News roundup, 15 Oct 2024

- Three cargo ships were hit by Russian missiles while in Ukrainian ports last week, killing at least 10 people and leading to fears that cargo operators will avoid the country.

- The BC NDP and Conservative parties remain in a statistical dead heat in the last week of campaigning. The NDP may well hold on due to greater vote efficiency and recent publicity about the Conservatives' extremism, but even if they do it's rather disconcerting that it's even a serious contest.

- The Canadian Association of Professional Employees, which represents around 27,000 federal employees, is calling for an investigation by the parliamentary Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates into a federal mandate that orders public servants back into the office a minimum of 3 days per week. Another union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, is challenging the mandate in court but this could take years to resolve due to the backlog in the courts; the parliamentary committee could potentially get quicker results.

- Following an incident last week in which a patient at St. Boniface Hospital brandished knives, some are calling for stronger security measures at hospitals. There is some discomfort about the idea of putting metal detectors at the entrances due to concern that it could make the hospital feel less safe for some, even as it makes it feel more safe for others. No statistics are given, though on whether the presence or absence of metal detectors would scare away more people, which would seem to be a pertinent piece of information. The article does note that Health Sciences Centre has been testing an "AI weapons detector" at the entrance to their ER; why AI is needed for this is not made clear, though if it somehow makes the detector less intrusive than a standard airport-style medical detector then it might have merit I suppose.

- The distribution of rapid COVID-19 tests in Manitoba is being discontinued, except for the most vulnerable people such as care home residents. I guess too much continued awareness of the disease is bad for business.

- Two middle-aged residents of Winnipeg's Lord Roberts neighbourhood have been charged with torturing and killing cats to make videos which were posted on the dark web. The suspects are known to police; disconcertingly, this appears to be unrelated to some other killings of cats that have occurred in Point Douglas recently.

- Despite recent reports that the closures of several 7-Eleven stores in Winnipeg were due to crime, it appears that this is actually part of a company-wide shakedown. Some folks in this Reddit thread think that the plan is to move towards making the chain more upscale (as it apparently already is in Japan) and that they're closing locations that they don't consider suitable for this. It's also pointed out there that the red herring of crime has been tossed out in similar situations before, such as the closure of the Osborne Village Starbucks location (stories about this made reference to crime but left out the fact that Starbucks has been trying to eliminate locations without drive-thru service) and similar stories about various Target locations in the US (many of which were apparently in over-saturated markets). In any case, Canadian convenience store chain Couche-Tard has been trying to buy 7-Eleven for some time, but getting rebuffed, and might well leap at the opportunity to take over the closed locations as a consolation prize.

- Alexandre Brassard, a biologist at St. Boniface University, was alarmed to find that a new book, entitled Mushrooms of Manitoba, contains multiple errors and makes no mention of several deadly poisonous species. The book appears to have been written with AI; Amazon delisted the book after CBC contacted them about the matter.

News roundup, 27 Aug 2024

- Despite Justin Trudeau's unpopularity with the general public, his cabinet are standing solidly behind him - at least publicly. The fact that the party has no mechanism to force him out probably has something to do with that.

- A patchwork of treaties and compacts dictate how water in the Colorado River system is shared between Mexico and the various affected US states. The problem is, the rules were drawn up over a century ago, at a time when the watershed received a lot more rainfall than it does now, and serious conflicts are looming unless new agreements can be reached. The one silver lining is that those conflicts would probably be worked through in courts rather than on the battlefield, which is more than can be said for the situation on the Nile or, much worse, the Indus.

- An Irish climate scientist is calling on her country to be proactive in moving people and key infrastructure, such as railway lines, away from the coasts before sea level rise becomes too severe.

- The push to force workers back to the office continues. This article concedes that working from home generally does not harm productivity or collaboration - but still argues that the push for RTO is a good thing. It blames working from home for the so-called "loneliness epidemic", which is kind of dubious (how many of your strongest social connections come from work?) but also says the quiet part out loud by admitting that the decline in commercial real estate is one of the biggest reasons. Strangely, it also blames remote work for "the growing homelessness and crime in city 'ghost towns'", which seems to me to be getting it backwards - devaluing real estate is a potential solution to homelessness, not a cause. That said, it does mention one valid concern - a decline in commercial real estate means declining tax revenues for municipalities.

- The Manitoba government has appointed an adviser to the Hanover school division, which serves the city of Steinbach and surrounding areas and has thus been riven with culture wars. The Tory opposition, predictably, is making angry noises about the move.

- Further to the reports that 7-Eleven is considering closing up to 10 locations in Winnipeg, the one at Arlington and Notre Dame was robbed six times in a single day.

News roundup, 15 Aug 2024

- Canada's two main railways, Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) are both in talks with their unions, and a strike and/or lockout is expected if they don't have a deal by the 22nd of August. The impact on industry in Canada as well as in the US could be dramatic.

- WestJet expects flight cancellations "for the foreseeable future" after 16 of their aircraft, representing some 10% of their entire fleet, were heavily damaged in a hailstorm in Calgary earlier this month.

- A new political party called the "Canadian Future Party", billing itself as a "centrist" party for "politically homeless" voters, has just been launched. The thing is, Canada already has a centrist party - it's called the Liberal Party. The interim party president is a former Conservative Party activist, which gives a clue to how they claim to position themselves; a moderate centre-right party might seem "centrist" if you think of the Liberals as "left". In any case, though, I don't see this party going anywhere of significance.

- Ksenia Karelina, a Russian-American dual citizen who was arrested on a family visit last January, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for treason. The "treason" in this case consisted of donating $51.80 to a charitable organization that says it is focused on humanitarian aid and disaster relief; the Russians claim, though, that the organization provides arms to the Ukrainian military.

- Winnipeg has long been known as the "Slurpee capital of the world" despite not having suitable Slurpee weather for a sizeable chunk of the year. The reason is likely the fact that we have a huge number of 7-Eleven locations; up to ten of them could be facing closure in the near future, though. The chain attributes this to increased theft cutting too much into profit margins. Some folks in this Reddit thread, though, think that this might just be cover for questionable franchising decisions, especially given that some of the closing locations are almost new.

- Moosomin is a small town on the Trans-Canada just west of the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. The town is trying to resist the global trend of declining small-town and rural populations by paying people $30,000 to move there. I guess if you had a full-time remote job that could be attractive.

- The organizers of Texas' State Fair are prohibiting guns on the fairgrounds following a shooting at last year's event. The state's attorney general is not pleased with this, and is threatening to take them to court if they don't reverse their decision.