You bring the jet fuel; I've got a ton of PLA+ in stock already. What could go wrong?
HonoredMule
I half expected "best" to be an extraneous word, as in there only are 51 Canadian films. Lucky for me, I like to to fact check before letting my mouth leak. As it turns out, we recently produced three times that within the span of one year, and the National Film Board of Canada takes credit for over 13,000 films since 1939.
That does come with a caveat, however, in that the NFB runs on subsidy to the tune of ~$70m per year and isn't really focused on mainstream, commercially successful entertainment. The numbers likely include "films" as short as 5 minutes, along with everything between that and feature length movies.
What's my point? I, uh, didn't get that far. Hopefully I've at least managed to pivot from parading my ignorance to acknowledging it.
Anyway, a few of the featured pique my curiosity (which I'm listing here for my own future reference):
- BlackBerry (2023, was already planning on watching at some point)
- Goon (2004)
- Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)
- Seeds (2024)
- Strange Brew (1983, hoping it's more "Dumb and Dumber" and less "Dude, Where's My Car?")
- Movies that aren't really Canadian:
- Navalny (2022)
- Turning Red (2022)
Well now it feels like I'm parading my lack of culture. 🤷♂️
Ok, now I'm hearing you loud and clear. This is also true and based, with abundant parallels. Like, teenagers think being aloof, distant, or mysterious is cool. More mature adults tend to end up deciding that being open, earnest, and genuine is sexy, even if they don't care about the things you do. Passion is what's cool, and apathy is just either insecurity or emptiness.
To me, there is an inherent satisfaction that comes from defying soulless entities trying to dictate my habits, values, and most notably dependence for their gain. There is inherent value in having greater freedom of choice and lower cost to changing my mind than accepting vendor lock-in would permit. And there is greater financial and lifestyle security from reducing the role of cash flow (and big tech) in sustaining that lifestyle. It's actually pretty comfortable relying more on other forms of self-help, including services that no one can manipulate against my will, or outright rug-pull on me.
I never really though of such things as irrational, but rather assigning different weights to the inputs we're tweaking and outputs for which we're optimizing. My values and "weights" are somewhat described by the personalized examples of benefit I presented - albeit scoped down to one particular context. The principles or values that resonate with any particular person do so for a reason. I think if we analyze those reasons deeply enough, we'll find both the internal motivation and external incentives to either change them or commit to them.
Conversely, I don't imagine nihilistic choices ever feel particularly good or right.
I think the notes of "America doesn't care about your principles or actions" are what rubbed people the wrong way in your original comment. And that's probably because it speaks to that sense of nihilism that likely isn't well represented on an open-source, Canadian-hosted, left-leaning, mainstream-alternative platform. But such people I would argue, based on global outcomes, are much more representative of the general public even in Canada. I'm upvoting your original comment now, on the basis that this underlying point is a message many need to hear, and probably articulated in the way that those people would hear.
That's a message I can get behind, but I've been making conscientious purchasing/spending choices for years, sometimes decades, in order to satisfy my own principles. In realms like privacy and intellectual freedom, it meant constantly fighting upstream while general consumer habits gave a mandate to everything I don't want and left no room for anything I do want. It means being the only person in a group not on Facebook, and also sometimes not really in the group any more either. In realms like buying local, it means being the only annoying person clogging the aisles scouring labels for origin information or paying way more for products that lack the demand which brings scaling efficiencies.
I wouldn't make different choices today. All the costs of self-hosting and maintaining personal tech infrastructure, trying to work with niche tooling and integrate narrowly-focused independent systems, and missing out on some mainstream stuff still do not outweigh the benefits - at least for me personally.
But let me tell you: it is profoundly more satisfying having a large-scale movement behind you, collaboratively sharing the burden and also having a real, economy-shaping impact benefitting the values that matter to you.
It can be for both reasons, and it won't matter how the administration spins it for their base. Starving the beast weakens it regardless of any backlash.
It's not too late for us all to do better. 😉
Given that so much of warfare is logistics, I'd think having a plane that costs half as much to buy and one third as much per hour of flight factors pretty heavily - including on that cost of training pilots. And I cannot imagine U.S. maintenance supply would come close to cost competitiveness vs having domestic manufacturing support that also spends defense money into our own economy.
Sure that probably wouldn't have tipped the balance a couple years ago - I mean, it didn't.
But here we are. At least we aren't already 40 planes into production.
Wab Kinew is First Nations, right? Not getting it does you credit. But people are going to expect it to mean something. It's probably best to clear the reeds by aiming for an intentional one.
People don't have to believe the misinformation they repeat, as long as they believe it justifies some action that will benefit them. For example, the more depleted the Colorado river basin gets, the more British Columbia will turn out to be full of terrorists and cartels, or its leaders plotting to disrupt the Frasier River, or whatever else... It's not like the details matter.
What matters is that the people in the place with the thing you want are evil now.
I don't rule out hostilities directed at Canadians on lemmy being something directly fomented by bots or including bot participation. But that's a rather low-value influence operation. I'd wager at least some is just a side effect of the vector that concerns me more: the faithful spreading a gospel aimed at Americans to manufacture American consent for something.
Oh yeah. In official public messaging and private dealings we need to appear friendly, welcoming, and beyond reproach from the perspective of international leaders and reasonable Americans. The objectives are: to avoid both escalation and giving the impression bullying us is a free action; and to slow-roll the impact on Canadians, buying time to adjust and build internal industry.
In reality, I think the friendship is already gone for good.
I also think/hope that our federal leadership secretly knows it. They have to at least know most Canadians do not want the previous status quo long term, even if it was freely offered.
Likewise thanks. And you do raise a good point with this:
whatever you choose, do it carefully with full knowledge that what your country looks like on the other side of the decision matters greatly to you and the world.
I do think that's something too few Canadians are considering. With all the patriotic rage brewing, there are a lot of calls for our various levels of leadership to lash out in any direction they can. People are getting mad at them for instead mostly sticking to a wiser path, focused on pressure rather than catharsis. You'll see our politicians in public speeches constantly reiterating how Canada and the U.S. are and should still be friends working to mutual benefit. I don't think anyone believes that, nor that we'd ever accept a return to status quo. That messaging is for the international community and American public, making clear that we are not the aggressors and will not rise to become such.
I see paths where the U.S. administration provokes an overreaction which weakens our footing on the high ground and creates a window for actions of a less purely economic nature. I've always expected the U.S. to eventually come after our resources wielding guns, not dollars, but this is way ahead of schedule even with the pressures of climate change. Dumpster is skipping long crucial steps propagandizing away the friendship to manufacture consent for war. That isn't going to work, but our actions here and now could jump-start that process of branding us hostiles.
As it stands, the trade war is a blessing for Canada's long-term outlook. It is validating the painful pace at which we've been recently growing our population, steeling our resolve to weather more pain for a nationally shared goal, and giving us the unity needed to dodge our own rightward descent, decouple from the U.S., diversify supply lines for critical assets (especially of military tech), and ultimately demonstrate that we are not a soft target even for the U.S. I only hope he stays the course and we hold our red lines. No deal is the best deal anyway.
And - assuming the CIA is really gutted and not being converted into a shadow organization - I like Canada's odds. At some point you might start thinking of your family in Canada as your in with a nation that still has a bright long-term economic outlook. 😉
I took a pass on that when it released. Horror, and especially psychological horror, are really not my jam. The closest I ever got to enjoying something like that is Resident Evil. That's why The Fly isn't on my list either. But that reminds me of another Canadian movie that caught my interest after watching a video essay about it: Blood Quantum (2019).