Canada

Stats Can report is much better: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260313/dq260313a-eng.htm

The scene of Canada’s iconic polar bears scrounging among chip bags and milk jugs stands in stark contrast to the majestic images of bears traversing the sub-Arctic shores that feature in global tourism campaigns for the Hudson Bay region. It’s a sore point for the town of Churchill, Manitoba. For nearly two years now, the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” that welcomes international photographers and tourists as “one of the best places” to see wild polar bears has been the site of a markedly ugly scene: bears scrounging for human garbage.

In April 2024, Churchill’s waste management facility—an old military building known as L5—burned to the ground. Spontaneous combustion in the gaseous garbage pile was the likely cause. The warehouse had been capable of storing up to three years’ worth of the town’s garbage at a time. Overnight, the town’s 900 or so residents were left with nothing. Garbage piled up in town. Dumpsters overflowed.

In the wake of the fire, the town was forced to dump all of its waste on top of the tundra, on an old landfill, about six kilometres from the L5 site, where a hard fence and an electric fence kept the bears at bay. It remains a tenuous stopgap. By that fall, as hundreds of hungry polar bears arrived on the shore of Hudson Bay to wait for the sea ice to freeze, an inconvenience had turned into a crisis. Bears congregated at the fence line, biding their time. When an ice storm fatefully knocked out the fence’s power supply, more than thirty ravenous polar bears stormed the enclosure to gorge on the garbage.

After two years, Churchill is still without a solution. The Manitoba government did not respond to requests for an interview. The town is looking at replacing the old waste storage building with a steel option, but cost (hindered by price hikes for steel due to the United States’ tariffs) and uncertainty around the location have stalled the decision. In the meantime, camera traps set up around Churchill’s makeshift facility filmed polar bears—lone males, females with cubs, subadults—trying their luck almost every single day this past fall, scientists say.

Sent this email to the senators and federal politicians that were doing those recent AI committees, hearing from experts in the field.

Dear AI and effects interested politicians,

You've heard many expert testimonies of people in the narrow field of study of AI, but one of the outstanding questions is societal impacts and what to do about them, which I can answer as I meet with leading scientists and engineers around the world every month on the topic of the many global factors at play in our past, present and future.

The crux of the matter is that we live on a physical planet with limits in resources, though we have more than enough resources for everyone, especially in Canada, the distribution of resources is what will define whether quality of life continues to decline or takes a turn to long term improvement. Local and decentralized AI has the potential to make the transition not only feasible, but to remake Canada as a thriving model for the world if the people and leadership want to use it that way.

One of the most critical understanding in order to be able to pivot from the escalating real wealth inequality in Canada to real wealth distribution and prosperity for the Canadian people is seeing beyond what Plato described as the Allegory of the Cave. The narrative begins deep inside the dark cavern, where captives are chained against a wall, accepting the flickering black silhouettes of animals and puppets cast by a fire as their entire reality. While these shadows define existence for those who remain in chains, the story moves to the right where figures have broken free from their bonds to begin the arduous climb up the rocky cliff face. As they ascend away from the artificial firelight, they leave behind the illusions of the cave to emerge into the bright sunlight and green grass above, standing at the top as they perceive truth directly instead of through the distorted projections below. allegory of the cave How it pertains to our current situation is those shadows on the walls are fears and abstractions that often fit in the Overton window of the wall, but the reality is that Canadians are flesh and blood homo sapien mammals with basic needs that need to be met in order for them to thrive and be productive. And those needs can not be met long term with abstractions like money but have to be met with real wealth like land.

For example the recent land transfers in B.C. took land from private citizens and gave it to band councils, an organization that was instituted by the Canadian government long ago to make it easier to control indigenous people as an abstraction, while not actually allowing any individual indigenous homo sapien mammal to have ownership of the soil. So even though 95% of BC is owned by abstractions/corporations, that wasn't enough for the government, and was escalated, reducing quality of life even further for the homo sapien mammals.

Why are AI data centers responsible for 99.5% of US's 2025 GDP growth, and why was much of the funding coming from middle eastern Oil barons? Because our Real/physical global oil reserves (Not the SEC fictions) of crude sufficiently high quality to run a society are running low, and AI has the promise of being able to do more with less. The transition is not caused by AI, it's caused by us running low on fossil fuels, every barrel of oil is harder to get than the previous. The recent Venezuela and Iran crises being yet other symptoms.

A local AI even late last year that one can run on a laptop, was as smart or smarter as an average human on a wide variety of text based tasks. And if a person has a gaming Graphics Card in their desktop, they can consult with a multi-PhD level intelligence at home. Yes they have limitations, just like humans, and need structured organization and good quality information to produce good results.

For example much of Canadian news is currently owned by Postmedia, a US based hedge fund. One practical alternative I'm working on is using local AI model refineries to generate local news based on municipal, county, police websites. It's also possible to make local social media discussion forms, with compassionate, tireless AI moderators, always willing to listen, give a pep talk, and reminder to follow the rules.

The Senate has been working on an UBI bill for years, but unfortunately it is just another abstraction that can at best serve as a stop gap measure for the transition. To illustrate a simple example based on historical precedent, for every 5% decline in oil, oil prices go up 50% and food prices go up 10%. Straight of Hormuz has 25% of global oil supply. At $3-$5/lt most people can't afford to drive to work. Attempting to pour money on it will only cause inflation.

Even if Trump admits defeat and apologizes to Iran thus meeting their stated peace terms and we go back to "normal" 25%+ of homo sapiens in Canada are food insecure growing at 4%+ a year. No amount of "jobs" or UBI will help either, because the fundamental problem is it takes three fossil fuel calories to get 1 calorie of food to the grocery store. Industrial farming as we know it is not viable without cheap and abundant fossil fuels. But homo sapiens need to eat, and believe it or not, food grows in soil with the application of rainwater and sunlight, which we in Canada are blessed to have plenty of.

One of the common complaints I've heard "but no one knows how to grow food anymore" which is where local AI comes in, multi-level PhD grade educator available in every municipality for any given use case from agriculture to electrical engineering and social cohesion you name it, and we can implement local AI refineries running on solar power to provide all the information we need with fiber optic cables and traditional rail between municipalities solving our information and transportation needs.

Another complaint I've heard is "most of Canada is uninhabitable" but as a descendant of reindeer herders, there is not a hectare of mainland Canada my relatives can not live and thrive on. Anywhere trees grow we grow food forests, anywhere animals roam we herd them. We have herded raindeer sustainably for over three thousand years. The main obstacle is government land hoarding for the benefit of abstractions and shadows.

We can have a beautiful high tech future in symbiosis with the land, water, plants, animals and technology, but for that we have to forgive, love and be kind to one another enough to say that yes, homo sapiens do deserve to have enough land to meet their basic needs. There is no other way, and even if the government doesn't agree, then the endless course of history will simply trample the government abstraction, as homo sapiens need to live and will continue to do so regardless of shadows and legal fictions.

As always by the supremacy of God, and the rule of Law, God wins. If you wish to be part of the victory is up to you.

May you be blessed, Andrii Zvorygin, Owen Sound, Grey County, Ontario, Canada.

With war in the Middle East keeping the critical Strait of Hormuz fuel route closed, the international community is reaching into its oil reserves to fill the supply gap.

On Wednesday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) agreed to release 400 million barrels from its emergency reserves — its largest-ever release — in order to help ease a disruption of "unprecedented" scale, the IEA said.

That's drawing scrutiny of Canada's oil reserves — or, rather, its lack of them, as Canada is the only nation in the G7 that doesn't maintain a strategic reserve.

While Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said on Wednesday that Canada would "do its part" to help contribute to the global oil supply, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre criticized the Liberal government for not having any reserves.

Prime Minister Mark Carney touched down in Norway early Friday where he will get important face time with the Nordic country’s leader and the German chancellor before taking in a major NATO wargaming exercise that includes Canadian troops.

Both countries are backing a bid by German submarine-maker TKMS to sell Canada 12 new submarines — a multi-billion dollar program that has been fast-tracked by the Liberal government.

Despite the high-stakes — militarily, economically and diplomatically — Carney said he doesn’t expect the submarine bid to be discussed among the three leaders.

"The short answer's no," he said, when asked about the possibility in Yellowknife prior to boarding a flight to Europe, "because we're at a phase in that process where the final bids have been submitted."

I wonder whether the major providers will use this as an excuse to jack up the prices, internet specifically, or try to be more competitive. Telus was ready to buy me out of contract, install a line that doesn't exist and offer month to month from get go, so logically I would assume it could help drive prices down, but then again greed beats logic.

At the very least I hope the cellphone plan changes should help those who don't usually shop around and don't sign up for plans when providers offer to "cover" the connection fee or w/e they call that bullshit.

A while ago I was browsing my feed on Sharkey and saw someone from a Mastodon instance ask if it was just him, or if there appeared to be a lot more people using the #yeg tag (for Edmonton) than the #yyc tag (for Calgary).

It's had me thinking since then that perhaps having a resource thread in these communities listing accounts such as politicians, local organisations, even local specialty accounts would be helpful to onboard people to Mastodon and retain people's involvement and interest in the Fediverse.

Having lists like this would also likely help onboard people as there would be a resource available to help showcase to those sceptical of joining that there are people in their own community that have an interest in the Fediverse, and post content that's relevant to them.

Would this be a worthwhile idea, or perhaps a bit too far out of scope?

Awwww, #americans opinions of #canada is way down according to gallup polls. Let me go find a quiet place to cry about it. 🤣

The Oil Sands Alliance — rebranded from the Pathways Alliance — has a history of misleading the public about the fossil fuel industry's support for climate action, all the while pushing to expand production.