What the absolute fuck, etc. Could have and SHOULD have said nothing.

In case you don’t know what Lindsay Graham was, especially in Canadian context, David Doel did a good recap.

The Peter principle states that a person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role, they will be incompetent at the new level, and will not be promoted again.

Does not check out. People keep failing upwards, often to the very top. 🥹

Zachary Taylor, director of Western University’s local government program, said it’s “kind of astonishing” that the councillor has raised so much at this early stage. He said it’s an indication that Bradford has become the “consensus candidate” among more right-leaning donors hoping to block Chow, a veteran progressive, from a second term.

In addition to raising money, Bradford has been busy assembling a campaign team that includes well-known operatives form Conservative and Liberal circles.

Mike Van Soelen, a partner at the Oyster Group public affairs firm, and former Liberal strategist Genevieve Tomney are co-chairs, while his campaign is being managed by John Sinclair, former deputy chief of staff to Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre. Sinclair was also chief of staff for Scarborough-Rouge Park councillor Jennifer McKelvie as well as executive director of the Ontario PC caucus under Premier Doug Ford.

Laryssa Waler, Ford’s former executive director of communications, is Bradford’s communications director, while Isha Chaudhuri, former communications adviser to Ontario PC Minister of Energy and Mines Stephen Lecce, is press secretary.

This bud is failing the Gaza litmus test among other red (blue) flags.

Donate to Chow if you can. I just did.

Things look too close for comfort:

Transcribed:

Statement from UAW President Shawn Fain

July 12, 2026

I’ve remained silent on the political infighting in our union over the past two years because it only distracts from our mission as a union and as a movement. But the stakes are too high, and the membership deserves to know the truth.

Let’s be clear about what’s going on here: Rich Boyer has fed the monitor false allegations about me and is now trying to weaponize these bogus allegations to steal the upcoming UAW election. He knows he can’t win a fair fight because he has no real platform to run on.

I’m done being silent. Neil Barofsky has a political grudge against me because the UAW took an anti-war stance about what was happening in Gaza.

I’ve retained a law firm to fight against the Monitor’s trumped-up claims against me. What the Monitor is doing is wrong, it’s unfair to the UAW and to you as members, and my lawyers are looking at any and all legal options I can pursue to make it stop.

We are going to fight back hard.

The truth when it comes to Boyer is that I didn’t want him running the Stellantis Department because he wasn’t doing a good job for our members. I wouldn’t let him hire family members into UAW positions, and I wouldn’t stand by while he bargained concessions with Stellantis and failed to enforce our contract. Boyer is bad for our union and I’m not going to let him use the Monitor’s bogus investigation so he can try to fail upwards into a bigger title.

I’ve stayed quiet about this because I don’t believe it helps our union to have these fights out in public. But make no mistake: our contracts, our jobs, and our union are at stake here. Our members are either going to see through these lies and the nonsense, or let Boyer and Barofsky destroy our union and weaken us at the bargaining table.

We’ve accomplished more in the past 3 years and 3 months than in the previous decades. This is what happens when you go against corporate America and their allies, and I’m not going to be intimidated or harassed out of serving our membership.

Our election is in 6 weeks. Neil Barofsky will not run our union, no matter how hard he tries. And no company sellout like Boyer is going to dictate our elections.

Our members are the highest authority in our union and they should have the final say.

In solidarity, Shawn Fain Signature: Shawn P. Fain

Statement made in a personal capacity. Titles used for identification purposes only.

This lift-and-shift VMs to the cloud frenzy reminds me of TD circa 2018.

Democratic Rep. Khanna says Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers blockaded him in West Bank for over an hour

Democratic Rep. Khanna says Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers blockaded him in West Bank for over an hour

Why is it the worst part? If the EU admin does not represent its constituents, it should be threatened. Otherwise it ends up being undemocratic rep of various business interests.

Windows 7 ran well on machines that ran Vista barely usable. Vista deserved the hate it got.

The World Bank would like a word.

Folks who’ve used Linkwarden and archivebox, which do you prefer? Is one a superset of the other?

The World Bank would like a word:

Niger (as of end-2024)

Sources:

• World Bank/IMF Joint Debt Sustainability Analysis for Niger (March 2026), Table 5: Decomposition of Public Debt and Debt Service by Creditor, 2024–27
• https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099041626143513038/pdf/BOSIB-46b1deab-a902-4b61-aad8-659f403af5de.pdf

Liberia (as of end-2024)

Sources:

• World Bank/IMF Joint Debt Sustainability Analysis for Liberia (2025), Text Table 3: Decomposition of Public Debt and Debt Service by Creditor
• https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099102925150056306/pdf/BOSIB-3b895607-ac1f-427a-bdd4-f61438d2070a.pdf

Mali (as of end-2021)

Sources:

• World Bank/IMF Joint Debt Sustainability Analysis for Mali (2021), Text Table 3: Decomposition of Public Debt and Debt Service by Creditor
• https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099072823130537514/pdf/BOSIB0ef4c4c4202d08d4a0016055e2f51c.pdf

Afghanistan (as of end-2019)

Sources:

• World Bank/IMF Joint Debt Sustainability Analysis for Afghanistan (November 2020), Pages 3–4
• https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/412161606925441043/pdf/Afghanistan-Joint-World-Bank-IMF-Debt-Sustainability-Analysis.pdf

This, make a partition thats a few gigs smaller than the drive, add the partitions to the storage pool instead of the raw drives.

No idea. AliExpress has some direct manufacturer stores and also resellers. Haven’t used Temu. I tend to find a manufacturer or a brand that people buy and like, then buy from their official store or reseller if no official store. For example Toopre bike tools are fairly well liked - https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-toopre.html.

Don’t think about drives in terms of reliability. Consider them a consumable in your storage system. The storage system should insulate you from the exact drives. Run a ZFS mirror or RAIDz2. Swap drives when they fail. The exact brand and model shouldn’t matter.

I don’t think so. This is all happening because of whatever leverage Israel has on your leadership. Israel refuses to comply with withdrawing form Lebanon.

aren’t people entitled to revenue of the brand they build?

Perhaps no. Take the capitalist system at its best - the brief periods in an industry when a competitive environment delivers good products at low prices. That kind of environment means competitors can very easily start producing an alternative of what the other guy is producing and undercut their prices. This is the desired status quo that actually delivers wealth for most people. In such status quo, the firms that make things can only make as much money as to pay their costs and salaries with little leftover for shareholders. Conversely - the vast majority of society gets more things and has more money to buy more other things, instead of padding the pockets of shareholders. This is what competition is and obviously firm owners, large or small, don’t like it.

The fact that we can’t make a whole lotta things in (Canada) without costing 3x what China makes it for is a separate but related issue. Personally I think it’s got a lot more to do with how much money Canadian firms make at various sides of the supply chains. People like talking abt cheap labour but Chinese labour isn’t nearly as cheap as it used to be and labour isn’t the main cost in a whole lotta things. E.g. in automotive, labour is 10-15% of the cost and if we assume free labour the Chinese cars are a lot cheaper than 15%. The rest is tools, machines, and parts like nuts and bolts. A Canadian-blessed machine screw set from my local hardware store costs $20. A significantly larger set from AliExpress (not the cheapest place in China) costs $2. This speaks to the profit margins involved in the two screw sets. Most of our industries have gone past their competitive stages and are now largely consolidated into 1 to several firms so they can extract significant profit margins. I think the avg for North American corpos is 10-15%. In China that’s about 5% and the state-owned sector which provides a lot of inputs operates as non-profit. Margins across suppliers for a product stack like compound interest and the price grows exponentially. If you have a product that starts at $1 at the beginning and you have 5 suppliers till the final product, you get $1.28 with 5% avg and $2.01 with 15% avg. If you have 10 suppliers you get $1.63 vs $4. The difference between the two is also exponential. The exorbitant profits of our industries make it not only too expensive to make things here, it makes it very difficuly to even attempt anything by people who don’t have significant capital.

So yeah, the answer is def in-house manufacturing for more than one reason but for it to be viable, shareholders have to make less, a lot less. If we get to such a point, down to just the difference in price of labour, I’m pretty sure we’d be able to easily handle that. The state we’re in at the moment is def not healthy but I don’t think we’ll solve it by protecting shareholder value while keeping domestic worker salaries low - a reflection of the high margins. When margins go down, either prices would go down, or wages would go up, or both. Both make it possible for more people to buy the domestically manufactured product. In other words the in-house manufactured product won’t be 3x market price in real terms anymore.

I mean… consider what’s gonna happen as the water shortages and crop failures in the US start. I doubt they’re gonna lay flat and suffer / die. I think they’ll come for our resources and it’s probably gonna be a matter of whether through negotiation or aggression. What puts us in one or the other timeline would be whether we present the risk of significant pain to them.

The next level is getting it straight from AliExpress, skipping the 25% Bezos Yacht tax.

Lots of factories design things. This isn’t the 80s. The factories are often a complete firm with design, R&D teams, etc. It’s what ODMs are and they exist for all things, simple and cheap to complex and expensive.