Today in "Christ, what an asshole!" - Poilievre, Tech Bros, and our potash industry

Poilievre's big idea - lets play "gotcha!"
So Poilievre thinks he can fiddle while Canada fights for its life against Trump. What an asshole.
As Dale Smith commented on Saturday:

Because Pierre Poilievre thinks he’s a tactical genius, he has announced that next week’s Conservative Supply Day motion will be about the MOU with Alberta, and forcing a vote on the language about a pipeline to the Pacific, in defiance of the tanker ban.
...It’s a transparent attempt to try and jam the Liberals, at least rhetorically, into supporting the motion in order to show support for the MOU, after which Poilievre can keep saying “You supported it!” and “Give me the date when construction starts,” as though there’s a proponent, a project and a route already lined up (to say nothing about the long-term contracts about who is going to buy the product once it’s built, because yes, that does matter). The thing is, these kinds of motions are non-binding, and really means nothing in the end. So if a number of Liberals vote against it, it doesn’t actually mean anything, other than the rhetorical notion that lo, they are not fully in lock-step on something, which actually sets them apart from pretty much every other party where uniformity and loyalty to the leader and all of his positions are constantly being enforced in one way or another. Maybe he will tolerate differences of opinion—or maybe he’ll crack the whip. We’ll see when Tuesday gets here.

I actually think this might serve the government's purposes. Liberal MPs were looking for a way to say we don't support this. Now, the Conservative Party gave it to them. Carney gets to show the Liberals are a big tent, and he still has a firm(ing) agenda. https://t.co/yv7DgOkei2

— Althia Raj (@althiaraj) December 5, 2025

Then this weekend the Globe and Mail reported More than half of Canadians support new pipeline from Alberta to B.C.:

....The Nanos Research poll, which was commissioned by The Globe and Mail, shows 56 per cent of Canadians support or somewhat support building a new oil pipeline and 55 per cent are in favour of lifting the ban on tanker traffic to make it happen. Roughly 37 per cent oppose or somewhat oppose each...
The survey comes less than two weeks after Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed an energy accord, which in part laid the groundwork for a new oil pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast.
The B.C. government opposes such a plan, but the most recent poll showed that 57.4 per cent of residents of that province support a new pipeline....

On today's CTV Power Play, Tom Mulcair summed it up:

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Why doesn't Poilievre just go away while the serious people tend to the nation's business. 

Tech Bros big idea - lets get rich(er) by gambling on what's next!
At this week's Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick asks whether the millionaire Tech Bros are gambling us to our doom:

You are, no doubt, being inundated with news about “prediction markets” right now....
Morals aside, these prediction markets are the dream of the post-COVID NFT mania. Unlike the NFT frenzy, though, they aren’t trying to turn JPGs into digital assets, they’re trying to commodify our opinions. But yes, crypto is involved here...
Last month, Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of Kalshi, gave the audience at the Citadel Securities conference a chilling glimpse of where this is all headed (if we let it). “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” he said on stage to a crowd of poor souls who, I guess, think that sounds dope.
Mansour’s “financialize everything” line is, in many ways, a condensed version of something Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a podcast last spring. A comment I come back to often because I believe he accidentally stated the fundamental driving philosophy of Big Tech. A perfect, succinct, unfathomably embarrassing snapshot of how a bunch of very wealthy losers view themselves:
“There’s this stat that I always think is crazy. The average American has three friends, three people they consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s like 15 friends or something,” he told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, while talking about the rise of AI companions. “I think that there are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don't have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”
Researcher Paul Fairie, on X at the time, had an even tighter summary of Zuckerberg’s worldview, “The average American has three eggs, but has demand for 15. So here are 12 photographs of eggs. I am a business man.”
The “here are 12 photographs of eggs” philosophy is everywhere you look. Not just at AI companies, but every large tech service. All of these platforms have inserted themselves into the cracks of modern life and want you to pay them — with your time, data, or actual money — for a hollow digital imitation of something we used to get from the other human beings in our lives. Or as X user r0sylns wrote recently, “Groceries? Get em delivered. Books? Buy em on amazon. Fuck libraries and bookstores. Stop buying CDs, vinyls, and DVDs, it's all on the cloud! Movie theaters? Obsolete. Subscribe to 10 different platforms instead! Stay inside. Be afraid of your neighbors. Work til you die.”
These “prediction markets” take Zuckerberg’s “here are 12 photographs of eggs” philosophy to its logical endpoint. A way to capture one of the few parts of the human experience they haven’t been able to ingest into their mega-platforms. Here are 12 photographs of opinions, bet on which ones will come true. It’s hard to imagine a better metaphor for late-stage Silicon Valley: Pay us a cut to imagine the future for us. An industry completely devoid of new ideas asking users to gamble on what might happen next.

Why don't these guys work on eliminating poverty instead of increasing it.

And finally, this:

Our potash industry's big idea was announced 2 weeks ago - lets send Saskatchewan potash through Washington State for export, instead of Vancouver!
Then today Trump started blathering about putting big new tariffs on potash...Oops!

Trump threatens new "very severe" tariffs against Canada to spur domestic fertilizer production

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) December 8, 2025 at 2:22 PM

The potash-production industry in the US will have about the same success as the US banana-growing industry.

— Cathie from Canada🍁 (@cathiecanada.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 4:15 PM

Canada number 1 potash producer in the world because we are home (in Saskatchewan) to the world's largest potash reserves. But!, guess who number 2 is! That's right, it's russia! He'll tariff Canada, not russia and you'll buy from russia.

— Schmingy 🇨🇦 (@sirschming.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 2:50 PM

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As Charlie Angus notes, it might not work out very well for anybody:

Go for it Donald. Trump is crushing the American farm belt. MAGA farmers have had a disastrous year from disappearing markets and the tariff war. Adding a severe tariff on fertilizer will wipe them out.

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— Charlie Angus (@charlieangus104.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 4:05 PM

I just hope Nutrien changes its mind now about building a big new export terminal in Washington State - the Western Producer article explains the other options it has for export terminals.
Or maybe they should just invent a Potash Peace Prize, with a golden potash paperweight:

Looks vaguely Trumpy, doesn't it.