Aren’t these both projects that had very strong long term benefits on shipping and exporting?
Jup.
Oh good, so are you saying in about 7 years, this data center bullshit will end?
Depends on whether the AI boom is like the canal boom (fizzled), or the railroad boom (still going, arguably underinvested).
I’m pretty sure the above rhetoric was about the canal and data centers. Railroad was a side topic. So I choose to interpret it as within 7 years, data centers are gonna be repurposed into big box stores or filled with cobwebs & left to crumble to dust.
Canals at least it was pretty easy to see a valuable use case.
Get commerce from New York to the Great Lakes without have to sail up past Maine and then still get past Niagara Falls somehow? That’s amazing!
It just got outpaced by technology
And the Panama and Suez Canals are STILL incredibly important to global shipping, greatly shortening trade routes where rail or road simply isn’t an alternative
Western Canada might not exist if it hadn’t been for canals.
After the war of 1812, Canada / Britain (there wasn’t really a separate Canada at that point) decided there needed to be a way to get military supplies and equipment to Fort York (Toronto) and west of there without using the St. Lawrence river. The river had a number of issues, but the biggest one was that the US controlled the southern shore. So, as a result, it built a canal from Ottawa to Kingston. Montreal to Ottawa was possible with existing rivers, and it was safe to get to Montreal from England without going too close to US territory.
So, the Rideau Canal was built. It connected Bytown (now Ottawa) to Kingston. For about 30 years it was the main way of moving people and supplies to the upper shore of Lake Ontario. After that it was replaced by railroads. But, without all the people who had moved west thanks to the canal and now could buy and sell things, there might not have been the justification to build those railroads.
So, yeah, it got outpaced by technology. But, it was a good idea, and was very useful for a few decades.
Also, many of those canals are now tourist attractions and pleasant natural spaces for residents. Virtually everywhere I’ve travelled where there is a canal, it is now used by people for pleasure boating, or houseboats. Almost always there’s also a nice walking path or bike path next to the canal. Rivers are lovely, but rivers tend to have sloped banks which means there isn’t a natural path that’s right next to the water. With canals, there’s often a man-made edge to the waterway, so you can walk / bike right next to it.
I often think about that canal future that never happened. How sick would it be to get a boat to work everyday
As someone who used to ride a boat to work every day, it fuckin ruled and I miss it
I prefer rail in its various forms. Way faster and cheaper. Canals are absolutely amazing at one crucial thing: moving mind boggling amounts of bulky low value goods for a fraction the cost of rail. The mississippi river system was no joke an american superpower (and still is) for a looong time. You can move grain for thousands of kms for the same price it would cost to ship it 150 via rail.
I do love rail, I’m just sad that we cleared most of our natural waterways for them to be laid down, and often stare wistfully when walking over a rail bridge
I was once in the running for a job at a place that was on the banks of a lake and included a boat landing. Learned that there was a house available within my price range right across on the same lake. So I started having real conversations with my wife about us getting like a jet ski for me to commute across the lake to work.
Didn’t get the job. Was bummed.
AFAIK one of the Google offices was near an airport and there were some people who flew in to work.
My college was near the beach. A fair amount of people would kayak-commute in to school.
damn, parallel life you must be living the dream!
Your co-workers would have been so jealous, they would have hated you, and sabotaged your job. You probably would have ended up in prison, framed for embezzlement. You dodged a bullet. Silver lining.
It isn’t. Riding the ferry is a pain in the ass. Boats are slow (or it is too much of a nuisance). High traffic makes it even slower.
Source: live in a city with shitloads of canals and ferries.
But it’s boat traffic. You can literally stare at the bobbing water until the waterways clear
Some people just never learned to embrace the dilly-dally lifestyle.
dilly-dally
ahh. one of my favorite pastimes.
Sadly we are forced to lock-in.
Until, some time within the first two weeks, the novelty wears off, and commuting on a boat becomes subjectively indistinguishable from commuting on a particularly slow bus.
Having commuted by ferry I have to say it’s still more comfortable than commuting by bus and it’s about equally fast/slow here and you can take a bicycle on the ferry during rush hour.
a ferry on a large natural river/lake/bay will be a very different experience than a ferry on an artificial canal, unless it’s extremely wide.
It’s a ferry on a relatively wide river, wide enough for container ships. Some ferry lines here go through the canals and are a little slower, but these are also shorter lines.
Let me introduce you to sea sickness and UV reflection making sunburn easier to get on the water
Montréal fixed slow ferries a while back. You’re definitely beating traffic on one of these and they essentially aren’t bothering anyone zooming across an already turbulent river commercial Harbour.
Just get one of those old Soviet meteors from some Eastern European junkyard. Not slow, great ferry.
I seem to recall reading about Swiss workers swimming home in the river after work, the current carried them the right way and it seemed brilliant
Yeah, they do that in Berne.
“I’m going to take the lazy river home.” That would be so sweet.
For the first 3 or 4 days. About then you’re gonna start getting tired of drying off before sitting on the couch when you get home. Then the weather will get too hot or too cold or too mosquito-y.
There’s a reason why all modern water parks are surrounded by concrete. Disney World had a water park out in the woods that included a natural lagoon. It’s been shut down for decades after a few guests died of brain eating amoeba.
I think the main advantage would have been getting non urgent freight off motorways as bulk efficiency is the big perk you get with boats.
If you want to boat into work every day Toronto has that option available all year from the islands. Another perk is living in a car free & wooded neighborhood 5-15 minutes away from downtown/harbourfront. Lots of people also live on boats on the Toronto islands, drive their dinghy into town during the summer and then dock at one of the harbourfront marinas in the winter. (Just watch out for the crazy water taxi drivers!)
But how much does that lifestyle cost (relative to a normal Toronto neighborhood)?
$900-1000 per month if you’re on a boat. Probably less during the summer. The houses on the islands are artificially cheap since the prices and sale is controled by the city. The issue is the limited wait list to have the chance to buy one of the houses.
So 50,000 – $700,000 for houses plus a $60,000-78,000 one time lease payment.
At the high end that would maybe get you a two bedroom condo across the water but the average is probably comparable to the price of a one bedroom condo.
The houses on the islands are artificially cheap since the prices and sale is controled by the city
Aren’t they also under the remains of a 100 year lease? With something like 70 years left?
I don’t have 70 years left, so that would be okay, but I can’t handle the Canada winters. I grew up in Cleveland, and that was close enough.
Not sure about that part. Got my info from here and it didn’t mention anything about the 100 year lease. Maybe that’s on the trust itself?
It was signed in 1993 I guess, when the Toronto Island Trust was created. My land lady way back got put on the list and I think it took her decades to move there.
I’m a little jealous of people in England who live on narrowboats on their canals.
And also jealous of the multi-use trail network on what used to be the tow paths, for that matter.
Liveaboard canal boats are also a thing in the Netherlands and honestly it seems pretty great!
There’s no way that the long term billing for AI is tokens. It’s not budgetable, it’s arbitrary, and eventually people will figure out ways to either game it or evade it.
It’s much more likely that they get crammed full of ads and become useless than it is that they become profitable charging via token IMO.
Just had a funny thought:
User: Please write a boilerplate function that does <XYZ>
LLM:
//XYZ Function: This function does the thing... //Subscribe to Incogni to prevent your valuable personal data from ending up in the hands of Data Brokers function XYZ () { ...Eh, it’s close enough?
If they really wanted to, they could charge for “GPU time” directly. Usage gets a bit complicated with batching and context caching, but its definitely a metric that could be precisely derived.
Don’t get me wrong though. That whole business model is doomed.
Whats funny is enshittifying is a suicide button when you can run deepseek or a different open weight model on your own machine. That i own. In my house. Without ads or censorship
And thus they will try to make computers so expensive that no one can afford them.
Free Version: Full of Ads
Premium Version: First adertised as Ad Free, then within a few years Full of Ads
Extreme Version: Ad Free for now, but features segregated into additional subscriptions.
Ad Free = we will not charge you for the ads
The plan is for them to make agentic AI and charge a yearly salary per agent. They are obviously not close to that goal, or you would hear more about it.
That also will not work.
There is applications and ways to make money. But competition isn’t hard to come by and profit will be under expectations.
So my expectations is “skill-based programming” will become too expensive as a long-term solution and people who went that route will quickly become uncompetitive.
I’m unsure what you’re referring to. Tell me more if you will.
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Pretty much all cloud compute is charged by usage (CPU time, storage, ingress, egress, class X api calls, etc), and is notoriously unpredictable. Businesses deal with it because, despite the unpredictability, it is cheaper than any other model could viably be offered at.
Consumer facing products will likely adopt different models; but “AI” is not a product, and most AI products will be bought by businesses.
Sure but none of that is the same as tokens.
Shoutout to the Clinton Kalamazoo Canal
Likely the most ambitious and worst infrastructure project in state history.
It’s so narrow and shallow.
So is the move by the car industry to get rid of mass transit in cities long ago a parallel to AI being swept in to replace people as some better solution only to find out later than it’s not so great but now getting people back is difficult?
The thing about the transit conspiracy is that at that time many people wanted rid of street cars and wanted more space for more cars. It’s not like Ford came to town in roaming gangs, ripping up street car tracks. They fed a desire among the public for a modern car-brained society and the public were happy to help.
A few counties like the UK and Netherlands got in on the canal game early. Nowadays, the remaining canal networks there are mostly used for leisure (there are a lot of houseboats in Amsterdam, London, the English Midlands and such), though occasionally they hold their own for specific freight (the spoil from tunnelling for high-speed rail lines in England was often moved by barge rather than convoys of lorries).
I live in the Netherlands, they still transport lots of cargo via canals. It’s one of the cheapest ways to transport heavy freight like cement. The canals connect to rivers so the barges can travel up the Rhine or Meuse to Germany . Canals aren’t just the waterways inside the cities.
Also a €7BN mega canal is currently under construction in Europe https://youtu.be/VdWQQ1OCUPo
Could have explained in 1 minute what they did in 15. Stopped at the 2. repetitions.
Canals are still used to transport freight in Europe. For example there is a canal in southern Germany that connects the Main to the Danube, allowing ships to travel from the North Sea to the Black Sea through rivers and that canal. Germany generally has lots of navigable waterways including canals.
Yeah, I live in Jersey (New), and we have the Delaware and Raritan Canal, named after the rivers it connects. Was actually used for a bit, and the idea of using it is fascinating. But now it’s a 44-mile path and waterway through history, it’s very nice.
I used to live in an area that had a canal through it with what seemed like a nice walking path alongside it. Those paths are there because many boats going down the canals were actually pulled by horses walking along the path.
Unfortunately, the path next to the canal in my area was full of groundhog holes, and it was nearly impossible to bike it or run it without riding or stepping in a 8 inch hole, which is just big enough to do real damage. And since it’s a useless canal, there is nobody assigned to maintain it, which is why it’s become a haven for groundhogs.
Yeah, ours is fortunately a State Park, and gets maintained. The path is about 4-6 feet wide, depending, pea gravel the whole way, so good for walking, biking, whatever. You’ll see people on the canal in the warmer months. It’s a great resources and I’m fortunate to live so close to it.
Go out there and make the Friends of the Canal group, and demand the change to a maintained canal!
Peter?
They are saying AI is a boom, we are building infrastructure for something that we will look back on as a quaint unfulfilled pipedream.
