Links for November 9th, 2025
This week from me at TVO: daring the premiers to stop whining about Supreme Court of Canada decisions and propose a constitutional amendment. Elected officials hold offices of real power and they can do more than complain about it:
Rather than thunder at Ottawa about their chosen outrage of the week, premiers could use the actual powers of their office to try and convince Canadians of what they think is needed. If they can’t make a winning case that clears the bar for constitutional amendment, they might discover a little bit of sympathy for a deeply divided court.
Also, a roundup of some of the lesser items from last week’s Ontario Fall Economic Statement. In the podcast this week, Steve and I talk provincial FES, federal budget, and Ontario-Quebec squabbles about doctors.
Elsewhere:
Why the St. Thomas battery plant has a $400M water problem [CBC]
Officials say the massive electric vehicle battery plant under construction near St. Thomas will require about $400 million in upgrades to the local water system, a cost the municipal water supplier says can’t be covered without help from the Ontario government, Volkswagen or a massive increase to ratepayers.
The Deep Heat Advantage [Cascade Institute]
Continued investment in drilling, stimulation, and well-field optimization offers highleverage gains that would help scale low-cost EGS development. These advances would also benefit other subsurface energy projects, including conventional and deep closed-loop geothermal. Continued R&D and new demonstration projects can help Canada overcome the remaining technical and economic barriers standing in the way of significant cost declines. With continued innovation, EGS shows significant promise as an optimal provider of clean, secure, and affordable baseload electricity generation in western and northwestern Canada.
Can Israel feed itself? Economic model to rethink food self-sufficiency unveiled [Phys.org]
When wars, pandemics, and trade disruptions shake global markets, one question becomes urgent for every nation: can we feed ourselves? A new study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers an answer—and a warning. According to researchers Prof. Iddo Kan, Prof. Israel Finkelshtain, Ph.D. student Yehuda Slater, and Prof. Aron M. Troen, achieving full food self-sufficiency in Israel is technically possible—but only for plant-based foods intended for human consumption, not for livestock feed. In other words, during a severe import blockade, Israel’s food system could sustain a vegetarian population, but not maintain its current levels of animal-based production.
Not really the most important aspect of current events in the Levant but the idea of veganism as a national security strategy made me chuckle for the way it confounds certain gender symbolism.
The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart. [NY Times]
It issued an “equity language guide,” which warned employees to be cautious about using the words “vibrant” and “hardworking,” because they reinforced racist tropes. “Lame duck session” was out, because “lame” was offensive. Even “Americans” should be avoided, the guide said, because it excluded non-U. S. citizens.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the group called for defunding the police and providing reparations for slavery.
The club even turned on its own founder, John Muir, with Mr. Brune saying the environmental icon had used “deeply harmful racist stereotypes” in his writings about Native Americans and Black people in the 1860s.
FBI Warns of Criminals Posing as ICE, Urges Agents to ID Themselves [Wired]
Criminals posing as US immigration officers have carried out robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assaults in several states, warns a law enforcement bulletin issued last month by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The bureau urges agencies to ensure officers clearly identify themselves and to cooperate when civilians ask to verify an officer’s identity—including by allowing calls to a local police precinct. “Ensure law enforcement personnel adequality [sic] identify themselves during operations and cooperate with individuals who request further verification,” it says.
Fascists Don’t Get To Claim Whatever Symbols They Want [Off Message]
They are the ones who want police officers to look like soldiers and soldiers to evoke repression, racial profiling, domestic occupation. They’d be thrilled if something as innocuous as children playing cops and robbers became divisive, and further sorted Americans politically. And the irony is, the men driving this polarization are soft, mentally and physically. Donald Trump could not walk from the Oval Office to the hole in the ground where the East Wing used to be with 20 pounds on his back. Stephen Miller could not complete a GoRuck challenge, due either to physical weakness or poor sportsmanship or both. More than a third of new ICE recruits have reportedly failed a very lenient fitness test. They should be the ones embarrassed by all this cosplay, not well-meaning civilians.
They’re the ones treating real men as pawns.
In all our discourse about male loneliness and alienation, we’ve given short shrift to the many ways political leaders have choked off healthy or neutral expressions of masculinity. They want masculine things, or really any kind of disciplined hobbyism, to signal political and cultural allegiance. When well-meaning strangers come to view ruckers and sport fighters and regular police and actual service members with more suspicion than they’ve earned, that’s all the better for the fascists.
Re: the very lenient ICE fitness test. A few weeks ago I gave it a shot and passed the published benchmarks pretty comfortably, and I’m hardly God’s gift to athleticism. What I am is a dude in his mid-40s who has spent the last several years doing some hard work to get myself in better condition so I don’t, you know, die at or before my kid’s wedding. That we’re governed by the whims of men who want the power that physical violence brings without any of the discipline required to actually develop that power, to literally build the muscles required, is a thought I can’t escape.
The Supreme Court’s (Self-Defeating) Supremacy [SSRN]
The justices’ interventions in both cases were not about preserving the role of the courts; they were about preserving the role of the Court. Threats to the Court’s own supremacy stirred the justices to act—and nothing else.
Insofar as preserving the Court’s supremacy is a fair explanation for the justices’ behavior on the Trump-related emergency applications, this essay argues that such an approach is, and ultimately will be, selfdefeating. In the short term, it will be self-defeating because it will necessarily encourage the executive branch to take ever-more aggressive actions against both the people and the lower courts—given the likelihood that those actions will be, if not endorsed by the justices, at least allowed to persist for a significant period of time. To take just one example, the Court’s grant of a stay (and Justice Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion) in Vasquez Perdomo, for instance, was followed by a series of headlines of ever-more-aggressive (and un-targeted) ICE raids in U.S. cities. It’s hard to view those developments as unrelated.
Build, Baby, Build: How Housing Shapes Fertility [JMP]
To study the causal effect of rising housing costs on fertility, I vary them directly within the model, finding that rising costs since 1990 are responsible for 11% fewer children, 51% of the total fertility rate decline between the 2000s and 2010s, and 7 percentage points fewer young families in the 2010s. Policy counterfactuals indicate that a supply shift for large units generates 2.3 times more births than an equal-cost shift for small units.
Hm, what could explain society’s failure to support the most basic aspect of its own reproduction? Hold on a second:
The Gray Vote: How Older Home-Owning Voters Dominate Local Elections
We find that homeowners and older voters are overrepresented in mayoral elections: relative to their share among registered voters, these groups account for a larger share of voters in mayoral contests. This finding is consistent across racial groups and is especially pronounced in mayoral elections that do not coincide with presidential or midterm elections. Disparities in turnout by race, in contrast, are quite small in comparison with those by age and homeownership status.
If you haven’t read Katherine Einstein’s Neighborhood Defenders you’re missing one of the basic critical texts of land use reform.
Building Segregation: The Long-Run Neighborhood Effects of American Public Housing [JMP]
Linking to modern mobility data, I show that children from low-income families who grew up in public housing neighborhoods experienced significantly lower rates of upward mobility. These findings demonstrate that, despite intentions of slum clearance and neighborhood revitalization, mid-century public housing reinforced existing patterns of economic and racial segregation and reduced long-run economic opportunity, although effects were largely confined to project neighborhoods themselves.
What Is the Third Oikos? [The Third Oikos]
But what those families look like — how they’re formed, who works, where, and how, how kids are educated, how they’re cared for — is likely to change. As the media scholar Marshall McLuhan argued, “Every medium or technology enhances some human function, obsolesces some older form, retrieves some previously obsolesced form, and when pushed to its limits, reverses into its opposite.” To thrive in the third oikos, we may have to look back to ways of living before the second oikos.
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show [Reuters]
On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.
Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.
Inside the race to train AI robots how to act human in the real world [Los Angeles Times]
In an industrial town in southern India, Naveen Kumar, 28, stands at his desk and starts his job for the day: folding hand towels hundreds of times, as precisely as possible.
He doesn’t work at a hotel; he works for a startup that creates physical data used to train AI…
Large language models that power chatbots such as ChatGPT have mastered using language, images, music, coding and other skills by hoovering up everything online. They use the entire internet to figure out how things are connected and mimic how we do things, such as answering questions and creating photo-realistic videos.
Data on how the physical world works — how much force is required to fold a napkin, for example — is harder to get and translate into something AI can use.
We Won’t be Missed: Work and Growth in the AGI World [NBER]
AGI fundamentally changes the role of labor and how it is valued. Before AGI, human skill was the main driver of output, and wages reflected the scarcity of skills needed for bottleneck tasks. In an AGI world, compute takes that central role, and wages are anchored to the computing cost of replicating human skill. While human wages remain positive—and on average exceed those in the pre-AGI world—their value becomes decoupled from GDP, the labor share converges to zero, and most income eventually accrues to compute.
Defining the Intelligence Curse [The Intelligence Curse]
This problem looks a lot like the plague that affects rentier states, or states that predominantly rely on rents from a resource for their wealth instead of taxes from their citizens. These states suffer from the resource curse—despite having a natural source of income, they do worse than their economically diverse peers at improving their ordinary citizens’ living standards.
Powerful actors that adopt labor-replacing AI systems will face rentier state-like incentives with far higher stakes. Because their revenues will come from intelligence on tap instead of people, they won’t receive returns on investments like education to prepare people for employment, employment and salaries, or a welfare state for the unemployed. As a result, they won’t invest – and their people will be unable to sustain themselves as a result. Humans need not apply, and so humans will not get paid.
This is the intelligence curse – when powerful actors create and implement general intelligence, they will lose their incentives to invest in people.
Let Them Eat AI-Generated Cake [The Bulwark]
One person who doesn’t begin to understand this is Elon Musk. His solution to income inequality, he said yesterday, was for people to buy humanoid robots—specifically the one he’s developing. “People often talk about eliminating poverty, giving everyone amazing medical care. Well, there’s actually only one way to do that, and that’s with the Optimus robot,” he proclaimed, according to the New York Times. How convenient.
One man who does seem to grasp the character of the current moment is Pope Leo XIV. In an interview in September, Pope Leo cited Elon Musk’s pay package in the course of arguing that “we’re in big trouble” when it comes to the “continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive.” More recently, he commented on “the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people.” We might take guidance from the first American pope.
The intellectual journey of Bill Kristol is… fascinating.
Predictions markets and the suckerfication crisis [Read Max]
The main difference is that where Unusual Whales and its peers tweet wish-fulfillment and fear-mongering engagement-bait in exchange for payouts from X.com, Kalshi and Polymarket intersperse their “BREAKING: Trump Might Win Nobel Prize” posts with enticements to bet on the strange and volatile world depicted in the other tweets. The first-order goal of, say, posting an A.I. image of Zohran Mamdani crying with the text “BREAKING: Mamdani’s odds collapse in the NYC Mayoral Election” is not to pollute the information environment with fake news and propaganda; it’s to entice X.com users whose brains have already been fully liquified by news slop to put their dumb money where their dumb mouth is.
Trump’s China Deal Is a Major Indictment of U.S. Trade Policy [The Dispatch]
Yet what Trump has done is actually worse than simply refusing to deepen trade ties and worse than doing nothing at all. Instead, Trump’s high and erratic tariffs on alternatives to China undermine American manufacturers and put Chinese imports closer to parity in the U.S. market (see above). And, as The Economist just smartly detailed (and as new data show), the tariffs also have caused governments to defend against new U.S. coercion by trading less with the United States and more with each other—undermining U.S. strength and influence along the way.
The Affordability Curse [The Atlantic]
Affordability is good politics, and a Democratic Party that focuses on affordability at the national level, and supports motley approaches to solving the cost-of-living crisis at the local level, is in a strong position going into 2026. But saying the word affordability over and over doesn’t necessarily guarantee good policy outcomes. In fact, it doesn’t guarantee anything. Which is why at some point on the road back to relevance, the Democratic Party needs to become obsessed with not only winning back power but also governing effectively in the places where they have it.
Can the Global Economy Be Healed? [New Yorker]
Whereas DARPA focusses on research that potentially has military implications, Rodrik’s proposed “ARPA-W” would focus on developing “labor-friendly technologies,” including some that employ artificial intelligence. As some observers predict that A.I. could eliminate huge numbers of jobs, many of them well paid, Rodrik, echoing the M.I.T. economists David Autor, Daron Acemoglu, and Simon Johnson, argues that technological progress needs to be refocussed. Referring to his proposal for an ARPA-W, he writes, “The overarching objective would be to allow workers to do what they cannot presently do, instead of displacing them by taking over the tasks that they already do.”
For the past seventy years, the so-called Asian model of export-led growth in manufacturing has had enormous success. But the relentless advance of automation, including rapid progress in robotics and 3-D printing, means that for the poorest countries, many of them in Africa, such manufacturing may no longer be a viable way of providing employment to huge numbers of people. The only alternative, Rodrik says, is embracing the services economy and raising productivity and wages in it. [emphasis mine -JM]
The E-Bike ‘Problem’ is an E-Moto Problem [Streetsblog]
There are growing concerns in many communities across America about the safety of “e-bikes.” These concerns are often centered around young people, who are increasingly turning to e-mobility devices for transportation well before they become licensed drivers. Lack of familiarity with the rules of the road, along with youthful enthusiasm, has sometimes led to unsafe behavior like speeding, riding on sidewalks, ignoring stop signs and traffic lights and even stunt riding on public roads and highways. Unruly behavior leads to social media posts, complaints to local officials, media reports and calls for more regulation of “e-bikes” or even outright bans. At its worst, unsafe behavior causes crashes, serious injuries, and even deaths of young riders.
A good series of posts at Streetblog that separates pearl-clutching from actual policy problems as ebikes and “e-motos” spread in our cities. Shorter: we need clear rules to differentiate the former from the latter — and more stringent regulation on the latter.
And while we’re talking about bikes, here’s a 90-minute video about “vehicular cycling” zealotry, and how it set back bike safety across English-speaking countries.