Last trip to the grocery store I couldn’t find any non-US salad kits, and Silk NextMilk is made down there now, because I guess our plants were the listeria ones. Chip dip was surprisingly hard to find too, although I did it.
I’m very pleased with how many vegetables actually come from Mexico (definitely via the US though), and there’s even a few things you can get from greenhouses, so that situation is less dire than I’d expected.
Killed all social media outside the fediverse. Even for our small business. Dumped Amazon and looking into Linux to drop Microsoft too. Degoogling the phone. We’re pretty good at the grocery store because we grow a lot of our own and make what we can.
Even for our small business.
Damn, that’s next level commitment! I’ve gotten rid of everything personally, but giving up on my income source being easy to find would scare me.
Also, RIP DivestOS. Still sad about that.
Fuck em. We will manage. They can eat a bag of dicks. If I could eliminate all American influence from our lives I would.
If you have a pixel phone then GrapheneOS is a solid choice.
If you’re up for a challenge try Ubuntu Touch, Mobian, Sailfish and Postmarket OS!
I’m interested in moving off Android but afraid of bricking my phone. Years ago I had flashed roms onto my galaxy s4 but these days I worry about not being able to get work calls if something goes wrong. How risky is it these days, also is there anything I should know ahead of time if I try to move to a linux os. Do they work well on cheaper phones?
Years ago I had flashed roms onto my galaxy s4 but these days I worry about not being able to get work calls if something goes wrong.
There are still issues with calling however I would say Ubuntu Touch has the best support that front as it is the most stable. It should be fine installing when following an official guide from that distro.
I should know ahead of time if I try to move to a linux os.
The cellular connectivity has issues and the apps are limited.
Do they work well on cheaper phones?
It really depends on how well the phone model is supported by the contributors. They have lists of their most supported phones that you can look at.
Thanks for the info! Going to say cheap phone, possible cellular connectivity issues might not be a good idea for me right yet. I’ll put it on the to do with next phone list. I sometimes do Instacart deliveries to supplement income when I accidentally splurge to much. Not having cellular in remote areas would mean I couldn’t work directions/electronic signatures for alcohol.
Not having cellular in remote areas would mean I couldn’t work directions.
The open-source efficient Organic Maps can help with that.
Your job sounds really cool! Seeing all the beautiful countryside!
Yeah my normal job is in Nashville. Instacart is what I was talking about on the side. Basically it is just picking up stuff for people like groceries and hardware stores and dropping it off. Mostly it’s Kroger for me, grab 25 items, drop it off at their house and make a few extra dollars. Usually can make $100 on my day off doing that for 5 hours or so. You know how far the trips are before you take them so if you want further drives you can do them but you are paying for gas so usually I only take farther ones when they are for decent money amounts. I have taken some that are 30 miles into the middle of nowheresville. I’ve actually delivered to an Amish community as well.
Mastodon is free, might be better than going totally off grid for your business.
The audience is smaller than twitter was, but if you find a niche the people are quite nice
Most of my groceries accidentally end up being nearly all Canadian products.
I haven’t really needed to buy anything other than groceries this past week, but I have been looking for alternatives to other products I’ll eventually need, and I will make buying Canadian first a priority, followed by Not American™ as a close second. 😂
Yeah, same. Aside from the products I mentioned it wasn’t hard at all. I had to take a bit of extra care with canned fruit, I guess.
American software dominance is pretty out of control. If you don’t want to use American streaming, you pretty much have to go to piracy instead, and if you want to talk to IRL people online US social media is the main game in town. Not to mention the internet backbone itself being centered in the US.
For online shopping, you can go Chinese. I need to look into if there’s any non-US Western options.
Sailing the Seven Seas is definitely the best way to do streaming.
US social media is increasingly right-leaning and bot-dominated, so you’re not really missing out there.
Online shopping is awful.
At this point, I’m hoping for the Giant Meteor.
Depends how you online shop. I do it occasionally and for niche things that aren’t sold anywhere nearby, and for that I’m immensely grateful. Hopefully someone’s working on federated ecommerce.
Anyone have suggestions for Canadian cat food that isn’t overpriced? I’ve got like 15 cats so I go through a lot in a month.
Most Purina products are at least produced and manufactured in Canada. I have been using the beyond line of products and my cats love it.
Sadly, it is a mega agro corp.
I guess it uses Canadian farms, but Purina is owned by Nestlé.
Dammit.
I knew there was a catch.
Huh TIL. I’ve mainly been feeding them that and the co-op stuff (Which they don’t care for so I usually blend them together.)
Acana is Canadian, though they are not super cheap but certainly not the most expensive either. My dogs like it, and one of them is a picky eater.
It’s generally going well. I already did this boycott once before during Trump 1.0, so I know what do look for.
It’s a bit harder this time around because there are things we need where a Canadian (or at least non-American) alternative doesn’t exist. The big one is diapers, as we haven’t been able to find anything non-American that also works within our budget and time constraints.
It’s unfortunate, but also only temporary. My kids should be out of diapers in a few years, provided the world doesn’t end before then.
Contact your local store to order https://www.royale.ca/diapers Made in New Brunswick.
I’ll do some research today to see if they are available where I live, or if they can be made so. Thanks for the tip.
Oh, well that looks promising!
We did it, Lemmy?
No cloth diapers in Canada?
There are, but they aren’t feasible for us to use. We would love to, and even discussed it before our first kid was born, but the realities of our lives make them impractical.
We had a few in diapers at the same time, reusable ones with washable liners are the way to go. It means carrying a container till you get home to handle a dirty diaper, but the cost savings alone meant less working hours.
Ah. I used a diaper service for my kid and it was pretty handy. Then again, that was 30 years ago and everything was much more affordable.
It looks like AliExpress sells some diapers. I have no idea how they compare price-wise, though, and the quality is bound to be somewhat lower.
In China they culturally have an alternate solution, so maybe that’s why outsourcing has been slower in the diaper market.
Not much changed for me personally, I already mostly buy local.
Btw if you really want to hurt america see if you can modify your rrsp/resp/tfsa/<other 4 letter acronym> to exclude American companies (and O&G while your at it). It’s hard and probably not good from a purely financial perspective, but I think it has a lot more impact.
I’m disabled. Also petition your government leaders to divest CPP from American companies and investment firms.
Already did it! And boy, was I glad I had when Trump started doing things.
VEU is one example ETF on the TSX.
Last year I moved from Ontario to Spain so avoiding American products has been pretty easy at the grocery store. The main thing has been cancelling online American services like Netflix, Amazon, Google one, Youtube Premium, etc.
Cancel them, but don’t stop watching American stuff you like. Just don’t pay for it.
This is the way 🏴☠️
What are you doing for streaming then? High seas, or is there something local available in Spain?
There is movistar plus which is a bit like crave, so its 100% not cutting off the US as you can watch some american content on it. But it also has a lot of Spanish content which is fresh for us. We’re also looking at some UK streaming services that are available in Spain like BBC ITVX but we haven’t subscribed yet.
Also looking at the high seas for content we couldn’t get at either of those 😅
Very disappointed to hear Silk NextMilk is made in America. Other plant based milks just aren’t the same. Have you found a good alternative?
Have u tried making peanut milk at home? It doesn’t take more than 10 min and is incredibly underrated.
I tried the Good Earth oat-coconut blend. No bones, don’t recommend as of now. Honestly if that’s the brand I’m going back to just oat.
NextMilk is a mixture of different plant based milks. Its probably the closest to real milk but I find any brand of original (some sweetener but no extra flavoring e.g. vanilla) oat milk to be close enough that I don’t miss cow milk much.
Next milk is a Silk product
I know. 😕
NotMilk, it is quite milk like. And company is from Chile.
As an American, pretty good, we don’t produce shit here.
It’s clearly a salad kit-based economy. /s
That’s a lie. We produce the highest quality bullshit in the world.
I had to buy moisturizer. I saw two on the shelf. Flipped the labels, one was made in USA, the other made Canada. I picked the latter. That was it.
Get Cutibase if you can find it. Made in Quebec, works really well, scent-free.
I bought Cetaphil. Would look into Cutibase next time around.
Stupid easy…
Yeah it’s going well. I already knew in November that Trump was going to fuck up the economy one way or another, so I bought a handful of bigger ticket stuff from the states at that time for Black Friday.
The main food staple I’ve had to change so far is baby carrots, I usually get the California organic ones in bulk at Costco. I just have to make a separate trip to my smaller local grocer for substitutes.
Hmm. I was stocked up on carrots, so I haven’t actually looked yet.
I did notice the huge Chinese kind are actually from China. I’m gonna need a different knife if I go with those, haha.
I thought looking at the list online would be annoying until I realized you can just look at the food labels. So it’s easy. Had to buy cabbage instead of lettuce last time I was at the store. That’s about it.
What were you doing with it? Cabbage is great but it’s not exactly the same as lettuce.
Putting it in wraps and cooking it with soy.
Mmm, that sounds good. I guess the lettuce would have gone in raw instead, then?
Damn, I think it’s wraps for me too tonight. I managed to find local greenhouse lettuce, which somehow is economically viable.
Excellent grocery shopping today. We didn’t buy anything US (we think). The red cabbage didn’t have any country listed and we assumed it’s Mexican since the green ones were. We didn’t have to switch lots but for some products we bought alternatives: taco shells, granola bars, salsa. We also found some Canadian stuff sold out or almost: ketchup, cereal (we picked a different Canadian one). It’s fun to try new stuff! Also really excited about tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, lettuce and basil from Alberta! This is very early in the year for us to get local produce!
No Alberta bell peppers where I shopped, unfortunately. It’s interesting that they’re doing that in greenhouses as well. I went with Mexico, which is fine, they’re cool, but the thing is you know it came in through the US.
I didn’t buy any fresh tomatoes this time around, so I don’t actually know what’s available.
I was impressed that they have them in February. It’s pretty cold an early in the season for bell peppers. Tomatoes grow like weeds but bell peppers are slower. Mexico works as well. I shop Canada first and then almost anything but US second. For example I don’t like garlic from China.
I’m American, and not buying American has been the norm for decades. So far, it’s working out pretty well.
Great until I went into Dollarama and bought an energy drink and now I need to get two gifts for 6 year olds. Most likely at Walmart 🤦🏼
We bake cookies as kids gifts. We never buy stuff. They chomp the cookies down and the next year ask if we brought them again.
I don’t know what you did in the end, but literally any store is probably better than Walmart, which is privately owned by the Waltons. Even Costco has shareholders all around the world.
Walmart is a publicly traded company. The largest shareholder is the Walton Family (50%) with the rest of the shares purchased by investors around the world.
Oh really? Shit, I missed that, I’m going to have to edit a couple comments.
It’s over 50%, according to Wikipedia, so the basic gist still works. It’s a Walton company with some outside investors.
[https://www.sec.gov/ixviewer/ix.html?doc=%2FArchives%2Fedgar%2Fdata%2F104169%2F000010416924000078%2Fwmt-20240424.htm#id138cb1433b44120b7c101e226ea4cae_157](SEC Document) I’m still calculating slightly less than 50% of Walmart between the Waltons and their Trust.
Thank you for doing the math, unfortunately SEC won’t even load for me.
I’d expect they’d want to keep more, but I guess they could just rely on a small share of the other voting investors to pass whatever they need, since opposition is never perfectly unanimous.
