| blog post in No Food for Thought | "Cryptocurrency": the pseudo-currency which no one understood or accepted, but which many bought On the cover of the May issue of Canadian magazine L'Actualité , I read "LE BITCOIN POUR LES NULS" ("Bitcoin for Dummies"). One of my first reactions was "true". In fact, it announced [https://lac |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | "Pilot Error" {LANG(notlang="fr")}The crash of Lion Air Flight 610 and the resulting 189 deaths raised quite a few questions. Understandably, a lot of suspicion w |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | And you call that educated? The USA's overestimated education ROI I grew up strongly rooted in the economy. My father was a merchant, I worked in his store, and I knew his employees earned 6 CAD per hour. For me, this minimum wage was generous. A few years later, I |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Bill C-18, Canada's Foreign Link Tax: A Threat to the Free Market AND Free Information For more than a year now, Canada's Online News Act , known as Bill C-18 , has been... in the news. Unfortunately, not for the right reasons. On paper , the act require |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Bitcoin is Not Going To Zero, and more on blockchains × Retracted I retracted some of the following in a 2022 post . Apologies When a decade of geek madness about "cryptocurrencies" culminate |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Canada's ongoing per capita recession The important inflation affecting Canadians has been well-known for years. What I wasn't aware of was our individual income has been decreasing for a long time, even though GDP is growing. Indeed, |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Chronic inflation: still insufficient to deflate short-termist illusions? In April 2001, I was still 15 and knew very little about USA politics. Yet it took a single misleading and high-stakes declaration from its then-president brushing off the Kyoto Protocol to put him at |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Crhypeto propelling Malaysia and Argentina towards gold medals, squeezing every last bit out of Earth Today's greatest challenges Preserving our non-renewable natural resources from being wasted The climate crisis (and a few more) What we can do Minimizing negative externalities |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Du Crédit d'impôt relatif à un fonds de travailleurs à un Crédit d'imposteurs Qu'y a-t-il de pire que de subventionner le secteur privé? Mal subventionner le secteur privé. Chose bien trop commune dans notre pays. J'allais cotiser à mon REER+ du Fonds de solidarité des t |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Free software and integration: a long-term issue More than a decade ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman started offering some Linux versions with significant support. Linux 2.6.32 was designated as a "long term" support release, even though the term was just ab |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Free Speech, Freedom to Exploit the Poor Democratic societies value free speech. But how much free speech is valued varies in each society. The USA is probably the greatest champion of free speech, to the point where it no longer has |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Green or Grey: Subsidies for Cryptocurrencies? For as long as I have been adult, I have been part of a kind which was not common, at least at the time: an ecologist opposed to subsidies for green technologies. I have always believed in the ((wp:po |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Happy 20th anniversary, €? Oh, and mea culpa 2022 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Euro becoming tangible . 20 years ago, we could have hoped a lot from that experiment. Greater European unity, more countries adop |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Inflation in Canada: François-Philippe Champagne and the PLC's grocery stunt Last year, grocery prices were inflating at a ridiculous speed in Canada, just as support for the LPC was crashing. Nothing which François-Philippe Champagne, our dear Minister of In tervention nov |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | La décarbonisation du carbone, ou l'écoblanchiment de l'énergie fossile Quelle stratégie un pays comme le Canada, devant des précipices démocratiques, environnementaux et économiques, devrait-il choisir? Simplement adopter le ((wpf:Principe pollueur-payeur|principe po |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Le vrai défi Hilo : dépasser les incitatifs pervers Les effets pervers sont innombrables. Il est ainsi bien connu que l'utilisation d'antibiotiques en agriculture rend l'humain beaucoup plus vulnérable aux bactéries en raison de |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | More debt on Canada's credit cards: The "Working Canadians Rebate" What do you do when you're governing a country with a debt surpassing a trillion CAD (over 20 000 €/citizen) , after [https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/understanding |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | New Religion Most religions appeared during history, but not recently. We do have accounts of how that happened, like the Bible, but it's not so clear who wrote what when, nor what exactly was written before time |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | No Monopoly on Stupid Lawmaking × 2022 Update: Facebook was actually ordered to divest Giphy. You may know [https://en.wiki |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Preventing Corporate Success Lack of supply is a problem Western states take very seriously. A lot more than the weight of excessive regulation. So when a market is lacking suppliers and failing to satisfy consumer expectation |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | Searching for a post-Google search engine? Ever since my friend Guillaume made me discover Google in the late 1990s, I never looked back. I've been using Google Search almost exclusively for a ¼-century, and I became a Gmail user even before |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | The European Union's Interference Equation: Inaction + competition = over-reaction In 1996, yearly worldwide PC sales went beyond 70 million units. It was obvious that personal computers would become ubiquitous and that the world would crucially need operating systems and commodity |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | The Neverending Movie of Unintended Consequences Competition matters . When antitrust law appeared, its target was—well—trusts. At least theoretically, capitalism couldn't prevent the appearance of monopolies. Anti |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | What happens when an alternative currency becomes legal tender? Some people think of "alternative currencies" as wonderful solutions to economic problems. But obviously, no currency can have any significant impact without becoming legal tender. So what would ha |
| blog post in No Food for Thought | What is "Canada News Media" (canadanewsmedia.ca)? And the sorry state of Canada's news media While trying to read [https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-best-thing-the-government-could-do-to-save-the-media-is-to-stop/|this paywalled article from Andrew Coyne titled "The best thi |
Kune ni povos is seriously freethough not completely humor-free: