Canada

Here are my (hot?) takes:

• America's greatest export is culture
• People love capitalism and they love consumption. People love celebrity, fashion, and wealth. People want to be seen holding a Starbucks cup while face-timing on their iPhones, talking about the latest Marvel movie. Truth is, most Canadians want to be at least a little American, and some Canadians want to be very American.
• A lot of people aren't political
• "Canadian" has always been a fuzzy concept
• Americanisms became entrenched before America became a dirty word
• Companies (especially tech companies) are designed to lock people in through various mechanisms
• Inertia is very difficult to overcome

TL:DR; It's 'cuz we're close, but Trump is helping us Canadians rediscover a healthy nationalism.

We were pretty well integrated with the USA over the last 30-odd years, to our mutual benefit and detriment. For the last 10 we've seen the vocal minority of Maple MAGA say with Maxime Bernier's People Party, but also the Conservative moment aligning itself (if not merging with) MAGA.

Under the Trudeau government, his government's foreign affairs philosophy was internationalism. Which generally made Canadians not really attached to their national identity, and our national symbols started to represent some of the colonial skeletons we were in the process of digging up. What made things worse is that the Ottawa Trucker Convoy was awash with Canadian symbols but they were a MAGA-coup-turned-nuisance-occupation. Most Canadians were either disappointed or disgusted at what national pride had come to represent the worst of us.

Though since Trump has been threatening Canada a lot, I think things have turned for the better, and non-MAGA people at-large have taken back the mantle of nationalism to decouple it from racism and bigotry. The !buyCanadian@lemmy.ca and !boycottUS@lemmy.ca movements are still active. I've not completely gotten rid of every American thing yet but like for 90% of stuff I have, and I actively look for alternatives every time before I buy, and discovered Canadian small to medium businesses I never would have come across otherwise.

For streaming services I have moved to my *arr stack (apps like sonarr and radarr) and CBC gem, I am not going to pay to watch US content. Even if I used the global, ctv, and citytv apps I would not be watching the ads because I use a pihole setup to block most ads. I use Unwatched to view YouTube videos as it blocks the YouTube ads. I have moved to self hosting my stuff (file storage through Nextcloud, my VPN through wireguard so that I can access most of my things away from my LAN, my images via Immich, my notes through Joplin, my web search through searXNG, and my password manager is vaultwarden so I can use bitwarden on my devices) if I had the money I would replace my iPhone and iPad with something I could easily load a new OS on. My desktop has been broken for years even if it wasn’t I would have installed Debian orsome fork of it. I have moved my blog to a Canadian host for my domain name and email host (I use a different email for everything to make me worthless to advertisers) my host is hosthero. If I had the money I would replace my HomePods with a DIY thing as I have moved all my automations (minus my good night one, I may figure out how to move it over once my place is repaired) to home assistant.

The only reason I use AWS is because duckdns.org is hosted on it, and I use duckdns for my ddns for all my VPN things.

I only really shop at the coop.

Countries like the united states, but also China for example, model their laws and regulations in such a way that companies can do business at the expense of individuals. This results in very wealthy, powerful companies that can be very competitive globally, especially in countries where laws tend to favour people over businesses.

Because Canada is more of a suburb of the United States than you'd like to admit. While Canada claims more square footage, the US has the better slice of the continent. The US is the richest nation on earth, home to 340 million people to Canada's 40 million, most of whom live within 100 miles of our border. To all those American businesses you listed, Canada is a sidequest. We might as well also sell shit to you while we're at it. We do the same to most of the rest of the world, compared to them you're small potatoes but you're a closer drive. Hell, more than half of you live south of Seattle.

Wtf are you even talking about?

1. the companies you listed are not the only companies in their markets,

2. at least one of the companies you listed is Canadian

3. how is this different from literally any other country around the world?

4. how are you listing Costco when they're literally the only store with a maximum markup %

The exact same thing that has been going on for the past ~60 years of American corporate expansionism.

They don't regulate their companies, allowing them to basically abuse their destitute class to let their corporate class amass a vast amount of capital, and then they use that capital to expand globally, buy overseas companies, create capitalists there and use them to spread their shitty exploitative and harmful practices.

The key it this process is that their companies look economically successful, because they make more money then their competitors, but in reality they're not more efficient or produce better goods (quite the opposite in fact), it's just that they're better at externalizing costs and exploiting others.

US money bribes politicians to let them exploit us.