No..uh...Tyrants? Newsposting

I was informed recently that for all the effort I put into finding and embedding the music for my last post, literally nothing appeared in the email. If you were interested in actually hearing anything I featured, here is a link to the actual post with all the music available.

Last post was chill and easy and short. NOT THIS TIME

Anyway, bit of personal stuff first.

I now have a regular group of cool folks that meet up on Wednesdays for a trivia night at the best queer bar I have so far discovered in Montréal: Bar Milton Coop (worker owned). We even won the week before last and received a pitcher of cider.

"Chill with folks on a regular basis" was a goal I literally wrote down for this year - both for my own sanity but also just being active in community is seemingly how any social progress ultimately happens.

I'm also volunteering a bunch. It isn't even that I'm doing anything particularly important for these groups right now; to some extent my time constraints and bashfulness in speaking French precludes doing more. But picking up pizza for Montreal Python and helping 10 year olds learn to make little toy programs after school at Code Club is satisfying in itself.

The French language workshops offered by Bibiothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) started back up again. Having done the intermediate group before, this time we were put in the advanced group. I didn't exactly feel comfortable with calling myself "advanced" in this language - recently took the government approved tests again and my best scores were still really middling - but upon meeting the other participants it was clear we could keep up with everyone.

Speaking of discomfort, I recently started taking lessons at a local queer boxing gym - Pelea. I've never been in a fight, and I don't intend to ever be in one. But, like badminton, a sport the incorporates technique is considerably more engaging than any workout routine I've tried to stick to. And sure, it can't hurt to know how to throw a punch (or, better, how to dodge one).

I took a break from Youtube recently, somewhat forced by their recent attempts to shut down alternative interfaces to their service like yt-dlp, Invidious, and Freetube. These allow you to watch videos without the various forms of enshittification or the Youtube algorithm - a machine for producing and normalizing reactionary right wing politics - constantly trying to drive you to watch.

There's a trick with computers that everyone should know: at some point you have to go analog. In this case, our eyes have to see the video or the basic premise of Youtube as a service is broken. Every attempt at preventing this by locking down devices is doomed to failure unless you implement a kind of all-pervasive totalitarian technocracy completely dominated by the wealthy elite. In other news, Larry Ellison - the worst billionaire you've never heard of - is gonna be running US TikTok.

I am truly a deranged freak. A total politics pervert. I keep up with Québécois, Canadian, and US news. And here, I will take them in order.

Québec is in a spat with the Federal government related to immigration and have tried to force their hand by drastically cutting both available work permits and new permanent residents. The current government - Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ, delightfully pronounced "cack") is trying to run to the right of the also relatively anti-immigrant Parti Québécois ahead of next year's elections. They remain undeterred by the fact every centrist/liberal party that has tried this same tactic recently in basically the entire developed world - from Britain to Japan - has eaten shit. While they are being hammered by a business community desperate for workers, we honestly don't expect to get permanent residency any time soon.

Speaking of eating shit - the effects of the tariffs have started to be felt throughout Canada, with jeep maker Stellantis declaring it will move production to the United States from Ontario. This comes hot of the heels of Mark Carney returning from attempted negotiations with the White House entirely empty-handed. The Liberal government is trying to put together a budget that matches cuts with investments and funding support for businesses being hit hardest by the trade war - cars, aluminum, and lumber being considered the most vulnerable.

Despite calls from Ontario's Premier Doug Ford, the reality is the Canada of 2025 is in no condition to resist the United States. With a population of 40m - including roughly a quarter of which constantly on the knife-edge of quitting the project - and abundant natural resources, Canada would be in trouble even if its southern neighbor wasn't rapidly descending into fascism while calling into question its sovereignty.

A Canada that bounces between half-assed unpopular technocratic Liberal policies and a Conservative party that is increasingly taking its cues from the hard-right reactionary internationale of Trump/Meloni/Le Pen/Farage/etc will be in an even worse position in 2050. Regardless of whatever condition or politics exist in the United States at that time, observers everywhere will see an increasingly empty north - potentially very empty with more restrictions on immigration - filled with fresh water, a breadbasket in the plains, tons of oil, and a potentially easy to integrate population. Basically it is everything you might want during a climate crisis even as you are denying its existence.

You want to have an independent Canada? Capable of resisting rapacious imperial powers? You need 100m Canadians. You open your doors to large numbers of people capable of integrating within a generation or two (almost anyone). Implement a massive public works program for housing, energy development, and education - the education as much for social reproduction of civic virtues as anything else. Import pennies-on-the-dollar solar from China and distribute it everywhere. Implement focused industrial policy instead of half-assed partial investments. Oh you want to do robotics? For real? Then it isn't just "build a couple of factories". Build a goddamned Shenzhen or go home. Worst case scenario is you are better prepared for the catastrophic climate change your former petro-policies helped ensure would happen.

Now in lighter news:

Molly White is the journalist to follow and read when crypto is in the news and has a detailed 15min read/listen on the current meltdown. In brief, Trump's recent threat of 100% tariffs on China - a response to China's restrictions on processed rare earth minerals, which is itself a response to the Trump Administration touching the money in another stupid way - didn't move markets in general given the hour (Friday after the close) but did obliterate 15% of the value of Bitcoin. There are also hilarious glitches in the ramshackle technology that composes crypto apps and of course a bunch of insider trading. It's a fun piece.

We are lucky to live in a world where, despite desperate attempts, crypto is not a load-bearing aspect of the global economy. For that we have AI:

The CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman has already called it a bubble and lot of market analysts have already speedrun the stages of grief and ended up at acceptance:

For society at large, the consequences of tech crashes vary enormously. The bursting of America’s electronics bubble of the 1960s barely grazed the economy; the bursting of its railway bubble in the 1870s resulted in the longest slump in American history. Our analysis of past technological bubbles finds that a number of factors matter most: what kick-starts the boom, the nature of the capital invested and who bears the losses.

Where might AI sit in the rogue’s gallery? To judge this, we picked ten historical bubbles and assessed them on each factor—spark, cumulative capex, capex durability and investor group. By our admittedly rough-and-ready reckoning, the potential AI bubble lags behind only the three gigantic railway busts of the 19th century.

That was in The Economist on September 7th. Last week the former IMF chief economist wrote something slightly more alarming in the same publication:

To put the potential impact in perspective, I calculate that a market correction of the same magnitude as the dotcom crash could wipe out over $20trn in wealth for American households, equivalent to roughly 70% of American GDP in 2024. This is several times larger than the losses incurred during the crash of the early 2000s. The implications for consumption would be grave. Consumption growth is already weaker than it was preceding the dotcom crash. A shock of this magnitude could cut it by 3.5 percentage points, translating into a two-percentage-point hit to overall GDP growth, even before accounting for declines in investment.

But that's The Economist. While the journals predominantly concerned with money-touching like the Financial Times are (to some extent) required by their audience to have a more clear-eyed view of the world, there are no unbiased editorial decisions. Famously:

Unfortunately, the state of media in the United States is rather deplorable at the moment. It's a story of layoffs and mass consolidation to the point where the choices principally involve which billionaire specifically you want to hear from. You have Twitter if you want to know what Elon Musk is chiefly concerned with. As mentioned above, TikTok will soon be a Larry Ellison joint. The Washington Post is of course owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos and he's not denying he is exerting editorial control. CBS is now being run by Bari Weiss, who has made a good living as an opinion writer willing to parrot whatever billionaire is currently signing the checks this week.

Just a few days before this post one of the largest mass protest in US history occurred. Seven million people showed up to No Kings. The median normie is furious and Donald Trump is underwater on virtually every issue being polled. About 100k people showed up for Charlie Kirk's memorial. How did the NYT cover each?

Where should you actually go for news? I've made recommendations in the past on this - I'll call out Foreign Exchanges once again for international news and ProPublica generally - but the real lesson seems to be to remain critical and curious. There might have been a time where you could read/watch the news a couple of places and mostly understand what was going on. It simply isn't that easy anymore, unless you want to rely on chatbots from the same billionaires.

But perhaps the biggest genuine tragedy this month was not a hateful Christian nationalist getting shot from the guns he so loved, but rather that Eric Adams dropped out of the New York Mayoral race. Here is possible the funniest thing he has ever recorded:

Anyway I love you and so does Bunny