The lawyer representing Mike Smith, the actor who plays Bubbles in the Trailer Park Boys, says a sexual assault charge against his client “won’t be tried in the media.”
“Well, what I’m going to say is, this is an allegation at this point. It hasn’t been proven. It’ll be tried in the court, it won’t be tried in the media,” said lawyer Stan MacDonald at Halifax Provincial Court.
“In the meantime, we ask that the privacy of everyone involved be respected. So that’s all I want to say today. Thank you.”
MacDonald appeared on Smith’s behalf Monday.
Smith has been charged with sexual assault in connection to an alleged incident that court records say took place on Dec. 30, 2017. Court documents indicate Smith was charged by Halifax Regional Police on Oct. 2.
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“It is actually quite common for charges of sexual violence to come out later on into years following the alleged incident,” said Crown attorney Nicole Ford, who confirmed to reporters there is one female complainant in this case.
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“That’s not uncommon, we do see that regularly and that’s why there’s no limitation for sexual violence.”
News of Smith’s charge has made headlines internationally and in entertainment outlets, with coverage on TMZ, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and BBC.
“Every person, no matter of their public status or their public personality or anything to do with their public nature or profile, doesn’t get treated any differently than any other individual,” said Ford.
“We at the PPS (Public Prosecution Service) take every file very seriously. We evaluate every file the same way for each individual person and we maintain our integrity of the investigation separate and we do not provide any type of special treatment to anyone based on their public profile.”
The matter is being transferred to Dartmouth Provincial Court, and Smith’s next court date is set for Dec. 3.
The Crown was granted a publication ban on any information that could identify the alleged victim.
Court documents show that Smith has been ordered not to communicate with or visit the workplace, home or school of the alleged victim. The documents do not include details about the allegation.
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This is not the first time Smith has faced charges before. In April 2016, Smith faced a battery charge in Los Angeles for an incident at a Hollywood hotel involving a woman.
The Trailer Park Boys, a TV sitcom series that follows a group of ex-convicts living in Nova Scotia and their misadventures, including petty crimes, first aired in 2001.
Trailer Park Boys announced in August they had completed filming for the 10-episode Season 13, which will coincide with the 25th anniversary of the series’ start.
An emailed statement from Trailer Park Boys Incorporated says they are aware of the allegation and take such matters seriously, and Smith has stepped away from his role as managing director.
“We recognize how difficult an allegation of this nature is for all involved. Out of respect for the legal process, we will not comment further on the case.”
Deutsche Bank called it “the summer AI turned ugly.” For weeks, with every new bit of evidence that corporations were failing at AI adoption, fears of an AI bubble have intensified, fueled by the realization of just how topheavy the S&P 500 has grown, along with warnings from top industry leaders. An August study from MIT found that 95% of AI pilot programs fail to deliver a return on investment, despite over $40 billion being poured into the space. Just prior to MIT’s report, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rang AI bubble alarm bells, expressing concern over the overvaluation of some AI startups and the intensity of investor enthusiasm. These trends have even caught the attention of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who noted that the U.S. was witnessing “unusually large amounts of economic activity” in building out AI capabilities.
Mark Zuckerberg has some similar thoughts.
The Meta CEO acknowledged that the rapid development of and surging investments in AI stands to form a bubble, potentially outpacing practical productivity and returns and risking a market crash. But Zuckerberg insists that the risk of over-investment is preferable to the alternative: being late to what he sees as an era-defining technological transformation.
“There are compelling arguments for why AI could be an outlier,” Zuckerberg hedged in an appearance on the Access podcast. “And if the models keep on growing in capability year-over-year and demand keeps growing, then maybe there is no collapse.”
Then Zuckerberg joined the Altman camp, saying that all capital expenditure bubbles like the buildout of AI infrastructure, seen largely in the form of data centers, tend to end in similar ways. “But I do think there’s definitely a possibility, at least empirically, based on past large infrastructure buildouts and how they led to bubbles, that something like that would happen here,” Zuckerberg said.
Bubble echoes
Zuckerberg pointed to past bubbles, namely railroads and the dot-com bubble, as key examples of infrastructure buildouts leading to a stock-market collapse. In these instances, he claimed that bubbles occurred due to businesses taking on too much debt, macroeconomic factors, or product demand waning, leading to companies going under and leaving behind valuable assets.
The Meta CEO’s comments echoed Altman’s, who has similarly cautioned that the AI boom is showing many signs of a bubble.
“When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman told The Verge, adding that AI is that kernel: transformative and real, but often surrounded by irrational exuberance. Altman has also warned that “the frenzy of cash chasing anything labeled ‘AI’” can lead to inflated valuations and risk for many.
The consequences of these bubbles are costly. During the dot-com bubble, investors poured money into tech startups with unrealistic expectations, driven by hype and a frenzy for new internet-based companies. When the results fell short, the stocks involved in the dot-com bubble lost more than $5 trillion in total market cap.
An AI bubble stands to have similarly significant economic impacts. In 2025 alone, the largest U.S. tech companies, including Meta, have spent more than $155 billion on AI development. And, according to Statista, the current AI market value is approximately $244.2 billion.
But, for Zuckerberg, losing out on AI’s potential is a far greater risk than losing money in an AI bubble. The company recently committed at least $600 billion to U.S. data centers and infrastructure through 2028 to support its AI ambitions. According to Meta’s chief financial officer, this money will go towards all of the tech giant’s US data center buildouts and domestic business operations, including new hires. Meta also launched its superintelligence lab, recruiting talent aggressively with multi-million-dollar job offers, to develop AI that outperforms human intelligence.
“If we end up misspending a couple hundred billion dollars, that’s going to be very unfortunate obviously. But I would say the risk is higher on the other side,” Zuckerberg said. “If you build too slowly, and superintelligence is possible in three years but you built it out were assuming it would be there in five years, then you’re out of position on what I think is going to be the most important technology that enables the most new products and innovation and value creation in history.”
While he sees the consequences of not being aggressive enough in AI investing outweighing overinvesting, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta’s survival isn’t dependent upon AI’s success.
For companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, he said “there’s obviously this open question of to what extent are they going to keep on raising money, and that’s dependent both to some degree on their performance and how AI does, but also all of these macroeconomic factors that are out of their control.”
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When Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chipmaker Nvidia, met with Donald Trump in the White House last week, he had reason to be cheerful. Most of Nvidia’s chips, which are widely used to train generative artificial-intelligence models, are manufactured in Asia. Earlier this year, it pledged to increase production in the United States, and on Wednesday Trump announced that chip companies that promise to build products in the United States would be exempt from some hefty new tariffs on semiconductors that his Administration is preparing to impose. The next day, Nvidia’s stock hit a new all-time high, and its market capitalization reached $4.4 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable company, ahead of Microsoft, which is also heavily involved in A.I.
Welcome to the A.I. boom, or should I say the A.I. bubble? It has been more than a quarter of a century since the bursting of the great dot-com bubble, during which hundreds of unprofitable internet startups issued stock on the Nasdaq, and the share prices of many tech companies rose into the stratosphere. In March and April of 2000, tech stocks plummeted; subsequently many, but by no means all, of the internet startups went out of business. There has been some discussion on Wall Street in the past few months about whether the current surge in tech is following a similar trajectory. In a research paper entitled “25 Years On; Lessons from the Bursting of the Technology Bubble,” which was published in March, a team of investment analysts from Goldman Sachs argued that it wasn’t: “While enthusiasm for technology stocks has risen sharply in recent years, this has not represented a bubble because the price appreciation has been justified by strong profit fundamentals.” The analysts pointed to the earnings power of the so-called Magnificent Seven companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. Between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of this year, Nvidia’s revenues quintupled, and its after-tax profits rose more than tenfold.
The Goldman paper also provided a salutary history lesson. Between 1995 and 2000, it pointed out, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index rose fivefold, and at the peak of the market a widely used valuation measure for the stocks that trade on it—the price-to-earnings ratio, or “P/E”—topped a hundred and fifty, a level not seen before or since then. By comparison, the five-year period from March, 2020, to March, 2025, had been relatively tame. It’s true, the Nasdaq had roughly doubled, and the P/E ratio had gone up considerably; but it hadn’t got anywhere near three figures.
Having written extensively on the dot-com boom and bust, I found some of Goldman’s analysis persuasive. Many people have either forgotten, or are too young to remember, the extremes reached during the dot-com years. In the logic of speculative hysterias—from the seventeenth-century “tulipmania” in Holland to the rise of Pets.com—greed, FOMO, and the greater-fool theory of investing eventually combine to banish caution, common sense, and financial gravity. Back in March, there was plenty of FOMO and trend-following on Wall Street, but it hadn’t reached the levels of the late nineties. Five months on, however, echoes of the dot-com era are getting louder.
Consider Palantir Technologies, whose A.I. software is used by the Pentagon, the C.I.A., and ICE, not to mention by many commercial companies. A couple of days before Huang visited the White House, Palantir released a positive earnings report. By the end of the week, according to the Yahoo Finance database, the market was valuing the company at more than six hundred times its earnings from the past twelve months, and at about a hundred and thirty times its sales in that same time span. Even during the late nineties, figures like these would have raised eyebrows.
Eye-popping I.P.O.s, another feature of the dot-com era, are also making a comeback. At the end of July, Figma, a firm that makes software used by internet developers, and which has added A.I. features to its suite of products, issued stock on the New York Stock Exchange at thirty-three dollars a share. When trading started, the price jumped to eighty-five. It closed the day at $115.50—a two-hundred-and-fifty-per-cent gain on the offering price. Watching this market action, I was reminded of August 9, 1995, when Netscape, which made the Netscape Navigator web browser, went public. Its stock was priced at twenty-eight dollars, rose to seventy-five, and closed at $58.25. In percentage terms, this leap was smaller than the first-day rise in Figma’s stock, but it’s often described as the beginning of the dot-com bubble.
It should be noted that, since Figma’s I.P.O., its stock has fallen back to below eighty dollars. This could be interpreted as a sign of sanity prevailing, but, given that the shares are still trading at more than double the offering price, other privately owned A.I. companies will be encouraged to enter the stock market. Renaissance Capital, a research firm that specializes in I.P.O.s, lists eight prominent candidates: OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Databricks, SymphonyAI, Waymo, Scale AI, and Perplexity. Almost all of these companies are unicorns: they have been valued at more than a billion dollars in fund-raising deals with venture capitalists and other early investors. But, across the country, according to the research firm Tracxn, there are about seven thousand smaller and lesser-known A.I. companies, more than a thousand of which have already received Series A funding from external backers to finance their operations.
The ready availability of early-stage funding means that a necessary condition for a dot-com-style bubble is in place. So are three more: excitement among investors about a pathbreaking technology—generative A.I. clearly has the potential to impact great swaths of the economy; a Wall Street production line staffed by investment bankers eager to earn fees for organizing I.P.O.s; and accommodative policy. Last month, the Trump Administration announced an “AI Action Plan,” which aims to remove barriers to the deployment of the new technology and to deter individual states from introducing “burdensome” regulatory A.I. laws. The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, appears to be preparing to cut interest rates next month, which could give another boost to the markets.
There are, however, some important differences between now and the nineties, one of which is that the online economy is no longer a vast open plain on which enterprising individuals can propose to build castles to the sky. It is a redoubt of monopoly capitalism, in which Big Tech dominates the horizon. During the dot-com era, or its early stages, anyway, small startups could reasonably hope to exploit first-mover advantage, gain early traction, and create durable business franchises. In the A.I. economy, it seems possible that many of the rewards will go to top firms that can afford to build and maintain large A.I. models and can use their market power and financial might to ward off, or buy out, potential competitors. A vigorous antitrust policy could perhaps prevent this from happening, but, as the Wall Street Journalreported last week, the Administration’s pledge to pursue such a policy is now under threat from lobbyists and power brokers with close ties to the President. If investors decide that monopolies are the future of the A.I.-driven economy, the outcome in the stock market could well mean further gains for existing industry giants rather than a broad-based bubble.
All of this is uncertain, of course. The A.I. boom is still in the stage of building out infrastructure—training large language models, building data centers, and so on. A.I. applications are just beginning to diffuse throughout the economy, and nobody knows for sure just how transformative, and profitable, the technology will be. In this environment, many investors are following the time-honored gold-rush strategy of buying the shovel-makers and big mine owners. But history teaches us that even this strategy is far from risk-free. In an interesting analysis that was posted on the financial-news platform Seeking Alpha, an analyst identified as KCI Research compared Nvidia to Cisco Systems, one of the firms whose stock went parabolic in 1998-99. Just as Nvidia’s G.P.U.s (graphics-processing units) are now widely regarded as must-have components of A.I. infrastructure, Cisco’s routers and other network equipment were viewed as essential components of the internet build-out; for a time, demand for them seemed virtually unlimited. Like Nvidia, Cisco was an innovative and highly profitable company. But, in April of 2000, its stock dropped by almost forty per cent, and a year later it had fallen by about eighty per cent. A quarter of a century on, it still hasn’t recovered the high it hit in early 2000, although, lately, it has come close.
The Nvidia-Cisco comparison was a useful reminder of a dictum from the pioneering stock analyst Benjamin Graham, who was a mentor to Warren Buffett: in the short run, the stock market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine that weighs the cash flows that companies generate. Ironically, the Nvidia-Cisco analogy also inadvertently demonstrated how long the short run can last for, and how dangerous it can be to predict its end date. The analysis was posted in February of last year. Since then, Nvidia’s stock price has risen by another hundred and fifty per cent. ♦
WHITEHALL, N.Y. (NEWS10) — Friends, family and the community gathered in front of the Whitehall Elementary School at the circle, tonight, for a special vigil to honor fourth grader, Airyonna Jabot.
Attendees held balloons and blowing bubbles for little Airyonna, the 10-year-old girl who tragically lost her life in a house fire back on the May 7.
Her family says she will be remembered for her lover spirit, and as the little girl who stuck up for those being picked on or bullied at school.
When it came to food, she was all about spaghetti and meatballs, tacos and chicken tenders from Sunoco.
Aryionna loved drawing and had an affection for Squishmallows and silly snapchat filters. Her family said she was excited about the new kittens her cat just had. They also said she is quite the little shopper as she favored the shopping app, TEMU.
Calling hours for family and friends are tomorrow from 4 pm to 6 pm at Carleton Funeral home in Hudson Falls with funeral services on Thursday followed by and afternoon graveside service.
According to the American Red Cross, the fire at 5 Maple Avenue displaced a total of 10 people. Officials tell NEWS10 there are no new updates, and the fire remains under investigation.
I do not like carbonated beverages, plain and simple. I won’t drink soda, and you’ll never catch me with a beer. Gin and tonics are a no. Sparkling water? A beast in disguise. Oh, the cocktail is not that fizzy, you say? I’ve heard that one before. And get your slushie out of my face. As I said, I do not like carbonated beverages. I do not like them at all.
I don’t just mean that they taste bad to me, the way soap or penicillin does. I mean that they hurt me. They inflict actual, physical pain on my mouth. The sensation is prickly, like having my tongue poked with hundreds of needles. On the handful of foolhardy occasions when I’ve dared take a sip of Coke, it’s felt like what I imagine sipping static electricity would feel like, at least until the pain subsides and I’m left with nothing but the hyper-saturated sweetness of a melted freezer pop. Even after I swallow, my mouth feels raw.
When I try to explain this aversion, people sometimes struggle to wrap their mind around it. “Even sparkling cider?” they ask incredulously. “Even cream soda?” Yes, even sparkling cider. Yes, even cream soda. Occasionally, people try to relate: “Oh, I hate carbonation too … except in champagne.” Whatever these people mean by “hate” is clearly not the same thing I mean. The specifics of the drink make no difference to me. The carbonation itself is the problem.
Part of me wonders whether this all traces back to an incident from my childhood. When I was 6 or 7 years old, I accidentally ate a piece of sushi covered in more wasabi than I’d bargained for and, in a panic, took a big gulp of water—except the water wasn’t water; it was seltzer, and I spit it all over the table. A couple of years later, I tried root beer at day camp and spat that out too. By that point, I’d pretty much learned my lesson.
So why am I like this? It’s not as though my mouth is hypersensitive to all tastes and sensations. I pop Sour Skittles at the movies and have a pretty high spice tolerance. My issue is more specific and, given that Americans consume more than 40 gallons of soda a person each year, very rare. But apparently I’m not the only one: On Reddit’s r/unpopularopinion forum and others like it, never-fizzers find common cause. Drinking carbonated beverages is “kinda masochist.” It’s “pure agony.” It’s like “swallowing battery acid.” “I feel like I’m drinking flesh eating bacteria,” one Redditor writes. “I swear I thought I was the only one who thinks they hurt,” another replies.
You can find dozens of posts like these online—so many, in fact, that you may begin to wonder: How many times can an unpopular opinion be posted before it ceases to qualify as an unpopular opinion? Scientists, for their part, have documented at least one instance of an anaphylactic reaction to sparkling water. That reaction was not caused by the bubbles themselves, but neither is carbonation’s distinctive mouthfeel. For a long time, people assumed that the fizzy sensation was just the tactile experience of having bubbles pop inside your mouth. Early suspicions to the contrary came from mountaineers, who reported that when they raised a toast at the summit, their bubbly champagne tasted flat. In 2013, researchers confirmed that the “bite” of carbonation is not dependent on bubbles: Even after drinking sparkling water in a pressure chamber, where bubbles cannot form, test subjects still reported feeling the slight “sting, burn, or pungency” associated with fizzy drinks, both on the tip of their tongue and at the back of their throat.
The source of that bite, scientists determined, is the carbonic acid formed when enzymes in the mouth break down carbon dioxide. (That process happens to be inhibited by a medication commonly taken by mountaineers to stave off altitude sickness.) The acid activates pain receptors, Earl Carstens, a neurobiologist at UC Davis, told me, so the experience of drinking a carbonated beverage should be sharp and irritating for everyone. In that sense, the weird thing is not that some people hate carbonation; it’s that anyone likes it at all. Social conditioning may play a role: We accept the pain of drinking soda because we’re taught that it’s okay. Or perhaps the mild pain is associated with a pleasurable release of endorphins, as can occur when people eat a spicy food. Both of those factors are likely in play, Carstens said.
But as my experience shows, not everyone experiences carbonic-acid pain the same way. Some people feel a refreshing tickle, others a chemical assault. No one knows why. Scientists have traced other aversions—to cilantro, for example, or tannic wines—to natural variations in human taste and smell receptors. “We are not at the same place in our knowledge of carbonation,” Emily Liman, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California, told me. The problem faced by sodaphobes may yet turn out to have a genetic explanation, but for the moment, scientists don’t even understand exactly which cells are involved in the sensation. Pain receptors (such as the ones that detect spiciness) and taste cells (such as the ones that detect sourness) seem to play a part in feeling carbonation, Liman said, but it’s unclear exactly which cells contribute.
In short, there’s no way to know whether I’m the victim of busted mouth biology, or of some long-repressed experience that bubbles up as oral pain, or of something else entirely. In any case, hating carbonation only means that I have to do a lot of polite declining. It’s not a huge deal, yet I sometimes find myself perturbed to to be cut off from a whole sector of human experience, to dislike something that almost everyone else seems to like, and to dislike it not because of some contrarian impulse or principled objection but because of my physiology or my psychology. Best not to indulge such musings, though—they can easily give way to temptation. Last summer, after years of strict avoidance, I ordered a cider at a bar, thinking that maybe, after all these years, something had changed. Nope!
