Rewatching TOS Star Trek. Practically every episode is a warning against everything the AI techbros are doing now.

Battlestar Galactica, but dumber.

I’m not holding my breath for Canadian political parties to follow suit. In any case, endless fights over if digital regulation = totalitarianism haverted left Canada w/o any direct means to block online state executions. Would C-34 cover this? I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

Canada is in a weird interregnum, where previously derided left-coded policies like nationalization & industrial policy are in the air, while deregulation, austerity, low taxes continue to dominate. The next few years will unfortunately be a lesson in why the latter policies aren’t fit for purpose.

tl;dr: Carney’s 90s-era economic strategy is designed to spur private sector investment. But Canada‘s problem is that the US is attacking the foundations of the economy. What’s needed is actual industrial policy outlining what the economy should look like in 30 years with a state-led plan to match.

4 The worry is, in the absence of an actual, state-led plan, Canada will spend $$$ on bandaid solutions to keep sectors temporarily afloat without actually putting them or the economy on a sound, long-term footing.

3 Despite his frenetic activity, Carney doesn’t actually have a comprehensive, whole-of-economy industrial policy. Such a policy would make the hard calls on steel, autos, etc. 3a What he has are old, FDI, low taxes, no regulation, private-sector-driven 90s-era policies. But it’s the 2020s.

A few random thoughts. 1 Canada can expect more of these events going forward, even after Trump is no longer in office. 2 The Carney government to date has been reactive to the US attacks on the Canadian economy.

* actually 1997. How time flies...

It remains amazing to me that nationalization -- which would've been mocked mercilessly when I started my professional career in 1999 -- is now treated as a legitimate policy option in Ottawa. It might not happen, but that it's even being taken seriously shows how much things have changed.

I have many answers to this. One of them is that the version of pro-pollution lobbying that replaced outright climate denial - which is basically that we can’t stop climate change on our own, so there’s no point worrying about it domestically at all - has triumphed, for now at least.

This narrative specifically is so wild to me. It's supposed to be a tool for efficiency and productivity but now we're being told we need to stockpile water and build a ham radio? Doesn't sound very efficient buds. These guys just want to live in their bunkers so bad

1990s: computer geeks connect their lab’s soft drink machine to the Internet so the world can see how many Cokes are left (fun!) 2020s: tech bros need a bot to remind them to drink enough water to stay alive (um…) It’s not your imagination: these people are getting dumber.