Autocracies are short-lived power grabs by certain people or groups of people. They pillage what they can, oppress who they want, and then run or fall when the walls start closing in.

Many have come and gone during our history on this planet. Many more will rise and fall.

Shenanigans are afoot…

Just as daddy Putin ordered.

😎

Yes they do. Every living thing does. Even plants do in their own way.

I keep Fish, shrimp, snails, and isopods and they all do too. Fish and shrimp actually poop quite a lot, especially the latter. I don’t think I could ever eat shrimp after seeing how many turds those things produce.

Beautiful news.

That explains all the AI crap they’ve been chasing for a while now. They’ve been trying to juice up the value to make it look appealing to potential buyers because you can basically slap “AI” on anything and it instantly shoots up in value.

Discord is effectively dead if this goes through.

Well, I mean…

It’s considerably better than “Redditor”.

Not going to happen. Not for a long time. As much as we would want it to.

The phone market is brutally, viciously competitive and an outsider trying to jump in without Android or iOS is almost guaranteed to fail. We used to have numerous options from all kinds of companies that came with a variety of operating systems but each one fell to the duopoly.

People are glued to their phones and social media more than ever. I would expect an attempt to get them to move to a non-American mobile operating system and phone would fail very quickly. Blackberry did used to make their own line of phones that ran BB10 and they were excellent. Nobody bought them though, or at least not enough to justify their continued production. Even fewer bought the following Android-powered BB phones and eventually Blackberry pulled out of the market. The same story for Windows mobile phones.

There are plenty of options for non-American cellphones and I’m sure in the coming years we will see Canadian ones too. The problem is that they will almost certainly run Android which means American control over your data and feeds. Getting Canadians to accept a sacrifice in short-term phone functionality to regain digital freedom in the long run is a tall order.

We really don’t know right now. The US essentially broadcast to the world that they are both diplomatically weak and compromised by the Russians and cannot be trusted or relied on. The meeting with Zelenskyy and the recent trade spats has indicated that the US can and will turn on its historic allies if Putin tells them to.

Beyond that point, everything is pure speculation. My guess? The US will continue to erode from within due to further economic and social disintegration. They are looking at a historic economic collapse which will severely impact the lives of US citizens. I can see them beginning to put increased pressure, possibly militarily, on Mexico and Canada as Trump uses the resources in said countries as a bargaining chip to placate US businesses that will start putting pressure on Trump. Once reality of the situation starts to hit the average US citizen then I think there is a very real possibility of civil revolt.

As for the EU, my guess is they will see a burst of increased unity and solidarity much like how Canada is now. Whether that lasts or will be acted upon remains to be seen, but I think it has become obvious to the EU leaders that Russia is a hostile power on their doorstep and they are on their own; the US will not help them. They will now have to contend with meddling and interference from both Russia and the US as both seek to disrupt and cause unrest in Europe. If the EU plays its cards right they could emerge from this stronger and more prosperous than ever. de Gaulle was absolutely right about the USA.

Not an American, but I ended up with an iPhone simply because the cost difference between it and an Android device via my carrier wasn’t that big. It was also a previous generation model at a steep discount which helped a lot.

I am not a fan of Apple but if a company is going to screw me then at least Apple isn’t so in-my-face about it like Google is. Google’s data harvesting and ads are absolutely atrocious.

I used Blackberry right up until they ditched BB10. Sometimes I wonder if I should just get a feature phone because modern smartphones are awful things.