water 金水

...

[Andrew Scheer @AndrewScheer]

The Liberals’ high speed rail project so far:

🚨 13 vice-presidents
🚨 Lucrative ad contracts
🚨 Millions in bonuses

The Liberals haven’t laid a single mile of track, but they're already rewarding insiders with cushy jobs, big bonuses, and contracts.

The likelihood of the Alto project turning into a massive boondoggle?

100%. In fact, it already has!

[Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱 @ryangerritsen]

Carney said today that Canadians need to believe in our minds that the economy is working.

Someone should tell the countless Canadians now living in carpool parking lots along the 401 & other highways that. See how they react.

Even people with full time jobs are living like this. It’s long past time the Liberals let others manage our Country, they have failed miserably.

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

Last year DOJ published a report.

For every 10,000 blacks, 153 violent crimes are committed by a black person each year against a white person.

The same figure for violent crimes committed by whites against a black person: 3.4.

A black person is 50-times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white person than for a white person to commit a violent crime against a black person.

This is an extraordinary difference in the rates of violence committed between these two groups.

We are told that whites are systemically racist.

We are told that whites are successful because they oppress others.

But the facts tell the opposite story.

Blacks are not the ones being victimized.

Whites are.

Western civilization has been successful not because it was oppressive.

It has been successful because whites created, starting thousands of years ago, systems that are impartial and fair.

Today these systems are being dismantled.

Criminals are being released because of their skin color.

Law-abiding citizens are punished because of theirs.

All in service of an ideology that is simply false.

This puts everyone in danger.

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

I was a lifelong Democrat. I thought most conservatives were ignorant or evil or lying. I believed almost everything written in the New York Times, The New Republic, and the Atlantic. I was horrified when conservatives criticized the authorities. Every criticism I saw: I thought all of it was motivated by animus, resentment, self-interest, or ignorance.

Whatever truth there might have been in the criticism, I saw as a mere "half-truth": an exploitation of this or that cherrypicked fact being weaponized. Why did I see it in terms of weaponization? Because I was biased: I saw liberal establishment institutions and figures as fundamentally good, so all criticism of them was automatically interpreted as being in bad faith.

Didn't the critics know that these institutions or figures were fundamentally good? If they didn't, they were ignorant. If they did, they were evil. It was that simple. This meant that any legitimate criticisms would just be dismissed, as if bouncing off of an impenetrable bulletproof shield.

This all changed once I started writing about the pandemic. Soon people started talking about me the way I once thought about conservatives. This led to a complete identity collapse as I came to understand that my old worldview was hateful and ignorant, that I hadn't understood what I had been judging.

I cannot forget the hearing that led to my dismissal from medical school a year after I started writing. During the hearing, people talked about me as if I wasn't human. My behavior was interpreted in the worst possible light. Complete fabrications were created. Nobody was concerned with the truth, only horrified at my apparent "unprofessional behavior", which was really a mirror of their unprofessional behavior directed at me. They structured the hearing to make it virtually impossible for me to speak and explain that what was being said was a lie. And nobody seemed to have any problem with this. Why? Because I was bad. If I am bad, then every mistreatment and every violation of the school's own policies became justified. A person who is bad does not deserve any rights. They only deserve punishment.

But the thing I remember most was the allusions to my social media activity. They said, "Kevin is driven by resentment from his childhood." I wasn't. I was on good terms with my parents. They alleged that I needed psychotherapy to deal with this trauma. It was a completely fake story that they had constructed about me, to demean me, to marginalize me, to try to explain the views I had expressed: that something terribly wrong had happened during the pandemic. They couldn't imagine that I might have legitimate points. So they reduced me to the same kinds of psychological caricatures that I once reduced conservatives to in my own mind.

When I was dismissed, I was broken. But I had help from friends who helped me understand what happened. And I came to realize that a hysteria had overtaken the left. I spent a lot of time reading about show trials, about witch trials, and so on. I also connected with people who had experienced similar things and came to realize that something similar had happened to hundreds of physicians around the country. My story wasn't unique. It was all the same story over and over again.

I cannot believe the person I once was. I cannot believe that I could exist like that. I still don't understand how I could be like that, or how millions of people in this country could continue being like that. It disturbs me greatly.

One thing I know is that whatever this thing is that is driving people crazy needs to be destroyed. It is hostile to civilization and to our humanity. It causes us to dehumanize each other and try to destroy each other. It is the very same monstrous thing that I once attributed to conservatives. But it had been inside me, and I could now see it inside others. This is something I still grapple with.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1858 a newspaperman named Frank Leslie found milk left at his New York door. It was bluish. It contained pus. He set out to find where it came from.

What he uncovered became one of the great scandals of the century.

The distilleries of Manhattan and Brooklyn had a waste problem. Whiskey left behind enormous quantities of hot fermented mash, and dumping it cost money. So someone had an idea. Feed it to cows. Hundreds of them, packed into sheds beside the stills, standing in their own manure, fed boiling spent grain until they sickened, their udders ulcerating, their bodies breaking out in sores.

The milk came out thin and blue. They fixed the colour with plaster of Paris and chalk. They thickened it with flour and rotten eggs. They cut it with water from a ditch that ran past the manure pile. Then they painted "Pure Country Milk" on the wagon and sold it from carts across the city as fresh from the meadows of Orange County.

The New York Times put the toll as high as eight thousand infants a year.

This is the milk that built the case for reform. The entire safety apparatus was designed around it. Sick animals, industrial filth, distillery slop, deliberate adulteration, urban sheds without a blade of grass for ten miles.

There were two ways to solve it.

You could stop feeding cows whiskey waste in filthy sheds. Let them eat grass on clean land and sell the milk fresh and local, the way every human had drunk it for ten thousand years.

Or you could keep the sheds, keep the mash, keep the scale, and heat the result until the bacteria died.

When the city finally investigated, the inspectors were tipped off in advance and the committee recommended better ventilation. You know which path they were always going to take. You can taste it.

The frightening thing was never raw milk from a healthy cow on good grass. It was a dying animal in a distillery, held upright by a sling while someone ran whiskey slop through its udder.

We solved that with a process, kept the process forever, banned the healthy version to be safe, and told you the cow was the danger.

Frank Leslie would have had questions.

[Toronto Star @TorontoStar]

Doug Ford and Mark Carney claim $2.2 billion HST rebate on new homes will help renters become owners. Instead, it’s helping the wealthy buy more rental properties https://t.co/N6ljVY6KC8

[The Food Professor @FoodProfessor]

The Canada Royal Milk story Ottawa doesn't want to explain https://t.co/05aKcCHBna

[JayGen 𝕏 er🇨🇦 @JayGenXer]

🔥 Canadian grandma just read The Globe and Mail’s latest and absolutely unloaded.

Article says: “As Canada faces crippling debt, it must do the unpopular thing and cut elderly benefits.”

Her response?

“These are the ones who paid the taxes in this country for how many years… the ones who have defended this country through our military.”

Instead of cutting seniors, how about stopping the immigration spending, the money we ship overseas, and the “lavish meals our prime minister spends upon himself”?

“I am so fucking sick of this country… get rid of this fucking tyranny.”

Seniors built Canada. They paid in. Now they want to cut their benefits while everything else balloons?

What do you think — fair or outrageous?

#SeniorBenefits #OAS #CanadaDebt #GlobeAndMail #CanadianSeniors #CostOfLivingCrisis #Trudeau #FraserInstitute

[Peter McCaffrey @peteremcc]

A conservative Minister once resigned over a $16 orange juice.

The Prime Minister spent $116 on 1L of coffee creamer.

[@Ven 🇨🇦 @Vendtta68]

@TrendPolCa @MarkJCarney So what Carney is saying is the uncontrolled migration over the last 8+ years artificially inflated economic numbers. Now immigration is returning to normal numbers the economic weakness of Liberal policies is showing itself. Buckle up.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1980, the four largest meatpackers in the United States controlled about 36 per cent of the beef market.

Today, four companies, Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef, control roughly 85 per cent of it. Two of them are Brazilian-owned. The decisions about how American cattle are bought, processed, and priced are increasingly made overseas.

This is not a new problem. Congress passed the Packers and Stockyards Act in 1921 precisely to break the stranglehold of the meat trust of that era. A century later the stranglehold is back, tighter than before, with one fewer company holding it.

The rancher who raises the animal is squeezed at one end. The shopper who buys it is squeezed at the other. The four firms in the middle are both the only buyers and the only sellers, and they set both prices.

When a single plant shut during the pandemic, national beef supply could drop by a fifth overnight. That is what a food system with four points of failure looks like.

The cattle are spread across half a million ranches. The control over them sits in four boardrooms.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

“We should have a communist area and a capitalist area beside each other to see who wins.”

North Korea vs South Korea

East Germany vs West Germany

South America vs North American

We’ve already run this test.

Communism always loses.

[Riley Donovan @valdombre]

Amazingly, the idea of immigration as a fix for ageing has been debunked for 20 years.

This 2006 study found that to stabilize our old-age dependency ratio we would have to take in 7 million immigrants a year by 2050.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

1/5
I'm a cardiologist. I have spent twenty years watching cholesterol destroy arteries, trigger heart attacks, and kill people I care about.
Today, Eli Lilly presented data that may begin to end that era.
VERVE-102. A single infusion. One dose. It uses base editing to permanently turn off the PCSK9 gene in your liver.
Presented today at the European Atherosclerosis Society Congress:
88% reduction in PCSK9.
62% reduction in LDL cholesterol.
Sustained up to 18 months.
No treatment-related serious adverse events.
One infusion. Not daily pills you forget to take. Not monthly injections. One dose — and your cholesterol may stay low for the rest of your life.

[cbcwatcher @cbcwatcher]

Must read for Carney's Davos speech fans "But this reading mistakes anxiety for strength. Middle powers are not becoming more visible because they are more powerful. They are becoming more visible because they are more exposed. The conditions that allowed many of them to flourish in recent decades are eroding. For years, they could shelter under U.S. hegemony, exploit an expanding global economy, and trade with rival powers without choosing among them. They could reap the benefits of scale without possessing it themselves.

That world is disappearing. Growth has slowed, globalization has become a contest over chokepoints, and great powers have grown more predatory. The United States is increasingly willing to use its dominance to extract concessions. China is using subsidies and export gluts to deindustrialize other countries, debt and infrastructure to make them dependent, and military harassment and economic sanctions to narrow their choices. The result is not a flatter world of ascendant middle powers but a harsher one in which the two top powers have more ways to bend others to their will." 1/4

[gvp @gvp324377]

@MoreBirths Lant Pritchett points out that rich economies + China + EE + FSU will lose 355M working aged by 2050, and Africa (least productive economies) will gain 800M.

Massive global productivity drop.

He says more migration is the answer, but people bring their culture with them.

[GW -Unbreakable ❤️🇨🇦🇺🇸🗽✝️ @GW49221300]

X/Twitter’s product head is becoming obsessed with playing copyright police while neglecting the actual platform.

Instead of fixing spam, bot farms, broken recommendations, engagement farming, shadow bans, scam ads, and the collapsing user experience, they are drowning creators in complicated “original content” enforcement bureaucracy.

YouTube already solved this years ago:👇

Platforms don’t need to become copyright courts. They respond to reports, process disputes, and act when necessary. Simple. Scalable. Efficient.

But X now acts like a paranoid legal department pretending to be a social media company.

Maybe Musk’s war with OpenAI terrified executives into overreacting.

Or maybe “protecting originality” is just a convenient excuse to quietly cut back the generous revenue-sharing payouts they can no longer sustain.

Funny how “creator protection” always seems to end with creators making less money while the platform gains more control.

The irony is brutal:
A platform built on speed, chaos, memes, reposts, and viral amplification is now trying to micromanage who “owns” every sentence on the internet.

That’s not innovation.
That’s bureaucracy wearing a tech hoodie.

#X #Twitter #ElonMusk #OpenAI #YouTube #SocialMedia #CreatorEconomy #FreeSpeech #Tech

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

La plupart des grandes boîtes sont des organisations zombies. Voici pourquoi.

Dans League of Legends, ton rang n'est pas un titre. C'est une mesure continue. Tu es Master parce que tu joues comme un Master cette semaine. Si tu arrêtes de bosser, tu redescends. Diamond. Platine. Gold. Le système ne te doit rien : ton rang reflète ta compétence à l'instant T, pas celle d'il y a trois ans.

Maintenant regarde une entreprise classique du S&P 500. Un type devient VP parce qu'il a été excellent à 35 ans. À 50 ans, il est toujours VP. Entre-temps, il a peut-être arrêté de produire, arrêté d'apprendre, arrêté de challenger ses modèles mentaux. Aucune importance : le titre est acquis. La hiérarchie pyramidale fonctionne comme un cliquet — tu montes, tu ne redescends pas. Ton elo organisationnel est gelé au pic de ta carrière.

C'est une aberration darwinienne. Ces structures distribuent l'autorité selon la compétence passée, et la compétence passée est un très mauvais prédicteur de la compétence présente — surtout dans un monde qui change vite.

Les jeux compétitifs ont résolu ce problème il y a vingt ans. Le elo se recalcule à chaque partie. La hiérarchie reflète la performance réelle, pas le souvenir d'une performance. C'est brutal, et c'est précisément pour ça que ça marche : les meilleurs joueurs sont vraiment les meilleurs joueurs, pas ceux qui ont été bons en 2008.

L'IA rend cette aberration létale. Quand une équipe de 12 personnes avec les bons outils peut produire ce que produisait un département de 200, le coût d'un VP qui ne produit plus n'est plus seulement son salaire — c'est le delta entre ce qu'il bloque et ce qu'une organisation méritocratique débloquerait. Ce delta explose chaque mois.

Regardez le marché. Le S&P 500 n'existe plus vraiment. Il y a le S&P 7 (Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla) qui capte la quasi-totalité de la création de valeur, et 493 zombies qui maintiennent leur cap par inertie comptable. Les zombies partagent une caractéristique : la compétence n'y circule pas. Elle s'y cristallise en titres, en territoires, en process de protection.

Les boîtes qui vont émerger dans les dix prochaines années auront une propriété structurelle nouvelle : l'autorité y sera révocable en continu. La compétence présente sera la seule monnaie. Plus de rentes de titre. Plus de comités. Plus de "j'ai mérité ma position en 2015". Tu produis maintenant ou tu sors du ladder.

C'est pas une question d'idéologie. C'est juste que dans un environnement où l'IA divise par 50 le coût d'exécution, les organisations qui protègent l'incompétence acquise se font oblitérer par celles qui ne la protègent pas.

Tout est à réinventer. Et c'est exactement ce qui rend le moment fascinant.

[Clay Thompson. @harryt59_harry]

We also owned petro Canada at one time. 👇