George Patrick Richard Benson

The Mayor isn’t here to hear speakers - the meeting is being chaired by Acting Mayor Zhou.

Alberta to invoke notwithstanding clause to shield 3 transgender bills from court challenges | CBC News The Alberta government has tabled legislation that seeks to invoke the notwithstanding clause to shield a suite of bills that affects transgender youth and adults from legal challenges.

I am pretty sure that when Merv Leitch and Peter Lougheed first created the notwithstanding clause, they didn’t mean it to be deployed to bully and oppress literal school children. #ableg #abpoli #TransRightsAreHumanRights #Alberta #notwithstandingclause

A slowdown, not salvation: what new extinction data reveal about the state of life on Earth For decades, biologists have warned that humanity is precipitating a sixth mass extinction. By some estimates, species are vanishing at up to a thousand times the natural background rate. Yet a new st...

Some good news, and some really dark news, but, most importantly, a more complex picture of how life on earth is evolving in the age of ecological breakdown and, more generally, the Anthropocene.

🙃🙃🙃

Who was that guy that ran as a left mayor who had previous federal political experience…? What ever happened to him?

Ken Sim's comments on EarlyEd were delusional:

His defense of "thorough budget presentation" suggested councillors were afforded multiple rounds of questions. In fact, critical councillors were given only two 5min blocks for questions and answers on 90 slide, 23p, $2.4b budget before ABC cut us off

GOAT

ANALYSIS | Ottawa names Yukon grid project in new major projects list. What does that mean? | CBC News Prime Minister Mark Carney may have put the Yukon-B.C. grid connection on the latest list of nation-building projects, but Yukoners are no closer to knowing when they can tap into B.C. hydro.

Great to see the Yukon to BC grid connection added to the federal major project list. A BC grid connection would allow switching from diesel both on community and on new mine projects! www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Great quote from Mike Larson:

“An FOI request is not really a request,” he added. “It’s a legal mechanism.”

File this under “incredibly niche topics that actually have massive societal implications.”

Opinion: Vancouver goes small: The city risks big new problems with its proposed turn to austerity Austerity budgets save some money in the short term, but have long-term costs, both financial and otherwise

New opinion piece in the @vancouversun.bsky.social: A turn to austerity will cost Vancouver dearly. vancouversun.com/opinion/opin...

Working on a piece about Pyrrhus and it’s so satisfying to get to stretch my historian muscles.

If you haven’t already and really want to lose sleep, look at what the @ipbes.net is tracking: www.ipbes.net/node/36759

When I was doing work on human migration and climate change, this was what always kept me up at night the most. Ultimately I stopped doing that work because it felt a bit chicken little at times — it just felt so hard to wrap my arms around.

Never gets old.

I’ve always been fascinated (and frustrated) by light pollution.

Standards like Dark Sky exist and I think are starting to show proof of concept, but extremely nascent.

Hasn’t come up enough, IMHO, in urban design questions.

Too worried about shading, I guess.

Happy Grey Cup Sunday to all who celebrate.

I think India’s gone pretty hard on rail electrification, too.

Ultimately, we still have to wait and see. Too many variables to feel confident in a clear outcome, but I am definitely trending bearish.

Who knows, maybe we'll find out more on November 25th?

If the AI bubble does pop, even a little, then that would have huge implications for the $540 billion in cap-ex associated with the sector, most of which has a clear energy relationship.

They offer a range of predictions and insights:
- AI could increase electricity consumption 5x
- >50% of data centre development could occur near large cities
- >50% of data centre development would be between 200MW - 1GW size
- AI could play a role in saving energy in different sectors

The one that I am watching the most is energy, where the @iea.org had big things to say this year, including that more money was invested in AI than oil itself.
iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/5306b...

And if the money dries up because of a significant re-valuation of the sector, well, that will have utterly massive knock-on effects that will reverberate across the world.

The rub for me is that we have a lot of engineers thinking and speaking on this, and they do so differently than finance folks do.

The question of whether or not the tech works is significantly (though not entirely) separate from whether or not it is *commercially* valuable - for now.

I disagree with both some of their priors and some of their conclusions but it's interesting all the same to see people sincerely try to work out what's possible based on clearly articulated assumptions and transparent scenario planning.

We need a lot more of that in the world.

AI 2027 A research-backed AI scenario forecast.

The folks at AI 2027 feel representative for interesting and thoughtful people deep in the weeds on the issue, but trying to make extrapolations on the future based on what they know. ai-2027.com

On top of that, you have just the... truly wild amount of hype surrounding these technologies. I've read and listened to a huge number of sources on this.

Even once you remove the obvious grifters, there are a lot of really smart people who truly do see something transformative on the horizon.

Pure-play AI companies (e.g., OpenAI) and their enablers (e.g., Nvidia, and Microsoft) are doing some combination of:

- Pumping their stock
- Being sketchy with how they account for capital depreciation
- Creating wild customer projections
- Some other riff on one of the above

But Burry's the latest in a line of folks all pushing back on both the value and the investments of the hyperscalers. There are like 50,000 versions of this argument, but most go something like: