Sikk Pow

This is Exhibit A for why economics is the apex predator of the social sciences. This should be a nutrition paper. It wouldn't have been NBER material 30 years ago. But economists spent decades sharpening their econometric toolkit into a weapon while other fields coasted on p-hacked garbage, sloppy identification, and storytelling dressed up as research. Now they're colonizing nutrition, public health, criminology, and publishing better work than the people who've spent their whole careers there. Adapt or get swallowed. Simple as.

Oleksandr Yakovenko, the founder of TAF Industries, one of Ukraine's largest drone makers wrote a good response to @RheinmetallAG's Papperger's irritating statement. I used AI to translate it for you. It is worth reading in full. "Dear Mr. Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, When you called Ukrainian drone manufacturers “Ukrainian housewives with 3D printers in their kitchens,” you demonstrated how deeply the European defense establishment still fails to understand the nature of modern warfare. This is not about emоtions. This is about battlefield reality. Here are the figures your industry refuses to acknowledge: In 2025 alone, Ukrainian drones carried out 819,737 confirmed strikes. They accounted for 90% of all combat losses of the Russian army—more than all other types of weapons combined. A single company, TAF Industries, produces up to 100,000 FPV drones per month. Over any given 90-day period, the products of my company alone have more confirmed hits than your entire fleet of equipment over its entire history of combat use across all conflicts. And most importantly—I built this company and achieved these results in two years, not fifty. Think about that. Our drones achieve greater kinetic effect in three months than your flagship platforms have in half a century. Why? Because the battlefield has changed, while your business model has not. Russian electronic warfare has rendered GPS-guided Western munitions (Excalibur, GMLRS, etc.) almost ineffective. Expensive and complex systems designed for wars with air superiority and conventional “peer-on-peer” conflict have become easy targets for drones costing $500–2,000 that attack them from above. The cost-effectiveness ratio has been turned upside down: one 120mm Rheinmetall shell or one anti-tank missile costs more than a dozen of our drones—yet our drones still prevail. This is not a “Lego game.” This is industrial Darwinism in real time. We iterate weekly. We lose factories to missile strikes and rebuild them within weeks. We print parts in basements and deploy 100,000 strike systems per month, while your engineers still require 3–5 years and hundreds of millions of euros to certify even minor upgrades. The war in Ukraine is not a temporary anomaly. It is the first true drone-industrial war. And it has already proven that outdated European platforms—no matter how expensive or “serious”—are becoming increasingly irrelevant if they do not integrate the very technologies you are mocking. So when you say “this is not innovation,” I hear something else: “We do not want to admit that the future is being written in Ukrainian workshops, not in Düsseldorf offices.” The hashtag #MadeByHousewives is trending for a reason. Because these “housewives” destroy more enemy equipment every month than entire European armies do over full campaigns. And they do so while your industry continues to sell 20th-century solutions at 21st-century prices. The invitation stands, Mr. Papperger. Stop laughing at the kitchen table. Come and learn how the war of tomorrow is actually fought. Because the next time someone asks, “Who needs tanks in the age of drones?”, the answer may be simpler than you think: Those who still believe in 1979 will lose to those who are building in 2026. With respect (but with facts), Oleksandr Yakovenko Founder of TAF Industries One of those “Ukrainian housewives”" pravda.com.ua/columns/2026/0…

"The numbers don’t lie. The United States is 100x more expensive, 10x slower, and offers zero job portability. Canada is faster, cheaper, and gives you freedom to switch employers." amirismail.com/canada-h-1b-al…

@peteremcc More precisely: Nenshi: Lewis is your leader. Respect that or separate.

Yeah Nenshi. Avi won. He is your leader. Respect that or leave.

I agree. But Miami needs to invest in the most advanced and cost effective mass transit that is possible. And the best solution on the horizon, hands down, is @swyftcities. Born out of Google’s Project Swyft, with contracts in development around the country and the world. Modular networks of autonomous smart vehicles that bypass the traffic and obstacles on the ground. $20-25m a mile is cheap compared to existing mass transit. Can move over 2,500 people per hour each line, each way. Can be built fast. More accurately installed in cities. Start with a pilot and watch the network grow. It is like Legos. I’m working on bringing it to Miami-Dade. DM’s are open to people that want to help!

It turns out Naheeed Nenshi is an NDP separatist.

@nenshi But Avi Lewis says you’re his guy x.com/sarobertsonca/…

Today, the federal New Democratic Party selected its new leader. It is clear that the direction of the federal party under this new leader, someone who openly cheered for the defeat of the Alberta NDP government, is not in the interests of Alberta. Last year, Alberta’s New Democrats voted overwhelmingly to make membership in the federal party optional. Many thousands of our provincial members, including myself, are not members of the federal party. We are a big tent and welcome the support of people who vote for every federal party. We believe in Alberta and we believe in Canadian energy and the good jobs it creates. We believe in more pipelines and in reducing emissions. We believe in strong public services and a strong jobs-driven economy to help pay for them. This is what we are fighting for every day. Albertans deserve federal leaders who understand the importance of Alberta and our essential role in the federation. Our focus is not on what the federal NDP says or does. Our fight is with Danielle Smith and the separatist UCP. Albertans deserve a better government, and we are here to be that better government.

“It is difficult to imagine another country in which its major media would ignore an iron-clad story indicating that the Prime Minister had lied.” via @Pagmenzies open.substack.com/pub/petermenzi… @MarkJCarney

Offhand — * Vacillation on masks, with abundant motivated reasoning in every case. * Promulgation of made-up thresholds with no evidentiary basis (e.g. 6 feet). * Authoritarian delight in nanny state intrusiveness (policing the beach and such). * 180 on many issues around BLM. * Lack of effective response from science funding bodies. * Denial of aerosolized transmission. * Changing of trial readouts so that they’d occur after the election. (Confirmed to me by senior OWS officials.) * Crazy criteria for vaccine distribution. * Adamant insistence on vaccine efficacy beyond what was supported by data. * Almost complete lack of follow-through on OWS (on pan-variant vaccines). I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones that stick out.

@Tablesalt13 more to the point: it was the first thing they offered her, which tells you exactly what their goal was: save money by killing her now.

🚨NEW - CANADIAN SENIOR OFFERED DEATH FOR MINOR BONE BREAK 84-year-old Miriam Lancaster was admitted to a Vancouver hospital with a broken sacrum (small back bone) Her doctor told her: "We can offer you MAID.’ she refused and recovered in a month, later climbed a volcano.

@ExnerPirot It's not just Asia facing a crisis. "Canada is back" is one of the worst things to happen to western Europe this century. wsj.com/world/europe/e…

It’s now obvious that Keystone is going to be easier and more economic than a northwest pipeline and will move first. That’s our own doing, Canada, and I greatly lament that fact. We couldn’t have gotten a more serious lesson in realism and geopolitics this past 18 months, and three weeks, yet still we will be putting more barrels south than in to the Pacific. But it occurred to me the real “generational fumble” was cancelling Northern Gateway in 2018. A privately funded pipeline, 90% through consultation and regs, that we let slide, nay, pushed away. A pox on everyone that contributed to that outcome, and to us making the same mistake less than a decade later. Real people are facing a real energy crisis in Asia Pacific today and we could’ve been in a way better position to help.

"Canada is back" is arguably one of the worst things to happen to Europe this century. wsj.com/world/europe/e…

@KnightLegg English is the official language of aviation, globally, full stop.

Imagine you’re the CEO of Air Canada…. ….sleepless and dealing with a brutal tragedy in real time with vast US and Canadian media coverage - and your PM decides to hit you with a cheap shot saying you lack ‘compassion’ because you lack excellent French language skills. But you’re the CEO of a regulated industry so he knows you can’t punch back. Even though his own French is carefully stage-managed. And the Governor General can barely speak it. The PM chose to use a national tragedy to score marginal political points with the Quebec language police. Tone deaf and gross. Je veux dire, c'est grotesque et d'une insensibilité totale.

My wife yelled from upstairs and asked, “Do you ever get a shooting pain across your body, like someone's got a voodoo doll of you and they're stabbing it?” I replied, “No.” She responded, “How about now?”

@nenshi What did you know about the water main, and when did you know it?

RCMP officers have been busy raiding offices across the province. That doesn't happen on a whim. Where there's smoke, there's fire. We can't ignore the alarm.

I await Governor General Mary Simon's condolence video in French. Why do the Liberals hold the CEO of Air Canada to a higher standard of bilingualism than their own appointee as Governor General, who hasn't learned French after four years in the role? TBH, I would rather have the CEO of our flagship carrier focusing his scarce time on safety and reliability than language training.

@ExnerPirot Pretty sure the technical term for this is gaslighting Alberta.

Good piece on the state of the play, the mood, in Canadian O&G. So much potential, we can all agree! Execution still lacking. cbc.ca/news/canada/ca…

In the United States car seat laws mandating use until age 8 save 57 lives each year at the cost of about 8,000 births.

The math on William Shatner’s existence is hard to process. He was born closer to the Civil War than to today. Montreal, 1931. His father manufactured clothes. His first acting role came in 1951, the same year color TV was introduced to the American public. Star Trek premiered in 1966. It lasted 3 seasons and got cancelled. The first rerun aired before humans had walked on the Moon. Those reruns are still generating licensing revenue 57 years later. He’s been famous for 60 consecutive years. He survived being typecast so severely in the 1970s that he did convention appearances for grocery money. He survived his third wife’s death. He survived Hollywood writing him off as a joke. Then he weaponized the joke. Priceline commercials. The roast. Spoken-word albums where he recites Elton John lyrics as dramatic monologue. Every project that should have ended his career somehow added to it. At 73, back-to-back Emmys for Boston Legal. At 90, oldest person to fly to space. At 94, a Super Bowl ad. At 95, 4.3 million people watching him smoke a cigar on X. His career has now outlasted the Soviet Union, the Space Shuttle program, Blockbuster Video, MySpace, and the first three generations of AI models. He’s been working since Truman and he’s posting through the Claude era. The compounding is the point. 75 years of showing up created a distribution moat that no amount of talent alone could replicate.

@nenshi Sorry, but "honest, ethical, decent" doesn't describe someone who mocks science (the medical use of ivermectin) for cheap political points, and then takes it himself when he needs it. "Life-saving pharmaceuticals for me, but not for thee." "Hypocrite" is more like it.

Twice the corruption and none of the competence. Albertans deserve better than rock bottom governance.