader who had all the answers. And, given that, I could understand how people could be taken in.

But, the MAGA aesthetic is so ugly. Their rhetoric is so unserious. Their leader is so old, fat and caked in orange makeup, and he sounds like an absolute moron. The people attending the rallies do comical things like wearing diapers. And yet, half the US looks at that and thinks: yeah, I’ll vote for them.

And then there’s Elon Musk. Every time he opens his mouth it’s less and less believable that anything he ever did was the result of skill or competence. Any time he talks about programming or system administration it’s clear he has no fucking clue what he’s talking about. When he talks about gaming he claims he’s one of the top players in the world, and yet it’s obvious he’s barely played the games involved. But, apparently Americans are so brainwashed that being rich means you’re “a genius”.

I hated George W. Bush, but at least I could understand how some people found his schtick endearing. I could understand how he harnessed people’s fear and hate and turned it into support for his “war on terrah”. But, with Trump my opinion of Americans has gone down to the lowest level ever. This is what works for you? Really??

Because Trump has a toddler’s level of understanding of how international trade works, along with a toddler’s tendency to throw tantrums when challenged.