merc

We've got an intelligence apparatus that has every message every one of us has ever sent electronically, and probably microphone data from every Internet connected device we've ever been in earshot of

Hahaha, no. The idea that devices with microphones are always spying on you is absurd. It just doesn't happen. It couldn't happen due to how much power and bandwidth it would require. And if they were it would be the corporations spying, and not the government. As for emails and text messages, sure. The US may collect a lot of data, but they can't process a lot of data. Look how many violent attacks there have been in the US, and how few have been prevented

They're really bad at spotting anything before it happens. When attacks fail, it's almost always because the attacker screwed up, not because the spies found out ahead of time. The Nazi who tried to drive a U-Haul into the White House wasn't stopped by spies, he was stopped by a security barrier, even though he'd been planning the attack for 6 months.

But, there's always a small chance that they'll stumble on you if you're plotting something.

Still i think that the US has the unique situation of having relatively well armed civilians

This is a double-edged sword. In other countries the government is really reluctant to have the military shoot protesters, because the protesters are civilians and, pretty much by definition, unarmed. If the police or military do shoot protesters, the undecided public is very likely to turn against the government for slaughtering innocent, unarmed civilians.

In the US, police are terrified of civilians, and are more than willing to shoot them. Civilians are fairly likely to be armed, so if the government claims that the civilians shot first, a lot of people will believe them.

Trump started claiming the election was fraudulent on November 4th. He spent a month and a half riling up his base, telling them the election was stolen. Eventually on December 19th he set a date for his rally on Jan 6th, setting a firm date and giving his supporters 18 days to prepare.

The US is big, and getting to DC is expensive and difficult, and it takes a long lead time to make something like that happen. It's now just one month since Trump took power, and although his chaos started immediately, it took weeks for it to build up to something that people might be willing to travel to DC to protest.

These things take time.

Street protests are one of several necessary activities for a change movement

Yes, name any successful movement for political change that didn't involve street protests.

✅ French revolution ✅ Suffragettes ✅ Indian independence ✅ The Boston Tea Party

And, I would imagine that it's extremely rare to have big protests without first having some small protests. People need to know they're not alone. It's really hard to be one of the first people at a protest. But, the bigger they are, the easier it is for people to find out about, and to feel confident in attending.

Add to that that everyone knows that to be effective these protests have to take place in DC, but the US is huge and DC is relatively small (and very strange as a city / metro area) so it will be a while before you can have mass protests in DC. The logistics of just getting there are difficult and expensive. In many countries, the capital is the biggest city in the country: London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Bangkok, Seoul, Mexico City... And, in countries where the capital isn't the biggest city, it's at least normally a very big city, Beijing: 22M, New Delhi: 28M, Ankara: 5M, etc. The Washington DC metro area spans the District of Columbia plus parts of 4 states, but is still only the 6th biggest metro area in the US.

I imagine there will be huge protests in DC. It will just take a while for all the logistics to be worked out.

Yeah, I love that one.

"Try" is too hopeful. "fuck_around" makes it clear that you know what you're doing is dangerous but you're going to do it anyhow. I know that in some languages wrapping a lot of code in exception blocks is the norm, but I don't like that. I think it should be something you only use rarely, and when you do it's because you know you're doing something that's not safe in some way.

"Catch" has never satisfied me. I mean, I know what it does, but it doesn't seem to relate to "try". Really, if "try" doesn't succeed, the corresponding block should be "fail". But, then you'd have the confusion of a block named "fail", which isn't ideal. But "find_out" pairs perfectly with "fuck_around" and makes it clear that if you got there it's because something went wrong.

I also like "yeet". Partly it's fun for comedic value. But, it's also good because "throw" feels like a casual game of catch in the park. "Yeet" feels more like it's out of control, if you hit a "throw" your code isn't carefully handing off its state, it's hitting the eject button and hoping for the best. You hope there's an exception handler higher up the stack that will do the right thing, but it also might just bubble all the way up to the top and spit out a nasty exception for the user.

Is it Loblaws or Metro or another big chain, or is it a smaller store? I'm guessing the big corporate stores will be the slowest to change.

It's a bad sign that you know the CEO's name.

Sure, but it makes up for that by having an idiot proof design.

I wonder how things will change in the next few months.

It seems to me it would be such an obvious thing for Canadian companies to change their packaging to prominently feature Canadian flags, but that takes time. Until then, it's still a bit difficult to know which products are Canadian vs. American vs. made somewhere else.

There's a small chance that Trump will back down and try to play nice with Canadians. But, I doubt it. So, I don't think Canadians are going to start changing their mind on buying US products any time soon.

I wonder if retailers will make it easy too. They generally try to stay out of politics and don't want to alienate anybody. But, if anger about the US continues, people might expect retailers to make it easier to buy Canadian and easier to avoid US products.

You should know that until you do renounce your citizenship, you'll have to pay taxes in the US even if you live in another country. AFAIK only 2 countries in the world still use citizenship-based taxation: USA and Eritrea.

Also, if you ever do try to renounce your citizenship, it's much more difficult than you might think. The people I know who have done it had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to complete the process, despite being up to date on their taxes and not being at all rich.

He isn't.

Not a smart person either.