Seriously. I have too many American friends who are confused when I tell them I have and will have no interest in going down to America, even if it's just to visit them, for the foreseeable future and they wonder why.

Could it be because your country was having open public discourse on the merits of annexing us? Or maybe that I don't want to get thrown into an ICE concentration camp for no reason?

What gets me is that no one seems to be mentioning exactly what it means that US is entering their 'Papers please' phase, and that supporting a fascist state isn't a very Canadian thing to do.

Not wanting to be hassled at the border, or having our sovereignty threatened is an understandable reason for avoiding the US, but it's also pretty selfish.

I wish I see more people, and Canadian news media talking about the bigger side of it as in 'We don't support fascism'

That should be an integral part of our identity, especially if we want to ensure the Conservatives stop trying to normalise maple maga ideals.

Brudda, it's a geniune question. The article talks about physical products.

It wasn't only tactical whataboutism, it was literal verbatim whataboutism.

That is the very specific method to get me to dismiss you.

I'm wondering how it going on other fronts i.e the non-physical.

No, you're not. You're attempting to undermine the central message of the story.

A real answer would be appreciated instead "I'm on high alert and will interpret any answer I see as malevolence".

Something that you could have looked up. But oh no, you had to deliver a whataboutism turd of a comment.

You're fooling absolutely no one.

Brudda.

While it’s true there’s a lot of that, AWS just dominates the cloud, and many of our own tech companies here in Canada use AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, not because they’re cheap, but because they have good uptime guarantees, security guarantees, easily allow you to deploy worldwide and provide fast access to customers almost everywhere (especially major markets like the EU and Asia), and provides companies access to a large talent pool who know how to use these systems. You’d be hard-pressed, as a business owner and/or CTO, to use other options and handle all those downsides yourself, slowing down your ability to do business. The only other potential non-US alternative here is probably Alibaba, but they’re not even close to being considered competition internationally.

Aside from Apple, the big tech companies down south are big and hard to displace not because of what most people know them for, but because of this large arm of software infrastructure that basically serves as the literal backbone of the consumer-side of the Internet.

And for those who think that we can just build that infrastructure ourselves, take note that these companies have been doing this for at least a decade, and spent billions and probably trillions doing this in the US and abroad. AWS itself claims that between 2011 and 2022, it invested $108.9 billion in USD, just within the US alone, and they have data centres in many parts of the world. Not discouraging anyone, but you have to think about where that kind of money has to come from.

Yes.

There is likely a device running US software in the room you are in.

Speak for yourself and being mainly physically targeted, I came to Lemmy to get off of Reddit, I miss the local community as many people do not have the interest in figuring out Lemmy. I have cancelled all of my streaming services from the US, if there is something I want to see that is strickly on a streaming service I put on my pirates hat and sail the high C’s, other wise I watch it on the Canadian Channels app (with my pihole on so that I do not see ads so that it becomes less valuable for the Canadian channel to continue paying for it) I subscribed to CBC Gem+ or whatever it is called and watch Canadian content on there. I us Unwatched to watch YouTube so that I am not paying Google, I feel for the non US videos I watch but they are still getting money from Google but Google is not getting it from me.

One of the first buy Canadian things I did was move my blog hosting from a US provider to hosthero.ca and changed it from .com to .ca then I looked at my iCloud stuff and started finding other options. Sure they are not all together anymore and do not easily communicate together it is however far less expensive than what I was doing before. I was using Apple’s hide my email feature I had 60 some email address (I think). After going through all those addresses and finding out what was dead or not I moved something like 45 addresses to my hosthero email server, and I started moving more things that did not already have their separate email address to my address. I would later find out that my ISP changed to an exchange server, I have no idea if they have to pay Microsoft for that or what but I have been transitioning all of the emails I get from there to there own email address. This is not a short process and I am up to 120 some email addresses, all of the pseudo-random email addresses are forwarded to 1 of 5 email accounts that I check. I can have unlimited free trials for things if I so choose (have not done that with this yet, I had done this a couple of times for things in my iCloud days). I do not trust myself with hosting my own password manager so bitwarden is not really an option for me so I went with 1password, for my cloud storage I just downloaded everything to one of my pi’s but I was having all kinds of difficulties with hosting my own VPN and NextCloud crashed on me a couple of times so I decided to go with sync.com. If there was any real competition for youtube I would not be sneaking in via other apps I would be using the real alternative platform.