Would you rather live in a world where 1 in 2 low-income people have adequate housing provided by the government at an affordable rate, and the rest wait on a list for someone to die just barely scraping by. Or a world where the housing is affordable for everyone?

Housing some people is great, but housing everyone is preferrable and achievable.

We do not lack houses in Canada (or pretty much anywhere that housing prices are the issue), it’s the distribution that’s the problem. There are more bedrooms in Canada than people, I did the math.

Land Value Taxes would solve the distribution issue, remove speculation, and reduce overall prices for everyone who isn’t living in a massive single detached house with too few people to be considered reasonable (Cough My parents Cough)

Are they actually solving their housing crisis though?

This plan was announced in 2024, so far they have delivered only about 30k units. They have another 270k under construction, and supposedly contracts for 600k more. That puts them on pace to… not hit their targets at all.

Then Mexico has 133 million residents, building 1.2 million government homes over 6 years is ambitious, but the market was already building 140k new units a year anyways, which would be 800k units over 6 years.

Even with years of prep, you can’t just double the amount of units produced per year. The number of skilled workers needed can’t be trained that fast.

At the end of the day, even if they succeed, they will have spent an absolutely egregious amount of money and built about 2% more total homes in the country. Does anyone think that’s realistically going to drive prices down significantly?

Don’t get me wrong, building houses is important, but the government should not be building them with tax money and then using a lottery to give them away to a few lucky low-income people.

There are more environmentally friendly transport options, more environmentally friendly food options (that are actually cheaper than meat), and setting the AC to 24C doesn’t cause heatstroke and saves a ton of energy over a 20C setting. It’s getting to over 30C here today where I am, and I will likely not turn the AC on at all because I cooled the house overnight with open windows and fans, and the indoor temperature will stay below 25C anyways.

Fuck the billionaires, I don’t give a shit about them. I want a land value tax that absolutely fucks them over.

I do however want to use AI for my small business, it’s making me far more efficient and giving me more time to spend with my family.

That’s because people are misinformed, and being intentionally lied to.

It is true that these datacenters use electricity, and in some regions of the US where power is almost completely unregulated they are seeing price increases, in Canada (other than Alberta) that simply can’t happen. BC already is auctioning only limited amounts to the industry.

Some of these data centers use water, but the new datacenters proposed in BC for example don’t use evaporative cooling and therefore don’t consume any water. A lot of the new data centers being built are like this.

Meanwhile, we don’t see protests about actual wasteful energy use/water use, or pollution.

Meat production uses significantly more water and energy, and generates far more pollution. I’m not talking a little bit more, I’m talking HUNDREDS of times more.

Even if datacenters keep expanding like they are currently doing, estimates put total global energy use for the entire industry at 0.4% of total global energy use by 2030. That’s not just AI either, that also includes keeping Amazon and Netflix running. If you want to see the math on that, you can go back in my comment history where I did a full breakdown.

Meat production alone is something like 15% of global energy use.

Then we’ve got fossil fuel vehicles, shitty home heating systems, and more. Even tiny adjustments or improvements in those would massively offset any sort of AI usage.

People are literally trying to save the world from data center energy use and pollution by going to a protest, then driving home in their gas SUV, grabbing a steak at the grocery store, and getting home to their 20C setting on their AC. It’s fucking ridiculous.

It’s the epitome of Penny wise and Pound Foolish.

While intentionally dismantling clean energy projects…

I’ve lost count of how many stupid things this asshole has said or done.

He’s just one big fuck up.

These same lawmakers are going to be doing more themselves when the fire is on their side of the border?

Give me a fucking break.

That’s why the power for projects like this is being set up to be auctioned in a competitive process.
https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2026ECS0005-000095

However, it’s not really a problem at the moment, we aren’t short on power capacity. Did you forget we just spent a stupid amount of money building the new Site C Dam?

Neither of these two proposed Datacenters in Vancouver or Kelowna are planning to use water evaporation for cooling, so there will be effectively 0 water usage.

From the posting comment:

but I think there’s a case to be made that the three new pipelines announced recently could end up being a good thing–for the environment!

There ARE economic and political reasons why they could be good, but building more pipelines will NOT be good for the environment.

No, this is an economic and political argument not an environmental one.

The less oil removed from the ground the better.

We’re talking about carbon capture and storage technologies while we could just NOT PUMP THE OIL and have the same effect with 0 effort.

“Someone else will do it” Sure, but also, they will run out faster and then… Less total carbon will have been released.

And “operational” is still a bit of a stretch in terms of it’s functional capabilities.

Home also too expensive…

If the success of your development hinges on your land value going up, you aren’t a developer you’re a land speculator.

Just another example of why we need Land Value taxes.

Nice try. I’m a meat sac.

You downplay how useful the technology is, if it’s that bad why not just let it fail? It’s because you know that it isn’t actually that bad, and that it’s getting better really fast.

You are however the ones who are not protesting beef production, while likely eating beef or tree nuts, both of which make data center water use look like a baby sipping a lake through a straw.

It’s not whataboutism, it’s calling you out for being a a hypocrite.

As for Vancouver, a place I am intimately familiar with, Hundreds of people are still stupid as fuck.

Here’s an article completely debunking the water use argument for the Vancouver datacenter, which won’t use evaporative cooling technology. https://thetyee.ca/News/2026/05/25/Questions-AI-Data-Centres-Vancouver/

Summer water restrictions of level 2 and 3 are completely fucking normal even without the data centers, and only ban… Surprise surprise, LAWN WATERING! because it’s so fucking wasteful.

The Turbines at the xAI datacenter are stupid, and a reasonable jurisdiction wouldn’t allow them to exist. The fact that the government isn’t stopping them when they are illegally installed is not a datacenter issue, it’s a government issue. Most datacenters aren’t pulling that kind of shit. Elon Musk is just an asshole.

They don’t need your help, they’re just playing the game like every other company. Almost every industry gets tax breaks, it’s not just datacenters. Everything from airplanes and automobile production to oil and gas extraction gets subsidies, despite being massively profitable.

Your argument is weak, try again.

I’m not saying data centers are good. I’m just saying that the arguments people are making against them are weak as fuck when they don’t complain or protest against other industries that are literally 100x worse.

The real reason there’s a growing backlash towards AI datacenters is that people are afraid of losing their jobs to AI.

All those things you said are just excuses people are putting forward because “I just don’t want to lose my job” is super backwards argument that makes them look like luddites. Most of those excuses can be entirely debunked or are flimsy at the very best.

The whole water argument is effectively a non-issue at this point, the vast majority of the new data centers are being built without evaporative coolers. Not to mention the fact that global Beef production uses around 200 times more fresh water than Global Data Centers (and that includes all the non-AI datacenters just running the basic internet and companies stuff that exists).

Power Grid and power pricing concerns can be easily addressed through legislation/regulation, which is exactly what’s happening in reasonable jurisdictions like British Columbia in Canada.

The noise thing is… nothing. It’s the same bullshit that got pushed for Wind Turbines. Sub-sonic, infrasonic, transonic… Bullshit. There’s no scientific evidence backing up any of that shit, which is why people are pointing to random studies in non-name journals published by quack citizen-scientists who are promoting their Youtube channels.

They’re also not building the damn things right next to millions of residential homes. They’re in industrial parks, downtown cores, or out in rural areas. Here’s a worst case scenario, Microsoft just built a new one in Vaughan, Ont (6100 Langstaff Rd) across the street from a suburb. It’s a small two story datacenter next to a massive Costco distribution center that has thousands of trucks going in and out. It’s still about 200 meters from the closest home, but across the intersection of two 4 lane highways which make enough noise (and air pollution) that any sort of data center is going to be entirely irrelevant.

Your average person simply sees no significant individual future benefit to having these built that would outweigh such a risk to their existence and value.

Plan B appears to have failed miserably. The US government is not following the constitution and nothing is being done about it.

I’m running Qwen 3.6 35B A3B (the MoE model) on an 8GB Vram Nvidia GPU with 32 GB of ram, with tweaking (and Turboquant) I’ve got it up to 30-40 Tokens per second and a 260k Context. It’s very usable. I’ve seen people report success with Dual 3060 Cards, but you’re still talking $1000-1500 for that kind of setup even if you have parts of it already.

It is a valid point when the OP claims “like we’ve never seen in the history of humankind”