News roundup, 31 Oct 2024

- An 18-year-old Florida resident has been arrested for threatening Democratic activists with a machete outside a polling station.

- Polymarket, a blockchain-based platform where bets can be placed on election outcomes, has confirmed that a single individual, using four different accounts, has bet $28 million on Donald Trump winning the US presidential election. This represents more than 1% of all bets on the outcome. The trader in question has not been publicly identified except by their accounts. The platform is currently giving 63% odds of Trump winning, considerably higher than poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, which gives Trump a 52% chance. Some Redditors are speculating that this simply reflects the biases of those who bet on these things; betting sites tend to skew male, and this one is crypto-based which also skews male. Hopefully this is the case...

- Pierre Poilievre is whining that it would be "not fair" for the Liberals to replace Trudeau as leader before the next election. I guess he's concerned that it might force the Cons to actually talk about policy, which is something of a weak point with that party.

- University of Pennsylvania economist Benjamin Keys suggests that the growing risk of climate related disasters should encourage people to reconsider whether it's a good idea to buy a house, at least if you live in a high-risk area. Given that insurance and property taxes have the potential to increase very suddenly, and that insurance might be difficult or impossible to obtain in the future, it might be safer to rent in such places.

- Mount Fuji has seen no snow at all this fall, the first time that this has occurred in the 130 years since detailed records began.

- Peg City Car Co-op, with the help of the Assiniboine Credit Union, is working on electrifying its fleet; the credit union is covering the cost of two charging stations to facilitate this.

- Kelly Vasas, the owner of the College Avenue building where all the tenants were illegally evicted this past summer, tried pulling the same stunt at another building he owns in August. It's almost as if the maximum fines for such actions are so small as to be just the cost of doing business for slumlords like him.

- New Zealand's governing coalition recently banned the public display of gang patches. The leader of one of the parties in the coalition, ACT, was asked what he thought about extending the ban to symbols such as the swastika - turns out he objects to the idea. I guess he wouldn't like us to draw the obvious conclusion, though.

- Russia has issued a fine of 2x10³⁶ rubles (approximately 2x10³⁴ US dollars) to Google for restricting Russian channels on YouTube. They probably will have a hard time collecting though.

News roundup, 10 Oct 2024

- Hurricane Milton hit Florida last night as a Category 3 storm, with winds up over 160 km/h (86 kt, 100 mph). Fortunately the worst of it did not hit Tampa directly, hitting instead in the smaller city of Sarasota, 112 km to the south. Nonetheless, St Petersburg still got 41 centimetres (not millimetres) of rain. Several fatalities have been reported from the hurricane and spin-off tornadoes, and power is out for more than 3 million people.

- Federal Public Services and Procurement Minister Jean-Yves Duclos says the Trudeau government is "seriously considering" a high speed option for the proposed high frequency rail link between Toronto and Quebec City. Certainly this is a good idea, but it's a bit late in the game to be doing something like this given that they've been in power since 2015 and are almost certain to be replaced next fall by the Poilievre Conservatives, who will likely cancel the project.

- The former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado has been sentenced to 9 years in prison for her role in a breach in the security of the county's electoral system. Following the sentencing, staff at the county courthouse have reported being threatened by members of the public.

- The landlord who evicted dozens of people from his apartment complex in Winnipeg's North End earlier this year has been fined $9,000. This is apparently the largest fine ever issued by the Residential Tenancies Branch; apparently all previous fines for this sort of thing add up to a total of $28,000. Nonetheless, it's probably pretty much a rounding error for the landlord. Current legislation only allows a fine of $1,000 for each tenant who actually comes forward. And according to Street Links, who had made the arrangements to house several previously homeless people in the building, several of those people are now back on the street following the eviction, and thus probably have bigger things on their mind than talking to authorities.

- A 10 year old boy in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil was severely scalded when boiling water was poured over him. A woman in her 40s has been arrested. The accused apparently claimed that the boy had been knocking on her door as a prank for "the last three years"; according to the boy's family they haven't even lived in the area for that long. Most likely racism as well as psychiatric factors played a role here.

- A researcher at the University of Michigan proposes that autonomous vehicles be required to take a national driving test in order to be certified for road use. Seems eminently reasonable, even if the Silicon Valley boys think rules cramp their style.

- The Trump Bible (which Oklahoma was originally going to make required reading in state schools before a backlash forced them to amend the requirements to allow other editions) was printed in China. That's awkward...

News roundup, 17 July 2024

- The City of Winnipeg has released a transportation plan that calls for residents to be using private automobiles for no more than 50% of trips by 2050 (it's currently about 80%). Of course 26 years is a long time; one would hope that some reductions in car use could happen before then.

- The UBC professor who made an injudicious tweet about the attempt on Donald Trump's life was apparently responding to another one by Shoshanah Jacobs, a biology professor at the University of Guelph, who had posted the video of the shooting with the comment "When 4 inches really matters". That university is also investigating the matter.

- Trump has selected JD Vance as his running mate for the fall. I guess Mike Pence was never in the running this time around. Vance apparently once declared himself to be a "Never Trumper", but it turns out he really meant "not a Trumper until it's necessary to further my political career". He's calling for tax rebates for fossil fuel powered cars instead of the ones for electrics, something that serves no real purpose other than to "own the libs". None of this, though, is enough to prevent some of the Republican base from making racist insults about his wife, who is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

- Wyoming has imposed restrictions on who can bid on oil and gas leases after a conservation organization, Wyoming Outdoor Council, bid on some leases in the hopes of preventing them from being developed.

- A severe storm hit Toronto on Tuesday morning, with roughly 76 mm of rain falling in the downtown core over a few hours and around 100 at Pearson Airport. Major flooding and power outages have resulted.

- Lab-grown meat has been approved in the UK for pet food; this is important because many pets (most notably cats) are obligate carnivores and can't live on a conventional vegan diet. Hopefully approval for human consumption will follow.

- Viet Duong Hoang, an engineering researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, has developed an autonomous drone that can recharge itself from the magnetic fields emitted by power lines without tapping into the lines So far, plans are to use them for the most obvious purpose - inspecting power lines.

- Remember Spirit Rising, the group home operator that made the news a while back for allegedly giving cannabis to their teenage wards, supposedly in the name of harm reduction? That already stretches the boundaries, but at least there was a kind of logic to it. More recently, though, it has been reported that they were also allowing their wards to be sexually exploited in return for alcohol and other drugs. That's worse than Sandra Guiboche's claim that she was helping with harm reduction because she was selling cleaner crack than the competition. And you can bet donuts to dollars that Poilievre will use this case as a "typical" example of harm reduction; one hopes that if he brings it up in an interview the reporter will ask him how many other cases like that he can name.

- Following an inspection that found that some fire safety systems were not working at a North End apartment complex, the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service issued an order to the building's owner last Friday to remedy the situation. In particular, they ordered that the exits must remain clear and that a "fire watch" be put in place over the weekend, to keep the tenants safe until the problems were fixed. Instead the slumlord immediately evicted all tenants with no notice, giving them each a wad of cash equivalent to slightly over a month's rent to go away, presumably calculating that this would be cheaper than making the necessary repairs. Presumably they plan to either charge hire rents for the units once the fix is eventually made (essentially a low-budget renoviction), or else let the building become yet another vacant derelict building that someone can break into and burn down. Housing Minister Bernadette Smith is rightly appalled and condemns the mass eviction as illegal. Be nice if the province could just seize the building, fix it up, and permanently add it to Manitoba Housing's stock; we'll have to see.

- Members of a community Facebook page for Saskatoon's Fairhaven neighbourhood (yeah, those kind of people) are calling on the city to prune the lower branches of pine trees in parks in the hopes that this will stop people from sleeping under them.

- Winnipeg lawyer David Davis has pleaded guilty to professional misconduct after punching an articling student in the groin. He has been convicted of professional misconduct on three previous occasions; nonetheless he escaped with a six month suspension.