🇨🇦 Thinker, Hoarder. I gather news and current events to outline and identify issues with a Canadian point of view.

  • 40 Posts
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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: October 27th, 2025

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  • I thought her family is Zionist. She spent her whole term as VP providing diplomatic protection for Israel, and in part served a meaningful role in one of the worst man made famines in human history and the destruction of Gaza. Maybe she’s not explicitly genocidal, but her actions are what brought the world to this exact global mess. Whether one blames Trump or not, there’s a sequence of actions taken to get here - I’m just saying Harris and the surrounding network is a part of that.

    I suppose the world may be in the process of coming to terms that the Americans can no longer solve the issue internally. At some point, I wouldn’t be surprised as more countries just negotiate directly with Iran, and without the US.





  • He [Lt. David Collins] said CoreCivic “did not request our involvement” for any cases last year.

    “Because no criminal investigations were initiated by the Sheriff’s Office, no reports were forwarded to the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office for consideration of charges,” he said.

    Outsider Canadian here, but is this not your red flag - among many red flags - that the private prison facility is now a lawless zone and perhaps the Sheriff’s office and prison operators are now shockingly open to criminal and civil liability? Under what authority would a Sheriff’s office have to enter an understanding with a private company as far as who is responsible to investigate crimes?

    In some jurisdictions, the police would act as basically an office holder when they decide when a piece of legislation was violated, and to lay charges against an individual. Police are agents or employees of the state when they are not exercising this special authority to charge people with offences. When the charge is laid, the prosecutors take over the file. But now you’re saying that the police no longer want to use that special function - the reason why they exist - and they hand it to a private company with their own interests beyond the Justice System?

    This isn’t the Justice System any longer, this is collapse.


  • TL;DR - Crown Corps don’t go far enough, get raided by politicians, and sometimes aren’t juiced enough to repel private interests.

    I have some reservations about this in the sense that it doesn’t go far enough to solve some of the issues that are evergreen, but now are critical. I’m sure most would agree that there’s a lot of logic to have a public corp operate what are accepted Public Goods (transportation, healthcare, utilities). But simply creating a Crown Corps that holds the status of 100% state owned doesn’t solve some of the more prominent issues with these corporate vehicles.

    I’ve said as much before, but I believe that the politician is both the most flexible and the weakest unit in the chain. Politicians are lobbied (possibly to the point of corruption), corporations with global shareholders have interests that go beyond the jurisdiction, and public corporations (Crown Corps) that become successful are targets of acquisition via…the Politician.

    Drawing inspiration from the experience of Danielle Smith’s CorruptCare in Alberta, and the so-called “War Room” of Premier Jason Kenny’s years, I would want a fully autonomous Public Corp that is completely divorced from the politician, and focused solely on the provision of the Public Good in question with some hard baked fiduciary requirements: to focus on the targeted jurisdiction, to include stakeholder consultations (community, municipalities, interest groups), to have quarterly reports to a multidisciplinary committee of experts (economics, health, social workers, lawyers, emergency response, military, engineers, agriculture, aviation, environment, accountants etc.), and to respond to these stakeholders and experts in semi-regular town hall styled discussions. In this environment, the Office of the Ethics Commissioner would be free to engage in all discussions, and publicly weigh in on any issues that arise.

    The government in question would simply seed the Public Corp by handing over property and be on a list of preferred service providers on the understanding that the Public Corp would operate in the public interest, and at a preferential rate like as if the property in question is completely undeveloped. In turn, the Public Corp would be essentially unbound, and allowed to develop property, invest, grow, make loans, and create other corporate entities, unfettered by the threat of hard baked backdoors where the politician may be tempted to raid the cookie jars of successful Crown Corps for money, install cronies, and peddle influence.

    In exchange for this unusual arrangement, because the Politician is normally the interface for the public, the Public Corp makes some binding vows. Off the top of my head to never sell out to foreign interference or designated opposing forces should be an easy one. Another example is Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation. Besides the most elementary focuses on providing safe, reliable public transportation, MTR is bound to only make investments that are expected to bring returns on investment. We could also build in some kind of mechanism of greater punishment for anyone involved with the Public Corp that later is found to be stealing or involved in corruption.

    We can also use the Scandinavian Model by basically having the Public Corp aim for 51% of the market.

    Alberta nearly had that with its Alberta Health Services, but the UCP and Danielle Smith have destroyed it.

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/alberta-doctors-say-leadership-lacking-amid-crisis-of-overcrowding-in-hospitals/

    BC had something similar with its ICBC, but I understand some of ICBC’s success was just too tempting over the years.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/icbc-proposed-class-action-lawsuit-1.5483879



  • Canada would have to face an existential threat, like an act of war or terrorism carried out by the US or Israel, before the society can justify that kind of deep divorce. All of the politicians and gatekeepers, or the establishment, are already aligned with active trade with the US. Under this scenario, Canada’s enjoyed a long standing “friendship” with the US over generations. This incumbent network would not disappear without some serious shifts in the world.

    Canada and the US have similar arrangements of hard and soft political power with Israel. We have networked ties with organizations/clubs, funding, information sharing, diplomatic missions, military contracts, commercial business, and large communities. Both Canada and the US also have an unknown number of Israeli soldiers who reside in each. Almost surely, these networked ties will engage soft power to resist the new scenario or create some kind of stalemate.

    Under the new scenario of boycotts and sanctions, I’d hazard a guess that either the US has catastrophically collapsed and has become hostile or there’s been some kind of societal change within Canada (state or domestic terrorism or foreign interference) that involves varying degrees of systematic violence to enforce a new power structure. If we followed these two guesses, then Canada would already be in the midst of a recession or depression, and escalated military readiness.

    We would perceive a life threatening force in our neighbour…this would not be a good time.

    Now if we just flipped a switch and said “oh today we boycott the US”, sure I suppose that would just be a depression and further discussions would be needed for concessions.






  • I don’t believe hallucination is the correct word when the AI is using algorithms to keep customers addicted and happy. I suggest this is the very same problem that Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg, and others have been doing from the start. AI is just branding, and the same addictive algorithms are applied to the public in unregulated fashion. Only difference is the branding is selling a story that AI is actually some kind of entity with the expectation of fantastic competence.

    I’m sorry to say, it’s incredibly competent at making fools of us.


  • I’m not sure about the blip.

    As I recall, ICE was receiving a lot of media attention over the killing of Renee Good, and that was followed with the killing of Alex Pretti. Reddit was accused of running ICE ads on its platform, and there was a backlash amongst its users.

    If this backlash is part of the blip, then the following plateau is curious. Was that some kind of intervention by Reddit, and what exactly is that? Retraction of the ads? Soft-Censorship? It sounds like Reddit actively polices efforts to draw users off the platform.


  • In all, ShinyHunters claims to have stolen close to 1 petabyte of data belonging to the company and many of its customers, many of whom use Telus Digital as a BPO provider for customer support operations. BleepingComputer has not been able to independently confirm the total size of the stolen data.

    The threat actor shared the names of 28 well-known companies allegedly impacted by the breach. However, BleepingComputer will not disclose the names of these companies, as we have been unable to independently confirm whether they were impacted.

    The threat actor says that much of the data for these customers relates to BPO services provided by Telus Digital, including customer support and call center outsourcing, agent performance ratings, AI-powered customer support tools, fraud detection and prevention, and content moderation solutions.

    I believe Telus also handles healthcare data for Alberta and beyond. Do we know if that’s impacted?