Canada is launching a fund to boost its artificial intelligence sector and creating a new AI safety institute as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues to…
“Making money” in the same way that every tech fad makes money. There will be legit applications but it wont be the world shaking boom that the news makes it out to be.
We’re making plenty of money, thank you very much - it also is a VC white elephant, you’re not wrong, but that VC firehose is currently pointed at AI and we’ve got plenty to fund salaries.
All the posts are rephrasing (1) why not more housing investments (2) AI is already doing well enough, why give American companies more money.
Zero discussions of the nuances of investing, the timing of the investment, HOW it should have been spent. Instead, it’s all “WE SHOULD BE INVESTING IN HOUSING”.
This is only a fraction of what they announced this week in housing funds, which is 7.9B in funding and 15B in loan:
This week, we announced a $15 billion top-up to the Apartment Construction Loan Program, a new $6 billion Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund, a new $1.5 billion Canada Rental Protection Fund, and a $400 million top-up to the Housing Accelerator Fund.
The problem with housing isn’t solely how much is invested at the federal level, but really the laws (at all 3 levels) that need to be completely rewritten from scratch for the 21st century. What’s the point of giving more money to provinces if it ends up subsidizing luxury real estate developers selling to rich foreigners? Does a 20M invested in building Drake’s Toronto downtown vacation house end up helping most Canadians?
What we really need is aggressive development of not just housing, but high-quality-low-margin housing, and all the infrastructure (water/electricity/hospital/schools) and public transport that goes with it.
We shouldn’t take 20 years to decide if we should buy a new train line - we should build now and think later. In fact, we should be giving contracts to Canadian companies (something that Europe/Japan/Korea/China tend to do), or at least force PSP/CDPQ to gain a majority stake in Alstom (sorry Macron) so they can consistently offer the cheapest price. Hell, go ahead and nationalize CN while at it, take over the freight rails and force cargos to wait. What are they gonna do, take the congested roads?
We shouldn’t be talking about millions, but billions, when it comes to housing. If we want 4M houses, which might cost something around 300K per unit and 100K of other infra upgrade costs, that’d take 1.6 trillions. The 20B allocated is literally a bandaid to cover a gunshot wound, and their 2B investment in AI would not change anything at the even the research level (considering 200M over 5 years to maybe 10 schools, that’s 40M a year which is less than 4% of the budget of a research university in Canada).
What we need is a 500B fund, half coming from federal/provincial/municipal (the latter who are collecting all those taxes and should be reinvesting a lot more on education and utilities), the other half from industry, spent over 10 years, with a clear, unpoliticizable, efficient, and unstoppable plan (apart from environmental and indigenous issues, nothing should stand in the way).
So really, people here are getting angry that “AI” is getting the crumbs of the pie instead of “housing”, not one is thinking about who’s eating the rest of the pie (private sectors owned by Americans like Bill Gates who’s the major shareholder of CN).
Your comment is the same thing I’ve been hearing for YEARS, and we’ve yet to see any improvements. At some point I’m going to call bullshit.
There’s always some excuse why the government can’t just help people directly, and it always boils down to some long way version of trickle down. We’re sick of it. We need help NOW, FUCKING RIGHT NOW. we don’t care about the excuses and we no longer wanna be told we have to wait another few years for the “investment” to somehow get to us
I totally agree the money should be distributed now. But spending $500 billions doesn’t happen instantaneously, even if it gets allocated now and the first cheque is written tonight, you can’t just throw 2B per day and housing will magically appear. It should have happened 10 years ago, second best is today, but we got a measly 20B today instead of 100+ that would actually make sense.
Also nowhere in my comment am I talking about trickle down. If you read again, you’ll see I’m focusing on solving the problem via not just blindly throwing money at the problem, but doing things that actually make sense. You can’t just build 100 high rises in saskatoonand expect things will work out: utilities/internet, transport, groceries/restaurants, healthcare, education, entertainment, and many more things need to be swiftly and strategically added. Some people think they should come from private companies, I literally suggested nationalizing them through pension funds, at the end it doesn’t matter as long as they are all urgently added. Again, if having a roof over our heads was the only issue, you can solve it now by buying a mobile home and moving to Atlantics or the Territories.
The libertarians must be back from Sunday brunch already.
This is the sort of thing I want my tax dollars going to. It’s investing in Canada’s economic future, which is one of the things our taxes should be going to. But, no, “tAxAtiOn iS thEft.”
Fuck off, I’m in no way a Libretarian - this sector of our economy doesn’t need investment there are buckets of VC money available (I should know, I work in it). I’d much rather see this money going to supplement housing affordability especially by way of public transit. We could build a whole lot of infrastructure for this money.
You do know the government doesn’t only have $2B to spend, right? They can invest in multiple things. And this notably is infrastructure. That word doesn’t just apply to transportation.
If this were a 20 million dollar grant I’d agree with you… but two billion is a lot of fucking money. We could build a good amount of government housing in cities to help house homeless and at risk families, we could fund food assistance programs for decades, we could invest more in supporting the arts (a little goes a long way when it comes to theater productions), and, as i said, public transit. I do agree generally with the “why not both” but we’re underfunding all the services I mentioned so why don’t we put that money towards public services instead of raising my salary.
Edit: Oh also, we already have pretty robust SR&ED programs that significantly subsidize my wage even though I produce far more value than I cost. I’d just say… we’re actually subsidizing this shit a lot already, we don’t need more.
I’d prefer phrasing it as “misallocation” just to avoid being associated with libertarian assholes that want their services to be provided by the government and want other people to pay for it.
Anyone who isn’t actively thinking about AI’s impact on the world in the near future will be glad to know the internet really was just a fad, streaming will never catch on and Dewey really did defeat Truman.
Thriving where, and at what cost? The money is to promote Canada as a centre for AI development and adoption so that Canadians can reap the economic benefits, and also to devise and implement safety measures against AI-based deception. Neither are a waste of money if you give the topic more than a half-second of thought.
If there’s any chance at all that even a fraction of the jobs threatened by AI are lost to AI then as Canadians are put out of work, private American companies will consume the money that would otherwise be going to Canadian labourers.
Our options are to compete and/or to legislate, but legislating away a technology like AI could very well be a huge economic disadvantage.
If there’s any chance that AI will be as disruptive as it looks in the near future, this type of investment is crucial to retain some Canadian control over the Canadian economy, and could very well be a national security risk to do otherwise.
Yes the government needs to do way more for myriad other problems, but this is an important area to focus on as well.
This week, we announced a $15 billion top-up to the Apartment Construction Loan Program, a new $6 billion Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund, a new $1.5 billion Canada Rental Protection Fund, and a $400 million top-up to the Housing Accelerator Fund.
Ok, I see where I went wrong. That was about low interest loans for those looking to improve the actual building process to reduce costs and accelerate construction.
Why does nobody ever recognize the people who refuse help? The biggest issue in my city are the homeless who go around threatening people, yelling at strangers, attacking pedestrians and refusing help or a spot at the shelter. We have services to help them, but no resources if they refuse.
I do get that part of it too, however it’s a much lower percentage here that are unwilling to receive support. I myself have come across these types on two occasions, out of thousands of homeless people I’ve interacted with.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !canada@lemmy.ca
What a cock. There are a thousand things more important than subsidizing “AI” horse shit. It’s making money all on its own.
Well, no, AI’s not actually making money. It’s drawing in speculators, though, so the hucksters hyping it are doing well for themselves.
AI is another VC white elephant. It’s very expensive to run, with questionable reliability and a totally umclear future.
“Making money” in the same way that every tech fad makes money. There will be legit applications but it wont be the world shaking boom that the news makes it out to be.
We’re making plenty of money, thank you very much - it also is a VC white elephant, you’re not wrong, but that VC firehose is currently pointed at AI and we’ve got plenty to fund salaries.
I forgot how much of an echo chamber Lemmy is.
All the posts are rephrasing (1) why not more housing investments (2) AI is already doing well enough, why give American companies more money.
Zero discussions of the nuances of investing, the timing of the investment, HOW it should have been spent. Instead, it’s all “WE SHOULD BE INVESTING IN HOUSING”.
This is only a fraction of what they announced this week in housing funds, which is 7.9B in funding and 15B in loan:
The problem with housing isn’t solely how much is invested at the federal level, but really the laws (at all 3 levels) that need to be completely rewritten from scratch for the 21st century. What’s the point of giving more money to provinces if it ends up subsidizing luxury real estate developers selling to rich foreigners? Does a 20M invested in building Drake’s Toronto downtown vacation house end up helping most Canadians?
What we really need is aggressive development of not just housing, but high-quality-low-margin housing, and all the infrastructure (water/electricity/hospital/schools) and public transport that goes with it.
We shouldn’t take 20 years to decide if we should buy a new train line - we should build now and think later. In fact, we should be giving contracts to Canadian companies (something that Europe/Japan/Korea/China tend to do), or at least force PSP/CDPQ to gain a majority stake in Alstom (sorry Macron) so they can consistently offer the cheapest price. Hell, go ahead and nationalize CN while at it, take over the freight rails and force cargos to wait. What are they gonna do, take the congested roads?
We shouldn’t be talking about millions, but billions, when it comes to housing. If we want 4M houses, which might cost something around 300K per unit and 100K of other infra upgrade costs, that’d take 1.6 trillions. The 20B allocated is literally a bandaid to cover a gunshot wound, and their 2B investment in AI would not change anything at the even the research level (considering 200M over 5 years to maybe 10 schools, that’s 40M a year which is less than 4% of the budget of a research university in Canada).
What we need is a 500B fund, half coming from federal/provincial/municipal (the latter who are collecting all those taxes and should be reinvesting a lot more on education and utilities), the other half from industry, spent over 10 years, with a clear, unpoliticizable, efficient, and unstoppable plan (apart from environmental and indigenous issues, nothing should stand in the way).
So really, people here are getting angry that “AI” is getting the crumbs of the pie instead of “housing”, not one is thinking about who’s eating the rest of the pie (private sectors owned by Americans like Bill Gates who’s the major shareholder of CN).
Your comment is the same thing I’ve been hearing for YEARS, and we’ve yet to see any improvements. At some point I’m going to call bullshit.
There’s always some excuse why the government can’t just help people directly, and it always boils down to some long way version of trickle down. We’re sick of it. We need help NOW, FUCKING RIGHT NOW. we don’t care about the excuses and we no longer wanna be told we have to wait another few years for the “investment” to somehow get to us
I totally agree the money should be distributed now. But spending $500 billions doesn’t happen instantaneously, even if it gets allocated now and the first cheque is written tonight, you can’t just throw 2B per day and housing will magically appear. It should have happened 10 years ago, second best is today, but we got a measly 20B today instead of 100+ that would actually make sense.
Also nowhere in my comment am I talking about trickle down. If you read again, you’ll see I’m focusing on solving the problem via not just blindly throwing money at the problem, but doing things that actually make sense. You can’t just build 100 high rises in saskatoonand expect things will work out: utilities/internet, transport, groceries/restaurants, healthcare, education, entertainment, and many more things need to be swiftly and strategically added. Some people think they should come from private companies, I literally suggested nationalizing them through pension funds, at the end it doesn’t matter as long as they are all urgently added. Again, if having a roof over our heads was the only issue, you can solve it now by buying a mobile home and moving to Atlantics or the Territories.
Wait… AI has its own sector now?
It’s the “out of work crypto-bros with piles of GPUs” sector.
Free money, everyone run to grab a piece of the free money pile. I mean - free if you ignore the cost to the tax payer.
The libertarians must be back from Sunday brunch already.
This is the sort of thing I want my tax dollars going to. It’s investing in Canada’s economic future, which is one of the things our taxes should be going to. But, no, “tAxAtiOn iS thEft.”
Fuck off, I’m in no way a Libretarian - this sector of our economy doesn’t need investment there are buckets of VC money available (I should know, I work in it). I’d much rather see this money going to supplement housing affordability especially by way of public transit. We could build a whole lot of infrastructure for this money.
You do know the government doesn’t only have $2B to spend, right? They can invest in multiple things. And this notably is infrastructure. That word doesn’t just apply to transportation.
If this were a 20 million dollar grant I’d agree with you… but two billion is a lot of fucking money. We could build a good amount of government housing in cities to help house homeless and at risk families, we could fund food assistance programs for decades, we could invest more in supporting the arts (a little goes a long way when it comes to theater productions), and, as i said, public transit. I do agree generally with the “why not both” but we’re underfunding all the services I mentioned so why don’t we put that money towards public services instead of raising my salary.
Edit: Oh also, we already have pretty robust SR&ED programs that significantly subsidize my wage even though I produce far more value than I cost. I’d just say… we’re actually subsidizing this shit a lot already, we don’t need more.
I’d add health care and education too. Imagine free post-sec…
It 100% is theft when those taxes go into the pockets of tech-bros instead of healthcare or education.
I’d prefer phrasing it as “misallocation” just to avoid being associated with libertarian assholes that want their services to be provided by the government and want other people to pay for it.
Sounds like a waste of money.
Reads like a waste of a comment.
Anyone who isn’t actively thinking about AI’s impact on the world in the near future will be glad to know the internet really was just a fad, streaming will never catch on and Dewey really did defeat Truman.
This industry is already thriving without throwing two billion of government funding at it.
Thriving where, and at what cost? The money is to promote Canada as a centre for AI development and adoption so that Canadians can reap the economic benefits, and also to devise and implement safety measures against AI-based deception. Neither are a waste of money if you give the topic more than a half-second of thought.
The AI bros are just the Crypto Bros reusing their hoard of GPUs.
That sector is already printing money with financiers falling over themselves together a piece.
So no point trying to attract it to Canada, then?
If there’s any chance at all that even a fraction of the jobs threatened by AI are lost to AI then as Canadians are put out of work, private American companies will consume the money that would otherwise be going to Canadian labourers.
Our options are to compete and/or to legislate, but legislating away a technology like AI could very well be a huge economic disadvantage.
If there’s any chance that AI will be as disruptive as it looks in the near future, this type of investment is crucial to retain some Canadian control over the Canadian economy, and could very well be a national security risk to do otherwise.
Yes the government needs to do way more for myriad other problems, but this is an important area to focus on as well.
Interesting point. I took the headline as investing in AI rather that investing in AI being in Canada. Cheers.
Liberals in pre-election mode: billion here, billion there, before you know it, it starts to add up to real money.
That’s 3 times what is being put into a federal housing program and AI already has people falling all over themselves to invest.
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2024/04/05/changing-how-we-buildhomescanada
Missed those. My bad. What led me to my error?
(Searching for announcement…)
Here it is.
Ok, I see where I went wrong. That was about low interest loans for those looking to improve the actual building process to reduce costs and accelerate construction.
Mea culpa.
E: and thanks for the correction.
So he’s got money to house homeless people, right?
Provincial issue
Conservatives can’t think further than Trudeau bad.
Humanity issue.
Also a provincial issue.
Why does nobody ever recognize the people who refuse help? The biggest issue in my city are the homeless who go around threatening people, yelling at strangers, attacking pedestrians and refusing help or a spot at the shelter. We have services to help them, but no resources if they refuse.
I do get that part of it too, however it’s a much lower percentage here that are unwilling to receive support. I myself have come across these types on two occasions, out of thousands of homeless people I’ve interacted with.
I guess because they’re the most noticeable, and the ones people remember.