News roundup, 14 Oct 2025

- The price of gold has topped $US4,000/oz t last week for the first time in history, as investors price in uncertainties about the US economy. Actual inflation hasn't been all that high, but the Federal Reserve has signalled that interest rates will likely decrease again later this year. Not mentioned in the article are concerns about the future independence of the Federal Reserve itself; presumably CBS' new owners don't want us thinking about that.

- A Bell 222SP helicopter went out of control and crashed while participating in a "Cars 'N' Copters" event in Huntington Beach, California on Saturday. The aircraft is shown from multiple video angles going into a spin, and the entire tail rotor gearbox was ejected from the tail before impact. The two people on board survived but with significant injuries; three people on the ground were injured as well. Juan Browne (blancolirio) has some preliminary analysis here.

- The Carney government has announced that they will be moving forward with plans for income taxes for some lower income Canadians to be filed automatically starting in 2027 and expanding over the next couple of years. This sort of thing has been the norm in many countries for a long time; no doubt the tax software companies are vehemently opposed, though. Politically, it's a smart move because when people have to do their own taxes they're reminded of the fact that they're paying taxes, making it easier to whip up populist anger about them. The government is also expanding a national school meals program.

- China is now outright offering to remove the punishing tariffs on Canadian canola if Canada is willing to remove the equally punishing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. Prairie premiers, including both Wab Kinew and Scott Moe, have been calling for this for some time, while Doug Ford is vehemently opposed. If this does happen I will be pleasantly surprised; while the Canadian auto sector is probably doomed anyway, I doubt that Carney will be willing to be seen to be admitting that, since the ridings with a lot of auto plants are mostly competitive, while the rural folks in the prairies who would benefit from opening up the canola market aren't going to vote Liberal no matter what (because Jesus, Trudeau, and freedumb).

- The Canadian Union of Postal Workers is backing away from their across-the-board strike, moving to rotating strikes instead. I guess that the union's leadership knows deep down that regardless of the merits of their position they're not going to win in the court of public opinion if people can't get their Amazon orders.

- BC Conservatives leader John Rusdad has ordered the cellphones of all his MLAs to be searched after it was leaked to the media that there had been a push for his leadership to be reviewed. Rustad denies being paranoid and claims that it was actually caucus members who pushed for this. Notably, the search extended not only to phones issued by the legislature but MLAs' private phones as well (at least the ones Rustad knows about). 

- The head of Oregon's National Guard told a Senate subcommittee that if his troops are deployed, they will consider protecting the public from ICE to be part of their mandate. Of course, this just means that the regime will use NG troops from a more pliant state, but it will be interesting if this protection extends to the actions of out-of-state troops. Things could get very interesting if, say, the governor decides to deploy the Oregon NG to protect the state's people from them (or from out-of-state NG troops). It's worth noting that ICE has already accidentally teargassed cops in Chicago.

News roundup, 14 April 2025

- A recent Angus Reid poll has found that 53% of respondents across Canada believe that Alberta premier Danielle Smith has betrayed her country by engaging with the likes of Ben Shapiro, who supports the Trump regime's desire to annex Canada. The article doesn't give a regional breakdown; I'd be interested to see what percentage of Albertans think Smith is a traitor. Notably, 67% of those who still plan to support the Conservatives think she is "defending her country by keeping an open dialogue with Americans".

- The UK parliament has passed emergency legislation that compels British Steel's parent company to keep the furnaces burning even if they aren't making money, or face criminal penalties for their executives. Despite this, there is still no guarantee that the two facilities in Scunthorpe will be kept open; a shortage of raw materials looms. And due to the nature of the process, it's extremely difficult to restart a blast furnace once it's gone cold. The company that manages the country's railway tracks has already been making contingency plans; they've been stockpiling rails for the last year just for this eventuality.

- Billionaires are all of a sudden uncomfortable about what Donald Trump is doing to their investments. Of course, they were fine with everything else he's done, or at least not sufficiently bothered to think the other stuff outweighed the wealth that they thought Trump was going to bring them.

- ChatGPT is supposed to have safeguards to limit its ability to make fake images of real people. CBC journalists tested this on Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre, though, and found that the right prompt can trick the AI into generating stuff that it's not supposed to, including potentially harmful disinformation.

- The daughter of Deepak Obhrai, who served as a Conservative MP from 1997 until his death in 2019, is running for the Liberals in Calgary East. Priti Obhrai-Martin says that her father spoke very highly of Mark Carney's work as a central banker during the 2008 economic crisis and she has decided to join his team.

- New information on the Hudson River helicopter crash calls the mast bumping theory into question. A new video shows the aircraft in straight and level flight before suddenly yawing to the right and breaking up; it also shows something, perhaps part of the main rotor gearbox, hanging from the rotor assembly as it spins downwards. More details, including an interview with a Bell 206 test pilot, here. I wouldn't want to be the last mechanics to work on that helicopter, that's for sure.

- A Toronto woman was meditating next to Peru's Pachitea River, which is heated by natural geothermal heating to around 90°C, when she apparently passed out and fell into the river; she got out but sustained severe burns and died in hospital.