Blayne Haggart
@bhaggart.bsky.social
Professor, Political Science, Brock University Knowledge governance, IPE, Sydney Swans tragic Co-author, with Natasha Tusikov, The New Knowledge: Information, Data and the Remaking of Global Power (Bloomsbury, 2023). Open Access.
My thoughts on where Andy Burnham’s (and the Left’s in general) priorities on the economy should be futureoftheleft.substack.com/p/the-left-m...
The Left must focus on where the jobs will be, not where it wishes they would be
A series on the politics of production.
futureoftheleft.substack.com
A company that would experiment on its own users like this, and obfuscated what it was doing, is not one that will abide by any "duty to act responsibly." @ntusikov.bsky.social and I lay out exactly why not in this Policy Options piece. policyoptions.irpp.org/2026/07/bill...
Canada can’t regulate Big Tech by trusting Big Tech
Bill C-34 puts too much faith in Big Tech. Canada should regulate the algorithms, data practices and business models that drive online harm.
policyoptions.irpp.org
Jason Leopold@jasonleopold.bsky.social · 20h agoBOMBSHELL story by Olivia Carville @bloomberg.com Internal Report Shows TikTok Kept Safety Feature From Millions A confidential document says an algorithm adjustment was kept from many users “by design,” as part of an experiment to measure engagement NO PAYWALL www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
Carney government moves toward listing West Coast pipeline as national interest project | CBC News
Canada’s federal government is advancing the process to designate the Alberta government’s proposed oil pipeline to the West Coast as a project of national interest. A notice published in the Canada G...
cbc.ca
Jeff Doctor@jeff.doctor · last mo.5 bucks says carney and co are going to blame Indigenous people when this pipeline boondoggle costs canadians their retirement savings and melts their children
again, if i had a calculator that gave me the wrong answer one (1) time, i would throw it out and never use it again and could probably bankrupt the company by simply telling people what happened
Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · yesterdayGotta love the “or stocks” part. Like Gemini realized its first answer was nuts so it tried to wedge in a better one.
I'm in the Star today with a piece on the Carney government's handling of relations with the United States. Last year, Canadians gave Mark Carney a mandate to disentangle our country from the empire to the south. By any reasonable standard, he's done the opposite. Link in first reply.
Taylor Farms salad is sold in Canada too. There was a...healthy amount left untouched on the shelf at my local Farm Boy yesterday I would appreciate a slightly more robust approach from CFIA, but perhaps they're still working out which of its 1,371 jobs to cut www.agrunion.com/jobs-cuts-at...
Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 2d agoTwo people have died from cyclosporiasis in Michigan, marking the first fatalities in the largest U.S. outbreak of the intestinal illness
NYC taxpayers will spread the cost of groceries to help people who otherwise couldn't afford them to sustain themselves? Sounds great! Let's do more of that
USA TODAY Opinion@usatodayopinion.usatoday.com · 2d agoOpinion: Mamdani's idea may sound appealing, but it's NYC taxpayers who will take the hit, subsidizing discounts they may never even use.
“The Trump administration’s campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court could weaken any hopes of justice for the victims of mass atrocities in Darfur, analysts say.” Important report from @geoffreyyork.bsky.social
U.S. campaign against international court threatens to jeopardize Darfur probe
ICC’s investigation will face new obstacles if Chad goes ahead with its planned withdrawal from the court
theglobeandmail.com
The question is, Do you want more money or less? Carney repealing carbon pricing means you now have less.
Might as well answer my own question. Mark Carney has redefined Canada's actual problem -- the US can no longer be trusted, is descending into authoritarianism and no longer follows the rule of law -- into an easier, more familiar one: how to increase Canadian productivity.
Blayne Haggart@bhaggart.bsky.social · 3d ago“Cameco, the Saskatoon-based uranium mining and nuclear fuel company, will mine uranium ore in Saskatchewan and convert it in Port Hope, Ont., before it is enriched in the United States.” What problem are the Carney and Ford governments trying to solve? Because it sure isn’t overreliance on the US.
“Cameco, the Saskatoon-based uranium mining and nuclear fuel company, will mine uranium ore in Saskatchewan and convert it in Port Hope, Ont., before it is enriched in the United States.” What problem are the Carney and Ford governments trying to solve? Because it sure isn’t overreliance on the US.
Canada built its nuclear industry on self-reliance. Its new reactors will depend on foreign fuel | CBC News
Canada built its nuclear industry around Candu reactors supplied by a made-in-Canada supply chain. Ontario is building, and other provinces are considering, SMRs that require foreign uranium enrichmen...
cbc.ca
This is the argument I made in @volumemag.bsky.social about Sidewalk Toronto and the cost of entertaining dumb ideas: “Individuals ... spent time and money mounting an opposition when they could have been doing other things ... Fighting this was a time and money suck.” – @shawnmicallef.bsky.social
Shawn Micallef: The Billy Bishop expansion pause was a real win for the people. But don’t put away those No Jets signs just yet
The federal government’s decision to pause the Billy Bishop expansion means that people who often win lost for once — are taking it badly.
thestar.com
It's a very simple equation. The alternative requires that the GOP either implodes or reverses the trajectory that it's been on for like three decades. So the choice is basically "risky electoral reform" or the status quo, and the status quo is "continued collapse of the constitutional republic"
Mark Copelovitch@mcopelov.bsky.social · 4d agoThere is no crushing the right in a two-party system. That boils down to “Dems will win every election forever,” & we need a system in which Dems can lose & it’s not a crisis for democracy because there are other pro-democracy parties.
If the EU had a spine, Visa and Mastercard would no longer be allowed to operate in Europe.
Paul Eric@pauleric70.bsky.social · 5d agoFrancesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur: "My credit card doesn't work, I can't pay bills or transfers; my health insurance was cancelled. I feel like Pablo Escobar—all because I said, 'Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.'"
New blog entry: On the non-use of AI in my writing process: www.antipope.org/charlie/blog...
Good column from @shawnmicallef.bsky.social and there’s a lesson in the No Jets TO victory. It’s — stay mad, Toronto.
Shawn Micallef: The Billy Bishop expansion pause was a real win for the people. But don’t put away those No Jets signs just yet
The federal government’s decision to pause the Billy Bishop expansion means that people who often win lost for once — are taking it badly.
thestar.com
Now, any couple who gets married in City Hall can request a pet certificate upon uniting their household! 🐾 This certificate is dedicated to the shared commitment, love, nurture and proper cuddles our pets bring to our lives. Be sure to bring your pets to make the ceremony paw-fect.
This is also good advice for emerging scholars and PhD students.
John Scalzi@scalzi.com · 5d ago1. Newer writers, just don't fucking use "AI" for anything, ever 2. How odd that being an established writer with a firm "no 'AI'" stance and ample pre-"AI" IP will become a definite competitive advantage over "new, hot, and possibly copyright compromised" deadline.com/2026/07/ai-q...
Seeing news of Google DeepMind killing AplhaFold and people rightly pointing out how it fueled hype of general AI, and cannot help think back of the mansplainers in my mentions about this post 🙄
Iris van Rooij 💭@irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 3w agoProtein folding is intractable in general, so the barrier cannot have been broken algorithmically in general. Where is the scam hidden? Either algorithms consume super-polynomial resources or they are simply not solving the problem reliably. There is no other way, unless P = NP So which is it?
A short-sighted plan in which Agriculture Canada belatedly realizes the value of research, but not so much as to hire back fired scientists.
Canada's National Observer@nationalobserver.com · 5d agoOfficials at Canada's agriculture department are asking scientists who were abruptly fired earlier this year to help the agency decide its future research goals, Canada's National Observer has found.
The key to reconciling Google’s previous organize-the-world‘s-knowledge mission with its current heel turn is recognizing that Google (and tech bros generally) has *always* understood knowledge as equivalent to (neutral) data.
Alex Cranz@cranz.bsky.social · 5d agothe company that was really good at helping you find information has decided to be the company that lets you fabricate new information and I’m not sure Google realizes how fundamentally different and potentially dangerous that is.
The reputation-laundering operation known as AlphaFold has been shut down. It changed culture in damaging ways, and similar protein-structure packages carry the mantle of black-box short-cuts that break the "chain of custody of why", offloading labor to often-haphazard and de-emphasized validation.
Google shuts down its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold project as it focuses on Gemini - Engadget
DeepMind's award-winning AlphaFold team is no more.
engadget.com
Jed Brown@jedbrown.org · last mo.The "chain of custody of why" is a load-bearing element of science. In numerical solutions of PDE (as in fluid and structural mechanics), the modern practice of verification (solving the equations right) and validation (solving the right equations) as distinct emerged from painful epistemic flailing
The most important change of the past 50 years has been the ascendancy of knowledge as a commodity, ripped from context. It started with IP’s centralization in the global economy and continued with the datafication of everything.
Kate Starbird@katestarbird.bsky.social · 5d agoOur relationship to visual evidence is being profoundly disrupted by GenAI tools, which will impact how we know, what we can know, and what we think can be known about the world. A massive epistemological shift is upon us.
Weather forecasting is a good example of why @ntusikov.bsky.social argues that the US evisceration of its regulatory and scientific agencies means Canada needs more, not less, government to pick up the slack. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...
Whither the weather balloons? U.S. changes leave Canada with less notice of storms, experts say
American stations have strayed from regular launch times observed around the globe as part of co-ordinated scientific effort
theglobeandmail.com
From a former chair of the CBA's criminal justice section, on the Ontario Court of Appeal decision on Pat King and the "Convoy."
‘Criminal conduct no less criminal during lawful protest’
nationalmagazine.ca
"A study done in Phoenix done by Arizona State University found data centres can increase air temperatures by up to 4 degrees Fahrenheit in downwind neighbourhoods. The waste heat given off by one data centre as it cooled itself exceeded the amount produced by 40,000 households."
CNN@cnn.com · 6d agoNew research suggests data centers have an alarming and overlooked environmental impact: heat pollution. CNN's Laura Paddison reports.
