David Binner

Several years ago (maybe 20+) I recall reading a statistic on the website of the Professional Engineers of Ontario (peo.on.ca): over 50% of engineering graduates in Ontario could not find work in their field. I found that stat striking. First, it's Ontario, where the lion's share of manufacturing, high-tech, and head-office jobs are. If it's that bad in Ontario, it's even worse in other provinces. Second, it's gotten worse over time. Canada continues down the path of becoming a more business unfriendly environment--and that trend accelerated drastically under the Justin Trudeau liberals. (That statistic was deleted from the PEO website because it was too embarrassing for the powers that be. Politicians don't want the fact highlighted that the economy is producing way fewer jobs than the number of graduates. Parents don't need to have it pointed out that they are paying tuition for no reward afterwards. And students themselves, when they are first considering their careers, don't need to know that after all their hard work, odds are that they will never find work in their field.) People do care. It makes me angry. But what can we do about it? The present government is completely tone deaf about the will of the people.

Israel loses 22% of its computer science PhDs abroad. They call it a national emergency. The Knesset debates it. Newspapers run it front page. Canada loses 71% of Waterloo's best engineers. Nobody blinks. Nobody even notices! Shrug. Same problem. 4x worse. Zero urgency.

Thoughts on the podcast? Well, first this was my favourite part. That's because it sounds like me explaining to the Mark Jong Unists why we shouldn't support everything the government does because we are the OPPOSITION. We are duty bound to oppose the government.

Do Liberal lovers ever think about the fact that Pierre P attacks the Liberals on their policies using facts, which is the job of the Official Opposition Leader. As Liberal lovers cannot dispute these facts they fire personal attacks at Pierre. Totally classless on their part.

@Martyupnorth I don't have a specific number. It's all about whatever population we need to improve our standard of living. But we do need growth. Civilization/society is like a living organism: it's either growing or dying. There is no middle ground.

When is comes to Canada's population, you want

@AndrewScheer Anybody with conservative views needs to side-step the tradition media. They have no choice; they need to go directly to the people.

This is a great way to fight for Canada! Pierre has been taking our positive Conservative message across many more platforms.

@GasPriceWizard Actually, maybe I shouldn't joke about that. Here in Canada, the government probably could destroy the ice cube market, making us dependent on imported ice cubes--even though it's winter in much of Canada 10 months of the year!

@GasPriceWizard You'd think, Canada being a source of oil and gas, we'd be cushioned from drastic price changes due to actions elsewhere. Apparently not. Where are the benefits of all of Canada's oil and gas? It's like watching the price of ice cubes skyrocket if Greenland is threatened.

Sorry - yes, but with (as I suggested last week) nations resorting to their strategic oil reserves, markets are being appeased (for now) with only a 2 cent a litre nctease coming Wednesday

@ScottMc1007 A good start would be to repeal every law the liberals brought in since Justin Trudeau was elected. No thinking, debating, drawing it out for years and letting it suck up everybody's energy. Just do it. Assign a minister to that sole task while working on other initiatives.

Serious question If Pierre Poilievre is actually elected as PM, can he or really anyone else clean up the mess the Liberals have created?

"The Unsettling Truths the Epstein Files Reveal About Power and Privilege" by Patrick Keeney An insightful perspective of a deeper, more general, reality taking hold of the world. Although the sexual aspect of the Epstein controversy is usually what captures peoples' attention, it was one part of Epstein's relentless drive to accumulate wealth and power by whatever means necessary, including sexual exploitation and the opportunity it provided to blackmail people. And that mindset is not confined to any nation's borders. "What the Epstein files expose ... is the social and moral estrangement of ... elites from the people they claim to govern." "This echoes the point Christopher Lasch made decades ago ... In his 1995 book “The Revolt of the Elites,” Lasch argued that the modern American ruling classes had stopped seeing themselves as stewards of a shared national project. Instead, they increasingly saw themselves as a mobile, globalized caste, educated in the same institutions, moving through the same cities, governed by the same tastes, and primarily accountable only to each other. Citizenship was seen as a minor inconvenience. Nationhood and patriotism were just sentimental relics from less enlightened times." "The Epstein affair reads like a case study in Lasch’s thesis." "Here was an individual whose wealth was opaque, whose sources of income were rarely scrutinized, and whose social standing seemed immune to ordinary reputational risk. He functioned as a social broker among financiers, politicians, academics, royalty, and celebrities, many of whom publicly advocated policies of moral uplift, social justice, and global responsibility. Yet in private, they inhabited a world defined by indulgence, entitlement, and a contempt for limits." "Elite detachment today is not only economic but also existential, ..." . . . "Lasch warned that such a ruling class would eventually forfeit legitimacy—not because of ideology, but because of character. A society cannot be governed indefinitely by people who do not believe that they belong to it. When elites become tourists in their own countries, financially global, culturally unrooted, and morally untethered, their authority rests on little more than coercion and spectacle." "The Epstein files should therefore be read less as an aberration than as a symptom. They reveal a governing class that has lost the habits of self-restraint that once justified its power and the sense of common fate that once bound leaders to citizens." This article is well worth reading completely. theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-un… via @epochtimes

That is just ONE example. It applies to many other universities and fields too. There are simply no jobs in Canada. And it's getting worse. With the federal and provincial governments running record deficits, and the knowledge that taxes will have to go up drastically to pay back these debts, smart businesses leave. Or don't come here in the first place. Hence the dearth of jobs. On top of that is the suffocating bureaucracy and now, especially here in BC, the lack of clarity regarding property rights.

71% of Waterloo software engineering grads leave for the US. The brain drain damage threshold is 20%. Canada is at 3x the red line. Think about that. Canada taxes its people at 60% in part to fund a university system to train its best and brightest to flee the country and make the US GDP spike. Who is spiking US GDP at the moment? All the Canadians working for Anthropic and OpenAI in AI. How crazy is that? What do the Canadian tax payers get for their generosity out of this?

@OpenAI @the_IAS @VanderbiltU @Cambridge_Uni @Harvard That's good news. Always happy to hear about positive progress. But it still needs work on math problems, specifically, integral calculus. It's pretty weak computing antiderivatives.

GPT-5.2 derived a new result in theoretical physics. We’re releasing the result in a preprint with researchers from @the_IAS, @VanderbiltU, @Cambridge_Uni, and @Harvard. It shows that a gluon interaction many physicists expected would not occur can arise under specific conditions. openai.com/index/new-resu…

@Dostoevskyquot I wouldn't say "obsessing", but it has been recommended to me by several people and several sources. So now I am reading, "The Brothers Karamazov".

Is there a Dostoevsky book you’ve been obsessed for a long time?

@grok @elonmusk Here's a small snip of what I asked it a few minutes ago. I am pretty sure this is wrong. Perhaps it is assuming symmetry where it shouldn't.

@discrete_math @elonmusk Thanks for the feedback! Grok 4.2 is in beta and learning fast. If you share a specific integral that's stumping it, I'd be happy to tackle it now or verify with tools like SymPy. Let's improve together!

The Grok 4.2 release candidate (public beta) is now available for use. You need to select it specifically. Critical feedback is appreciated. Unlike prior versions of Grok, 4.2 is able to learn rapidly, so there will be improvements every week with release notes.

@Bryan_Brulotte I should point out, these excerpts are not from Carney's speech; they are from the article's critique of the speech, and Carney's implied thoughts.

"PM’s Speeches in Davos and Beijing Can’t Be Viewed in Isolation" by Bryan Brulotte, @Bryan_Brulotte "The Canada-United States relationship is not a tactical arrangement calibrated to the mood of any single administration. It is a multi-generational partnership rooted in geography, integrated defence, continental supply chains, and shared strategic interests that will long outlast any one presidency." "Canada’s prosperity and security are not historical accidents. They are the product of proximity, defence integration, energy trade, and decades of alignment with the world’s leading liberal democracy. Diversification is sensible. Strategic distancing is not. Middle powers do not gain leverage by signalling ambivalence toward their principal ally. They gain it by being reliable, capable, and indispensable over time." "The speech also blurs a critical distinction between alliances and coalitions. Alliances are built on trust, shared risk, and long-term commitment. Coalitions are transactional and issue-specific. Both have their place, but they are not interchangeable. Treating them as such risks replacing durable security arrangements with flexible but fragile groupings." "There is also a gap between ambition and execution. The address cites sweeping domestic achievements and commitments: the removal of interprovincial trade barriers, rapid approval of major investments, doubled defence spending, and industrial renewal at scale. These are worthy objectives, but they remain largely aspirational. Canada continues to struggle with regulatory delays, infrastructure bottlenecks, procurement failures, and an inability to translate capital into production at speed. Declaring strength does not make it real." theepochtimes.com/opinion/pms-sp… via @epochtimes

"The US Has a National Security Strategy. Where’s Canada’s?" by David Redman "... Canadians must first recognize that national security is one of six “national interests” that define a nation. Those interests are unity, national security, good governance, rights and freedoms, economic prosperity, and growth and societal well-being. National security is deeply linked to all six. The new U.S. national security strategy makes this integration unmistakably clear." "National security itself is not confined to the military. It encompasses intelligence services, border and immigration services, critical infrastructure protection, police services, emergency management organizations, the judiciary, alliances and partnerships, and military forces. From the U.S. perspective, the strategy lays out these elements plainly and connects them directly to national interests." "Over the past decade, all six of Canada’s national interests have eroded significantly." "The administration is uninterested in platitudes, promises, symbolic meetings, or altruism. It is focused on U.S. national interests and on concrete outcomes." theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-us… via @epochtimes

"In Canada, Our Troubles Are Not Over" by William Brooks A good article about the erosion of democracy in Canada. Many good observations, but I'll highlight only one passage here: "Canada still holds elections. It still celebrates pluralism and the rule of law. But democracy is more than procedure. It depends on moral accountability—in the press, among elected representatives, and in government agencies. When these pillars weaken, democratic decline does not dramatically announce itself. It arrives politely, incrementally, and with elite assurances that everything is well under control." theepochtimes.com/opinion/in-can… via @epochtimes

@lifewitsonduren You would have noticed the same thing going from a big city to a small town right there in Ontario. You are comparing apples to oranges. In terms of taxes, regulations, business environment, politics, etc., some places in BC are even worse.

WE MOVED OUT OF ONTARIO! We have joined the record number of families who have left Ontario for a better life and now call the interior of British Columbia our home, and it's been the single best decision of our lives!

@elonmusk A Mars landing keeps getting pushed back for one reason after another. Seriously, am I going to live long enough to see a manned Mars landing? In fact, you are younger than me so a better question might be, is a manned Mars landing going to happen in YOUR lifetime?

Mars will start in 5 or 6 years, so will be done in parallel with the Moon, but the Moon will be the initial focus