Category: Travel

A division of storied Quebec industrial conglomerate Power Corporation is launching a C$1-billion investment fund focused on solar and wind projects.“This is a landmark moment for Power Sustainable, and the first of several projects we intend to bring to the sustainable investment marketplace in the coming years,” said chair and CEO Olivier Desmarais, a grandson of both Power Corp. founder Paul Desmarais and former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien.Like this story? The announcement is “the latest show of Canadian financial might for the renewable sector,” the Globe and Mail reports.The new Power Sustainable Energy Infrastructure Partnership is an offshoot of a Power Corp. division, Power Sustainable Capital Inc., that already has investments around the world—including Quebec e-bus manufacturer Lion Electric, which announced earlier this month it had sold a 15.8% share in its business to e-commerce behemoth Amazon.The Globe says the new partnership, which includes Groupe Desjardins, Great-West Lifeco, National Bank of Canada, and Switzerland’s Après-demain SA, will announce investments in projects in Canada and the United States over the next two to three years.Citing Pierre Larochelle, Power Sustainable’s co-managing partner, Globe mergers and acquisitions reporter Jeffrey Jones says the announcement “shows how sustainable energy investment and the push to cut carbon emissions have shifted from government policy-directed endeavours to economic opportunity”.“I think finally the world is getting behind the shift to decarbonization, which obviously, for people who have been believing in this and investing in this for a decade, it’s great and we’re pretty excited,” Larochelle told Jones. “We invest in what we do because not only do we believe we can generate good returns and good performance for our owners. At the same time, we do believe in being active participants and investors in the fight against climate change.”The announcement “comes amid a flood of investment in green energy by big-name institutions,” Jones writes. “Late last year, Brookfield Asset Management set up an impact fund led by former central banker Mark Carney that could eventually be worth as much as US$100 billion. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board expanded its $9 billion renewables business by setting up a European investment arm.”Although its success won’t depend on government programs, the Globe says Power Sustainable stands to benefit from the new federal carbon price and the shift to green power and energy storage in Canada, as well as the ambitious climate and green recovery plan now taking shape in the United States.

Source: Power Corp. Division Says $1-Billion Renewables Fund Will Be ‘First of Several’ – The Energy Mix

Canada’s mountainous terrain offers exceptional opportunities for clean hydroelectricity generation, and the country has worked to maximize its advantages. Some 61 percent of the country’s total electricity generation comes from hydro plants totaling some 82 GW of production capacity, and this country of just 37.5 million people ranks fourth in the world in total hydro production, trailing only the USA, Brazil and China.

Source: 88-megawatt Canadian hydro-to-hydrogen plant to open in 2023

A luxury train trip that comes complete with all-you-can-drink tequila may sound like the stuff of an intrepid imbiber’s dreams, but it’s now a reality thanks to a certain liquored up locomotive.The Jose Cuervo Express—nicknamed the Tequila Train for reasons that will become obvious—has been chugging through the untouched Mexican countryside for the past eight or so years, but has recently started offering a new elevated experience fit for the most discerning tequila sippers.The vintage-style, black and gold train travels from the city of Guadalajara, through the untouched Mexican countryside, to the tiny town of Tequila. This remarkable community was designated a Pueblo Mágico (Magic Town) by the Mexican Secretariat of Tourism, and, of course, offers its signature spirit in spades.

Source: This Tequila Train Offers Epic Views of Mexico and Bottomless Tequila – Robb Report

THE FIRST-EVER EDIT to Wikipedia took place on January 15, 2001. Today, the online encyclopedia officially turns 20 years old, on the date known as Wikipedia Day. One of WIRED’s earliest stories about Wikipedia once compared it to the ancient library of Alexandria. For the site’s volunteer editors, however, there’s another metaphor that has long been popular: Wikipedia is a role-playing game. At first blush, there do not appear to be many similarities between editing the internet encyclopedia and playing Dungeons & Dragons. Yet proponents of the RPG metaphor see numerous resemblances to both table-top RPGs and their online counterparts. According to this humorous and continuously evolving essay composed by Wikipedians, the Wikipedia “game world” consists of 6.2 million “unique locations” (read: English Wikipedia articles), 40.6 million “players” (Wikipedia editors), and the common villains are the trolls who disrupt articles in “boss fights” (the edit wars that sometimes take place regarding the content published on an article). The “game designer” is Jimmy Wales, who started the site 20 years ago, and was reportedly a big fan of MMORPGs of the 1980s, like Island of Kesmai and Scepter of Goth. More recently, Wales sent across a box of D&D Beyond books and swag for his Christmas 2020 Reddit Secret Santa gift.“Comparing Wikipedia to a role-playing game is useful, as it helps people understand why Wikipedians are so reluctant to recognize external expertise,” Dariusz Jemielniak, a professor at Kozminski University and author of Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia and coauthor of Collaborative Society, wrote in an email.

Source: Wikipedia Is Basically a Massive RPG | WIRED

IN OCTOBER 2019, Idaho proposed changing its Medicaid program. The state needed approval from the federal government, which solicited public feedback via Medicaid.gov.Roughly 1,000 comments arrived. But half came not from concerned citizens or even internet trolls. They were generated by artificial intelligence. And a study found that people could not distinguish the real comments from the fake ones.The project was the work of Max Weiss, a tech-savvy medical student at Harvard, but it received little attention at the time. Now, with AI language systems advancing rapidly, some say the government, and internet companies, need to rethink how they solicit and screen feedback to guard against deepfake text manipulation and other AI-powered interference.

Source: AI-Powered Text From This Program Could Fool the Government | WIRED

Auckland, New Zealand (January 18, 2021) – After a mostly sleepless night following the capsize and near-sinking of American Magic’s AC75 racing yacht, PATRIOT, Skipper and Executive Director Terry Hutchinson faced questions from the press. Here’s a recap.On the local assistance:“We need to recognize the heroic effort by everybody in the Auckland community that came forward to rescue PATRIOT from despair. In particular the local authorities, the police, the fire and rescue, and then finally the competitors, Team New Zealand and INEOS and Luna Rossa. They were spectacular. When you think about that family, our sailing community, it was awesome to see the show of support.”On safety:“Fortunately, while [PATRIOT] has a bit of damage to her, the crew is safe. And at the end of the day, that’s really all you can ask for.”On team dynamics:“I trust Andrew [Campbell] and Dean [Barker], as we all do when we get on that boat day in and day out. We trust them with our lives. When one of those guys makes a comment and you hear it in his tone about it being light, you take it seriously. It is truly one of those games that if you make one mistake and the boat touches down, it doesn’t take much for the guy behind to get around you. And so we made the decision to do what we did.”

Source: Terry Hutchinson: Facing the press >> Scuttlebutt Sailing News

As the saying goes, the avalanche doesn’t care if you’re an expert on avalanches or an expert on anything else, really the avalanche does not care that you have some email you’d like to answer or that you’ve been meaning to clean your garage or spend more time with your kids. The avalanche just cares about gravity and getting down the mountain. The avalanche doesn’t care that you are not an expert, Or that this is your first day ever skiing in the backcountry or your 200th day. The avalanche really doesn’t care. If you would prefer not to take a ride under thousands of pounds of snow moving downhill at 150 mph And come to a stop under the debrisNothing personal here just physics. The avalanche doesn’t care if you haven’t done everythingYou wanted to do in life yet the avalanche doesn’t care about your plans or dreams, or your free will, or whatever. For all the avalanche cares, You could be a tree or a rock. Really, you’re just in the way The avalanche doesn’t care if your friends are experts on avalanches, or on snow science, or at digging you out from under ten feet of recently relocated snow. The avalanche will probably not decide to take it easy on you and bury you under six feet of snow instead of ten feet this time, no hard feelings. The avalanche doesn’t care if you respect it will not pick a fight with you in a bar or bumping into it or stepping on its shoe does not have an ego or an agenda just a lot of mass and potential energy. That is really hard to win an argument with once it starts moving. The avalanche doesn’t care about the things you wanted to do in the next few years. But unlike the avalanches, few people would probably like it if you got home safely be careful out there. And if you’re not sure how to be careful. Maybe stay in bounds until you are because skiing is fun and being able to continue to ski for a very long time Is even more fun and of course, there are other things in life that are nice to be there for, too

Source: The Avalanche Doesn’t Care | Outside Online

In October 1957, American cryptologist and codebreaker Elizebeth S. Friedman and her husband, William F. Friedman, were the subjects of a short article in TIME magazine about their new book debunking a long-held theory that William Shakespeare wasn’t the true author of his plays, and that a cipher was hidden within his texts pointing to the “real” author’s identity. “The Friedmans’ credentials are impressive,” commented TIME, adding that William led the team that broke the Japanese “PURPLE” code a few months before Pearl Harbor.While William was considered during his lifetime to be America’s leading cryptologist, and is remembered today as the godfather of the National Security Agency, Elizebeth’s achievements have only received greater recognition in recent years, after World War II records detailing her role were declassified. In fact, the Shakespeare project, which Elizebeth had first encountered as a young woman in 1916, now seems like a minor side project compared to her other achievements. Widely known as “America’s first female cryptanalyst,” in World War I, Elizebeth and William directed an unofficial code-breaking team employed by the national government. During the Prohibition era, she was responsible for breaking codes used by narcotics and alcohol smugglers, incriminating high-profile mob-run rum rings, including that of Al Capone in New Orleans. But her biggest achievement was uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943—a feat that J. Edgar Hoover took full credit for on behalf of the FBI. Friedman, meanwhile, took her involvement to the grave.

Source: Codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman Never Got Her Due—Until Now | Time

In 1959 and 1960, while a student at Bishop’s University, Webster did summer internships at the Globe and Mail — a paper where much later, from 1983 to 1989, he would be editor-in-chief, as he would at the Montreal Gazette from 1989 to 1993. Two subsequent years as the Bishop’s correspondent for the Sherbrooke Daily Record were a further springboard, via a spell as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, to a career whose highlights have now been gathered into a remarkable book.Newspapering: 50 Years of Reporting From Canada and Around the World (Barlow Books, $29.95) does more than serve as a condensed personal view of a momentous half-century. It’s also a master class in short-form reportorial journalism and editorial writing. This kind of material, if not digitized, can all too easily be lost to history, relegated to decomposing microfiche and endangered paper archives. For all those who care about the noble trade he plied, Webster’s book is a boon.

Source: Former Montreal Gazette editor-in-chief Norman Webster looks back at 50 years of reporting | Montreal Gazette

A coalition of sustainable farming groups is calling on FTC to regulate use of the term, which it calls deceptive to customers and harmful to “truly independent farmers.”On some of Cargill’s customer-facing websites, the term “independent family farmer” makes an appearance before the company’s own name does.If you’re familiar with the company, this should come as no great surprise. For years, the meat processing giant has made numerous efforts to underscore the role that its contract growers play in the supply chain, often to a point of minimizing its own involvement. Online, you’re encouraged to “meet the family farmers” that raise its poultry. In a 2015 ad, the company—without naming itself—promoted one of its poultry brands as produced by “independent turkey farms.” And two years ago, the company went so far as to launch a line of limited-edition, “blockchain-based” turkeys, which allowed consumers to trace birds back to their exact farm of origin. The implication, apparently, is that the poultry supply chain takes a simple path from producer to plate, with Cargill playing an all-but-negligible role in the process.

Source: When meat is sourced from “independent family farms,” what does that really mean?