fidotron

In winter even the warm bits of the EU aren't all that warm either, and no one complains about the cold like a (non B.C.) Canadian encountering European winter humid cold for the first time.

Europeans go to Thailand, even Latam etc. It's why so many were killed in the Indian Ocean tsunami.

> largely a welfare state propped up by the rest of Canada, primarily Ontario

Aside from the wrongness of the rest of your comment, you're hilariously out of date here. Ontario has become the defining political and economic disaster area in Canada.

Months ago. I live in Quebec (which is where the hospital incident occurred).

Now thanks to the Internet it's way harder for hotel clerks to claim prices are different, which used to be exactly what they'd do, consequently it's improved dramatically on that front. I still remember the face of an Ottawa guy decades ago confronted with a european smartphone shoved in his face to show he was lying through his teeth. He clearly wasn't ready for the whole concept.

One of the major problems of Canada is it's essentially a line of provinces east-west. It means you cannot simply route around a province with unreasonable demands, everyone must be placated, and the resource region of Alberta is seriously landlocked.

This has bred an economy of rent seekers and real estate at the expense of almost everything else. There are reasons that the best and brightest of Canada enthusiastically leave en masse to the place that Canadians claim to detest most of all, which leads to a sort of self loathing complex with the ones that stay; they are utterly mystified by the idea that anyone with any skills/talent whatsoever would want to move to Canada, it's truly mind boggling. (This is why I prefer Quebec - it's got enough people in it that really like Quebec a lot).

The question is if it would allow all the wealthy Canadians to finally leave for Cyprus without paying exit taxes.

It's something many Canadians don't want to accept, but too much of their tourist facing industry is setup to exploit and frankly con Americans.

I recall on my first trip here ending up in hospital, being mistaken for an American and shown one price list, only for my insurance company to get on the phone and promptly a new price list appeared and a lot of "We're sorry we thought you were American" from the staff.

And prior to the mobile web dealing with Ontario hotels was like haggling in a Turkish bazaar with an obnoxious layer of passive aggression on top.

Quebec is also about to have a provincial election where separatism, and everyone's relationship to it, is the main argument.

Many people on both sides of the Atlantic wrongly think Quebec is more compatible with Europe than the rest of Canada because they speak French, but almost the exact things Quebec separatists care most about are the things the EU wouldn't let them control.

The great confusion for Anthropic and OAI is how to break out from pure chat without signalling you in fact intend to eat all of your customer's business too.

I don't actually disagree, and advocate that for now the thing to do is use both.

You need to use frontier models to understand where the puck is going, but also to use local ones for anything remotely sensitive.

I turned off Anthropic properly and switched all of that over to OpenAI yesterday. (I use other models for other things too, especially DeepSeek in Pi).

Honestly aside from the voice it uses you wouldn't notice a difference. Switching costs are low, vote with your wallet.

If it involved being able to leave Canada in perpetuity without an exit tax, which would open the floodgates in a most unintentional way.

I refer you to the video as to the why and how, keeping in mind that's before the Berlin Wall came down.

The Brits have a habit of only telling you the precise truth when they think you think they're joking.

Brexit was obviously going to happen a good decade before the referendum, the tension was so blatant. This idea people were conned into voting leave is just utter nonsense - they'd been chomping at the bit for the opportunity for years.

Now the UK has managed to ramp up the tension dramatically, but without some easy foreign political bogeyman to blame. It's not going to end well either, but it's not clear exactly what the endgame is. This is why the Greens, Reform and Restore are suddenly things.

There is a strong case that much of the eastern bloc were tricked into joining, by the UK, in order to weaken the Franco-German efforts for ever closer union.

This was even a joke in the UK at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYqB0uTKlE

It sounds constitutional, and if you want to make a Canadian exasperated ask about the history of the Canadian constitution.

Hint: it's still not been signed by all the relevant parties.

There's no planet on which Cameron's visit that time was regarded by anyone on any side as anything other than a failure. Cameron was simply putting a face on it.

It has pissed off the EU (understandably), pissed off his own supporters, and pissed off his enemies.

Exactly. And, let's face it, democracy. Either the people in the UK wanted freedom of movement or they didn't, and they voted on that basis.

People don't exactly feel they agreed to the Boriswave either, and now when I am back visiting the UK it's noticeably the most racist it's ever been, by a very significant distance.

I'm in Canada now and Canada has the same dynamics going on.

> Presumably under the proposed thing Canada would largely adopt EU regulations.

Canadian provinces do not agree with each other about trade regulations. They will not surrender this to the federal government, and they certainly won't to the EU.

Canada isn't actually a single market itself.

It's not actually reporting on the substance in any meaningful detail, and no one is, for the relatively simple reason that once it happens every special interest group in Canada will find something to go nuts about.

Right. The oddity now is the euroscepticism is rooted in the countries previously considered the core.

I am of the view the UK should never have joined as a full member, and it would have been better to establish the two speed membership way back then, allowing France and Germany particularly to engage in further integration without mutual interference involving the UK.

My position is hardly rare. Iceland didn't join at least partly because they were suspicious of intentions regarding fishing.

Human cooperation does not mean misleading your compatriots into deals that you then ratchet up ever further until it becomes completely intolerable.

There are reasons that in the long run flexibility wins.

Does anyone actually know publicly what is and isn't the deal for associate membership?

At least here (in Canada) I'm not seeing any concrete details.

It literally privileges people in countries outside the EU by giving them more rights than those inside.

Which many people inside the EU would observe seems completely consistent with EU behaviour.

Edit to add: "Being misled" would refer to the way the EU was sold to many participants in earlier decades as an economic union, and not an all encompassing political one, with it simply ratcheting that way. Whenever objections occurred referenda would simply be repeated until the populations complied. It's far from the exercise in democracy that proponents promote. (This is distinct from saying it is _all bad_).

I am in Canada. There's no evidence Canada is OK with those things.

> Also, the Brexit referendum was a campaign promise of David Cameron that was going to trigger if his conservative party won the 2015 general election

That is iff the renegotiations with Brussels failed, which they did.

> The UK renegotiation was a net loss for the EU, this Canada deal is a deal where both parties gain something.

V. hard to see what Canada gets out of it. All the roadblocks to Canadian trade with the EU today (especially around resources) are internal to Canada and have nothing at all to do with EU status.

That's what happened afterwards.

The referendum was triggered by a failed negotiation between Cameron and the EU in the first place.

This makes being involved as little as possible but no more far more attractive than being bound too tightly together though.

Almost like many of the EU states were misled into their current situations.

It's literally what happened.

Cameron was trying to reduce the scope of EU integration with the UK (esp freedom of movement), with the threat he didn't want to use of a referendum, the EU said no (as the other commenter explained partly to disincentivize others, but also because they thought he was bluffing and people would never vote to leave), so the referendum was held.

This is the other part: if associate membership is a thing then won't half of the EU start thinking that's their future?

> If you've been around the ESC scene

This is a euphemism on par with attending parties in parts of the SFO AI community.