- Mark Carney's Liberals have swept three byelections held yesterday, giving them a slight majority of 174 seats in the 338 member House of Commons.
- There are already predictions being made about how the defeat of Viktor Orbán will impact the global right. Certainly it's a sign that Trumpism isn't popular on the international scene, but before we get our hopes up too much, it's worth noting that the incoming prime minister, Péter Magyar, is right of centre himself and was a member of Orbán's Fidesz party until 2024.
- German chancellor Friedrich Merz is the most unpopular head of government across 24 democracies. Only 19% of Germans approve of his performance, while 76% disapprove; Emmanuel Macron had a lower approval rating (18%) but also a lower disapproval rating (74%). The margin of error for the survey isn't given, though, so it's questionable how meaningful the ranking is for those two. Meanwhile Donald Trump's approval rating is still 38% in spite of everything, and his disapproval rating is only 57%. Leaders of Spain, Italy, and Argentina also fall into that mid-range; the most popular leaders among the countries surveyed were Indian PM Narendra Modi (70%), South Korean president Jae-myung (63%) and Czech PM Andrej Babiš (55%). From that it's probably safe to say that there's no correlation in either direction between how popular a leader is and how good they are.
- Electric vehicles are getting cheaper; even in the US they're increasingly competitive with conventional cars. Combine that with the impact of Trump's war on fuel prices and Americans just might find themselves dragged into the EV era, no matter how emasculating it might be to not hear that V8 roar when you press the accelerator.
- Two people have been arrested after allegedly opening fire on the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. This comes only two days after someone else tried torching the place. Nobody was injured in either incident. Meanwhile a survey of 2,400 "knowledge workers" found that 29% of those surveyed admitted to taking actions to sabotage their companies' rollout of AI. Of course the way AI gets introduced is often pretty haphazard; some of the accounts given in this related Reddit thread are pretty telling:
"The majority of AI rollouts that I've seen have been 'Please guys, find any problem that we can solve with AI. Anything, please. Just do something, the executives don't have any ideas either but we need AI.' and then they blame the workers when there's not any useful use case."
"My wife's company had that. Find a way to build it into your workflow. Then suddenly someone changed they mind and they're requiring you NOT to use it. I think someone just found out how shit it can be. So now, weeks after being aggressively pushed to use AI whenever possible, it's now pause all AI use."
I think in a lot of cases companies have been sold on the idea that investors want you introducing AI as soon as possible and that your stock value depends on this, so executives push people to find some use, any use, for the technology so that they can include metrics about how much they're using it in their annual reports. Certainly that's what the AI companies themselves would have you believe. And I guess day traders don't hold onto the stock long enough to see the technology fail to deliver anyway.
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