Links for August 24th, 2025
This week I was in Ottawa for the annual conference of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, something I’ve been doing for many years now. Unsurprisingly, my writing at TVO was decidedly municipally focused. The vibes from the conference were notably different from last year, with AMO and others advocating less for wholesale change and more for incremental (but potentially more achievable) reforms:
To integrity rules and strong mayors we could add other files, like homelessness, highway design, or the nuts and bolts of infrastructure funding programs. AMO and its members haven’t given up on the idea of a more comprehensive change to provincial-municipal relations, but this year the requests are more modest, incremental, and pragmatic. Most delegates TVO Today spoke with at the conference were relatively optimistic about working with still new-ish minister Flack — some version of “a guy we can work with” was a common refrain. Flack, in his speech to AMO delegates Tuesday afternoon, signalled that the government is willing to listen and make changes to some proposals, including both Bill 9 and the government’s housing infrastructure fund.
Also at TVO, a look at the extremely welcome but also extremely belated news that Ontario has finally approved some transit-oriented development policies, after literal years of holding up progress.
Elsewhere: the Globe and Mail reports that Toronto’s housing policy showdown with the federal government doesn’t seem to have resolved, yet.
No sign of housing deal after Housing Minister meets with Toronto mayor [Globe and Mail]
The mayor added that she showed Mr. Robertson a list of approved housing projects, amounting to 30,000 units, which she said would go ahead immediately if the federal government stepped in with cash to allow the city to waive what are known as development charges. Those fees, which can be as much as $150,000 a unit, go toward needed infrastructure such as roads and pipes.
“I showed him the list, and he said ‘My god, we can get shovels in the ground?’ And I said ‘Yes, now,’” Ms. Chow said.
Ms. Chow said the city is on track to overperform on its overall commitment under its housing agreement with Ottawa to build about 60,000 new homes over three years, even without the blanket requirement for sixplexes.
Toronto can claim it’s going to over-perform but its commitment under the federal housing program was pretty straightforward and they’re currently in breach; Ottawa has a real problem if they let Chow and council flout a black-and-white commitment, as I wrote previously.
Not that Toronto is the primary problem in national housing policy right now:
Canada isn’t in a housing starts slump—Ontario is [RBC Economics]
Units currently under construction (more than 93,000 units as of July) are just 11% off from all-time highs in the region, which suggests completions are likely to stay relatively plentiful (albeit diminishing) in the near term.
The downturn in Ontario’s housing construction pipeline could have dire consequences for 2026 and beyond if not addressed.
Any material drop in completions causing a slowdown in the housing stock’s expansion would make it that much harder to close the province’s housing supply gap. It could increase the shortfall and aggravate the affordability crisis if it coincides with a rebound in population growth once Canada’s immigration policy is readjusted.
Notes On a Nonexistent Crime Wave [Public Comment]
In terms of its underlying causes, the current homelessness crisis is very nearly the opposite of the 20th century urban crime wave. It is a product of affluence, inequality, and political sclerosis. In the late 20th century, America’s large cities struggled in large part because their major industries and tax bases were getting hollowed out; today, they are struggling because their land use regimes and planning institutions are ill-equipped to manage rapid economic growth.
Which brings us to the real reason why Trump is an enemy of urban America. If cities like D.C. and Los Angeles truly were crime-ridden hellholes, they would pose little threat to the MAGA movement. It is because these are prosperous and dynamic places that they must be occupied.
A review of Murray's 'Great Housing Hijack' [Michael Wiebe]
Murray has a strange view of value capture, claiming that airspace is public property, and the public needs to be compensated when airspace is privatized by allowing landowners to build apartments. By this logic, isn’t it a giveaway to allow landowners to even build houses on their land? After all, that’s also taking airspace away from the public. The right approach here is simply optimal tax theory: we should tax inelastic factors, like land…
Murray claims that the reason missing middle housing is rare, aside from regulations banning it, is that it is expensive to buy land with existing buildings. But then, why do we see detached houses being demolished and replaced with new detached houses, instead of townhomes or low-rise apartments? The answer is not the cost of demolition, but the fact that demand for detached houses is very high. In Vancouver, developers would rather build a detached house instead of a four-storey rental building. The four-storey would have been feasible a few decades ago, but enough mansion-buyers have moved in that now only a six-storey rental building can compete.
Why are we retreating into our homes? [Carbon Upfront]
I have seven espresso bars within 500 meters (.31 miles) of my home, yet I have an espresso machine. I was surprised to find that I had nine places to get pizza in the same radius, yet home pizza ovens are one of the fastest-growing appliances on the market. We have room for all this stuff.
We have traded the park for the backyard, the theatre for the media room, the pizzeria for the pizza oven and the espresso bar for the Breville Barista Express. AD Magazine shows 11 Designer-Approved Wellness Rooms to Incorporate Into Your Home. And of course, we have traded the hardware store and bookstore and everyotherstore for Amazon and have destroyed our main streets.
How Does the US Use Water? [Construction Physics]
Because of rising concern about water use of data centers, it's worth looking at them specifically. Per Lawrence Berkeley Lab, in 2023, data centers used around 48 million gallons of water a day directly for cooling. Most of this water will evaporate as part of the cooling process, and is thus consumed. If you include indirect water use by including their share of water required for electricity consumption, this adds another 580 million gallons per day. However, as we’ve noted, most thermoelectric power plant water use is not consumptive. Taking this into account, actual water consumed by data centers is around 66 million gallons per day. By 2028, that’s estimated to rise by two to four times.
This is a large amount of water when compared to the amount of water homes use, but it's not particularly large when compared to other large-scale industrial uses. 66 million gallons per day is about 6% of the water used by US golf courses, and it's about 3% of the water used to grow cotton in 2023.
How much energy does Google’s AI use? We did the math [Google]
AI is unlocking scientific breakthroughs, improving healthcare and education, and could add trillions to the global economy. Understanding AI’s footprint is crucial, yet thorough data on the energy and environmental impact of AI inference — the use of a trained AI model to make predictions or generate text or images — has been limited. As more users use AI systems, the importance of inference efficiency rises.
That’s why we’re releasing a technical paper detailing our comprehensive methodology for measuring the energy, emissions, and water impact of Gemini prompts. Using this methodology, we estimate the median Gemini Apps text prompt uses 0.24 watt-hours (Wh) of energy, emits 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent (gCO2e), and consumes 0.26 milliliters (or about five drops) of water1 — figures that are substantially lower than many public estimates. The per-prompt energy impact is equivalent to watching TV for less than nine seconds.
A dangerous new idea about what Democrats are doing wrong [Vox]
Left-wing activists and public intellectuals have strong incentives to believe that there are minimal tensions between the progressive movement’s factional project (to pull Democrats leftward) and the Democratic Party’s electoral one (to disempower the Republican Party). If there were large trade-offs between these two endeavors, then such progressives might have a moral obligation to counsel some form of moderation. After all, as the Trump administration demonstrates on a near-daily basis, the stakes of keeping the authoritarian right out of power are extremely high.
Yet one cannot advocate for a more ideologically cautious Democratic Party without risking estrangement from other progressives. In principle, there is no reason why it couldn’t be true that social democracy is the most just political system and that — at this particular point in history — the Democratic Party would win many more elections if it moderated on some issues. The latter is an empirical judgment, not a normative one. Yet to articulate this view as a progressive is to jeopardize your sense of belonging and esteem among those who share your moral commitments. Doing so is sure to get you derisively branded as a “centrist.” Some progressive writers may even feel comfortable calling you a “craven” scammer without evidence.
In reply: Against Vulgar Populism
And my frustration with the data-driven approach resonated. They got what I meant and who I was talking about. Political discussions are for the public; they should not require a degree in statistics. Also, don’t take it so literally, Eric. It’s figurative language. Do sinister interests lurk behind the vulgar positivism of the center right? Yes, absolutely, but I think this vulgar positivism itself is the problem, the way it has made people talk about their “priors” instead of their beliefs. It inserts a dead and dulling corporate language that kills any thought or imagination. It turns people away from politics or towards the part of politics that’s exciting: populist demagogery and conspiracy-mongering, you know, fun stuff. It constantly forecloses interesting public debates about values and moral problems by pointing to data, which, by the way, they often aren’t even very transparent about. It’s a type of rhetoric without admitting to itself that it is; it gestures at reason, moderation, empiricism, but it does not wholly capture those things.
In Maine, a Political Novice Makes a Long-Shot Bid to Oust Collins [NY Times]
Enter Graham Platner, a 40-year-old oyster farmer and former Marine who served three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and is set on Tuesday to announce a long-shot challenge to Ms. Collins, with a campaign focused on making life better for his state’s working class.
“We need to stop using the exact same playbook that keeps losing over and over and over again,” said Mr. Platner, a political unknown who serves as the local harbor master in the tiny town of Sullivan. “Running establishment candidates who are chosen or supported by the powers that be in D.C. — in Maine specifically — has been a total failure, certainly in attempts to unseat Susan Collins. It is time for us to try something new.”
Your Rectitude Isn't Helping [Off Message]
So I’m writing now to encourage Newsom to dismiss liberal critics who helped set the tone for Democrats during Trump’s first term. Don’t listen to anyone who says dial it back. Ignore the strained contrarianism of The Atlantic, which scoffs, “What political project [these posts] serve other than entrenching Trump’s style is obscure.” Ignore the dead-enderism of liberal rectitude politics, the consultants who imagine celestial referees will stand before the electorate and declare Democrats winner of the decency contest.
Satirizing Trump in this way, by essentially holding up a mirror, serves the express purpose of startling people out of their desensitization. It works, and is working, on two levels: First, by demonstrating that Trump can be effectively mocked. Second by exposing the inconsistency or bad faith of everyone who’s given Trump a pass. Newsom is also holding a mirror up to establishment figures who only expect comity from Democrats, and to Republican propagandists—like Dana Perino—who pretend to be outraged, while simultaneously cheering Trump’s depravity.
How Electricity Got So Expensive [Heatmap]
Where are these higher costs coming from? When you look under the hood, the possibly surprising answer is: the poles and wires themselves. Utilities spent roughly $6 billion more on “overhead poles, towers, and conductors” in 2023 than in 2019, according to the Lawrence Berkeley report. Spending on underground power lines — which are especially important out West to avoid sparking a wildfire — increased by about $4 billion over the same period.
Note the urban planning angle:
Sprawling suburbs in some states may be driving some of those costs, she added. In California, people have pushed farther out into semi-developed or rural land in order to find cheaper housing. Because investor-owned utilities have a legal obligation to get wires and electricity to everyone in their service area, these new and more distant housing developments might be more expensive to connect to the grid than older ones.
And while we’re talking urban planning angles:
Countrywide natural experiment links built environment to physical activity [Nature]
Here we address these limitations by leveraging a large US cohort of smartphone users (N = 2,112,288) to evaluate within-person longitudinal behaviour changes that occurred over 248,266 days of objectively measured physical activity across 7,447 relocations among 1,609 US cities. By analysing the results of this natural experiment, which exposed individuals to differing built environments, we find that increases (decreases) in walkability are associated with significant increases (decreases) in physical activity after relocation. For example, moving from a less walkable (25th percentile) city to a more walkable city (75th percentile) increased walking by 1,100 daily steps, on average. These changes hold across different genders, ages and body mass index values, and are sustained over 3 months. The added activity is predominantly composed of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, which is linked to an array of associated health benefits. Evidence against residential self-selection confounding is reported. Our findings provide robust evidence supporting the importance of the built environment in directly improving health-enhancing physical activity and offer potential guidance for public policy activities in this area. [emphasis added]
OpenAI’s Sam Altman Expects to Spend ‘Trillions’ on Infrastructure [Bloomberg]
Altman also said he sees parallels between the current investment frenzy in artificial intelligence and the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. In both cases, Altman said, “smart people” became “overexcited” by a new technology. But in each instance, he said, that technology was “real” and poised to eventually have lasting impacts on the business world and society.
“Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited by AI? In my opinion, yes,” Altman said in response to a question from Bloomberg News during the conversation. “Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.”
I’d call myself moderately AI-skeptical at this point but I have no doubt that people will find creative uses for the sheer tonnage of compute that’s being built in those datacentres.
But I think it’s obvious – one way or another, this bill must be paid – and therefore we must also expect that the time when AI models were free or nearly free is over.
Finally, we must see whether the rapidly rising prices of computing power will affect earnings expectations in the large American tech giants, which have largely driven the massive share price increases we’ve seen in recent years on the American stock market.
In recent days we have seen a bit of weakness in the US tech stocks and I think we might be heading for more bad news going forward as tech companies struggle to maintain profitability as computing power prices continue to rise and capacity problems in the sector become a lot more obvious to investors.
When Trump's Brain Broke [Unpopular Front]
Consider: Trump recently referred to St. Petersburg as Leningrad, a name that the city has not borne for over 30 years. Some suspect his tendency to lavish praise and respect on Putin is because he’s a Kremlin asset, but I think, on some level, he believes he’s still dealing with the Soviet Union. Russia is a “big power,” as he puts it. The pageantry of the recent meeting with the Russian leader comes straight out of the late Cold War summits of Reagan and H.W. Bush. Not for nothing does the late Cold War align precisely with when Trump was at his first peak. In 1987, he even met General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
Then there’s trade. Trump is obsessed with tariffs. When did this preoccupation publicly emerge? Well, in the late 1980s. In 1987, he took out a full-page ad in the Times, complaining that, “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” The open letter is primarily focused on the supposedly unfair trading practices of the Japanese, who are said to be “ripping off” America and must be “made to pay.”
A Nation of Lawyers Confronts China’s Engineering State [The Atlantic]
Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the ideological mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government from the 1980s onward. By 2002, all nine members of the politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers. Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University, China’s most prominent science institution. At the start of his third term, in 2022, Xi filled the politburo with executives who had experience in aerospace and weapons….
The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. More than half of U.S. presidents practiced law at some point in their career. About half of current U.S. senators have a law degree. Only two American presidents worked as engineers: Herbert Hoover, who built a fortune in mining, and Jimmy Carter, who served as an engineering officer on a Navy submarine. (Hoover and Carter are remembered for many things, especially for their dismal political instincts that produced thumping electoral defeats.)
I’ll withhold wider judgement until I read the full book but while I think this critique is obviously correct in part, it misses the other thing that a government of engineers gives China: largely avoiding turning matters of science into culture-war stuff. China is succeeding at addressing its energy sovereignty by treating it as an engineering problem to solve, not an offshoot of gender politics.
Related: Analysis: Record solar growth keeps China’s CO2 falling in first half of 2025
The CO2 output of the nation’s power sector – its dominant source of emissions – fell by 3% in the first half of the year, as growth in solar power alone matched the rise in electricity demand.
Building Ultra Cheap Energy Storage for Solar PV [Austin Vernon]
Our technology works by storing energy as heat in the least expensive storage material available - large piles of dirt. Co-located solar PV arrays provide energy (as electricity) and are simpler and cheaper than grid-connected solar farms. Electric heating elements embedded in the dirt piles convert electricity to heat. Pipes run through the pile, and fluid flowing through them removes heat to supply the customer. The capital cost, not including the solar PV, is comparable to natural gas storage at less than $0.10/kilowatt-hour thermal and 1000x cheaper than batteries.
COVID Revisionism Has Gone Too Far [The Atlantic]
At times, the revisionist narrative seems to exist in an alternate history in which the United States implemented a heavy-handed, centralized response to the pandemic. In reality, Donald Trump, who was president in 2020 (many COVID revisionists somehow overlook this), spent most of that year downplaying the severity of the pandemic, undermining public-health messaging, and refusing to implement or support the policies that public-health experts, doctors, and much of the country were begging for. The result was a shambolic and porous state-by-state patchwork rather than a unified national strategy to deploy the full resources of the federal government….
Although state-level analyses find no pre-vaccine difference in COVID deaths, they do estimate that the most restrictive states experienced about 30 percent fewer infections than the least restrictive ones, which is the precise outcome that NPIs are supposed to achieve. That is why Thomas Bollyky, the lead author of one of the state-level studies that Macedo and Lee cite, told me that he was shocked to hear his work being used to shed doubt on the effectiveness of NPIs. “I feel like I’m having an Annie Hall–type moment,” Bollyky told me. “These interventions were designed to reduce infections, and that’s exactly what they did.”
Finally, we’ve had another outbreak of the “should you still be on Twitter” discourse and I liked Matt Pearce’s take:
You don't have to quit Twitter. Just stop defending it. [Matt Pearce]
But I left Musk’s Twitter (which was already problematic and deteriorating before Elon’s acquisition) because prospects kept deteriorating for the things I really cared about. The product was bad! The platform depressed outbound hyperlinks to my writing, prioritized and incentivized slop on the feed I was seeing, and many of my favorite posters had long wandered away. This is on top of the baseline cognitive tax of spending too much time on the infinite scroll.
Nor were there prospects for improvement. The proprietor didn’t seem to give a shit about the deteriorating output and whoever was leaving. Certain entities in life don’t care if you complain OR if you quit, Hirschman noted, and they aren’t the kind to reform themselves…
For the record, I’m still on Twitter periodically. I don’t love it, but I don’t actually think Bluesky is much better for my mental health. They both suck in different ways, but one doesn’t make me feel like I’m doing volunteer labour for extremely terrible people. You don’t have to do any of it, and you certainly shouldn’t be trying to make people feel bad for opting out.
Have a good week.