I was at a bar a while back and the talk stuck with me. He was a Israeli who moved to America about twenty years ago and still visits Israel to see his family.

He said, "Americans have to stop seeing America as being #1 at anything." We talked about Israel and Palestine, we talked about the current White House bs, and afterwards, I finally understood what he was saying, especially with the lens of him being an Israeli.

America is America. It's a place that exists. The rest of the world has a lot better everything. It's like living in a small backwater town: You know it's shit, and it wont magically become something it's not, especially if the Mayor and the Sheriff are inbred hicks who bang each other's sister wives. Maybe you grow your nestegg until you can move. Or maybe you carve out a piece of the shit hole. But know that it's a shit hole.

That's America. Just keep milking because the lunatics are out of their cage.

The US have always been the bad guys. Even independence was about being able to do more genocide and land stealing without the British getting in the way.

Canada also has a brutal history of both slavery and genocide.

Accepting that is the first step to overcoming systemic racism and building communities that we can all thrive in.

It might not cover everything, but here’s a nice list:
https://european-alternatives.eu/

https://cryptpad.fr/ as an alternative to Googles online office suite.

end-to-end encrypted and open-source collaboration suite.

still really early in development but if you primarily work from the browser on a desktop/laptop, it works well enough. I've struggled with getting sheets working on a mobile browser but I really like that you could completely self host if you want or just pay them to do it for you.

Yeah that's the thing that stands out so much. That almost everything mainstream is either US or China. Come on rest of the world step up.

Real American question

Haha I don't actually have any to cancel.

My wife loved orphan black! I didn't know it was Canadian. We both loved Kim's convenience. And Kenny vs Spenny is an all time great.

There's a little bit in this Wikipedia article but I can't find much either.

IIRC it mostly stemmed from a lot of US tv channels not being available in Canada at the time. So to make them available, they started hacking satellite descramblers and Direct TV cards. Then they found a giant market in the US willing to buy these boxes and cards to get free tv.

There were people in the US making them too, but the Canadian stuff was more reliable and updated quicker when Direct TV changed codes.

I did know about the 51st state thing but wanted to know more about the boycott. thanks.