Today's Round-up plus some Canada good news

Hey, I'm feeling not to spunky tonight so this won't be lengthy.

But here are some interesting comments and posts I saw today:

 
A substacker named Linda T is not impressed with the "He Yells" critique of Prime Minister Carney:

There’s a new story making the rounds in Ottawa, and it picks up neatly where an older one left off: apparently, Mark Carney likes to yell at annoying, incompetent politicians.
He must be going hoarse on the Liberal benches...
...The more progressive Liberals complain that he’s too managerial, too pro-growth, too friendly to energy, too dismissive of caucus feeling, the more he looks like someone separate from the very Liberal brand Canadians had grown sick of. The more MPs leak that he’s harsh behind closed doors, the more he looks like a man trying to drag an entitled caucus back to work. The more they warn that he isn’t a real Liberal, the more many voters may think: good.
That’s the irony. Carney’s distance from the Liberal Party may be one of his strongest political assets.
The Liberal brand was badly damaged before he took over. Canadians were tired of the lectures, the scandals, the identity games, the broken systems, and the sense that the country was being governed by people who were always performing virtue while avoiding accountability. Carney gives voters a way to keep the Conservatives out without having to pretend they still admire Trudeau-era Liberalism. He’s a permission structure for exhausted Liberal voters, soft Conservatives, centrists, and institutional Canadians who wanted a change without wanting Pierre Poilievre.
So when Liberal MPs complain that Carney doesn’t treat them with enough deference, they’re misunderstanding the transaction. Carney’s appeal isn’t that he restores the Liberal Party to its old self. His appeal is that he appears willing to discipline, ignore, or override that old self.
That leaves the caucus trapped.
They can’t easily remove him, because he saved them. They can’t easily defy him, because he has numbers. They can’t easily embarrass him, because their own public reputation is worse than his. They can’t credibly present themselves as guardians of democratic accountability after years of swallowing every Trudeau excess. And they can’t appeal to voters by saying, in effect, “please help, the prime minister we backed for power now has too much of it.”
No one is coming to help them.
Carney owns them. Not emotionally, maybe not even ideologically, but structurally. He has the office. He has the majority. He has the polling. He has the floor-crossers. He has the ability to replace troublemakers with new loyalists. Most importantly, he has the one thing caucus MPs usually respect more than principle: the appearance of being able to win.
That’s why the leaks are a bluff. They’re not a rebellion. They’re a flare shot into the sky by people who’ve realized the ship captain isn’t taking orders from them.
And if they keep pushing it, they may find the public reaction colder than they expect...

Paul Krugman confirms that nobody likes America anymore:

...But a funny thing happened to Trump’s attempt to hand Ukraine over to his comrade in thuggery: the war has turned in Ukraine’s favor. The fighting remains a gruesome slugfest, but Ukraine’s superior flexibility and capacity for innovation have gradually given it the upper hand in the drone warfare that increasingly shapes combat. In fact, Ukraine is so proficient at drone warfare that the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia — which are facing drone attacks as a consequence of Trump’s disastrous Iran war — have signed agreements to draw on Ukrainian technology and expertise.
Zelenskyy, it turns out, does have quite a few cards, while Trump has far fewer cards than he imagined.
Before Trump, we were also a nation almost universally regarded as essential: Nations believed that they needed access to U.S. banks to do business, access to U.S. markets to prosper, access to U.S. weapons to defend themselves. But by breaking decades’ worth of international agreements — not to mention threatening allies and betraying Ukraine — Trump quickly forfeited the world’s trust. By failing so spectacularly against Iran, a far weaker military power, Trump has dispelled much of the world’s fear.
And now the fact that the world is managing economically despite Trump’s tariffs, while Ukraine is surviving despite Trump’s attempt to cut it off at the knees, has revealed that we are much less essential than everyone assumed.

Here's a good discussion piece:

Years ago I flew to Beijing to teach. I stepped out of the hotel and the air was warm and sticky, and I could feel it on my skin. You looked up and there was no sky, only haze. By the time I reached the car, my throat hurt. That is the problem nuclear power solves for China before it solves anything else. The coal that powers the country also hangs in the air over Beijing. The smog is why China wants clean power. This spring, on the coast of Zhejiang, a reactor reached full power just over 5 years after the first concrete went down. In Britain, Hinkley Point C has been under construction for the better part of a decade, and it still will not switch on until around 2030. What separates the two has almost nothing to do with the reactor itself. When I put this in front of executives at IMD, the first thing they'd say is "authoritarianism." I grew up in Hong Kong, so I understand the instinct. Then I look at the record. France built 56 reactors in about 15 years, as a democracy. South Korea built its own standardized fleet more recently, also as a democracy. So I want to know what's really so special about the Chinese build, to see what the rest of us could actually borrow, or steal. Three things jump out. One, an industrial policy that holds steady across decades. You cannot finish something that takes 10 years if the rules reset every 4. Two, cheap and patient capital, moved through state banks into whatever the country decides matters most. Japan did it, South Korea did it, Taiwan did it. None of this is a Chinese secret. Three is the one Western engineers find hardest to accept. China stopped trying to build a masterpiece every time. It took a design that was good enough, held the blueprint nearly constant, and improved it reactor after reactor. The crews repeat the same work, the suppliers sit close by, and approvals move fast because everyone already knows the design. Costs come down with every build. This goes well beyond nuclear. China ran the same approach in high-speed rail, solar, wind, and electric cars. Take something that already works, keep it steady, and let the learning pile up. In the West, we are in love with the engineering marvel, the thing that has to be first in class and new to the world. That instinct gave us Hinkley Point C and Vogtle in Georgia, where every reactor was a custom project that forgot what the last one learned. There is even a term for it, negative learning. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of building a reactor in America climbed over the decades, while in China it came down. None of this is glamorous, which is probably why it never makes it into anyone's headline. The advantage is mostly boring. You know... it is standardization, repetition, and the patience to do dull work for 20 years. It is the quiet leadership that cuts red tape, forces rival companies onto one standard, and gets no press release for any of it. A fusion record does get a press release. China set one early last year, around 18 minutes of sustained plasma. France broke it a few weeks later. Either way, it means little until someone can scale it. The moonshot is the easy thing to celebrate. The boring base underneath it is the hard part, and the part nobody wants to pay for. I have my own blind spot here. I was in Boston recently, defending Europe, when an American said the thing I had stopped seeing. "You have made it so hard to do business across your own countries that nothing on the continent can scale. Britain even feels like a whole ocean apart." He was right. I live inside my own bubble, and I had stopped noticing it. Two things are worth copying from China. First, put scale and speed ahead of novelty. Once a design is proven safe, copy it and get moving. Resist the urge to invent a brand new national standard out of pride. Second, and this one is harder, let yourself consolidate. America's legacy carmakers are down to 2, General Motors and Ford. Europe has more than a dozen, and still wonders why it cannot move with force. We do not need China's politics to borrow China's discipline. France showed that 50 years ago. The UK choosing Rolls-Royce to standardize small reactors is the same idea, starting over. None of this is out of reach. What I do not know is whether we have the patience to do the boring work long enough to get it back. Here is my question to you, my dear readers. What is the one thing in your industry that people keep rebuilding from scratch, when copying it would get them further? I wrote about this build discipline, and why the reactor is the easy part, here: https://howardyu.substack.com/p/the-reactor-is-the-easy-part

- Howard Yu

Read on Substack

Canada Good News

The Littlest Hobo is coming back!



And I love it that the Guess Who are back

Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman performed together as The Guess Who for the first time in more than 23 years at Canada Life Centre Friday night.

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— Winnipeg Free Press (@winnipegfreepress.com) June 5, 2026 at 8:59 PM

No CUSMA, no boozma!

Wab Kinew on US booze ban: No CUSMA, no BOOZMA.

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— Scott Robertson (@sarobertson.bsky.social) June 4, 2026 at 12:41 PM

And Kinew has banned a data centre proposal too:

Good! www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

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— Susan Portelance (@prairiescribe.bsky.social) June 4, 2026 at 11:57 AM

Good news about Friday's jobs report

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Explain to me once again how girls aren’t as good as boys in math and science. Use little words so I understand. 😂 www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

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— 🇨🇦 (@janciebe.bsky.social) May 30, 2026 at 3:42 PM

The Banff bear they call The Boss

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