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Kashmiri saffron crops are being ravaged by hungry porcupines https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/4/16/kashmirs-famed-saffron-faces-devastating-new-terror-porcupines

A business book on OpenAI suggests that Sam Altman was chronically lying to the board of OpenAI (or doing things without telling them) because they were LessWrong type doomers and their understanding of AI safety was getting in the way of making all the money (OpenAI dominates the chatbot business even though it does not own the best technology for some use cases and is losing billions of dollars a year; but Sam Altman knows that if enough money passes through your hands you can make some stick to your fingers) https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/04/06/how-sam-altman-got-fired-from-openai-in-2023-not-being-an-ai-doom-crank-and-lying-a-lot/

Almost everyone in these spaces is crazy, greedy, or a Nazi. So whichever faction wins the results will be bad.  About the least harmful result is the chatbot companies which take rich people's money and spend it building nothing (one company borrowed $2 billion on a promise not to release technology before they have superintelligence which is very South Sea Bubble).

And people at chatbot companies lie like the Hells Angels are at their door about a debt they can't pay.

Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic the chatbot company (ClaudeAI), is married to Holden Karnofsky, founder of an EA spending organization GiveWell and Anthropic staffer.  Amanda Askell was an early employee at Anthropic; her ex-husband is William MacAskell. Daniella's brother Dario Amodei is CEO of Anthropic and once shared a group house with Karnofsky while both worked for Open Philanthropy, another EA organization. So the org charts of these companies and foundations look more like Saudi Arabia or Qing China than contemporary Canada, its all roommates and lovers and members of secret societies hiring each other. The closest thing I can think of in respectable circles in the USA is Old Media journalism. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/53Gc35vDLK2u5nBxP/anthropic-is-not-being-consistently-candid-about-their  See previous discussion about how all this (gestures) has social dynamics similar to geeky subcultures but much more ambitious goals and bigger budgets or influence (although a $20 million endowment and some six-figure to low-seven-figure grants to fund EA propaganda on Vox Media is not that much in absolute terms! Just big by the standards of FOSS or the SCA or your local amateur dramatic society).

Many people in these spaces hate public universities and civil servants, and I note that those are institutions in the USA which were dragged kicking and screaming away from hiring your friend's failson and your ex-wife's bridge partner.  Publicly-traded companies can't get away with this easily any more either.  But American so-called Libertarians tend to be very comfortable with organizing a country like one patriarchal family, and IQ-fetishists and believers in secret revelations can also be persuaded that clearly they know best and rules are for lesser creatures.

I note without further comment that there is a Mormon tranhumanist association if Czarist Russian cosmicists are not your jam https://www.transfigurism.org/

Another stupidity: if you want to create an industry, you usually need to import experienced workers to set it up. This is so elementary that King John of England imported converted Moors from Spain when he decided that he would like his own crossbow industry. But this crowd want negative net immigration and are antagonizing the rest of the world.

When several of their goals are inconsistent, like bringing back agriculture and industry and net emigration, they try both.

I wrote some notes on my expectations for the second round of Trump, combined with some thoughts on the frequent online-left memeing about the "end of the US Empire" being an imminent outcome of this:
https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2025/02/06/trump-ii-expectations-and-empires/

Thoughts welcome!

Xenophon or Sallust would run intellectual rings around the US administration as far as understanding arche or imperium. Hundreds of junior academics like Bret Devereaux understand how the American empire works better than the people in charge of it let alone the Iranians or Iraqis or Chagosians.

These baboons have such a crippled understanding of reciprocity and systems theory that they don't seem to understand that European military weakness is part of a deal with the United States.  If European countries other than France develop an expeditionary military, they will use it in ways that the USA does not approve, just like the USA uses its expeditionary military in ways they do not approve.  If US IT becomes openly predatory and not just parasitic, the EU will introduce alternatives and relentlessly force US services out of the European market.  It took decades of work to turn the center of global imperialism away from invading Suez for kicks and they are throwing that away.

Someone with more time and a different education could explain the similar situation with US control over global finance and the trade deficit (if the rest of the world wants to build up US dollars, it has to export more goods and services to the USA than it imports).  Again, this is a source of unimaginable US power and wealth which a US administration is attacking.

I read an American being sad about the thoughtlessness in the group chat about bombing Yemen.  Just remember that nobody involved can explain how the US decided to invade Iraq, which is probably the single most destructive choice a US administration has made since the decision to back a puppet regime in South Vietnam with troops. There are no documented debates, no oral memories of reasoned argument, just a vague shift. The rot is not new and not linked to any one person.

If the CEO of Tesla were brighter or humbler he would hope that J.D. Vance has never read Il Principe about what to do with the enforcer you bring in to break some heads and terrify your new subjects.

Edward Niedermeyer wrote this about the CEO of Tesla https://niedermeyer.online/2024/11/07/means-and-ends/

"For me, (the CEO's) reliance on "ends justify the means" logic was one of the original red flags about his entire deal. I certainly wasn't doomed to always be a Tesla hater: I've always liked EVs, I believe strongly in protecting the environment, and I'm a lifelong west coaster who kinda loves the idea of having a "home team" automaker. What turned me off about Tesla early on was the cynicism: the willingness to simultaneously violate environmentalist principles and use them justify other bad acts."

The other problem in Canada is that BC and Alberta are underrepresented in parliament.

How many more seats should the west have, out of interest?

That is a technical question and I don't have a reference offhand.  Its also complicated because parliament will expand from 338 to 343 seats after this election. 

Wikipedia gives population of Canada 41.5 million Q1 2025
population of BC 5,722,318 in Q1 2025
population of Alberta 4,960,097 in Q1 2025 (obviously these are all estimates)

So BC and Alberta have 25.8% of the population of Canada, and would have got 87 MPs under representation by population.  They actually had 80.

This site seems pretty reliable although I don't know where the figure 339 comes from https://businesscouncilab.com/insights-category/analysis/why-alberta-continues-to-be-under-represented-in-ottawa/ Note that the number of electors per MP varies by a factor of 3:1 or 3:2 if you exclude tiny Prince Edward Island (somewhat smaller and much less populated than Crete).

The other problem in Canada is that BC and Alberta are underrepresented in parliament. Quebec and the maritime provinces have a number of special favours written in to the rules for the size of parliament and the western provinces were not good negotiators last time it came up.

This would not be such an issue if JT had fulfilled his promise to replace First Past the Post, because then winning 60% of votes in a riding would be 50% better than 40% of votes, and not "exactly the same result."

I wondered what was going on with this thread.

The beautiful thing about identity is that as soon as someone says "I am" it exists.  And we can easily access that in some societies, just like we can often access external measures such as baptisimal records or guild membership. And there is so much confusion around these categories that I like to clearly distinguish the two.

I would call some of those social categories, since in my own jargon identities are fundamentally "I am" not all the things that get placed on people like race or class or servile status.  I have blogged about how identity is not really useful for premodern history since we so rarely have access to people's internal subjective experience whereas we often have evidence for social categories.

Liberal leader and PM-without-a-seat Mark Carney has called an election with the Liberals and Tories approximately tied in voter intent.  He already implemented one major Tory policy by ending the individual carbon tax after the April rebate payment.  Trump's threat to annex Canada caused about 10% of voters to shift their intent from NDP to Liberal, and 10% of voters to shift their intent from Conservative to Liberal.  The election is the earliest possible, Monday 28 April (roughly five weeks away).

On the weird Internet communities front, Carney is really into spicy autocomplete despite being a banker where precision and factuality matter.

Something called the Toronto Star was one of the papers which had an excitable headline about the Kelowna residential school in 2021.  Its only read by people in TO and other journalists (although back when I read newspapers I wonder how many journalists read even one paper a day given some of the things they forgot and some of the patterns they failed to recognize) https://www.thestar.com/

Doug Saunders once published the book Maximum Canada (meaning population 100 million https://www.dougsaunders.net/about/maximum-canada/ ).  After an American pundit talked about 1 billion Americans, Pierre Polievre is complaining about the Century Initiative, a lobby group with Saunders' original goal https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/  Usually its Canadians who adopt bad old idea that the Americans are abandoning.

BTW the Pinkerite blog has a chart of racialist networks around Emil Kirkegaard https://www.pinkerite.com/2024/12/elon-musk-supports-german-neo-nazi.html (Kirkegaard has no visible means of support except for family, an inheritance from racialist Richard Lynn, and American racialist Wickliffe Draper's Pioneer Fund)

the CEO of Midjourney has an active Twitter account (in 2025!)

This doesn't really surprise me at all, I think - it's that sort of tech-capitalist milieu that still does cling to Twitter (and probably Twitter where any kneejerk admirers of Bay Area tech still hang out).

I guess Apple is still pretty popular, and some consumers like Amazon but even then its known for being rapaciously capitalist. And some people really like generative AI / LLMs.  But I don't think many people look at MS or Meta or Palantir or Netflix or Stripe and think "that is cool I want to be a part of that mission."  They think maybe "that has a lot of money I want a piece of it."

Birdsite Guy did turn Twitter from a journalism / elite site to a tech / far right site, but that made it less useful for influencing officials and journalists.

David S. Holz the CEO of Midjourney has an active Twitter account (in 2025!) where he markets himself as an active transhumanist and trades posts with Roko of Basilisk fame.

The company seems to be private so its hard to know its revenue and expenses (which have little to do with the stock price of publicly-traded "tech" or "AI" companies anyways).

He also seems to believe that there are people who still admire any Bay Area "tech" company?  That is a disconnect.

After one of BC's 87 MLAs was expelled from the Conservative caucus for insulting residential-school survivors in a podcast interview, two others resigned in solidarity (!)

People out in the boonies seem to be getting excited about whether or not the unmarked graves at one specific school have been found (AFAIK nobody says "yes"), not that for 90 years Canada operated a system that ripped children from their homes, tried to destroy their cultures and languages, exposed them to cold, hunger, disease, and abuse, and did not even provide meaningful education.  Nobody disputes that, nor that thousands of First Nations children died early deaths because of this system.  So I think its a double alternate-reality: people who have convinced themselves that debating about that one specific school is a cutting point, and people who have convinced themselves that mocking survivors is much more acceptable than it actually is.  Maybe they found some social-media troll who claimed that the graves had definitely been found and convinced themselves that anyone off their social media service care what the troll says.

A report that a ground-penetrating radar survey had found possible unmarked graves at a residential school brought the schools to the attention of many settler-Canadians.  Its well documented that many children died at these schools and many were disappeared, the only questions are about the details (say, the difference between an unregistered cemetery with wooden crosses which rotted and an unmarked grave). 

Meanwhile I see even Canadians who don't acknowledge that our choices were dealing with orange Julius while prorogued and holding a Liberal leadership race, or dealing with him in the middle of a Federal election which a Trumpist was almost certain to win.  No good options since the PM did not resign in summer 2024 or summer 2023 and since the US election went the way it di.

Related to the New Hampshire story is the Libertarian charter cities (Zones of Economic Development and Employment) in Honduras. The government which authorized the charter was a bit heavy on the bullets and light on the ballots and after an election litigation is ongoing.

https://restofworld.org/2021/honduran-islanders-push-back-libertarian-startup/

https://restofworld.org/2022/crypto-libertarian-prospera-lost-legal-battle-honduras/

You can kind of sympathize with the founder who is Venuzuelan-American although I was told that early on it was easier to get disillusioned with Hugo Chavez if you were rich ("middle class").

Valuable economic activities thus far include cryptocurrency and a crank conference with bonus white nationalists.

Asteroid mining company AstroForge has lost control of their probe, the first private spacecraft to travel beyond the moon https://www.space.com/space-exploration/private-spaceflight/i-think-we-all-know-that-hope-is-fading-private-odin-asteroid-probe-is-tumbling-in-space

Its worth stressing that so far all the money in space has been in communications and observation and earth orbit is what you need for that. So while private companies have helped reduce capitalist launch costs (USSR-derived systems used to be cheaper than US systems) there are areas like life support and long-term, long-range missions where almost all the expertise is in government space agencies. Space tourism has limits too since 'send people to orbit for a few hours' is much simpler than what the ISS does let alone a crewed mission to Luna or Mars. Businesses like asteroid mining or lunar He3 for fusion are still speculative.