Western Canadian Separatism
Western Canadian separatism in Alberta and Saskatchewan is a political hot potato in Canada right now with the federal liberal party, whose owners have absolutely no interest in meeting the needs of either province, making soothing sounds while they get their trade deal with the United States squared away and put the legislative and regulatory changes they need to implement their policies in place.
Those changes seem to include:
- legislation on a national energy corridor and priority federal project approvals that can be presented as responsive to western concerns but are actually designed to ensure, both through the tax system and through proxies wielding the judicial and regulatory systems, that nothing of the kind ever gets built;
- working with partners, particularly "first nations" councils, to propose resource extraction and/or transportation projects that can absorb national attention but never be built - for example, a pipeline to Churchill Manitoba for oil export through Hudson's bay;
- more media funding and support for continuing efforts to weaken conservative governments in the prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan; and,
- trying to weaken Trump on trade with the EU while undercutting the Quebec Separatists preparing for their next referendum by having the French government proxy their negotiations for EU entry, by combining Carney's social contacts with the political muscle provided by Soros et al to create a new Canada-EU trade compact.
In partial response, Alberta premier Danielle Smith has announced a new "Alberta Next" panel to tour the province collecting public opinions on what to do - a process I assume will replicate, with one major exception, that of past panels, none of whose major recommendations have been acted on.
The exception is that the most recent "fair deal" panel, toured around the province by former premier Jason Kenny in 2020, did not recommend a public referendum on Alberta independence, but every public hearing the current panel dares hold will be dominated by that issue - meaning that they probably will have to recommend a referendum on independence from Canada despite the fact that a no vote on such a referendum is almost inevitable and will greatly strengthen the federal government's ability to impose its (euro-fascist) policies and preferences on Alberta and Saskatchewan.
In fact the current front runner on gaining the signatures needed for a non government sponsored referendum to be placed on the ballot, one put forward by The Alberta Prosperity Project, seems to be attracting considerable major media support precisely because, I think, its inevitable failure will significantly weaken the western position.
A second proposed referendum has already been announced too - this one led by a former conservative leadership candidate: Thomas Lukaszuk, asks "Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?" and purports to be pro-Canada.
In my opinion, however, it is mostly just Anti Danielle Smith - but does have significant potential to misfire in that a well managed "no" campaign could easily take the win.
So what can be done? If we wish to keep the country but reduce liberal exploitation of the producing provinces, the two provincial governments could put forward an immediate referendum asking for authority to explore an economic union with the United States as a fallback to be voted on if, or when, the liberal government in Ottawa fails to rectify a clearly ennunciated list of western grievances.
That would, I think, get an 80% or better positive vote in both provinces, strengthen existing provincial leadership, and force Ottawa to choose between treating the west fairly or destroying the country providing their funding and claims to power.
Pam Bondi
My bet is she'll either be fired within a month or find the courage to release files, and charge people, without having all the sign-offs the system is insisting are required. The people telling her to hold off while the paperwork gets done are right, but telling them to stuff it is righter. So will she find the courage? I hope so, but I doubt it - too bad Flynn's so old.
AI and Productivity
Right now AI's highest uses are in search and the reduction of customer service time per product sold.
On the search side, a service such as perplexity.ai can now give you a well formatted, deeply researched, and easily verifiable answer to any search question (including some requiring fairly extensive calculations) in seconds - a good research assistant can do that too, of course, but the human will take days to match perplexity's depth and be more likely to miss something important.
On the customer service side these things can handle the overwhelming majority of customer questions and concerns with a speed and accuracy humans can't match.
So how will this affect national productivity? I've got two predictions:
- first on the hardware side, people are assuming that today's large scale data centers will continue to be needed and are developing electrical generation facilities to match. In reality, however, future hardware will need much less power - and the next step in AI development (see my February 6th, 2007, zdnet column on this) will not need the storage or data access the current generation does. As a result many of those power plants will get built, but will not be needed.
Thus the most important industrial AI effect will be cheap, reliable, power - and that will lead to major productivity improvements across the economy.
- Ai is great at re-search, not good at all on invention, and outstanding on memory, accuracy, and replication. As a result the new plants now being built as part the Trump industrial renaissance in America, already generally very automated, will use AI to improve product engineering, customer support, and manufacturing quality to a level 1960s Maytag ad writers could only dream of.
This will have long term positive consequences for American defense, national productivity, and exports (obviously I'm ignoring social consequences arising from the increasing numbers of Americans who are, or will soon become, unemployable) but the indirect consequences are likely, I think, to prove even more important. For example, about 1-2% of the people who currently do product engineering and manufacturing support are very high IQ creatives who, freed from the mundane elements of their jobs, will invent and popularize revolutionary new ideas and technologies previous generations never imagined. Whatever those turn out to be, they'll dominate life from the late 2030s forward in much the same way that computers and related telecom technologies dominate now.
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