cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/61737959

The utter audacity of this.

The exemptions would be retroactive, meaning all existing, outstanding requests for information from these offices would be scrapped, including Mr. Ford’s phone logs.

The utter audacity of this. And it goes even further:

The exemptions would be retroactive, meaning all existing, outstanding requests for information from these offices would be scrapped, including Mr. Ford’s phone logs.

While perusing some coffee to buy from my favourite roaster that also is extremely transparent about pricing, this caught my eye:

$7.35 USD per lb including $0.65 USD per lb "reciprocal" tariff placed on Ethiopian imports. * This coffee entered the US before being imported into Canada.

Hm. Seems the niche importer they worked with to access these particular beans was American. Since we're a small market, I suspect this kind of thing is going to be happening a lot.

I got an initial take from an LLM and apparently the company importing from Ethiopia and re-exporting to Subtext is eligible for a refund on the duty (a "drawback") but a big, um, drawback of that is that it's fairly onerous:

• Many importers use a drawback specialist or broker because the paperwork is complex; fees are usually contingency-based (e.g. 20–30% of the recovered duty).
• For small, irregular shipments, filing costs often outweigh the refund, so many small importers simply don’t bother.
• For large distributors or commodities with steady re-export flows, drawback is routine and worthwhile.

Curious if anyone has similar anecdotes or run across an attempt to quantify this sort of trade flow and effect of US tariffs? I wonder if the impact of this across every little thing adds up to a meaningful amount of inflation?

Now that I have to file my T2 electronically I went looking for the most affordable way to do that and found T2Express. Not only was it the cheapest at ~$40 but it actually has had a native Linux version since 2020!

I wish I'd found this sooner because they also have a version for doing personal taxes called "myTaxExpress". The main reason I keep a Windows VM kicking around is to file our personal taxes every year with StudioTax and I'd way rather have something I could just run directly and not have to bother with that.

Their T2 software worked well enough for my purposes but a nil return is pretty straightforward. Anyone used their stuff to do their personal taxes and have an opinion on it? Are there any other options out there for Linux native software for filing a T1?

Two parts that stuck out for me were:

"There's no hiding from it. They can turn your phone into a camera. They can turn it into a microphone. You can turn the power off, they can still use the device. It's the most intrusive thing that exists in the world today."

and

He also learned from the April 2023 affidavit that the RCMP had ordered an ODIT on his union phone during the time he was engaged in collective bargaining conversations that year. He says this breached not only his privacy, but the privacy of some 19,000 union members.

It's concerning what a few billionaires are doing but there are way more of us so if everyone is doing small things it can add up.

One easy one is noticing where businesses you deal with get their boxes. My favourite coffee roastery used to use Uline boxes but is switching suppliers after they learned the back story on those guys: https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-denial

What are some other small ways you've found to push back on the attempted coup of our southern neighbour?

Language matters.

The President is empowered by a Congress controlled by a narrow majority. Rather than the individual they have chosen, I am pissed at the Republican party. And disappointed in the American people. The guy? He was always that way and would have continued to be so at a safe distance from the levers of power without his enablers.

It is the American and especially Republican relationship with Canada that is important in this situation. Those are what endure, that person is only momentarily significant. So, where we can choose the narrative, I think that's important to focus on.

Plus I suspect he likes the sound of his own name.

I've blithely assumed that backups / snapshots of my home dir (including my Thunderbird profile) were covering my email. But it occurs to me it may be more difficult than expected.

I have message synchronization on for any folders I care about ("for offline use"). What I was assuming this meant was that if my mail host disappeared or mysteriously deleted an important folder, I would still be able to switch to a backup, start TB in offline mode (via a commandline parameter), and copy those folders to a local folder at which point I could reconnect and drag them back to my new host, a local imapd I use as an archive, or wherever.

But ...would that actually work? Anyone recover email from offline folders? How'd that go?

Edit:

Well, there can never be too many reminders to verify our backups and I'm all for that but that's less what I was after. I was specifically thinking about the scenario when an IMAP host somehow loses an important folder or disappears entirely. How would it go to recover from a sync'd folder in tb? What caveats would there be? Would attachments show up?

But ya, this post was silly, it's easy enough to try. Yes it works, yes the attachments come with. No major issues in my limited test.

However, I did learn one annoying thing: there is no command line option to start Thunderbird in offline mode. So in the case where the folder was deleted on IMAP I'd either have to:

• disconnect from the network before running the app
• quickly toggle offline before it finishes connecting and deleting the folder
• use the pref to prompt if you want to go online every time you start

I think for as rare a scenario as this is it's fine to just disconnect but I'm a bit surprised it really doesn't seem to have a flag for it.

I see there's an update coming soon that will add support for AVIF (woo!) and I wonder if that'll also coincide with enabling WebP for pixelfed.social? I was hoping to use less platform resources by uploading smaller/better files.

Also, if they're smaller maybe they won't have to be reconverted server-side? It'd be nice if I could optimize them locally from RAW without them being reprocessed but didn't see any guidelines in help that would guide me in doing that. Or will it be re-jpg'd regardless of what I send?