By “vertical” I suppose they mean that the portrait is sideways.

Traditionally in my family it’s called the Excited States of Hysteria.

People need to understand how data is used

No. People need to learn to refuse to have their ID scanned at bars and restaurants and every other place that has no business scanning their ID.

There should be a public consensus that having your ID scanned on demand for no reason is unacceptable. It would’ve been obvious to the people of thirty years ago. There ought to be public service announcements telling people why it’s wrong, if for some reason the practice can’t simply be prohibited completely.

We’ve long been in need of a new—or freshly revitalized—brand for people interested in making things better to organize around, and it seems like we’ve finally got one democratic socialism.

Or is he one of those rare politicians who listens to the people of the country

Ha! Unless he’s been replaced by the pod people in the past couple of weeks I do not think that is likely. I would be betting on Trump doing what he always does rather than Carney doing what he always doesn’t.

$800,000 to install cooling measures in parks during stretches of extreme heat

I know the idea is to generate talking points to make it sound as if you’re doing something about climate change, not to actually do anything about climate change but if it’s literally installing sprinklers in city parks to cool people down on hot days — although that’s nice — I wonder if it might be just a little too obvious that it’s not really accomplishing much relative to the size of the problem of climate change.

Poilievre did a great job keeping the Conservatives out of power for a while. It was just bad luck for Canada that he did such a good job of it that the Liberals got a majority.

I guess when you’ve preemptively announced that you’re not going to retaliate against the illegal tariffs in any way that would get their attention, such as putting export duties on petroleum products, you end up with little choice other than to give them whatever they want.

He wasn’t exactly sphynx-like in the speech I was thinking of. He spoke with eloquence, but directly and plainly. It did indeed seem clear that he sincerely believes that the existing banking system — which he had a hand in running for so long — operates in service of the public good.

When it was announced that Mr. Carney would run for office, the first thing I did to find out about him was to watch a video of one of his recent speeches to a big business audience. There is no way he would think of MMT as acceptable. He’s a huge fan of the way things are, so we will keep spending a significant percentage of the government budget directly on satisfying the greed of the rentiers.

Of those, defence needs mentioning as it is the biggest by a large margin.

You mean we could afford it now, or we could afford it if some form of MMT were adopted? I think readers might benefit from it being noted that there is a difference.

Throwing money at established for-profit real estate developers: Not the best thing they could be doing, but maybe it’s better than nothing?

Apparently the new units will have access to an indoor bicycle parking area, so that’s nice.

Your critique of Modern Monetary Theory does not suggest that your study of the concept has been comprehensive enough to include glancing at the Wikipedia page about it.

I see no reason why advocates of MMT wouldn’t have the same kind of reaction I do to the spending on oil pipelines, the military, the capital gains tax cut, the new ministry for AI, the new ministry for online censorship, the carbon capture idiocy — you’re spending how much on what!?

See also: Why businesses lie about AI

a situation in which everyone – “boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants” – has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies.

The link is presumably meant to be to this: https://blundervalley.ca/blog/what-flipped-hamiltons-vote/

[some random tech bro] suggested that based on its size, the data centre proposal before the city was unlikely to be an AI data centre, claiming it wouldn’t be economically viable. A quick search of Ontario’s corporate registries determined the owner of the land also runs an AI software company.

AI software companies are not going to hesitate to do a thing just because it’s not economically viable.

Just common sense innit? You’ve got more money, you get more votes. It’s practically a law of nature. Trying to enforce some other system would be going against the natural order of things. It’s the best way to maximise shareholder value.

• Youtube shorts
• Youtube comments
• Inane point-form fights about complex political issues
• Entities exercising so little brainpower that they appear to be bots
• Alberta separatism

What an exquisite combination of the wonders of the social media world.

If Mexico and Canada were to make a trade deal and leave the US out of it, maybe it could be an actual free trade deal without any bullshit about ISDS, data sharing agreements, draconian new copyright laws, or anything else.

It’s hard to believe it’s as low as that but then I should’ve hesitated more to believe the much higher estimate from the first website I saw making a guess. If he’s done better in life than I had thought, my apologies for repeating such slander.