Canada has a problem: we don’t own the data that informs our biggest policy decisions. Writer @vassb.bsky.social explores why we’ve come to accept a system where private platforms hoard core economic intelligence and treat it like business as usual: thewalrus.ca/canada-labour-data/

A lot of the conversation around BIG nation-building projects has been focussed on physical infrastructure (I suppose digital initiatives become physical fast). 2 OTHER national ideas I noticed: 1 @policyalternatives.ca a crown corp for institutional fleets www.policyalternatives.ca/news-researc...

The scavenger hunt says: what if politics were also just a little bit fun? Would that be okay with everyone? Looks like it is.

The Air Canada flight attendant strike was illegal. It was also profoundly Canadian. As Jen ‪Hassum explains in a new column, Canada’s democracy depends on defiance, not obedience. Read it here: ricochet.media/labour/the-a... #AirCanada #cdnpoli @hassum.bsky.social

LFG! ✊🏻

Song for a flight attendant strike! 🛬 youtu.be/CL2a8fos5NI

Important to note: this is total compensation, of which ~2/3 is in non-wage market assets tied to AC success. Every unpaid hour a flight attendant works increases the value of those assets and makes Air Canada execs wealthier.

Last time I checked my landlord still won't accept "exposure bucks" 🤷‍♂️ 🙄 "Duboff’s argument is that because Spotify is “the most engaging service, the calculated per-stream rate is lower”.

it never ceases to amaze me that there are people who work in music who don't even *checks notes* listen to music

cool cool cool

In providing wall to wall coverage of the new Arcade Fire single, the music media is proving that it is deeply unserious about sexual harassment, violence and discrimination, and making music safe for all people.

a confederacy of bootlickers

Many have pointed out how the larger conversation about the group chat eludes discussion of the horrors of war, but seeing a civilian woman just accepted as “excellent” collateral is … pretty ghastly

Cool thought experiment, but the inertia of path dependency (i.e. existing DSP market share means artists are loath to not upload to them) is a pretty big obstacle to overcome. Would require massive, coordinated collective action🫠

Show me the policy, please. I’m into this idea but what are you gonna do? Absolutely huge opening for the NDP to take advantage of anti-system political moment, but it’s gonna require more than slogans.

This review of Abundance from Malcom Harris goes so hard and I am here for it: "refusing to be forthright about society’s structural antagonisms opens the door to demagogues who peddle false conflicts that still ring truer than the liberals’ false peace" thebaffler.com/latest/whats...

The United States government under Trump by all accounts is shipping these people into indefinite involuntary servitude in El Salvador without even the pretense of any judicial process, much less duly convicting them of a crime. It’s an enslaving operation.

Where are you @melaniejolycan.bsky.social and @markjcarney.bsky.social? If you're serious about standing up to the US a two way arms embargo is in full seriousness the place to start. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/...

Tuesday. Ottawa.

Along with all of the other things that this is, it is also the direct & inevitable consequence of the failure to put a lot more senior executive branch officials in jail for a very long time for Watergate, Iran-Contra, torture, & all of the other things in the last 50 years.

HEARING STARTING SOON (5 p.m. ET). Listen on the public line: 833-990-9400. Meeting ID: 049550816 (then press the pound sign).

Other people are still at "is it a constitutional crisis yet?" and I'm at "the crisis was several exits ago, the car has crashed, we're now just seeing how many cars end up in the pileup and how high the casualty count is" or "the house is actively burning down, the question is what's left after."

Excellent analysis of why the Liberal plan to build privatized high-speed rail isn't going to deliver what we need - it should be publicly owned and operated.

This is Marco Rubio retweeting El Salvador’s president mocking the Trump administration’s open defiance of a judge’s order. Every single Democratic senator voted to confirm Rubio. Some like Tina Smith, in her interview with me, now say they got it wrong and regret it. They all should say it.

I’m catching up on the cabinet announcement but you gotta love to see that not only has the gender parity thing been cast aside but the entire women and gender equality portfolio has evaporated. SURE women’s and lgbtq rights are quickly eroding globally but no biggie, right? Mark Carney said so!

This ep of M4N is great bc it identifies ‘indie distribution’ as atomizing artists/music. The ‘freedom’ to go it alone is actually individualizing risk — it’s the opposite end of the continuum of getting screwed by a major label. podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/m...

A solid take! One note: While it (correctly) points finger at big tech, imo the issue is broader — it's capitalist systems and logics eating music (& most other industries) & driving unsustainable wealth inequality. Wrote a bit about one aspect of that here: bsky.app/profile/brod...

I know you like to line dance Everything so democratic and cool But, baby, there's no guidance when random rules

National anthem discourse is a way for comfortable liberals to insist they’re ‘resisting’, while ignoring the real effects that authoritarianism, acceptance and complicity in genocide, fiscal austerity & more are having on real people. A way to avoid responsibility for others.

So bummed reading analyses of how Spotify became profitable -- the below from Mark Mulligan/MIDiA gets the analysis correct. The bummer is that this is seen as a good thing by many - profitability by turning artists — whose work IS the value of Spotify — into customers driving profit 🤮

I'm gonna shine out in the wild kindness

I feel a lot of clarity. That we are living in a terrible world with terrible systems and a terrible ruling class grinding us down. AND I feel so much intense affection and gratitude for all the human beings making their way through, forming communities, trying so hard to care for one another.

There are literally not enough journalists employed in the US to cover the bad shit that is happening right now. We are now going to experience the social consequences of a weakened news industry--which are the same as the benefits of a weakened news industry, to those who weakened it.

Really struggling to square the need for economic nationalism to counter the tariffs with the weird downstream impacts that framing this nationalism within cultural/ethnic terms will produce. Nationalism is Janus-faced and who knows where it’ll go from here.

Of course, that's why I mentioned "industry". As I talk a lot with indie musicians via my podcast, I can clearly affirm music is a primarily a matter of passion

More and more I think about music (industry) as entering a crisis of (social) reproduction --- as capital extracts more and more (hyper-focused on existing catalog, failing to develop new artists, only short term support for artists to extract most value in shortest time)...(1/5)

iPods > Spotify

I'm gonna shine out in the wild kindness

Let's not kid ourselves It gets really really bad

I am a climate scientist and this is correct ⬇️

“Honestly, I am running out of metaphors to explain the warming we are seeing,” said Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo. www.ft.com/content/fd91...

I'm gonna shine out in the wild kindness

the weather's cold, the going's tough, the year's subsiding—but i'm delighted to share my 100 favourite songs of 2024: www.saidthegramophone.com/archives/bes...

Explore the legacy of Breach of Trust’s Songs for Dying Nations in our latest Deep Digs. @danielgwilson.bsky.social celebrates this unsung Indigenous rock record from the early 00s and details just how relevant its themes still are today. newfeeling.ca/2024/12/04/d...

Remembering a time when you could learn about new music you might enjoy from a print magazine

"Sorry, we can't make this technology that sucks and nobody wants and that uses enough power to blow up the moon unless we *also* steal people's shit to throw into our content woodchipper in order to produce mediocre digital particleboard out of the cumulative artbarf." futurism.com/the-byte/ope...

🫠🫨🥴

UMG trying to present Virgin Music’s acquisition of Downtown as an investment in the independent ecosystem is fooling no one. This is wealth extraction from the independents, another step in UMG’s relentless path to dominance and stifling competition. We call on regulatory bodies to block the deal.