The Canadian government froze the bank accounts of truckers involved in a protest [1] [2] [3].
If a government is willing to go after the property of its own citizens without due process, foreign investors have to think: "What's to stop the same from happening to me?" Even if that foreign investor's a central bank.
[2] Maybe the truckers' protest went too far; they were blocking roads. The point isn't whether they deserved to be punished; the point is that their accounts were frozen without going through the laws and court system.
[3] This was in 2022, so it has nothing to do with the current US administration.
For anyone curious, this is hyperbole that people of certain political persuasions love to mischaracterise.
These were not "protests", they were a sustained attempt to appeal to the wrong level of government for policies of a foreign government by a bunch of people who were riled up on the internet. Highlights included nazi flags, guns, harassing and threatening women and local residents, etc.
what is most telling is that when you search for commentary about the Canadian federal government freezing bank accounts, a significant portion of links are from reactionary, right wing websites.
They did freeze bank accounts though, and in other countries with democracy, citizens are allowed to protest, “occupy” and nazi flags are free speech. Mentioning guns is hyperbole, zero protesters shot anyone. Now, the government DID take peoples rights away and their bank accounts . Very important.
Why is "occupy" in quotes? The trucks jammed downtown Ottawa and were making a tremendous amount of noise. That isn't some peaceful protest that got a permit ahead of time, it was an attempt to shutdown the nation's capital.
why stop at Venezuela? Chile has valuable mineral deposits, and crave the freedom that only the mad king can give. Extend the empire to Tierra del Fuego I say!
Chile is a stable, market-driven democracy with a robust economy, whereas Venezuela has experienced severe political authoritarianism and a deep, multi-year economic collapse, and a massive humanitarian exodus of millions of citizens.
> whereas Venezuela has experienced severe political authoritarianism and a deep, multi-year economic collapse, and a massive humanitarian exodus of millions of citizens
none of which has been resolved by the US violently removing their leader and taking over their oil
> The UK is not a federal system like the USA, and so there is very little that counts as UK law as such.
This seems quite far-fetched. Parliamentary sovereignty alone would be unthinkable in the US model, where US federal legislatures have fairly delimited powers that they cannot arbitrarily change. The Scottish government, for example, essentially exists at the whim of Westminster and (in this iteration) was only created a few decades ago.
Scots law is actually a separate issue from the current Scottish Parliament, in fact it was used as one of the arguments for having one. I remember it being set up: I voted for it.
The UK constitution, if it can be called such, is made up of numerous contradictory documents, but Scotland retaining its own legal system was one of those. It has some everyday features not found elsewhere in the UK like procurator fiscal, and until recently the "not proven" verdict. (I was at a murder case a couple of years ago where the panel (accused) was given a "not proven" verdict.)
To add, Switzerland is a little weird with accident vs disease.
If it’s an accident (ie sudden, unavoidable, unpredictable, more or less) it’s great because you have nothing to pay, you don’t even need to worry about the bill and there is no deductible and everything is covered no questions asked.
If it’s a disease, then it’s the regular insurance rules which can be quite arcane and you’re never sure what’s going to be covered and how much.
My transport was from adverse consequences of a surgery and so they deemed it not an accident, and that’s why I had to pay.
Oh wow. They were cool with me they said if we transport you it’ll be expensive. I didn’t have a car, I was living pretty high up a hill, it was midnight, and I had lost quite a bit of blood already so I thought “fuck it I’ll find out how expensive it is once I’m fixed”. But they wouldn’t have charged me if they hadn’t transported me (at least that’s what it sounded like)
I guess I made the right call because I fainted in the ER later from blood loss.
This isn’t the case for these watches in the UK as well, as they only work on certain partner networks, but I’m unsure whether this is due to the GP claim or something else.
Can't quite speak for UK, but in EU cases I know about its because some (popular) watches need special provisioning process for eSIMs and getting that proprietary software requires carrier to beg our favorite mega corps for provisioning software and do extra work.
It's not like phones where pSIMs were relatively brand agnostic, were back to per-hardware BS.
I have a Pixel Watch 2, it seems that only certain carriers (typically not MVNOs) can set it up with an eSIM that will present as having the same number, but any MVNO that provides eSIM setup via QR code should work to provision via the connected phone.
I can imagine Apple being less inclined to allow arbitrary eSIMs on their watches, preferring to only support the case where the eSIM is guaranteed to support the "correct" presentation.
This doesn't directly follow from the first part of your comment, and more importantly seems inaccurate with respect to Anthropic's public statements on this situation. For example:
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
In fairness, they are up against a part of government that can move swiftly and authoritatively. They don’t have the luxury of biding time against a sclerotic and process-bound bureaucracy.
There is a good reason no one seriously tests the resolve of these particular regulatory authorities.
What they wanted is to regulate competition but they forgot that current admin is Trump. They should have buy gifts to Trump preferably gold and pay for few exciting dinners in Florida. They should have learned from Bezos and Cook.
I’m not sure what the featured article has to do with Europeans? In any case, not only are the vast majority of people not in Europe but surely Europeans (in any sense of the word) are not the primary groups targeted by a “hitler salute” in the US.
While neat that a government operates this, I’m not sure it’s a viable alternative for most users given that the servers are AFAIK all in Norway. For example, the latency from my network was 150-200ms (compared to 6ms for the Speedtest.net server) and the speed test results appear less consistent than they may be in/near Norway.
> Argentina's ministry of education did something like this with university software. The one used by students to sign up and by teachers to track grades, etc.
For what it's worth, this seems roughly equivalent to Moodle, which is open-source (GPL) and used globally, apparently especially popular in some of western Europe, the US, etc. [1] School systems can and do of course customise it as needed.
The problem with Moodle is that it's terrible. Yes you can customise it, but the core must be 20+ years old now, and it really shows. Universities don't have the talent in house to do anything more than bodge solutions for local bureaucratic knots. That doesn't generalise into an improving system over time.
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