News roundup, 16 Dec 2024

- Undeterred by the failure of the previous attempt, South Korea's National Assembly has impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol for his short-lived attempt to impose martial law. The president is now suspended from his role pending a hearing from the country's Constitutional Court; the prime minister, Han Duck-soo, will serve as interim president until the matter is resolved.

- Federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon has referred the dispute between Canada Post and its workers to the Canada Industrial Relations Board. He has further directed the board to order striking employees back to work if it determines the dispute is at an impasse. No doubt this is an attempt to be seen as helping to save Christmas, but it probably won't sit well with a lot of unionized federal employees. Conceivably this could create some opportunities for the NDP in places like Ottawa, since the current state of the Liberals is such that tactical voting to stop the Conservatives is probably futile, and in light of that civil servants might just decide to throw their vote behind a party that continues to stand up for them.

- The City of Winnipeg's decision to defer the full electrification of Winnipeg Transit's fleet is drawing negative reviews from some. Tom Brodbeck points out that while it is indeed true that the initial purchase costs of diesel buses are lower than electric buses, the actual operating costs (including maintenance) are higher, and suggests that the overall cost difference is pretty much a wash. He could also have pointed out that in many cases the service problems seen at Transit have more to do with the availability of drivers than buses, and that it will be a lot easier to get federal funding for electric buses now than it will be in another year. On a somewhat related note, the Amalgamated Transit Union is calling for fare evasion enforcement, ideally by community safety officers. They point out that most of the acts of violence against drivers and passengers come from fare evaders.

- Two women who are trying to sue a youth leader at a Winnipeg church for sexually assaulting them as well as the church for their alleged complicity have been ordered to front $50,000 each because they live outside the province and the court doesn't want any trouble collecting court costs if they lose.

- A whistleblower who alleged that OpenAI's use of copyright material goes beyond fair use has died in an apparent suicide. Naturally this has led to speculation that it wasn't really a suicide, though others have pointed out that it's quite possible for tech industry folks to make your life hell without taking any direct action to kill you; "you'll never work in this town again" applies to Palo Alto just as much as to Hollywood. In other OpenAI-related news, the company's CEO, Sam Altman, is donating a million dollars to Donald Trump's inauguration fund.

- Trump's transition team seeks to discard a policy of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which requires vehicle manufacturers to report report crashes if advanced driver-assistance or autonomous-driving technologies were engaged within 30 seconds of impact. Elon Musk vehemently opposes the policy, perhaps because 40 out of 45 fatal crashes reported under the policy have involved his company's vehicles.

- A 19 year old conscript in the Russian military was reportedly shot to death by his commander after refusing to sign a contract to fight in Ukraine, after attempts at persuasion using a whip failed to deliver the desired results.

- The Southern Chiefs' Organization has announced that their grand chief Jerry Daniels will be taking a leave of absence for "health reasons" following an incident in which he was hospitalized following a fight outside an Ottawa bar.

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.