Doug Ford moves to exert more power over Toronto

Doug Ford, Premier of the province of Ontario, is furthering his life-long ambition to be Mayor of Toronto, or at least to exert control over the city, one way or another. He has never forgiven Toronto for not voting him in as Mayor back in 2014, and has made it his MO as Ontario Premier to interfere in Toronto politics as much as he possibly can, from reducing the number of city councillors (in the middle of a municipal election) to closing down and moving iconic museums to trying (and failing) to get rid of the city's bike lanes.

In his latest shot across the bow of the city, Ford has vowed to take over Toronto Island's little Billy Bishop City Airport and expand it to accommodate jet planes. Currently, the small airport is only used by smaller turboprop planes operated by Porter Airlines and Air Canada. Ford wants to see "small jets" also able to use it, which would require an extension to the runway and more parking and infrastructure in general.

The idea of jet flights from the island airport has been proposed - and defeated - many times, most recently in 2013. Business travellers may be in favour of it, but the residents and users of the Toronto waterfront and its parks have repeatedly rejected it due to the increased noise and development. Current Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow remains implacably opposed to expansion of the airport.

The airport is currently owned by a three-way agreement between the City of Toronto, the Toronto Port Authority (a federal agency) and the federal Government of Canada. While the City remains opposed to the idea, the Port Authority reportedly favours further development, and the federal government is reserving judgement thus far. 

Because of the way the municipality is structured and its subservience to the province, Ford and the province of Ontario could legally replace Toronto in this ownership structure, in which case the further development of the airport would be all but assured, even if it is against the wishes of the city's residents. Ford would have another victory over the ungrateful City of Toronto, and his business buddies would be very pleased with him.

Studies say remote working actually improves productivity and engagement

Remember all that fuss a year or two ago, as companies and government departments reacted en masse against the pandemic trend of remote working? How we were told that the pandemic was now over and we had to get back to normal - at least four or five days a week in the office - because the financial health.of rge.ckmpany, the province, the very country, was at stake? A lot of people were very upset about it, but most people went along with it - after all, they were left with little choice.

Well, how did that turn out?

Multiple studies are suggesting that, actually, those few holdout companies that did not insist on the great exodus back to the office are.doing substantially better than those that, for whatever reason, did insist on a return to the traditional office set-up. 

A report by the Insititute for Corporate Productivity says that more flexible organizations that allow for remote working produce stronger output, wealthier engagement, and faster growth than those more hidebound conapnies that mandated office attendance. Even without invasive monitoring of employees, such companies reported high or very high productivity. 

A Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a positive relationship between remote work and total factor productivity in various industry sectors, and faster growth in productivity since the pandemic.

The Flex Index has shown that fully flexible companies grew revenues 1.7 times faster than more traditional companies, even after adjusting for industry and size.

A randomized peer-reviewed study by Trip.com found that their two-days-from-home hybrid model resulted in no decline in performance or promotion rates and a much improved staff retention rate. 

A US Government.sccpuntavikoty Office report in 2025 notes that workplace flexibility has helped with recruitment, retention and general organizational health. This is in spite of Trump's blanket back-to-the-office mandate.

A University of Pittsburgh paper on S&P500 comapanies concluded that return-to-office mandates do not improve financial performance or company value and adversely affects employee satisfaction, and even led to an outflow of higher-skilled talent.

It seems like the jury is in, and flexibility wins out over tradition.

Stock exchanges will more than recover from current war - they always do

The stock markets almost always take a hit with every war or major global disruption, particularly those that impact oil producing countries, whether it be the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Yom Kippur War, the Gulf War, or Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The US-Iran conflict is no different, although it has the potential to be a much bigger upheaval, what some are calling "the biggest oil disruption in history".

After every such event, though - even partway through sometimes - the markets find a way to come to terms with the perceived risk, and returns to pre-war levels, usually within a matter of days. For example, this took just 28 days.in the cae of the 2003 Iraq War, 27 days for the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war, 7 days for the 2025 US bombing of Iran. The 1990 Gulf War took longer at 131 days, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War and Arab oil embargo took as long as 6 years for the stock exchanges to get back to pre-war levels. But investors can take heart that, even in the worst cases, share prices do recover (and then go on to ever-increasing record levels). 

The same will happen with the current US-Iran conflict, although it could takes a while, particularly with the unpredictable Trump at the helm of the US efforts. The stock exchanges always seem to me irredeemably naïve in some ways. For example, all it takes is Trump saying "the war is very complete, pretty much", and that it will be over "very soon", for the markets to react positively and oil prices to correct themselves a little, even though what he said didn't actually make sense, comes amid mixed messages from others in the administration and even from Trump himself, and is an opinion based anyway on absolutely nothing. 

So, hold on, they BELIEVE the guy!? The war is far from "complete", and a resolute Iran says, "we are the ones who will determine the end of the war". And even if Trump wants it to call it a day - "Any time I want it to end,  it will end" - Israel has no intentions of stopping the bombing any time soon - while Iran is down they will continue kicking for as long as they possibly can.

But end it most certainly will, one day. And you can bet that, within weeks, the stock exchanges will be be back at, or near, record levels.

Tone deaf to the nth degree

In an instance of tone-deafness jaw-dropping even by his own lofty standards, Donald Trump has essentially called most Americans fools.

As Americans - and others - kvetch about the rapidly rising prices of oil and gasoline (and therefore everything else) Trump dropped a Truth Social post: "Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety snd Peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY." [His capitalization and punctuation]

Oh, OK. Daddy knows best, I suppose. Pardon me for thinking.

Iran's President apologizes for attacking neighbours

In the midst of all-out war between the USA and Iran, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian made the bizarre gesture of a formal public apology to the neighbours - Sunni Islamic, more westernized countries that host US air bases - that Iran has been attacking with waves of drones and missiles, in what is known as "horizontal escalation". "I deem it necessary to apologize to neighbouring countries that were attacked. We do not intent to invade neighbouring countries."

Meanwhile, Iran's armed forces continued to do just that, with nary a let-up in their bombardments.

The President is not a particularly important or influential figure in Iranian politics  - the real power in the Shia Muslim theocracy lies with the Supreme Leader (Ayatollah), the leadership council, and the Revolutionary Guard. But, even so, this kind of apology in the middle of an active war is all but unprecedented, not to mention pointless.

AI in war - we might already be there

It's a scary time when the two top news topics are war in the Middle East and Artificial Intelligence. Even scarier is an article about the confluence of the two. But that's where we are right now.

It was of course only a matter of time before AI was enlisted into the service of war-making. In some areas of military surveillance, intelligence and reconnaissance, it has been used for years, often with alarming repercussions. Take Israel's Lavender program to identify Hamas targets, for example.

AI military use becomes even more problematic with the advent of agentic AI, where decision loops become fully-automated, without any human intervention. And, of course, that is the direction military strategists are going, despite the potential for Artifical General Intelligence (AGI), where AI overtakes human intelligence and even learns to use deception to get its own way (the kind of stuff that AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and others have been warning us about for years).

It's no coincidence that several leading AI researchers left Open AI over worries about the company's lack of ethical guardrails, and many of them gravitated to competitor company Anthropic, which seemed to have a more constrained and prudent approach to its research. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has publicly warned about the potential for AI to serve some of the worse tendencies of autocratic states.

It was perhaps a surprise, then, that the US Department of Defence (now the Department of War) signed a contract with Anthropic last July, and developed Claude Gov, an extension of Amthropic's publicly-available Claude chat-box, and the first large language AI model trained on classified material. The agreement did come with restrictions and guardrails: that the tool would not be used with fully-autonomous weaponry, and that it would not be used for mass surveillance of American citizens.

Then, predecitably, the Republican administration pushed back. Secretary of Defense/War Hegseth started talking about an "AI-first war-fighting force" and accelerating AI adoption "from campaign planning to kill chain execution" (he has the military lingo down-pat, even if he is perhaps not quite sure of the ramifications). There was talk of freeing the system from "ideological bias" and "red tape" - which is code-speak for imposing ideological bias and removing all inconvenient rules - and using AI to pursue "social engineering" and "cultural agendas", all things that Anthropic explicitly aimed to avoid. Yikes!

Anthropic tried to enforce their explicitly-stated rules, and refused Pentagon officials unrestricted access to Claude Gov's capabilities. Trump too got involved - well, of course he did - calling Anthropic "a radical left, woke company" (the worst insult ever in his books), and accusing it of trying to "strong-arm" the US military. He even threatened to designate Anthropic a national security supply chain risk (a label typically renewed for Chinese and Russian companies), and threatened legal action to force the company to comply with his whims.

Despite Anthropic's concerns, there are reports that Claude Gov was involved in both the US kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran. It's not clear to what extent these operations involved fully-automated weapons systems, and there is no way the Trump administration is going to tell us. 

So, the guard-rails are down, and the training wheel are off. In the hands of an unbalanced and unhinged administration like that in today's White House, all bets on weaponized AI are off. Science fiction tropes are in everyday use, and none of this is good.

Another little-discussed Ozempic side effect

It seems like every time you read about Ozempic/Wegovy/semaglutide/GLP-1, it's being touted as the ultimate cure for pretty much everything. It's probably the most successful drug in the world, and many people are referring to it as the "everything drug" because it does seem to have an effect on many different conditions, not just diabetes and obesity.

The other times you read about it, though, is when some of the more unfortunate side-effects are discussed: Ozempic face, Ozempic ears, Ozempic butt, Ozempic breasts, Ozempic wallet, etc, etc. Gastrointestinal discomfort and nausea are the most common side effects, but these appearance issues are much more top-of-mind for many people. It seems like the rapid weight loss and, particularly, the loss of fat and muscle, causes pretty much everything to sag, wrinkle and loosen. Well, that might be the pric2e people have to pay for the good stuff, and it may not be a permanent or irremediable condition (although fixing it can certainly be difficult).

More recently, though, I have been reading about another commonly-reported side effect: intolerable itching. Red, itchy patches and/or swelling affect 3-8% of users, usually restricted to the injection site, but sometimes body-wide, depending on the individual. This may just be a reaction to the injection itself or to the drug, but it can be a big issue for some people.

Just a reminder that miracles don't really exist.(or come with complications).

Productivity and life expectancy are inversely correlated

Here's an interesting, and probably statistically spurious, factoid: economic output per person seems to be inversely correlated with life expectancy.

Best illustrated by the graphic above (which I had to scan from the print copy of the Globe and Mail article for some reason), GDP per person (what you might call productivity) of G7 countries, in order, are: USA, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Britain, Japan. Average life expectancy in those countries, IN REVERSE ORDER (worst to best) are: USA, Britain, Germany, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan.

Almost an exact match (apart from Britain, which seems to manage poor productivity AND short lives).

While this is not necessarily a causative relationship, it COULD be. It is certainly a striking correspondence.