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
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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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.
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.
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.
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 often think about that canal future that never happened. How sick would it be to get a boat to work everyday
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
"I'm going to take the lazy river home." That would be so sweet.
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.
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.
damn, parallel life you must be living the dream!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Let me introduce you to sea sickness and UV reflection making sunburn easier to get on the water
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.