Your Butter Sommelier Will Be With You Shortly: "Canada’s first butter bar..."

From Toronto Life, March 17: 

Canada’s first butter bar is coming to Port Credit
Let the butter-maxxing begin

Butter has long inspired acts of devotion. Butter fondue candles—the wacky cousin to the butter board—recently went viral on TikTok. Last summer, the CNE served a Wisconsin-style butter burger, much to the delight of the GTA’s cardiologists. And every November, the likenesses of presidents, celebrities and athletes carved into soft golden statues fill the halls of the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. Butter is a beautiful thing.

Related: St. Brigid’s Creamery, the Ontario-made gourmet butter Emerald Grasslands fans need to know about

Later this spring, Port Credit will get its own shrine to butter with Butter Bar, a storefront hawking locally made small-batch butters from the creative mind of Kate Engineer. She’s known at the Port Credit Farmers’ Market as “the butter babe” and to friends as “chief executive churner,” and she’s been preaching the gospel of butter for about eight years. After launching her hospitality business in 2023, she got to churning bespoke blends—first for friends and family, though she eventually found herself slammed with orders. Now, she’s opening her own store.

“I grew up in a butter-loving household,” she says. “Our family owned a restaurant, and we had an allegiance to butter over olive oil. A few years ago, I had a dream to make a flight of melted butters to dunk shrimp in—now I have a whole business. For two years, I was a one-woman butter show, churning the butters in my kitchen, but now I’m working with a local family-owned creamery to scale up.”

At Butter Bar, Engineer’s compound butters are the main event, and they come in sweet or savoury varieties like cinnamon-sugar-nutmeg or thyme-sage-rosemary. Because they’re small-batch and contain less salt, she says, they’re silkier and higher in delicious fat than big-brand butters....

....MUCH MORE 

Previously from Toronto Life:

• Big Money: The Jeff Bezos Of The Illicit Drug Trade
• The Godfather of Artificial Intelligence Has Some Concerns
• Meanwhile, In Canada: "We Don't Bow to Big Raisin"
• The Education Of Elon Musk: The Ontario Years

Possibly also of interest:

• Small Batch Artisanal High Fructose Corn Syrup
• Is the Future of Food Artisanal?
• The Future Will be Artisanal Everything (HAIN; AHFP)
• Artisanal Pencil Sharpener Considers Career Change
• Questions America Wants Answered: “Should I dilute the laudanum before rubbing it on the gums of my caterwauling baby?”
• Speak of the Artisinal Devil: "Hain Delivers Strong 4Q – Analyst Blog" (HAIN)
• The World is Going Artisanal-- Caffeine: The Magazine 

Still Too Much Liquidity In The System: The World of Luxury Water Collectors

Similar to cocaine being God's way of saying you have too much money, we take the nouveau pretensions of the H2O crowd to have deeper meaning. 

Didn't your mother ever point out that Evian is just naive spelled backwards? And that's Evian, much less this:

"Iskilde from Denmark is a great water for a vegetarian mushroom dish because it has earthy taste notes. Beverly Hills 90H20 is the perfect pairing for a seasonal salad because it will cut through the acidity of a vinaigrette dressing and help balance out the flavors."

tripe.

I blame the Fed's response to the zero lower bound problem.

Inside the Very Real (and Very Complicated) World of Luxury Water Collectors

We've been down this muddy road before:

2013:  I'm in the Wrong Business Part 625: "$20 for a bottle of water? Your water sommelier will bring the menu right away"

2013: Climateer Line of the Day: H2Oh Give Me a Break Edition

2017: Premium Water: Evian Is Just Naive Spelled Backwards

And the whole artisinal thing:

Trifecta, We Have a Hot Sauce Sommelier To Go Along With The Mustard Sommelier and the Water Sommelier

Yes, ma'am, the Satan's Saliva small barrel Special Reserve sauce is made from Scotch Bonnet peppers grown exclusively on a tiny island off the coast of Antigua, a larger island.

The peppers are picked at the peak of their short lives to ensure the characteristic citrus and battery acid top notes contrast with the charred peat and road tar bottom to create a complex tease, flamboyant enough to be called the scamp of the vineyard pepper pot but finishing as cigar box and C4.

In case of overdose the usual cold milk treatment is insufficient and one should go deeper into the butterfat realm, whipping cream at minimum, preferably a hunk of cream cheese to gnaw on as you search for the nearest burn unit.

Perfect when paired with artisanal small batch lard or any of the kicky tallows now making the scene. 

Now back to work.

• "Ye Olde Artisanal Stock Pickery & Son" (or "Equity investing as a luxury good")  
• Testing Small-batch Artisanal Portfolio Construction With Cliff Asness and Grantham, Mayo's James Montier

Or does this type of mockery make me the snob?
Entering that wilderness of mirrors is the slow road to snooty madness so I'll just answer 'no'.  

"Baidu robotaxi outage in Wuhan caused by 'system failure', police say"

This Wuhan, I have heard of it. 

From Reuters, March 31: 

A "system failure" caused a robotaxi outage involving multiple vehicles operated by Baidu's Apollo Go ​in central Chinese city of Wuhan, local police said on Wednesday, ‌re-igniting safety concerns over the fast-growing service.

 

Police received reports late on Tuesday that numerous Apollo Go cars had stopped in the middle of roads and were unable to move, ​according to an official statement. 

Passengers were able to exit the vehicles ​safely and there were no injuries, police said.

The cause of ⁠the incident is still under investigation.

 

At least 100 Apollo Go vehicles were ​affected, a traffic police officer said in a video published by Shanghai-based ​news outlet The Paper. The officer added that while the car doors could be opened, some passengers were hesitant to get out because of heavy traffic and called police ​for assistance....

....MORE 

 

Related:

December 2017:  Interview With CEO Robin Li on Baidu's (and China's) Goal Of Ruling Artificial Intelligence

May 2024: "Baidu Launches New $28,000 Robotaxi In Wuhan"

August 2025: "Lyft and Baidu plan Eurobocab launch, starting in UK and Germany next year" 

November 2025:  "‘Robotaxi has reached a tipping point’: Baidu, Nvidia leaders see momentum as competition rises"

Probably not related:

May 2025: Internet of Things: Former MI6 Head Says China Could Bring London To A Standstill

Capital Markets: "Hope Boosts Risk Appetites and Drags the Greenback Lower"

From Marc to Market:

Hope springs eternal, and the capital markets are trading on hope that the Middle East war ends shortly, even as missiles continue to be fired in the region. President Trump again hinted that the war may be winding down shortly. He will address the nation at 9:00 pm ET today. At a news conference today, UK Prime Minister Starmer announced plans for closer cooperation with the EU. Although by treaty, NATO is not obligated to get involved, any more than it did in the US long war in Vietnam, President Trump renewed his threat to leave the alliance. After the US threat earlier this year to take Greenland from a NATO member, the pact had been strained.

The Middle East War weighed on stocks and bonds and supported the dollar. If, and that may still be a big if, the war winds down, the markets are anticipating a reversal: a rally in stocks and bonds and a weaker greenback....

....MUCH MORE 

Mr. Chandler's first sentence would have had a fair chance in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest but sadly the contest is no more. The contest had a good run, 1983 to 2025 but now we are left with the original as our lodestar:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. 

—The opening sentence from Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1830 

 

In addition to one of the greatest run-on sentences of all time, Bulwer-Lytton is also known for the house he inherited from his mom, Knebworth:

 

 

 —Via Philosophy for Life

He was afterward made 1st Baron Lytton of KKnebworth. 

Barclays Predicts Growing Treasury Market Will Need Bailouts

From Bloomberg, March 31:

The Treasury market has been rendered structurally unstable by its explosive growth and is likely to require occasional “official interventions” to support its functioning, according to strategists at Barclays.

The $31 trillion US government debt market “has grown far faster than the quantum of bank capital,” creating a gap between the supply and demand for liquidity that reverses a decades-long trend and is “the underlying force driving market fragility,” according to a March 30 report by New York University finance professor Jeffrey Meli and several of his former colleagues at Barclays.

The Treasury market has grown at a rate of nearly 9% since 2009, faster than over the previous two decades. Bank capital, meanwhile, expanded by an average of 3.8% a year since 2010, less than half its rate over the preceding period, according to the report co-authored by Barclays strategists Samuel Earl, Anshul Pradhan and Amrut Nashikkar. The bank capital calculation uses quarterly Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data.

“This imbalance increases the need for official interventions to stabilize markets during periods of volatility,” the team wrote. The result is “a vicious cycle: expectations of intervention can become self-reinforcing if they result in greater use of leverage and, thus, more risk of disorderly unwinds.”

Meli left Barclays for academia last year and remains a consultant to the bank.

Official interventions in the Treasury market have become a common feature of the landscape since the 2008 financial crisis, taking the form of large-scale buying of securities by the Federal Reserve. The largest of those followed the onset of Covid in 2020, when Fed buying of Treasuries to meet a sudden demand for cash in the financial system caused its holdings to balloon to nearly $5 trillion in 2022 from around $2 trillion in early 2020.

The Treasury market’s growth is a function of the size of federal budget deficits requiring financing. The slowdown in bank capital growth, the report says, appears to be a consequence of post-crisis reforms that reduced banks’ average return on equity.

The divergent growth rates since the crisis are “a huge shift and a complete reversal — from an oversupply of liquidity to the exact opposite in just a few years,” the strategists wrote.

Other manifestations of the market growing faster than bank capital include broad cheapening of Treasuries relative to interest-rate swaps. They also include the collapse since the financial crisis in the share of Treasury auctions awarded to so-called primary dealers.....

....MUCH MORE 

Probably related 2018/2022:

Think You Know Sovereign Debt? "Lending To The Borrower From Hell: Debt and Default in The Age Of Philip II, 1556-1598" (plus a tiny treasure)