It's perfectly reasonable for current customers and potential customers to be concerned and cautious when a company shows a willingness to resort to knee-jerk reactions, especially when such reactions can suddenly harm the customer and are due to something that the customer has no control or influence over.
The company involved doesn't matter, and the reason for the knee-jerk reaction doesn't matter. It's a business practice that all customers should definitely watch out for and take seriously, even if they haven't been affected by it (yet).
Knee jerk reaction? Their country almost got toppled by a dictatorship.
Namecheap at the same time said it had over 1,000 employees located in Ukraine, comprising most of its support staff, mostly in Kharkiv (which was a major location of fighting).
How were their customers harmed? They could have transfered their domain within the two week grace period.
Any customer they'd want to have understands that it wasn't a knee-jerk action by any stretch. Rather that it's just something that (responsible) companies have to do once they realize that overarching conditions have emerged that make it simply untenable to keep doing business in certain environments -- completely irrespective of the conduct of any business or individuals in that environment.
Like when there's just too much corruption in a certain country. Or that country starts going on old-school (and very large scale) military campaigns against its neighbors.
So if anything their better customers will not only instantly understand their decision, but will hold them in incrementally higher esteem for it.
It's weird. Usually when a company announces an ethical stance to avoid doing business in ways that support unjust wars, we applaud it, but when a company actually stops doing business in a way that would send money to continue unjust wars, we suddenly decry it.
I don't think it's that surprising that such items are being discarded today.
They might have had value at some point in the past, but they probably haven't retained that value well at all.
For example, enough of the information in those encyclopedia sets, non-fiction books, and magazines is probably now out-of-date, invalid, wrong, or incomplete.
Most of the paperback books and magazines I've seen discarded in boxes along sidewalks are merely previous generations' equivalents of "cheap short term attention catching hooks" from when such things inherently required more physical overhead.
A good chunk of those items probably weren't particularly wanted to begin with, or are infeasible to keep now. No replacements are needed or wanted.
Some of the books, tapes, devices, and other items were probably given as birthday, Christmas, graduation, etc., gifts. They might not have even been that useful to the recipients to begin with. Physical gift-giving like that is less-common these days in my experience, with gift cards and even cash replacing physical items. A lot of items given as gifts in the past are simply no longer offered for sale today, or are so cheap that giving them can even be seen as insulting by some people.
Much of the new housing stock in places like Canada, Europe, and even the US to a lesser extent are small apartments. A lot of people just don't have space for items in general, especially when downsizing or moving into a retirement or care facility.
Enough of the items I see discarded are also damaged, broken, or otherwise unusable, too.
For informational content, maybe, but on a larger level it seems that nothing has value anymore. Makes me curious about what disappeared in people's mind. I don't think spotify replaces a set of LPs even though in terms of sound waves you can have the same amount of bits.
Spotify absolutely replaces LPs or other physical media. Sure you own the physical media, but it doesn’t last forever, it takes up space and it’s somewhat inconvenient. Most people don’t really care about owning music and are happy to pay a few dollars a month for a service that has every song they might ever way to play and to never have to move a box of records again.
Just over a decade ago, there was a job ad for a host role with the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that explicitly required applicants to be "Any race except Caucasian".
From what I remember of my occasional pre-acquisition visits to those chains, they certainly weren't competing on price.
Their drawing power was due to offering ethnic and/or specialty foods (Middle Eastern and Mediterranean products for Adonis, Asian products for T&T, fresh products for Farm Boy) that weren't as common at the more established supermarkets.
I remember being surprised at how expensive items generally were at those chains compared to the more established chains I tended to shop at at the time.
For a customer like me seeking low prices, those smaller chains weren't viable or practical competitors to the larger chains. I'd only end up there as a last resort, typically while travelling and facing time constraints.
The numerous problems that Canada is facing today are ultimately caused by government interference.
While we've certainly seen technology cause and enable change in the private sector, the public sector can basically just ignore disruptive technologies without any real consequences.
If the public sector ever did face any sort of real disruption due to technology, the public sector would likely just regulate away the technology that's causing them problems.
The situation is made worse by a big proportion of the Canadian population being heavily dependent, directly or indirectly, on large and inefficient government. This includes much of the mainstream media, in addition to the overtly government-controlled services (education, health care, policing, etc.), and government itself (politicians, bureaucrats, etc.). These people have no incentive for positive change, and actually a lot of incentive for things to get much worse than they already are.
I think it'll be a mix of economic and demographic factors that eventually result in change, rather than technological factors.
Decades of awful immigration policies have created a society in Canada that's now extremely fractured, well beyond the traditional (and mild in comparison) English/French divide that has already caused enough problems in the past.
Eventually, the already-severe economic inefficiency imposed by government will become unsustainable, and economic troubles will result in "Balkanization" occurring. It will be particularly bad in parts of Ontario and BC, where we already see this beginning to happen.
Care to defined "awful" here? Is this an euphemism to refer to non-European immigrants?
Canada has done very well with immigration IMO. A far more sensible and welcoming system, and most immigrants integrate and do well in Canada pretty quickly.
Bringing in culturally-incompatible foreigners has certainly been a significant problem in Canada.
Bringing in low-skill, low-productivity, and often criminally-inclined foreigners (especially refugees) has also been a significant and socially-costly problem in Canada.
Bringing in foreign "students" has harmed the quality and reputation of Canada's education systems.
Bringing in adult foreigners to do the low-end, part-time jobs that Canadian high school students and university students used to do has hurt Canada economically, and resulted in atrocious service in many retail stores and restaurants.
Bringing in huge numbers of foreigners each year, while simultaneously restricting the construction of new housing, has created severe pricing distortions in the housing and rental markets. These foreigners also put immense strain on the already-insufficient transportation and health care infrastructure.
What you say about "integration" is a myth. A visit to the cities surrounding Vancouver or Toronto will make that very clear, very quickly.
The mainstream media and established parties have wrongly tried to portray them as "extremists" or "fringe", but the People's Party of Canada's platform is by far the most reasonable, balanced, and sensible out there:
It isn't perfect (their proposed immigration rate is far too high, for example), but unlike all of the other parties, at least what they propose would generally steer Canada in a much better direction than it has been going in under the Liberals and Conservatives.
> Everyone else is experiencing outrageous costs of housing, education, and medical care ...
This shouldn't come as a surprise.
Those three sectors you list have tremendously invasive and widespread government interference, and it has only gotten worse with time.
This government interference inherently creates various types of economic inefficiencies (such as the loss of competition, corruption, wasteful bureaucracy, diverting resources to the unproductive users, etc.) that eventually result in severe distortions throughout the entire economy.
This isn't a problem just in the US, either. It's also happening in Canada, for example, and often to a far worse degree.
Anyone who proposes more government interference as the solution to these government-created problems will inherently be making the situation worse.
I've never had any success creating a GitHub account with a throwaway email address.
The last time I tried, I'm pretty sure the email address was rejected right away, and the account couldn't be created.
Not being able to reasonably create an account there is certainly annoying when it comes to performing simple searches.
It has also prevented me from submitting new bug reports and adding information to existing bug reports for a number of open source projects over the years.
I'm always disappointed when I see an open source project using GitHub, because it makes contributing to that project more or less impossible.
I deleted my account and moved my stuff when Microsoft took it over, and never looked back. A project on Github is a project i will not interact with. People have very short memories.
Currently, you'll see words, phrases, and names like "Firefox sends", "telemetry", "Google", "Microsoft", "share this with our partners", "share that data with its partners", "sends us data", "share aggregated data", "our third-party ad platform Kevel", "AdMarketplace (a third-party referral platform)", "Cloudflare", "Comcast", "Adjust", "Google advertising ID", "our partner Fastly", and so forth.
In my opinion, I wouldn't expect to see any of those in the privacy policy of any software product that truly respects my privacy.
The company involved doesn't matter, and the reason for the knee-jerk reaction doesn't matter. It's a business practice that all customers should definitely watch out for and take seriously, even if they haven't been affected by it (yet).