News roundup, 1 April 2024

- The Kinew government says they have plans, to be revealed in tomorrow's budget, that they say will justify their request for an exemption to the federal carbon tax. We'll have to see how that goes.

- Speaking of the carbon tax, countrywide protests against it are scheduled to start today. There's something kind of ironic about their choice of a date... or maybe it was intentional. When the Tories' campaign against the tax uses terms like "so-called experts", they're not going for your vote or mine, they're going for people who hate expertise on "principle". People who are ignorant, and proud of it. One can't help but think of the story (perhaps apocryphal) of how US Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was told by a supporter, "Mr. Stevenson, you have the support of every thinking American". Stevenson supposedly replied "That's not enough, ma'am, we need a majority". Pierre Poilievre is going for the votes of the kind of people who would kick off their protest campaign on April Fools Day, and it's likely to pay off for him.

- Donald Trump's criminal trial for the hush money allegedly paid to Stormy Daniels begins later this month.

- Far-right extremists and their fellow travellers are trying to create a parallel economy, or as they call it a "freedom economy", because they think the established banks and e-commerce platforms are too woke.

- Several American and European investigative journalists have come to some conclusions about "Havana syndrome". Whereas the conclusion from US officials a year ago was that this was not something inflicted by a foreign adversary, and a recent report found no sign of physical harm to the patients (which would lend support to the mass hysteria theory), this report draws connections to Russian intelligence. Certainly this does have a ring of plausibility.

- AI is becoming sufficiently widespread that it's creeping into almost everything. That might be OK if it were reliable, but it isn't. It even poses problems for further developments in AI (and our control thereof), since as AIs are trained on text found on the internet, they will encounter more and more text that was produced by AIs in the first place.

- Former Winnipeg city councillor Bill Neville has died. He was a "conservative" of a sort that most present day conservatives would not recognize as one of their own; as a friend of his said, he "was part of a political culture that seriously valued forethought and moderation". The conservatives of today would consider forethought and moderation to be an affront to their freedumb.

News roundup, 19 March 2024

- It's almost a given that living in a great international city (Hong Kong, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Dubai, etc) will be very expensive. Almost, but not quite; Paris has managed to remain remarkably affordable. The secret - government investment in housing. Around 25% of the city's residents live in public housing. Of course, you also need to take action against people who fraudulently represent themselves as being entitled to subsidized housing, like a bunch of folks in Victoria seem to have done.

- An analysis by the US National Institute of Health of "Havana syndrome", the mysterious illness that affected American and Canadian diplomats in Havana and other capitals has found no evidence of anything physically wrong with the afflicted people. This lends a fair bit of support to the mass hysteria theory, though as a caveat it's worth noting that some neurological conditions (most famously chronic traumatic encephalopathy) are only detectable in an autopsy.

- Winnipeg Transit's community safety team are getting good reviews from bus drivers and passengers so far. The Winnipeg Police union, though, shows no sign of withdrawing the grievance they filed about the team in January; in fact, I suspect the success of the team in showing how problem passengers can be apprehended without shooting them is probably adding to their displeasure.

- The Kinew government has introduced a bill to prohibit the use of strikebreakers in legal strikes and lockouts, as well as to make it easier to join a union. Predictably, the Tories are doing their utmost to delay the bill's passage.

- The American Bullfrog is native to eastern North America but is an invasive species in the west, including in California. People keep importing them for food; a proposed ban on further importation is causing concern by some that it is culturally insensitive to those who eat them.

- BC is warning its residents to be prepared for a "prolonged wildfire season" this year.

- Europe is banning imports related to deforestation starting next year. This includes a ban on products such as palm oil that originates on land that was deforested after 2020. Malaysian and Indonesian officials are fulminating about what they call "regulatory imperialism". No doubt there's an element of injustice here given that once again it's developing countries having to pay the price for damage that until recently has mostly been done by rich countries, but the obvious counterargument is that deforestation isn't going to bring justice to those countries anyway - quite the opposite.

- The scientist who was fired from the National Microbiology Lab in 2021 has been located in China.

- A Winnipeg attorney has been suspended for "conduct unbecoming a lawyer" after she was convicted of impaired driving and assault with a weapon after ramming another vehicle in a road rage episode.