adespoton

Whenever I hear about Canada and the White House in the same sentence, it reminds me of that little event in 1812….

How about we delay it for… hmm… four years and three months?

Thank you, CBC. I’ve had it with PostMedia.

BC citizens like to flip, because they don’t want to vote for anyone who hasn’t kept their election promises?

We’ve always been fickle.

https://birdsarentreal.com/

The US already does that :D

Er, he voted for Harris? I’m pretty sure he understands the situation.

But even those who didn’t… I can understand why someone being repeatedly punched in the stomach would have difficulty deciding who to call their leader between the person punching them and the person off to the side jumping up and down saying “Ooh… let ME have a turn!” They know that voting for a third party will still end up with one of these two punching them, so the reasoning shifts a bit.

One part of this is history.

Canada and the US were British colonies; Mexico was a Spanish colony.

When some of the British colonies declared independence, they still had to trade with the colonies that hadn’t. People had relatives on both sides, the postal systems were integrated, indigenous people were mistreated in the same manner, and the list goes on. Culturally, the two remained very similar while the political systems differed.

Stuff coming from England often ended up in Toronto or New York; both of these cities became hubs of publication.

This is the way the relationship stayed pretty much up until NAFTA in the 1990s; books had already had over a century of being published in Toronto and New York for distribution across English North America.

Mexico had a different history, and a different relationship with California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Instead of Mexico being a route for culture and European goods to enter the US, it was a source of cheap labor once slavery was abolished.

Unlike Canada where the most influential Canadians lived right along the border, in Mexico the influential Mexicans lived further south, with itinerant workers living along the border.

NAFTA changed the balance of trade somewhat, but it didn’t change the already established cultural norms or the places people lived.

One clarification: carrier towers can still find a phone; GPS is passive; your phone locates itself in relation to the GPS satellites.

Most phones are also broadcasting WiFi MAC IDs and Bluetooth MACs, plus hardware and capability strings over Bluetooth. And then any apps you’ve got loaded may also be calling home with your location unless you have that disabled and rotate your ad ID regularly.

[edit] also worth pointing out that even if you turn a smartphone “off” it still pings the local cell towers with its IMEI regularly. Surprised me the first time I witnessed that.

Exactly; email is digital post cards and always has been.

Of course, that means I can encrypt a message and use someone else’s email account to send it :)

I have a LinkedIn account. It has the list of recent jobs I’ve held and my education.

That’s my social media presence.

Things like Lemmy are my secondary presence that I keep anonymous.

It’s never been an issue during my background checks. But then, if anyone ever dared to ask me about my lack of presence, I’d give them a level stare and tell them that I practice what I preach.

So what this really tells us is that Republicans are staying solid at 1/3 the voting population, and fewer people are identifying as Democrats.

…on procedural or technical grounds.

That’s the important bit; I had been thinking that they were just dodgy complaints, but it’s really that the forms weren’t filled out correctly or the right paper didn’t get to the right person on time.