News roundup, 12 Sept 2024

 - Jagmeet Singh has indicated that he now opposes the carbon tax as introduced by the Liberals, saying that it puts too much burden on working people. I kinda, sorta get what he's saying, but I think a better approach would be to oppose the GST. If I was in charge, what I'd do is eliminate the GST and raise the carbon tax to make the change revenue neutral; that way there'd be no net increase in the regressiveness of the tax regime, but a strong incentive to shift one's purchases towards more environmentally benign things. Of course politics is the art of the possible, and maybe Singh fears that the existing carbon levy is so tainted by the fact that it was introduced by the Trudeau government that the only way to avoid being associated with the Liberals is to reflexively oppose it.

- The Toronto International Film Festival has cancelled the screening of Russians at War, a documentary by Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova. The film profiles frontline Russian soldiers, some of whom express doubts about the war, and its official description as submitted to TIFF describes the war as "unjust", but nonetheless some Ukrainian groups denounced the film as "propaganda" (perhaps because it humanizes the Russians too much for their liking).

- The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed new rules that would limit the sizes of vehicles for the consumer market. A good move on both safety and environmental grounds; unfortunately there's a good chance that auto industry lobbyists will kill it.

- A division of Cox Media Group has pitched the idea of having smartphones do what many have suspected for years that they already do - namely listen to ambient conversations and direct advertising to their users based on the content of said conversations. Notably, the pitch mentioned that Apple, Google, and Meta are all clients of CMG; all those companies have denied that they make use of this capability, but meanwhile Ford has filed a patent for something similar that would direct ads towards their cars' users.

- Following the sudden death of Cathy Merrick, the Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, at a public event, the Winnipeg Free Press published a photo of Merrick lying on the ground. The AMC was outraged at the publication of the photo and called for a boycott of the newspaper. The paper is apologizing for their handling of the incident.

- Peter Nygard has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for five sexual assaults committed in his company's Toronto office. Including credit for time served he'll be out in 7 years if he's still alive (a big if, that).

- A few thousand years ago the Sinai Peninsula was a much greener place than it is now. A Dutch engineer has a scheme to make the desert bloom, though some environmentalists fear that there could be serious unintended consequences, assuming that the scheme works at all.