The US is actively shrinking its "sphere of influence". Just look at USAID: a worldwide sphere of influence, shutting down as we speak.

Canada shares a border with Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, which is part of the EU.

I know it's a stretch... but it's there 😁

An EEA agreement could be a start, then see how things go on from there. With the USA's isolationist politics, USA might no longer be a viable largest trade partner for Canada.

You've gotten to be kidding... /s

As an English as an n-th language speaker, I'm much less picky about regional dialects, and tend to bunch them all up together... then rely on autocorrect — or the occasional Google search — to pick up on slang and regionalisms.

From a correlation to Spanish/Latin tenses, and the etymology of "got + -en", I got the impression that "gotten" was closer to a strictly pluscuamperfect meaning, with "got" being a more simplified replacement for all past participles.

Does that make any sense?

It's an effect of coordinated lobbying by think tanks established worldwide by the same people who trump this.

Not a coincidence that the Spanish far-right party leader shared a photo of himself meeting the Polish far-right party leader at the CPAC in USA earlier this year.

Sure, why not... I'll have 15 years of experience using ChatGPT, and only ask for a 2040s salary plus the time travel commute. 🙄

Cautionary tale about why FOSS is important. Also about why Kbin lacking an official API is a problem.

serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums

Sorry, lost me at Reddit.

I helped with the remodeling of a house once. Part of it involved moving the gas stove, and some electric sockets.

When the gas guy came, he looked at the installation, nodded, "old style, huh". Took out a saw, and went on for the gas pipe. I was like "WTF man! Don't we turn the gas OFF first!? 😯". Turns out, there was no way to "turn the gas off"... for a single apartment; it was either the whole apartment building, wait for it to purge, leaving everyone without gas in the meantime... or saw the metal tube as gas was leaking out of it. I just kept waiting for a spark to ignite the whole kitchen... but seems like the guy knew what he was doing, and the house didn't explode that day.

Meanwhile, we were discussing whom to call for the sockets. Gas guy overheard us, and went "just rip the cable off the plaster". We went like "WTF do you mean rip the cable off the plaster!? 😯". All helpful, he showed us: gave the cable from the socket a tug, and indeed some paint and plaster fell off, exposing the wires.

Turns out, he used to be on the building crew of those apartments, the whole house was wired by placing wires on the wall, then holding them in place with some plaster and painting over it... and no ground wires in sight 🤦

I can track engagement, and I can update them if need be

That's inherently bad as in:

• Third party (you) tracking the user
• Hiding the true target from the user
• Destroying any attempt at content archival

They're not inherently bad "for you", just for everyone else.

The charges usually end up falling onto the last one who can't stick them onto someone else.

Like, a carrier can blame the ISP, who can blame the VPN, who can check its logs and blame an address owner, who... better keep their own logs capable of identifying someone else if they're letting random people do random stuff using that address. And a good lawyer, and will and money to fight it.

THIS IS NOT (just) ABOUT GOOGLE

Currently, attestation and "trusted computing" are already a thing, the main "sources of trust" are:

• Microsoft
• Apple
• Smartphone manufacturers
• Google
• Third party attestators

This is already going on, you need a Microsoft signed stub to boot anything other than Windows on a PC, you need Apple's blessing to boot anything on a Mac, your smartphone manufacturer decides whether you can unlock it and lose attestation, all of Microsoft, Apple and Google run app attestation through their app stores, several governments and companies run attestation software on their company hardware, and so on.

This is the next logical step, to add "web app" attestation, since the previous ones had barely any pushback, and even fanboys of walled gardens cheering them up.

PS: Somewhat ironically, Google's Play Store attestation is one of the weaker ones, just look at Apple's and the list of stuff they collect from the user's device to "attest" it for any app.

Long term? Minimal. All the niches it fills, have alternatives that would just grow to fill them in.

Short term? Catastrophic. Losing GMail and "login with Google" would leave a lot of people with no email, no way to login to other services, and no way to recover their passwords (through email). The loss of Photo backups would also upset many, Drive and Docs would leave a lot of people and businesses without their daily tools. Search would likely be the less affected, with plenty of alternatives already to pick from.