It's important for citizens to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian and US economy before they decide that the country needs a 'deal'. I've brought together a bunch of background info that I haven't heard much of from the legacy media. I think it suggests Canada is doing a whole lot better than America right now. https://billhulet.substack.com/p/my-hot-take-on-the-current-trade

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[–] CloudwalkingOwl@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think it's important to understand what happened during the Industrial revolution. It involved a lot of booms, busts, and a tremendous amount of wasted investment. In Ontario, where I live, there are pieces of extremely expensive to build, but ultimately worthless infrastructure projects all over the place from this time. There was a tremendous over-build of railways and also some canals, for example. In Guelph Ontario, for example, the city owns a railway that it took over when it's parent went bankrupt and stranded local industry that depended on it. And in Perth Ontario, there's a dead canal that goes through the downtown and is a remnant of another failed infrastructure project. These are the 19th century equivalents of LLM data centers.

It's not a question of AI being a bubble or a new industrial revolution. It can be both. And governments have a responsibility to navigate this stuff to minimize risk to the ordinary citizens. Instead, it looks to me like the US is terrified by Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), so it's putting the deed to the farm on the table. This is a profound misallocation of the nation's resources.

[–] AGM@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

Follies and failures are a normal part of any period of explosive change and growth. That's the nature of markets. What matters long-term is who comes out on top in the end. Whoever comes out on top in an industrial revolution also comes out with enormous economic and military leverage over anyone who lagged behind. Now, we can take a cautious approach where we try to never set a foot wrong by regulating everything to a T (and it would have to be done via massive regulatory restriction, because this is a market-led revolution and not a state-led revolution), but that won't make us win in the long-run. So, if you want to think of what happened during the industrial revolution, consider what happened to countries that fell behind during the industrial revolution. That is a big part of what's missing in your analysis of how Canada is positioned relative to the US. The US is in a period of instability as they revamp their whole industrial and financial policy approach, but US tech is positioned to be winners of this industrial revolution and to have massive leverage over Canada in the long-term because of it.

To be clear, I don't like this and if it were up to me we would slow all AI development down until we could provide the power supply from renewables while making social and political adjustments to ensure the benefits could be widely distributed. But, it's not up to me and I can only call it as I see it.