re-nationalizing petro canada is a better idea than a new pipeline.

i don't want to say this is good. it's terrible.

but, it's a gaza protest i can stand in solidarity with.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gaza-hamas-protest-israel-1.7493595

a 25% tariff on assembling cars in canada and shipping them into michigan pretty much kills ontario's automotive sector.

the government is responding by planning to ship oil from alberta to quebec (the national energy program) and generate an industrial policy around made-in-canada cars. but, this is dumb. it's backwards - it's bringing back the 50s. it's responding to trump with trump.

if we're going to build our own cars just for us and are no longer going to be able to export, the most obvious thing to do is to completely phase out fossil fuels entirely, which makes the nep strictly obsolete thinking. if all new cars are to be electric, and only electric vehicles are allowed by some upcoming date like 2035, canadians will need to buy electric vehicles to replace their old economy ones. this will drive the sector for a while.

we may need to nationalize some of the plants. 

then, you reroute the electricity we're exporting back to canada to get the grid up by hiking up export taxes, which drives up the cost of manufacturing in the us rust belt at our benefit.

in all of this is an opportunity to retrain workers to build more houses in a massive make work plan, which we clearly need.

the canadian political spectrum is once again asleep at the wheel. this could be an opportunity to transition off carbon, at least in our populated great lakes and st lawrence region. let alberta export it to texas all it wants, until it starts to see the value of export taxes, itself.

your brain is a quantum computer, it's not a turing machine. all chemical reactions in real life are quantum reactions. classical computers are also quantum reactions, but those quantum reactions are obscured, as they exist at a lower layer.

your brain error corrects, but the amount of data it requires to do so is immense and the way we're approaching quantum computing has no resemblance to the way our brains work, at present.

there's likely better possibilities in building supercomputers out of bacteria bioengineered into behaving like synapses, but we need to get something like wave packets happening in the quantum computer, not pretend we can rely on this concept of superposition, which we don't even have a viable theory of. we don't know what superposition even is, yet we're trying to design computers around it, then getting frustrated when they don't work.

it's a dead end.

ai as it exists is just a computer program that does a google search for you.

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=how+to+google+search

i can already look up facts on google without asking ai and that does 90% of what a doctor or teacher does. they're already obsolete. the other 10% is never going to be replaced by any computer searching decision trees, ever.

but i learned something when i went through my cancer scare a few years ago - doctors are trained to use the same algorithm an ai would. i actually took graduate level courses on ai at carleton about ten years ago, and it's really not any sort of magic. it's a decision tree, a database search. 

we have no idea at all how to make computers actually think and won't until we understand how we ourselves think. quantum computing may never happen, but real ai is likely outside of the possibilities of binary logic.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/26/bill-gates-on-ai-humans-wont-be-needed-for-most-things.html

i have a better idea: let's get auto workers retrained as construction workers and get them out there building houses.

and who will buy those cars?

once again: this is stupid.

everything mark carney is proposing is stupid. he's the dumbest conservative politician we've seen here in canada in years.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/federal-election/article-carney-vows-2-billion-fund-to-protect-canadas-automobile-sector/

if trump wanted to break the canadian political system, he's already done it.

i have absolutely no interest in this election at all. the issues being discussed are idiotic, and the proposals on the table are moronic, across the board.

the canadian political establishment is using trump as an excuse to push policies they otherwise couldn't get away with, like hikes in military spending. nobody wants to waste money on the military, and i'm not falling for the bullshit.

trump's stated goals of the tariffs are to generate a revenue stream he can use to offset cuts in income taxes. he's trying to oversee a giant tax shift from progressive income taxes to regressive consumption taxes. in response, both of the parties in canada are proposing the same copycat tax shift. then, they're arguing that they have to do it to fight trump, when they're actually both adjusting tax policy in alliance with trump.

this whole thing is a facade. a charade. theatre.

nobody wins in the end, but the big losers will be the canadian people.