Canada has huge reserves of oil, natural gas, minerals, timber. Americans need that.
Canada doesn’t need anything americans sell
Adobe Photoshop 👉 Use GIMP or Affinity.
Adobe Illustrator 👉 Use Inkscape or Affinity.
Word and Excel 👉 LibreOffice is better. No AI shit and it won’t spy on you.
Microsoft Windows 👉 Use Linux. It’s more secure anyway.
General Motors, Ford, Dodge, Chrysler, Tesla 👉 We don’t need shitty american cars. Buy Hyundai, Toyotas, Honda, Volkswagen.
Apple iPhone 👉 Buy a Samsung
Starbucks Coffee 👉 Just drink local coffee.
McDonalds 👉 Buy from A&W or Harveys
Hyatt Hotels, Marriott Hotels, Four Seasons 👉 Go to Canadian hotels
Amazon 👉 Fuck Jeff Bezos. Buy from your local stores.
Maxwell House Coffee 👉 Balzac’s Coffee Roasters is Canadian
Tourism 👉 Visit Quebec, Banff National Park, Niagara Falls, Vancouver Island, Johnstone Strait, Yoho National Park. Go north to watch beautiful Arctic landscapes. At least you won’t be shot and killed.
Boeing 👉 Buy Airbus. At least they won’t crash.
What do americans sell that Canadians actually need? Nothing. They just sell convenience. Their products are often substandard
Payment 👉 Use Interac instead of credit card.
Seriously that should be #1. They charge 2-3% transaction fee to the vendor, give you 1% back as a “reward” to give you the impression that you’re not being screwed over and pocket the rest. Meanwhile Interac charges only 1/10th of that and it is Canadian.
Paying with a credit card is like playing a 1-2% tax to the US. I’m sure if someone did the math they’d be horrified by his much of a drain it is on our economy while it boosts theirs.
Also Krita has become extremely capable and easier to approach coming from Photoshop than GIMP IMO. If should at least be listed along it as an alternative to Photoshop.
Cash. Cash is life.
I second Krita. There also used to be CorelDraw… but they were acquired by private equity earlier this year :(
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Interac sucks though, we need a nationalized instant payments mechanism.
Also I don’t understand why business owners don’t push harder for Interac given the blatant fee difference
Never found a place that interac doesnt work. TF are you doing wrong?
When Interac is an option, it does work. But I often come across transactions that Interac isn’t the most convenient option.
Debit Instant payment should always be first place as most convenient option. If it isn’t, we’re doing it wrong.
Interac is all across Canada, for purchases or sending cash direct to a buddy. How does it suck?
Thanks for the detailed reply. Some good points for sure.
I’ve gotten around that by using Email aliases, so my interac is not my direct email.
They are free at my Credit Union, its one reason I left TD Bank…they tacked fees onto everything
Do people still use (non bank) ATMS in this era? I havent used one in 15 years maybe. I haven’t handled cash in so long that when somebody gave me a fiver or ten for a Craigslist exchange that I didn’t recognize it. Looked totally foreign to me.
It is. Its why most people have chosen direct deposit that skips the security question.
Yeah there are workarounds to most of these, it’s possible to get by. But it leaves much to be desired, and it’s a legacy system that has evolved very little over the years. It’s kind of like we live with the instant payment system built for the 2000’s and in my point of view, it sucks that we have missed the most of the last 20 years of development in the space.
I wouldn’t say sucks, but there are benefits that credit cards have that Interac doesn’t. But why cant we have a Canadian credit company?
Yes I think we should have both. A nationalized instant payment platform, and a Canadian credit card provider. Both have their uses, both are critical infrastructure.