- Singapore (Malaysia) 1965

- Montenegro (Serbia) 2006

- Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia) 1993

- Iceland (Denmark) 1944

However, these are rare as most secession events are violent. Establishing a new country typically requires a revolution, and there is more support for that broadly in Canada for various reasons than any single province. The Alberta referendum is a polite signal and a test.

The boomer generation and it's broadly left politics is dying off, meaning that the LPC and NDP need to replenish their electoral support to stay in power. It is uncontroversial that they have been doing this using radical immigration policies and throwing money away, particularly via the abuse of definitions of "temporary," and "asylum." Political interference by both India (exporting their independence problem) and China (creating a resource vassal) is undeniable at this point. Canadians with a stake in the country are quite reasonably concerned that their society is being demolished and replaced.

Will they revolt, and could it succeed? It depends on whether they get US sponsorship or not. The more interesting question than the Alberta theater is whether Canada revolts and establishes a republic, or whether it gets annexed by the US or the EU. Alberta is just a canary for these other scenarios, imo.

maybe the license language means they make no reps about security, but if this is as described they have compromised the compliance of their customer base.

The ONLY control that mitigates this risk is disk encryption, and it is perniciously misleading to ship a sabotaged product on which these legally consequential decisions get made around the world- based on the specific assurance the product is designed and marketed to provide.

If true, it is a specific outrage against the laws of several countries, medical and other research ethics, public health, and the social contracts people have with their institutions. If MS is given impunity for this, a lot of regulation is not worth the paper it is written on.

before arguing further, I recommend looking at the breach notification sections of the laws in these major economies: https://www.dlapiperdataprotection.com/

If it's a backdoor, that's a serious fraud against their customers.

- PRC police stations in Canada: https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlm...

- Foreign interference in elections: https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=abo&dir=comp/m...

You have no serious people.

If Canada had any kind of national identity it would not have become what was recently described as a "south asian country controlled by China," in a conversation about its relationship to US national security. Outside faculty clubs pickle ball courts, and maybe dog daycare pickup runs, there is zero resistance to annexation. It would be the only time the US would ever be "greeted as liberators."

It means the solutions aren't technical, and nobody votes their way out of this. I've checked out because the demoralization campaign worked, and there is nothing to save. The outs are Alberta separation, US annexation, civil war, or MAID. There is no longer a political solution. If there were, these surveillance controls would not be necessary.

By this point there should be a 3-5 year formula where someone can finance buying a crappy strip mall or corner building and turn it around as the hip new thing and exit for 5x anywhere in the world. Invest in loss making restaurants and music venues operated by the people who care about them.

Alex Danco's writing on "Scenes" [1] codifies a lot of the details, but nobody so far has been able to scale it.

The main factor when I did a hacker/artist space, it was the effect of relationships with musicians and scene people, not the affect of a vision to make something cool.

The defining factor of the spaces I've seen succeed vs. fail was something physical, and explicitly not software, and to a lesser extent, politics. You can have software and politics flavored things, but unless you are doing something physical like robotics, motorcycles, puppeteering, bookselling, pyrotechnics, music production, mma, it's not going to survive. Sure, there are spaces that don't do anything physical, but if you scratch the surface there is always a mysterious source of funding by the usual suspects who want to direct the scene to some other end.

The physical activity creates the competence hierarchy that is a stable and self regulating social dynamic.

[1] https://danco.substack.com/p/how-scenes-work-with-jim-oshaug...

I get the sense it's mainly a question of who provides the information. There isn't a version of these documents that reinforces any public institutional consensus, so it's hard to separate insightful skepticism from mere narrative alignment.

i doubt there will be official popular contact in my lifetime, but orienting a nuclear and AI capable civilization to a place relative to others seems timely.

AI is the perfect (and necessary) bridging and filtering tech for transferring ideas from a more advanced civilization, as it's an integration layer. it's "us" as the sum of our knowledge, but its notionally superior, and can be adapted and expanded, where it's a proxy or buffer for ontological shocks.

im optimistic on this.

imo ufo disclosure is probably the most important thing a democratic government could do right now, and one of the few things it could actually succeed at.

An example was this early AES proposal: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-36492-7_17

These articles are a bit like saying scientists find expensive watches do not tell time in any appreciably better way, yet even technical founders who should "know better," are still wearing them with a t-shirt and flip flops after their exit. The economics of high end audio make more sense as an analogy to jewelry or art.

After volatility, haircuts, cap gains and other risk, there are so few productive assets to invest relatively small amounts in, where a store of value that depreciates less than inflation and purchasing power is a desirable thing.

If you love music, it's a way to build a shrine to it. Arguably, the real problem is consumer gear that simulates the experience of something valuable that won't end up in a landfill, but its just crap you throw away when you move house.

If your diagram is ugly, you're probably mixing levels of abstraction without acknowledging it. It's a forcing function on articulating what you know and what is outstanding. Something that is black boxed should be referenced as a black box.

I use a lot of data viz because it's a high bandwidth way to show relationships, dynamics, order of complexity and its location, information problems, scope, and de-noise data. So much can be explained by having AI make you a uml sequence diagram of a concept. it is unreasonbly effective. If you are making a "chart for management" and using powerpoint or native excel charts, you're probably creating garbage though.

what is most likely in play, as we have seen in other identity schemes, is that the cryptography will be sufficiently opaque that experts won't be able to reason about it until after the products are forced on people, or, they will just accept junk protocols and use the law to shift liability to the user to comply with identifying themselves truthfully on the internet. the other scenario is if the protocol provides strong anonymity, it will use a bunch of new primitives without mature standards that happen to have escrow access built in.

Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is a dumb regulation that going to create its own regulatory arbitrages and spawn very powerful and profitable black and grey markets. Poor laws create criminal economic opportunity, and digital id is just creating a massive one.

Between Meta being behind a digital id initiative under the pretext of alleged "age verification" and the Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives, it appears gen Z now has a cause to build tech against and fight for. These are dying organizations that cannot innovate and they've attracted a pestilence that is pivoting them to the easier problem of political maneuvering. as it's easier to militate for what nobody wants than to make something anyone actually wants.

The upside is that people get to be hackers again. Tools to cleanse our networks and systems of Meta and other surveillance companies and the influence of these compromised organizations are an OS install and a vibecoding weekend away.