Aceticon

Punk Floyd

Parroting nationalistic myths is an occupation of Fascists, not of those in working class movements.

Nationalistic delusions of grandeurs are part of the foundation for guys like Trump ending up winning elections.

Sanders should know better.

Good luck getting the Trumpettes to understand that...

It's a tax increase which can be (and is being) mis-portrayed as something that the seller pays, when in fact it's the buyer that pays it.

In practice what Trump did was institute the equivalent of an additional 25% sales tax for all Americans when they buy goods manufactured in Canada or Mexico, but because this tax is usually payed by companies (which do most of the importing) and most people aren't at all familiar with how Import/Export works, he seems to be getting away with portraying it as a tax on Canada and Mexico.

(The concern of those countries is not that they pay more - which they don't - it's that a selective "sales tax" that only applies to products they export to the US makes their products less competitive on price when sold in the US, hence they will sell less which is bad for their companies)

I've seen some theories around that the purpose of this significant increase in tax is to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy that the Republicans are passing.

I've seen a similar thing happen overtime for Aliexpress shipping to Europe - it used to take 2 months to were I am (Portugal), now it takes a bit over a week.

I think they set-up some kind of consolidated shipping operation so that the sellers on their site can ship things via Aliexpress' own system, which is way faster (and invariably involves air-shipping via The Netherlands) and often is listed as Free Shipping.

I've bought once or twice from sellers there that don't use it and those packages still take 2 months to get here.

I mention this because it makes sense that Aliexpress has set up a similar system for the US given that it's a market which is almost as big as the EU.

This is probably why the EU itself recently changed the rules and VAT (the EU's version of Sales Tax) is payable on all purchases from outside the EU, no matter how small the value, but import tax remains only payable on purchases above €150.

They also set up a system so that non-EU retail sellers can collect VAT directly on payment - just like EU ones do - so for example a buyer from the EU buying stuff via AliExpress will have the VAT added to the price during checkout.

Grouse Mountain (in Vancouver)?!

Granted, I was there a decade or so ago, but you can just take a bus to the trailhead/cable car lower station and then take the cable car up there or just walk the trail up (not hard) and then take the cable car down.

Granted, it's mainly interesting for people who like Nature.

Also, take the boat to cross the river.

I've been a "digital packrat" for ages and in my experience storing things like video files in external hard-disks has been the superior option since around the time of Bluray and Xvid encoding (so, from around the mid 00s).

Further, whilst most of my collection from back in the days of recordable DVDs is stuck in them until I have the patience to transfer them (which would be many days worth of work), upgrading the harddisk storage over time as you need more storage is a breeze.

Also thanks to me using HDDs for media storage I've had easy access to my media collection from the comfort of my living room for almost 2 decades, since I put those disks on a homemade NAS (which for a while was an old Asus EEE PC with Linux) and had a TV Media Player on my living room connected to my TV and to the network so I could just use a remote to access the files via SMB and play them on the TV. (This was well before Android TV, and back then the Media Players were dedicated hardware solutions such as the ASUS O!Play)

I've been doing exactly this and for even longer than this guy.

Then again almost 3 decades in the Tech industry (which amongst other things means seeing several comes and goes of "providers") have long taught me to be suspicious of being dependent on 3r party providers, and even more so of having my stuff hostage to their wills (either hosted in their machines or wrapped in encrypted envelopes which I cannot remove).

There is no actual good consumer reason for a seller of digital goods to keep it in their systems or in your own storage but encrypted, without letting the buyer have free access to what they bought.

Back when those things started a lot of people went for the convenience of encrypted Apple music on their iPods, encrypted books on their Kindles and buying videos that they could only stream never get and, inevitably, they got screwed and here we are.

I, for one, didn't got screwed with that stuff.

So, only criminals will have them?

Those specific propaganda elements are widespread in the West and widelly repeated in the mass media even outside the US, so it's useful to deconstruct all that for others when I am in a position to do so since that deconstruction of it will also alter their perception of other instances they saw which at the time they did not really spotted for what it really is.

Hopefully the pointing out the mechanisms used here to construct a highly biased image will even make the readers of the deconstructions of it such as mine be more resilient to other instances of the same techniques being used.

Further, how can we be sure that this poster is a propagandist sock-puppet and not just a normal person who got deceived by the modern (that relies on framing, qualifying and implying) style of propaganda and hence repeated it?

I think that all in all, it's better to have these things and then just deconstructing them for all to see, than silencing them. Also on principle I'm very wary of Censorship.

I went to all the trouble of pointing out the obvious hypocrisy and propaganda not for "these people" but for everybody else.