It touched a nerve because no one in the trump admin is qualified to do their job. There's a lot of corruption and a lot of people getting access to things they shouldn't due to their relationship and loyalty, not merit. There's a big difference from a sys admin having super user access and some random politically connected hack abusing their privilege.
The only example I can think of is Canada arresting Meng Wanzhou when the US asked, and not backing down in the face of significant Chinese threats, souring Chinese relationships significantly.
But that's an example of Canada being a good ally to the US.
Took Canada 4-years longer than the rest of the Five Eyes alliance to ban them, prompting the Biden administration to threaten to terminate the agreement.
Canada chooses not to participate in the defense of North America from potential threats, deferring the cost and military response entirely to the United States.
The roughly 100 organized crime groups operating in Canada (including three groups dedicated to supplying fentanyl) are partly drawn to loopholes and lax penalties that allow fentanyl-related money-laundering operations to flourish.
Canada remains the only G7 country on the 2025 USTR Watch List. The 2025 USTR Special 301 Report again expressed concerns with Canada's perceived lack of IP enforcement, particularly at the border and against online piracy.
I tried to avoid some of the more common ones, like NATO spending, trade dispute, etc. A lot of this stuff, like providing for the common defense, don't make it easy for cartels launder money, don't look the other way on counterfeit goods, aren't unreasonable demands.
1) The delay came at a tricky time. Canada had arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou on behalf of the USA, and China disappeared two Canadian citizens in retaliation.
4 & 5) Canada has a gun problem, and the guns originate from the USA. Canada has a problem with sick Americans crossing the border and buying meds meant for Canadians. American cross-border concerns about Canada don't hold a candle to that.
6) This is a strange expectation. If it had merit, then the reverse would, too: America is guilty of undercutting Canada's efforts to maintain global free trade.
So that leaves NORAD and the Digital Services tax.
To my mind, it seems like Canada primarily is guilty of being a nation with a few priorities and interests of its own, rather than a state.
This is your evidence? This is meaningless. The problem is, you’re applying reasoning backwards. You’re starting with the assumption that Trump’s ramblings are justified, so you search for whatever you can find that supports his side, and thus conclude that this evidence is sufficient to justify his claims, because it’s all the evidence out there. Instead of actual reasoning, which would be to start with the question “are his claims justified?”, searching for evidence for and against, and realizing that these few articles in support are dwarfed by the hundreds of billion dollars in trade between the two countries.
Your argument stems from the idea that Canada is not its own country, and that Canadians cannot have their own interests or opinions on how things should be handled.
How dare they not follow the rules and behave like the other 50 states!
This is exactly what Trump's attitude is, and it's why Canadians are angry.
If we look at history, it's no surprise that the US's alliances are fleeing and temporary.
The US doesn't really have any real allies, as any ally could be betrayed for any reason at any time.
Just look at all the betrayals that Trump was personally responsible for, such as Afghanistan, NATO, Canada, Ukraine, the Kurds, and Syria. Poor Kurds have to watch as Trump shakes hands with the leader of Al-Qaeda, who is currently carrying out ethnic cleansing and massacring people.
Alliances should be mutual. What has the US done for Canada lately, especially considering the outrageous demands? Like what has the US done that benefitted Canada, but also cost the US at least in some way (so no BS about "US is growing and Canada is having some of the pie")? In what way has the US suffered and didn't grab as much as it was able to, just so Canada-the-ally would also be taken care of? When has the Trump's US acted like a real ally/friend instead of a volatile backstabbing bandit with the "winner takes it all and I don't care what happens after" attitude?
I claim that Canada has been much more of an ally to the US than vice versa.
What a load of BS, Canada is the best friend the US could ask for.
Remember in 2018 when Canada held Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou under a U.S. extradition request? It tanked Canada/China relations and had trade ramifications Canada is still feeling today.
It's quite odd, the past days there's been this messaging from different users about how old allies haven't been good allies. First I saw this point about Denmark, now Canada.
Hard to understand where this is coming from, it's really odd to see it popping up out of nowhere when barely a year ago this would never have been brought up about any of these countries... Where is the messaging coming from?
That’s fair enough. Part of it is the Trump effect. I tend to dive pretty deep into things when they catch my interest. A lot of time we write things off as crazy simply because we don’t understand the context behind the presumption of insanity. So I try to look under the surface so to speak. I want to know why someone feels the way they do, even if their thesis is a little confused. Almost like: “I see you are very passionate about this, let me figure out why.”
I try to make the world make sense. Communication is a skill and many otherwise smart people simply fail to invest in it. Curiousity I suppose.
There are two things Canada is guilty of.
1) it spent far too little on its military
2) it trusted the Americans far too much by tying its economy so deeply with the USA.
If you subtract the oil purchased by the USA, Canada has a trade surplus with the USA. A trade surplus that's mostly comprised of finished goods. Canada sells raw materials to the USA and buys finished goods from them.
The lack of public awareness is honestly the biggest issue. I’ve got nothing personally against Canada or the Canadian people. And I certainly don’t think Trump’s approach has benefitted the situation. But I also recognize that his grievance have a level of merit. I can critique a government without blaming a people, right? I disagree with how the Canadian government has been handling itself. I think there is a way to resolve these issues, but I think first Canada has to at least acknowledge they exist. Whenever there is discussion like this people love to flood in, eager to defend our neighbor to the north and stick it to Trump. These issues have persisted through many administrations. You ask why Congress doesn’t stop Trump from his actions? It’s because the political consensus in Washington is that they are needed. I have no doubt whoever comes next will blame Trump and declare a new era of friendship and peace. But these issues will be at the core of any new agreement between the countries. People disagree, countries argue. It’s temporary. America wants Canada to succeed and Canada benefits from America’s success. They are just renorming the relationship a bit, which team dynamics tells us takes us back to the storming phase. Give it time and we’ll be rolling along again.
> I think there is a way to resolve these issues, but I think first Canada has to at least acknowledge they exist.
One can't and shouldn't acknowledge the things that don't exist.
Like:
- Venezuela's drugs being a big problem in the USA
- Russia/China trying to take Greenland
- Norwegian government responsible for giving Peace Nobels
- Canada's efforts to poison USA with fentanyl
They are all fake news and anyone spewing that should ridiculed, not engaged and reasoned with to find the compromise. (Example: since we are talking here and I share my eternal wisdom with you, it is only fair that you should give me all of your weath. Oh, you don't think it is reasonable and don't want to give a random guy anything? Fine, it is a fair compromise then in which you give me half of everything. The Greatest Deal!)
Being a good ally isn't just doing entirely what the US says the should do. The US needs to coordinate responses to China and work with allies to come to a shared understanding. How the current administration operates is assuming these allied country are fiefdoms. The economic situation in Canada isn't great, and the US could make it stronger, but refuses to.
The same feedback is largely true for most US allies. If you want people to decouple from China, you need to offset and fix the underlying reason they are trading with them.
I have many complaints about Trump's handling of foreign policy. Don't mistake my tone for approval of his approach. He is needlessly aggressive and domineering. We have tried the carrot approach though. Coalition of the willing. By and large I would say our allies are spiritually willing but physically unable to. If we use Canada for example, I don't think they need to jump at every demand, but things like stopping counterfeit sales (Pacific Mall), taking meaningful steps to stop cartel money laundering (Vancouver), actually meeting military commitments (Ukraine promises). A lot of it doesn't get reported because people don't really want to hear it. Like I said, Trump is not right in his handling of these issues, but Canada allows them to fester because its in their interest.
China captured 2 Canadians as retaliation. Wanting to de-escalate and get them back seems pretty reasonable. Unless the US proposed a military operation to get them back?
They still did that. Even though being a pawn in another player's game (USA trying to kill its technological competitor) and paying for it in many different ways was definitely not in the Canada's interests.
You seem to have this strange position that "what's good for the US is also automatically good for Canada, or at least it doesn't matter what Canada things and what it's national interests might be; just shut up and do what we say (even if it's a command to jump from the building)".
You have a laundry list of complaints about Canada's action wrt the US. What would someone like you on Canada's side of the border offer in response, do you think?
All of these issues go back long before Trump, who has made things uniquely worse. But any two countries with as long (and tightly bound) a history as ours are going to have constant points of friction. Are you suggesting Canada is uniquely a "fake friend" in this equation?
I wouldn't count on the people that elected trump, twice (!), to come to their senses. The American voter cannot be trusted to do what is right for the country.
I'm surprised that people are so surprised by this. Funds operate with risk management models and practices. As the US becomes more unstable, politically, these will weigh in on how much money people keep in US markets. US threats to annex Canada and invade greenland. US kidnapping foreign heads of state. Actively using federal agents as shock troops against blue cities. All of this has true economic impact, either real in terms of losses but also USD as a stable currency run by legitimate people.
Would they implement capital flight controls? if you invest in the US, can you get your money out? No one knows but it seems increasingly less likely. Red lines are being crossed weekly.
The country is heading towards a decline into a developing world style authoritarian dictatorship.
The current plan, as proposed, isn't even accurate or helpful. It has butter under healthy fats, which it is not. "meat" is thoroughly vague and red meat is very different from fish and poultry. Red meat of all types are filled with saturated fats associated with cvd and ldl-c levels.
It's not scientific and that's exactly what you'd expect out of RFK and MAHA movement.
All of this coming while the administration guts science funding, food inspections, vaccine guidelines, handouts to farmers producing nutrient poor foods, corporatist policies creating more food deserts.
thoroughly discredits what they are trying to do, even if there is some good in here.
CVD and links to saturated fats is a long, long established phenomenon and has a lot of science behind it. A single study or even studies should not invalidate or discount it. Before people misinterpret what this is saying.
Sugar may also contribute some to CVD but most cardiologists still think fats are the main driver of CVD.
Those studies however generally put beef and sausages into the same "red meat" category. So yeah... that science is, from what I've seen, basically worthless.
Large percentage, yes. The issue is the "not large percentage" part. Sugar, additives, preservatives, colors... all of these are toxic. And when you mix up beef steak with sausage... you won't get realistic results.
That's like asking "what's the issue if somebody salts the soup with cyanide, most of the meal will still be soup". Yeah, but the cyanide will still kill you, even if it is the small percentage.
there are literally thousands of studies. there's no real scientific debate amongst people that know what they are talking about. Red meat, and any food high in saturated fats, are awful for your heart. full stop. that includes sausage, steak, ham, butter, etc.
the people eating "lean steaks" are fooling themselves. There's no such thing as "clean beef" it all has high amounts of bad fats. Are some worse than others? of course but let's not kid ourselves.
There is literally no proof for any of that. In fact, scientists recently seem to be walking back on the whole "saturated fat bad" stuff. Because nutritional science is less science, and more "monetary interests + blind faith".
There is very little science in nutrition, despite the existence of thousands of studies. There are huge gaps in even the basics of nutrition understanding, and we are constantly discovering new confounding variables. Some dietary fibers were being counted as carbs as late as the 2000s. The huge impacts of the gut microbiome on digestion of food has barely been recognized in the last 10 years, and we still basically know nothing about it. Inter-personal variations in base metabolic rates and/or absorption of nutrients from food is gigantic, with basically no known reasons for it (some of the difference is tied to muscle mass, but even if you eliminate differences in muscle mass, there are still large differences that remain), and no inclusion in common models and dietary recommendations.
I'm not trying to say that red meat is good for you. I'm just saying we have no real idea, and you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot. Try things out, see if you can eat similarly to people you know who are in good health, and get blood work done regularly to see if you're ok. Probably avoid highly synthesized foods.
Says you? because that's not what cardiologists, nutritionists and doctors say. around the world. there's a ton of real, good science from many countries that show a very clear link between increased saturated fat intake, CVD and LDL-C levels. It's not really in question.
You are essentially hand waving away 80+ years of scientific studies and data because...you said so?
> you really shouldn't trust a doctor about any of this stuff any more than you should trust the latest health influencer crackpot.
This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.
I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern.
In any other domain, I would agree with you 100%. But nutrition science really is that bad, in my experience and opinion. With some exceptions (e.g. the need for vitamins to avoid things like scurvy, or the relationship between salt intake and blood pressure), even long-standing nutrition beliefs and practices have been overturned (e.g. consumption of cholesterol, or the discovery of the role of dietary fiber), and some of the newer research is likely to overturn others (e.g. with the role and diversity of gut microbiomes, it's likely other nutrition advice will depend to some extent on your specific microbiome).
The reason for this is fairly simple to see: the methods of science that work so well in other areas of biology are completely impractical in nutrition because of
1. The difficulty of ascertaining and maintaining compliance with a specific diet for a long term study
2. The very long-term effect of some food choices
3. The unknown degree of inter-personal variance in food consumption
4. The expected low effect size of dietary recommendations
5. The huge variety of possible dietary effects
6. The huge amount of possible confounding factors in any population-level study
As you'd expect from this combination, the only effects we really have good science about are those that are relatively fast acting (e.g. salt intake increases BP in less than a day) or have very strong effect sizes (e.g. lack of vitamins or certain amino-acids produces severe diseases). For things like life-long effects, or even effects over multiple years, especially where the correlation is slight, you're left with very unclear science where the unknown possible confounding factors dominate any conclusion.
Edit to add: even today, there is a clear disconnect in nutrition science between people who advocate mostly for relatively simple guidelines and the avoidance of processed foods, usually recommending a preference for vegetables over animal-based products; and the older style of guidelines that you suggest, that say a grilled steak is much worse for you than, say, a stevia-sweetened granola bar you'd buy in a super market.
Dietary cholestrol hasn't really been overturned, but sure there is some nuance. Some people do respond badly to dietary cholestrol (like you said, individual advice is sometimes required), but dietary cholestrol is also not a linear response afaiu. That is, if you eat one egg a day, you may as well eat 4, but if you can completely eliminate dietary cholestrol it could make a difference. So, many guidelines don't bother with suggesting it, because it's too hard to eleminate it to the point of mattering for the average person.
All that to say, the science isn't wrong, but the practicalities influence the advice.
The guidelines haven't changed, but they should be. The association between cholesterol and CVD is specifically related to blood cholesterol levels. However, in healthy individuals, blood cholesterol levels are not strongly impacted by dietary cholesterol choices - since cholesterol is synthesized in the body, there is homeostasis, and higher cholesterol intake leads to lower rate of synthesis, maintaining the same blood levels.
However, some individuals suffer from a bad regulation of this homeostasis, and for them dietary cholesterol does lead to persistent high levels of blood cholesterol as well. So the guidelines should apply for them, but not for everyone else.
Nutrition science is not science in almost any of the ways a real science needs to be, and there is almost zero "real, good science" to be found in it. The reasons this statement is true (as well as the precise qualifications of the exceptions to this) are well laid out by tsimionescu in response to your post.
The measurement, control, confounds, and even basic concepts are atrocious here, this is possibly the only field as bad as or even worse than e.g. social psychology. And this is all ignoring the massive economic interests involved.
It is in fact only science illiteracy that would lead one to think nutrition science is a serious science. At the most absolute charitable, it is a protoscience like alchemy (which did have some replicable findings that eventually led to real chemistry, but which was still mostly nonsense at core).
Matter of the fact is that the entirety of belief that saturated fat "clogs the arteries" was based on the epidemiological studies which failed to adjust for other risk factors such as trans fat intake, intake of processed foods, and many more.
We should not throw away "80+ years of scientific studies and data" because... said "80+ years of scientific studies and data" do not exist. Not a single actual study had ever been made. The best we have are epidemiological studies, and these have massive issues.
"This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.
I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern."
It is not an insane take, you are just being a dumbass. Doctors do not have any training in nutrition. When I asked my doctor - doctors, actually, plural - for dietary advice, literally all of them told me "I don't have knowledge to advise you on that, figure it out on your own".
Science has basis in reality, yes. But doctors aren't scientists.
not sure where people have been for the last year but MAHA and rfk have been on the "fat is good train" and seem to completely ignore entire decades of science.
yeah social media is proving itself to be a bad actor like big alcohol, big tobacco. No incentive to do the right thing or improve anything. ripping audiences away from them is the only way they'll understand.
That's a really cool use case and seems super helpful. working cloud native is a chore sometimes. having to fiddle with internal apis, acl/permissions issues.
Bold of you to assume the public will ever catch up or care in the world of relentless algos and propagandizing. Tariffs have been in place for months now, which is objectively a regressive self imposed tax on US citizens.
DOGE/Musk, noem, Kash, hegseth, etc.
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