There are many, many other jobs where you can openly display your religions and no-one will give a shit.

So a government job prevents you from doing so. Boo hoo. Find a different job, then. Religion isn’t a “disability” that needs protecting other than demonstrating a wholesale lack of effective bullshit detection skills.

Oh, Albertans can leave Canada, alright… by emigrating through the border to America at the 49th parallel.

Learn how to snipe at distance. We cannot beat them with force, but we can bleed them dry from a million separate cuts.

The only good fascist is a dead fascist.

I like RustDesk. If you’re worried about connectivity, you can even run your own relay server.

Then volume is the tactic we need to work with.

Keep in mind that if we were to cancel the entire order of 88 F-35 aircraft, and use that money on Gripens, we would be able to purchase about 420 of them from Europe. That is before any cost savings of building them domestically, this is full sticker price.

Then also consider that quality of tools has never won a war: quantity has.

WWII - on both fronts - has demonstrated this superbly. Sure the Tiger was an exceptional tank, and was virtually unbeatable by a Sherman. The Germans knew how to build a quality machine that was years ahead of anything that America could put out. In fact, it took about 8 Sherman tanks - operating in concert - to take out a German Tiger; distracting it until a shot could be taken against one of its vanishingly rare vulnerable spots at exceedingly close range. And the number of combat-ready Shermans by the end of that skirmish was usually 1 or 0.

But when America had manufacturing capacity to pump out Shermans by the tens of thousands, it didn’t take very long before 10, 20, or even more Shermans started trundling over the ridgeline for every Tiger the Germans fielded.

At that point, despite the clear technological superiority of the Tiger, it was simply overwhelmed.

Almost every modern combat has had numbers win. Not quality, numbers. Especially among tech-similar forces. And the Gripen is the closest available aircraft to the F-35 in tech; certainly closer than the Sherman and Tiger were.

I know what he’s talking about: not against American pilots, but as make-believe American pilots.

Which is a good idea, but not perfect: American pilots will have noticeably different behaviours and tactics, and even personality types that are (generally) not found up here. While training against other Canadians in an F-35 is great, it’s not as good as training against Americans in an F-35.

But that’s the trick - how do we get America, using F-35 aircraft, to help us to train up our Gripen pilots?

And when our original order of 88 or so F-35 planes could, if completely cancelled and on a per-dollar basis, buy 420 Gripens straight from Europe, how do we get America to unknowingly train up so many Gripen pilots?

A phyrric victory is one where the costs have exceeded the benefits that have accrued through victory.

Make no mistake, we would never be able to win in a modern conflict against America. Even if we dropped the entire original order of 80 F-35 aircraft, and used that money to buy 420 Gripen straight from Europe (ignoring domestic production and the lack of skilled fighter pilots, here), we would still lose any kind of air superiority push by America.

But (again, assuming sufficient well-trained pilots) we would definitely f**k up America’s ability to project air superiority by a massive amount. I would even call it a strategic disembowelling of America’s air power.

Just like hunting boar with a spear, the hunter risks the boar being so enraged that, despite being lethally wounded, it still force-impales itself the rest of the way up the spear to get at and kill the hunter.

The point of the Gripen isn’t to win against America. That is impossible.

The point of the Gripen is to have the majority or entirety of the Canadian Air Force beyond America’s ability to remotely restrict operations or shut down completely, such that the pain of any invasion dramatically exceeds any rewards and could even be a lasting semi-lethal blow to their domestic air capabilities as a whole.

For many places, it’s operational inertia. If you’ve had a hosting account at the same place since 1998, you’re bound to still have username/password access to services like FTP even though other (and better) options exist.

And then there is the issue of sole control. Many greybeards like myself still run traditional username/password auth on services because,

1. We have whitelisted our IP address, and if dynamic, keep that whitelist updated
2. That outside of said whitelisting, the service is a quasi-honeypot meant to protect the machine as a whole. Any connection made from outside the address space of my ISP, by anyone else, is by default considered malicious, and is banned instantly as a precaution. They don’t even get the opportunity to attempt a login; merely connecting to said service is sufficient evidence of hostile intent.

So while my setup is not ideal, it is ideal for myself. if I had anyone else as co-admin, or even clients, things would get stupidly complicated very quickly. But since it’s just me…

An IBM Selectric??

Now, something cheaper and clearly not as reliable, I can understand. But these machines were quite bulletproof, easily on-par with Olympia or Hermes in terms of build quality and usability. They were meant to take a pounding on the daily and keep on ticking. About the only way these things broke down is either via benign neglect or intentional malice.

And they were also built like tanks, with heavy steel and iron… there would be a non-trivial chance of injury or even death via ricochet or shrapnel where an IBM Selectric is concerned. That makes me think this was staged… you don’t want to close-fire on a Selectric without body armour and face/neck protection.

Yeah, Apple has a lot of shitty restrictions in its walled garden. Firefox not being able to use its own rendering engine being a big one for me. And there are plenty more, such as a lack of responsiveness to legitimate devs when they report copycat rip-offs.

But as the Android ecosystem has shown, a breakdown of the walled garden has seen malware and scams explode in number. Many of the secondary app stores just don’t have the resources and tools to keep users safe.

Allowing alternative walled gardens is not the answer. Dramatically lowering the barriers to legitimate app developers is.