- The BC Conservatives have been quietly editing their platform on their website, removing nearly half of the content in an attempt to make themselves look a bit more moderate. The party's leader is also refusing to answer questions about one of their candidates' claims that vaccines cause AIDS. In a sane world this kind of evasive behaviour would hurt their chances, but the latest polls suggest that they're gaining popularity and are now slightly favoured to win. It's as if the perceived momentum the Cons have gotten since the collapse of BC United is triggering the herding instinct of the electorate to rally around the party that's making gains.
- Following a recent mandate, many federal civil servants in Canada have been ordered back into the office for a minimum of three days a week. The government is not ruling out further moves in this direction; it seems a strange choice, given that a lot of those workers are likely to be Liberal-NDP swing voters and may throw their lot in with the NDP out of frustration. There's a lot of discussion over on Reddit about this; some think the NDP could make big gains by campaigning on this, though I fear that this could alienate some of their traditional labour base who can't work from home due to the nature of their jobs. The commercial real estate angle is also prominent in those discussions; some in that same thread point out Mark Carney's role at Brookfield Corporation, which has rather a lot of those holdings. A more charitable take could be that a collapse in commercial real estate could be bad for the tax base of many municipalities, not to mention that things like pension plans are probably heavily invested in the same thing.
- California governor Gavin Newsom has followed through on his vow to veto the new AI safety bill passed by the legislature, saying that the bill could "stifle innovation" (presumably we're supposed to believe that innovation is a good in and of itself, as opposed to something that could be good or bad depending on the nature of the innovation) and "prompt AI developers to move out of the state". This is despite the urging of numerous people in the entertainment industry who signed an open letter calling for him to allow it to be passed; I guess tech trumps entertainment even in California though. It also comes despite disturbing revelations about the internal workings of OpenAI.
- To many observers, Donald Trump doesn't seem to be seriously trying to win the election. This does not make much sense in terms of his ego, much less in terms of the legal troubles he could face in the near future. It might, however, make sense if he is sufficiently confident that his pre-stacked Supreme Court will hand the presidency to him anyway.
- Clarence Woodhouse, who served 12 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit, has finally been exonerated, more than a year after two equally innocent co-accused. His brother, who was also convicted of the crime, died in prison before he could be exonerated.
- Hockey has sometimes been described as "soccer on ice"; some parents at a kids' game in Hamilton last weekend seem to have taken that to its logical conclusion and brawled like soccer fans.
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