Um, dude? If you’re going to pretend to be a Canadian, might be good if you studied up on Canada first.

If instead you’re from one of the more disgustingly backward parts of rural Alberta, you might want to pay attention to what’s been happening in the rest of the country for the last fifty years or so, with emphasis on the past couple of months.

It’s the letter of the law: media shifting is legal in some places where downloading a copy from an unofficial site is not. Also, there are people out there who would not have the first idea where to look for an existing rip.

I dunno about the biggest famine in history—it would take a lot of people dying to match the higher death toll estimates for the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. I could see things getting pretty messed up, though: sharp rises in food prices because of lowered yields, the need for imports going up, profiteering on the international market, lower-income people being unable to buy enough calories to survive. Unfortunately, it’s likely that the urban poor, rather than the rural white people who are the core of the Republican voting base, would be the ones disproportionaly affected.

The US is just itching for a reason to be a victim here.

If they honestly want that, and we don’t give them a reason, Trump will just go ahead and fabricate one. Again.

The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star are still Canadian-owned as far as I know . . . although to be honest, I’m not certain that Canadian billionaire ownership is much of an improvement.

The US could not stop us from committing mass voter fraud. A large percentage of the Canadian population consists of English-speaking white people with accents that are pretty much the same as a large swathe of the United States—the group of people that receive the least scrutiny in most parts of the US. It’s unlikelly they would even be questioned when attempting to vote. (That’s also what makes potential guerilla warfare so messy.)

what would even be different?

The Republicans would immediately become unelectable, for starters, because you’d be adding a lot of population that skews much further left politically than any part of the US. And most of us would be extremely pissed off.

On our side, we’d be getting issues we really do not want with health care (and social services in general) and with gun control.

It would likely all end in guerilla warfare. Or worse. Overall, it’s a bad deal for both sides.

We’re not at the point where we want to burn every bridge with our southern neighbours . . . yet.

I expect the usual game of whack-a-mole will now ensue, with the main repository moving to a new host or changing its name (or both). People sometimes forget that github isn’t the only game in town. Eventually either Nintendo will get tired or the code will end up on a Russian or obscure-nationality server that ignores DMCA notices.

The white is like staring into the Sun.

Sad to say that, because of the capitalization, the first thing that came to mind was “Toronto Sun or Vancouver Sun?” I think they both still have paper editions, so they’d be at least white-adjacent . . .

If the system is functioning correctly, provincial and territorial taxes are collected from everyone in the province or territory and the services they fund are disbursed where they are the most helpful, not to the people who paid the most in. Sometimes that means that money flows from a larger population to a smaller one, if the smaller population’s needs are greater.

I take it you’ve never lived in a rural or remote community. They tend to be disproportionately underfunded and impoverished (and in the Territories, many of the people living in those places are from Indigenous or mixed-race backgrounds, whice opens a whole other can of worms).

Not that couriering a few pills up to sit on a shelf along with the painkillers and disinfectants requires a lot of funds—I’d guess less than $100/community/year, and it would have to be a pretty sad place if the inhabitants aren’t paying even that in taxes. We are not talking about surgical abortions here. We are talking about a few bloody pills that can be prescribed as necessary via pre-existing telemedecine setups if no one on site is qualified, and disbursed by the nurse running the clinic.

(Edit: I admit that I’m assuming the Territories use a similar model to remote Ontario communities like Kashechewan, where the government will fund nursing stations for communities of a couple of thousand that are largely inaccessible by land.)

Not unless free transport, and free accommodations for those who have to travel for more than a couple of hours in each direction, are also provided. The government could stock abortion pills at more remote clinics—I mean, unless there’s some unusual shelf-stability issue I don’t know about. They just don’t.

My car is 25 years old and never ran anything over.

That’s in part because your car is 25 years old. Designs have changed over time to increase the sizes of blind spots (as an unintended consequence of things like strengthening the support pillars for the roof to increase rollover survivability).

Some countries won’t allow you to declare your work to be in the public domain (although Canada isn’t one of them). Declaring it CC-0 does about the same thing while working around that issue.

Nope, “toonie” is the nickname of the two-dollar coin and perfectly fine in context. (I suppose it’s also a double-whammy, since I don’t recall the US having a two-dollar denomination . . .)