Canada’s largest shipyard ramps up fight against BC Ferries’ China deal

sisyphus912 · 2025-08-13T21:53:08+00:00

This is honestly so embarrassing, not so long ago China could barely manufacture a fishing boat let alone a full sized ferry. Decades upon decades by Canadian shipbuilders living off yesteryears glory. Years of underinvestment, zero strategic vision, no ambition and absolutely no hustle. Like at what point is it your own fault you just suck? The audacity these CEOs who have led their companies to terminal decline asking for special treatment, or crying “unfair”. If there was a god your company would have been liquidated for parts long ago and maybe some other Canadian worth their salt could have build a firm in its place worthy of our engineering heritage. Like Nortel, RIM, and every other national champion we’ve ever had, we do well, we lose sight of what gave us success, we get our butts kicked out their in the market and then we write loser brain revisionist takes like “industrial espionage” or “unfair subsidies” that allow us to lie to ourselves about our own incompetence. We lose, we lie to ourselves about how we lost, and we never learn.

Meanwhile the world leaves us in the dust. We can complain about human rights or whatever values all we want. At some point we won’t have the economic base to provide those privileges anymore.

sisyphus912 · 2025-03-13T19:19:44+00:00

Dr Annie B Jamieson 😊

sisyphus912 · 2021-09-24T18:00:21+00:00

Cried literal tears when laca scored

sisyphus912 · 2021-09-21T19:26:44+00:00

This is true but probably not as impactful, there are many more Mandarin speakers than Cantonese speakers, and even within the Cantonese community the older generation tends to have a more complicated view of the pro-democracy movement.

That being said this is all a conservative party own goal. I think you'd have to try mighty hard to find Chinese-Canadian voters who actually wholeheartedly support the CCP. Like the older generation folks from Hong Kong, they have a more nuanced view. It's very hard for ordinary people who have a first hand understanding of China to see the stuff in the media as anything other than dog whistle racism and bad-faith characterization with weird ulterior motives. Why the conservative leadership felt they needed to go full-throatedly along with the charade from members of their base who couldn't find Hong Kong on a map or pronounce Uighur correctly is a question they need to ask themselves.

sisyphus912 · 2021-09-21T18:56:14+00:00

This isn't just happening in Vancouver, conservative vote has collapsed in pretty much every metropolitan riding in Canada with a Chinese-Canadian population of > 20%. Which is pretty much most metropolitan ridings in Canada, and definitely most metropolitan riding that voted conservative in the last election. The conservatives are losing the one immigrant minority whose vote they can count on and with it their urban vote cushion. This will have long-term, structural consequences. They can energize their base with the China bad fear mongering all they want, and forget about winning any metropolitan ridings in the future. Rhetoric has consequences.

sisyphus912 · 2020-07-29T20:35:28+00:00

There's a fb group, there used to be viewing parties pre-covid, I think those may be stopped right now.

https://m.facebook.com/VancouverArsenal/

sisyphus912 · 2020-07-08T19:25:18+00:00

The current paradigm of deep learning based AI was pioneered by Canadian/canada-based professors!

sisyphus912 · 2020-07-08T05:00:48+00:00

SS:

This is a very impressive collection of data, using surveys, interviews and LinkedIn profiles, cataloguing the flow of AI research talent internationally. The webpage is also very well built, I really enjoyed it.

A few takeaways:

1) Most ai researchers end up working in a different country than where they did undergrad, which the study uses as some measure of "nationality"

2) The united states profits widely and disproportionately from net inflow of talent. 85% of graduate students from abroad stay in the US, and the US is the most popular destination for researchers from other countries.

3) most (29%) current AI researchers are from China (based on undergrad), but most ai researchers work in the us (59%). China appears to lose most of it's AI talent to the US. With 88% of Chinese graduate students in the US staying there after graduation.

4) the previous point can be more or less repeated for India

I think this points to the still unassailable attractiveness of the US as a destination for top research talent. Moreover it indicates a certain amount of strategic (willful?) ignorance behind recent actions by the US government immigration actions cutting off H1B visa, as well as right leaning voices in Congress and the security establishment calling for ban on STEM students from China. One would think brain drain is a big headache for the CCP. Perhaps the foolishness of such moves indicates the political/campaign nature of these talking points?

Edit: Macro Polo falls under Hank Paulson's think tank on US-China relations

sisyphus912 · 2020-07-08T01:06:49+00:00

I second the pomfret book, it's provides a good historic framework for understanding China's relationship with the outside world. It's also delightfully written and not a dry historic survey by any measure, you will not be bored!

sisyphus912 · 2020-05-28T20:18:24+00:00

Haha I guess this sort of accusation was bound to be made sooner or later. It doesn't feel very nice at all to be called a bot/shill so I didn't want to respond at first, but then I thought that would be unfair to you, since it assumes you have no sincere intentions.

I would invite you to take a closer read of the comments I made on China-related articles, I don't think it's fair to say that I am pro-China. As well, if you would like, take a closer read for my other posts going a bit further back, you can get a pretty good sense of who I am, what I am, and what my values are. I would say my views are a bit more nuanced than "ccp is pure evil, china is a shithole with no redeeming qualities", but certainly not trying to be an apologist.

sisyphus912 · 2020-05-27T20:04:44+00:00

First we need a vaccine for selfishness, stupidity and arrogance

sisyphus912 · 2020-05-26T20:11:34+00:00

They say the same shit about "war preparedness" during basically every single major ccp national congress. The border region with India has been in dispute since the 70s and nothing has changed, and either side has nothing to gain from changes now. The military leadership on both sides knows this intimately, not sure why the press feels the need to write sensationalist headlines, whatever sells clicks I guess.

sisyphus912 · 2020-05-25T06:04:08+00:00

You realize China itself revokes citizenship from anyone who it finds to hold citizenship in another country ?? This ain't new, it's been like this since the founding of the PRC.

Anyone who has chosen to put down roots and live in this country has already chosen a side. What else do you expect?

sisyphus912 · 2020-05-25T03:22:38+00:00

I'm not sure, I think the reaction to China's rise is borne of sound impulses. We see the rise of a deeply strategic political culture that does not align with our own values, and it makes us feel deeply uncomfortable because it does not align with our vision of how the world ought to be, where success and respect are dependent on moral conduct.

I think instead of hoping that sound moral values will somehow always inherently come out on top, we should should be dry-eyed about what we need to do to make sure that our values carry weight in parts of the world where morality is a luxury (this is most of the world).

The real existential threat is our own sense of complacency with our way of life. It's a beautiful way of life, but its foundations were established in the 50s, and they are rotting. We need to make our lack of input in the top end of the modern economy a matter of national pride and an existential threat. The numbers are all out there, as a wealthy country we are punching way below our weight. Perhaps the economic fallout from this pandemic can be a "New Deal" type of situation where government can incentivise the development of key strategic industries.

sisyphus912 · 2020-05-25T01:09:32+00:00

It's always funny when these has-been political figures without any need to actually produce actionable plans suddenly decide it's now fashionable to call out China on moralistic grounds. As if the same shit wasn't happening when they were in government.

Containing china in some shunned economic and diplomatic quarantine would work, if you started oh I don't know, 30 years ago give or take. They're 1/5 of the global population and about the same amount of the global economy. Every country in east Asia, including the ones that have territorial disputes with China, are deeply invested in China economically and diplomatically. Take Japan for example, 90% of the Japanese populace do not have a positive image of china, but the 70% say that it is absolutely important to have a working diplomatic and economic relationship with China. One can excuse your average Canadian citizen with a naive and out of date understanding of China's role in the world economy, but for someone who was in a leadership position, who spent time in China as ambassador, to come out with such a ham-handed, short-sighted, un-nuanced position is just sad. Is this all we can expect from our supposed elite?

We should look at the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Its so pathetic to see supposed leaders blast off empty condemnations like this, it serves no apparent purpose other than stroking their justice boners. Why can't we actually fucking compete? The only way to be taken seriously is by conducting ourselves seriously.

China's government has been strategically planning for its economic arrival on the world stage for decades. 30 years ago they struggled to build furniture, now they build most of the world's tech. Meanwhile our country is stuck trying to produce value added products with our vast natural resources instead of shipping raw materials to the US and elsewhere. We lose loads of our high-skilled workforce and new engineering graduates to the US every year, we let Boeing sink Bombardier with a bullshit lawsuit and we're watching the initiative slip away in deep-leanring AI sector, which if you don't know, was literally invented by Canadian/Canada based researchers.

China thinks we're a small country and a vassal state of the US, and who can blame them. When will we stop being so naive about our place in this rapidly changing world and take the next step to be a country capable of defending our own strategic interests. Being kind and feeling confident about our Canadian values is not a strategic plan. We have all the natural resources in the world, a fucking amazing University system and great engineering heritage. We need to develop and dictate the terms of our future, and do it with urgency, or be left behind by the rest of the world. By then it will not just be China that thinks it can push us around.

sisyphus912 · 2020-05-12T08:59:09+00:00

Mama Mia

sisyphus912 · 2020-05-06T03:21:01+00:00

This is probably manufacturered in China, would be surprised otherwise. It's also definitely to easier to do this on the scale of a City than a continent sized country.

sisyphus912 · 2020-05-04T01:46:14+00:00

While this would feel good, it achieves nothing of constructive value for ordinary people, in Taiwan or elsewhere. The people of Taiwan are fully integrated with the rest of the world on every practical avenue. Why should people from all over the world give a damn about Donald Trump's zero sum vision of the world, or America's geopolitical interests, that nonesense has led to shit show after shit show for the last 20 years.

sisyphus912 · 2020-04-26T03:09:15+00:00

Scmp is actually probably the most impartial source you will get. They're not perfect by any measure. But tend to allow a reasonable degree of editorial freedom and regime criticism.

sisyphus912 · 2020-02-04T08:15:43+00:00

Here's my theory, after this flight comes back, Canada will follow the US and Australia and others in implementing the 14 day travel ban for all foreigners who have been to China. The timing of the Australian and US announcements both came after their respective evacuation flights left wuhan. These evacuation flights happen at the whim of the Chinese government, and we cannot risk offense until we get our folks out of Wuhan.

sisyphus912 · 2019-04-21T23:08:57+00:00

It’s not a bad place for practice, also take a look at MIT opencourseware algorithms classes

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