Let there be no doubt, Trump is the symptom, not the problem. Vance is the President in Waiting (I predict he will be POTUS after the November elections), and he will be far worse then Trump ever could be. Trump is knee-jerk, Vance is cold and calculating.

But the good news is, based on the mud-slinging the Republican party is doing, they are really. really afraid they will lose the Senate AND the House in November, and they are trying to shore up support in America for their failed policies. They really, really need this trade deal, and Carney knows it. Unless they get a trade deal before November, the American political scene will look very, very different.

The irony is that in 2028, a state with the same population as Canada might hold a referendum about leaving America. This trade dispute just might push California over the edge, and I am not talking about earthquakes.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/01/24/country-of-california-secession-newsom-trump/77907859007/

and more recently

https://theharvardpoliticalreview.com/calexit-california-independence/

If America is so out of control and beyond the reach of the Rule of Law and the Constitution that it can elect Trump (recall that he is considered to be potentially a traitor to the Constitution by the Supreme Court), then it is definitely within the realm of possibility that California could separate.

What is Canada’s Opportunity?

Semiconductors are the backbone of the modern electronics industry. Most of the time we hear about modern “mega-fabs” from companies like TSMC which manufacture large quantities of silicon semiconductors or about chip design firms like NVIDIA or Intel that design integrated circuits using multiple silicon semiconductors to create the CPUs and GPUs that are the backbone of personal computing as well as large scale datacentres.

However, there is another kind of semiconductor compound semiconductors – so called because unlike silicon semiconductors they are made out of a combination of elements like Indium Phosphide (InP) or Gallium arsenide (GaAs) – that are equally as important to modern advanced technology. Compound semiconductors have different properties that make them unsuitable for general-purpose computing units like CPUs and GPUs. However, they are crucial for rapid information transfer, underpinning all telecommunications and datacommunications, as well as applications such as high-speed signals in 5G, satellite comms and specialized defence radar systems.

Maybe they should sell it to Honda or Hyundai and build robots instead.

Now THIS is interesting. A test of the current state of the state-religion divide.

An overly aggressive Catholic teacher defending the staunch ultra-Conservative dogma of Catholicism against a more liberal student in the Catholic school system.

This teacher was sanctioned by the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT - the governing body of all teachers in Ontario that posses an active Ontario Teaching Certificate, in or out of the classroom) for, in part, interacting with the student as follows:

At a Sept. 25, 2019 Catholic Values Subcommittee meeting, Del Grande directed comments and behaviour toward a student who opposed showing an anti‑abortion film in schools. The OCT found that he rolled his eyes, snickered, used a hostile tone, and told the student, “You’ve been brainwashed by the liberals.” [emphasis mine]

The OCT concluded that:

these actions amounted to verbal abuse, psychological or emotional abuse, disgraceful or unprofessional conduct, and conduct unbecoming a member under Ontario Regulation 437/97.

The Floodgates of Hell opening up in Ontario Catholic High Schools? Teachers in the Catholic School System in Ontario being put on notice that there are limits to how far they can go in pushing the Catholic doctrine on a student? A student who can openly oppose the position of a teacher that aggressively defends the Catholic religious dogma, under the protection of the OCT potentially sanctioning the teacher against abusing the student?

This should definitely reverberate in most Teacher break rooms in the Catholic Schools in Ontario.

Of interest is that the reach of the OCT in sanctioning a teacher goes far beyond the classroom. It includes any teacher-student interaction, wherever it occurs. All that is necessary is for anyone, including the student or parent of the student, to bring the activity to the attention of the OCT.

This is an interim schedule while we continue the consultation necessary. We urge parishioners to continue to attend and participate in the Sunday Mass in their ‘cluster,’ to use their parish envelopes to support their parish...

Ahh, yes. The most important reason. Nothing about spiritual fulfillment, all about cash flow.

Perhaps the very best news for Canada's trade negotiators. Strong evidence that Trump's tariffs are harming the American economy more than the Canadian economy.

America's inflation rate is much higher than that of Canada.

What, investors are beginning to think that maybe AI is more hype than substance? A really expensive way of doing not much of anything?

Didn't this also happen with the dot.com meltdown? A few good ways to productively use it, a lot of ways to wastefully use it.

You would think they would have learned.

The truth is, AI should not stand for Artificial Intelligence, it is in reality Algorithmic Intelligence. Same computer processing, except that it is thousands of computers in a single chip all processing the data at the same time, with each computer doing the same math (a*b+c) but each simultaneous computation uses different input numbers. Great for doing massive simultaneous calculations, but certainly not 'revolutionary'. Instead of one computer doing one program taking a thousand cycles, a thousand computers doing the same program taking one cycle. What IS revolutionary are the algorithms that are being developed, and the applications these massive calculator arrays are being used for. Some will bear fruit, most will not.

Let's take a 'for example'.

Weather predictions for the next day. You start with a given set of data, then run your predictive algorithm a thousand times, each with a slightly different set of possible future data points. One of them is probably the most accurate. The problem is to decide which one. The second problem is that it takes a week to do all the thousand runs. You can have a 95% accurate prediction in one week for what the weather is going to be tomorrow. See the problem?

But with the newest AI chips, you can do the thousand different scenarios at the same time. Also, you can calculate a probability for each scenario at the same time. The scenario with the highest probability is the most likely. Then you check the actual weather, feed it back to the system, and it gets better at calculating the probabilities for the correct scenario. You get tomorrows weather today, and the system gets better and better at calculating the probabilities. This is a useful application.

Second condition. In a lottery, you can use this same server to predict all of the potential combinations of numbers, before the next draw. Except that the probability of any one combination being drawn is, well, still equal. There is just no way the system can get better at selecting the correct random number. The selection of which combination to use is still random, from equal probabilities. You can calculate what all the potential outcomes can be, but this tells you nothing if they are all equally likely. So it tells you nothing. A completely wasteful application.

Yet there are far more companies trying to use 'AI' to do the second condition than for the first condition. After investing a fortune in hardware, they still have the same accuracy in decision making as before.

Interesting how the final price of the 'art' was just under the total budget for artworks. I wonder how that happened?

Recognition that America is a country that uses forced labour as an official government policy.

It just occurred to me ,,, if Alberta separates from Canada, will the Conservatives ever have a chance of getting elected federally?

No wonder PP is doing everything he can to keep Alberta in Canada.

And in next year's news, "P.E.I. aerospace firm announces that they have been bought out by a major American defense contractor."

Wow. America being put in the same negative, unsavory context as Russia. Really demonstrates how soured the American reputation is in Canada - just a shade short of being declared 'number one enemy of Canadian democracy'.

Drastically increasing flight activity of massive commercial jets right beside the CN Tower. What could possibly go wrong?

The Canadian company gets paid in the local country's currency for the power from the solar farm, so the company has invested in a Chili pepper plantation beside the solar farm, and sells the chili peppers on the international market for a return on their investment in dollars. There is farming, and then there is farming.

Michael Ma was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Canada when he was 12. He was raised and educated in Vancouver

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ma

I can find no reference to his age, or to the year in which he immigrated to Canada. Hong Kong was transferred to China on July 1, 1997, 29 years ago, so I could not determine if he immigrated to Canada when Hong Kong was British, or part of China. But unless he is younger than 41, it was before Hong Kong was transferred back to China, and he would probably have been, rough;y interpreted, a British Subject in Limbo, (A British passport to the rest of the world but not really a British passport in Britain). This certainly goes towards addressing any issue of bias, and if he could hold a Chinese passport by birth.

https://passportia.org/en/uk-citizenship-hong-kong.php

This certainly does put an interesting twist on the Canada-China dialogue. It is really difficult to sort through fact-from-fiction, depending on where you were indoctrinated with your Chinese history knowledge.