Here I am reading along only to be shocked by casual racism. I’d love to know why you didn’t provide pictures of other ethnic groups native to the various lands mentioned in this article? Or is it that you don’t consider Sierra Leonians people? How dare you caption the picture “Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic”. Throwing in pictures of people in traditional garb with pictures of maps and mountains and such is incredibly disrespectful, racist, totally unnecessary and completely repugnant. I couldn’t unsubscribe fast enough.
I didn't see the comment but La Gazzetta Europea does seem reasonable elsewhere albeit talking about the hot topic of immigration to the West.
Maybe Hippolyta should be ignored as they are more likely the racist. Hypocrisy comes naturally to such types that are keen to accuse others of the same.
The relevance of the Sherbro people is that there is an island. It is being planned for a charter city. It got described as a "greenfield site", ie one with no people. However, there is an entire ethnic group called the "Sherbro people" located on the island. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherbro_people . To me, this is surprising and relevant in the way that, say, the fact that there are ten ranchers living in a part of Solana County that nobody ever denied had some ranchers in it is not.
As for the picture, I looked into them and thought it was a pretty exotic looking picture that accurately conveyed the idea of "ethnic group living on a far-off little-known African island" and I found it interesting.
I think you are coming from a place where noticing that an ethnic group is interesting, or different-looking, is automatically belittling of that ethnic group. I don't have that instinct, and I think it is fine and good to be delighted by how different and unusual different groups can be.
The caption raised eyebrows for me (I did wonder if it was a reference to something I didn't understand). I didn't know the term 'greenfield', so I didn't realise the comment about the town and the ethnic group was supposed to be a counterpoint to the greenfield claim. So it did seem like a bit of a non sequitur to me (but also, you're just listing off a variety of facts about each one).
I am glad to read this comprehensive reply to that comment, because it makes connections I didn't make on my own.
What I think he meant is that the Sherbro people picture ticks every box in the criteria for a portrait of an exotic ethnic group, to the point where it might as well be AI or a header for a dictionary article on Ethnicity. It's got topless, darkskinned women in colourful skirts and bodypaint, standing a in a line in a jungle. I've seen dozens of similar pictures from Borneo to Tierra del Fuego.
"Racist" was not the best word, but it is certainly "ethnocentric" to hold that the more exotic a group of people are (from the perspective of a well-off urban white Westerner), the more they count as "being ethnic". Much of the humor in Scott's comment is precisely that "being ethnic" is itself a strange turn of phrase. "Ethnic" is not something you are: it is a property of how some groups are defined.
Or, we could pretend like we're adults reading a blog, that the people in that picture are supremely unlikely to know or care that some obscure American writing a blog somewhere thousands of miles away thinks they're interestingly exotic, and that the whole thing of labeling stuff like this racist and problematic is a net loss for mankind.
We're adults reading a (broadly defined) philosophy blog with a huge comments section. Comments trying to discern what philosophical attitudes might be behind the author's or the commenters' words seem to be on point, regardless of whether the people being originally written about know or care.
Are you protesting against my using the label "ethnocentric"? I explicitly rejected the label "racist" and did not us the much too vague "problematic". I guess it is true that I view ethnocentrism as mildly "problematic", just like an infinity of things in the world. If your point is that it is not OK to imply that anything from the author or fellow commenters is "problematic" in any way, sort or kind... that means you refuse any sort of criticism, even mild. Not workable.
Orthogonal to the above, Scott is certainly not obscure.
Fine post, fine answer; wonderful caption, A+, made my day; would pay-subscribe just for this, only trouble: I am already a paid-subscriber. And will remain so as long as Scott will remain Scott. Hypoclites are hardly the target group of ACX. God bless them and I wish them a wonderful day. Scott: give Kai a hug and feel loved. Because you are.
Personally I was delighted to learn that that particular clothes-and-makeup situation had been invented on this Earth, A+ cool picture that taught me a thing I didn't already know. Also yeah, calling the whole island a greenfield site when there's already a town there is misleading and I'm glad you pointed it out.
I’m not sure if “greenfield” means “no inconvenient people already living there”. History doesn’t seem to support it. I think the term was created to contrast “brownfield”.
Though, calling something with inconvenient people living there a “greenfield” could be construed as kinda racist. Seems obvious to me that the picture (and the caption) was included to point out the kinda-racist use of “greenfield”.
I was under the impression of the opposite of davep - the term greenfield came first (probably coined in mid-century suburban expansion if I had to guess) to refer to development in open spaces, which are typically marked as green on maps.
Then with deindustrialization as a lot of cities started to have these abandoned or under-utilized industrial/warehouse districts in the middle of the city, "brownfield" was coined as a contrast to greenfield, for urban revitalization of industrial areas. I think this coinage may have not come until the late '70s or the '80s, as it's sort of a progressive urban planning concept—redeveloping uninhabited warehouse districts was seen as a lower-harm alternative to doing things Robert Moses style.
Dogpatch or Mission Bay are easy examples of brownfield development in SF.
Are there any examples of "greenfield" being used outside of a development context? I don't think anybody referred to places that colonized or expanded into as "greenfields". I don't think the terms are (generally) used to refer to "open spaces" (which are usually not open for development).
Put another way “open spaces”/“green spaces” are things meant to be preserved as such. “Greenfields” are meant to be developed.
With "open spaces" and "green spaces", it doesn't seem like "greenfields" adds any extra meaning.
It's widely used in the tech industry to refer to coding something from scratch instead of bolting features on something that's already there. Often with a connotation that it is a lot easier to make fast progress: I can write ten thousand lines of greenfield code in the same time as one thousand on existing project, simply because the cognitive load is so much lower. On the other hand someone else coming after me will not have such an easy time.
Since it's widespread in tech the term is probably ambient in the Bay Area.
"Brownfield" refers to land that has extra development costs (like waste cleanup); "Greenfield" refers to land/property that doesn't have this cost. The etymology might be that "greenfield" was created to indicate things that weren't "brownfields". Both are "developer" terms.
Their use of the term "greenfield" here seems odd to me.
It seems "greenfield"/"brownfield" are developer jargon.
They are developers. So it seems fitting to me that they are using developer/real-estate jargon. It also seems fitting they are ignoring people who live there.
I don't think anybody uses the term "greenfield" in discussions about clear-cutting Amazon rainforests (for example) or even farmland (another example).
Also, I don't see a picture of a load of women who've laboriously painted their entire bodies, put on their brightest coloured skirts and posed, beaming, before a photographer who is presumably of a different ethnicity, and think "these women would be upset if I joked about our cultural differences, I'd better treat this image with solemn, sober respect."
Because in real life when you meet someone with their traditional glad rags on and that look on their face, in my very limited experience, generally they're as excited to show off their culture as you are interested in it, and usually it's a mutual interest too and you're all in for a cracking evening talking about who's culinary traditions make the least sense or what have you.
Priggish aversion to pointing out the cultural differences of a group of people who've lined up conspicuously to show off their cultural differences is in its own way offensive.
Except many times they do it because that is the only way they can make money, by parading around for tourists. It's not necessarily a bad thing, especially when it gives them income they otherwise would not be able to obtain. But it also sucks that that's their only option and it should make decent people at least feel some unease about the situation.
Given that this particular island is relatively undeveloped, that seems plausible. I will need to sit with that thought for a while to find out if it affects my position in general.
I still feel like it would be presumptuous to let that colour my impression of this particular photo of these particular women, and my default presumption should remain that they are dressing up for their own reasons, because to suppode otherwise with no other context seems uncharitable.
If that is their situation (who knows?), it seems bad, but not made worse by noticing that the striking and interesting photo of these women is indeed striking and interesting. How would not including that photo or clucking about how insensitive the photo is help them, again?
I don't think there's any reason to suppose that the photographer was necessarily of a different ethnicity, as opposed to someone from their ethnicity who fully understood the cultural context of whatever was going on, which I take to be some kind of festival or other special occasion I don't know all the details of. Anyway, whatever it was, I hope the women involved were having a good time and would be pleased to know that random foreigners think their colorful skirts and elaborate body paint are neat.
That's totally fair. I can't remember why I presumed the photographer was of a different ethnicity, if I had to rationalise it I would say that since the subject seems to be the women and their dress, rather than anything specifically they're doing, it seems like a photograph an outsider would be more interested in taking, whereas somebody from that culture would tend to focus on whatever celebration / festival was actually taking place. But actually I have taken photographs like that myself, not because western party clothes are interesting to me as a subject but because the people are family and friends and the photos are for home consumption. So on reflection, it could easily just be a line up of someone's sisters or friends.
Here I thought people were going to complain about seeing titties at work. But without constructing various racisms, I agree the vibe is off. Point-and-laugh always runs the risk of falling flat, whatever your intentions.
I love the sentiment at the end of this paragraph. Ethnic just means a characteristic relating to a distinct people, in other words it's anything cool about a people that isn't part of the consumerist monoculture slop machine. This has all gotten so politically loaded. The value of a culture is in its most distinctive aspects, I get why rhetoric shifted to talking about our "shared humanity" that unites us and all these universalist platitudes, but that's the boring part about any people. If you weren't previously inclined to invade and oppress a group using otherization as a technology of power and subjugation then we should trust you to find exotic garb cool without that becoming a vector of oppression. (And for that matter, pointing out the apparent distinctive cultural value of a group of people on an island that's about to be developed seems like something the anti-colonialist types would want to be noted.)
Yes I also found it to be a celebration of human uniqueness. Glad you attacked the underlying assumption of the original poster, which is that we must conform and must not celebrate difference.
> I think you are coming from a place where noticing that an ethnic group is interesting, or different-looking, is automatically belittling of that ethnic group. I
I think that's the general idea. I personally don't endorse this view, since one can't go through life being perpetually offended at everything -- that way lies madness. Still I can somewhat understand it.
Imagine that you posted a picture of your family on some e.g. East Asian or African forum, and people reply by saying, "wow, those are definitely Americans all right, look at how fat and gun-happy and loud they are", or "yep, they're barbecuing, it's the kind of food Americans eat all the time". That's not too bad, but now imagine this happens everywhere all the time wherever you go. I can see how one might get a bit annoyed at that.
This is fair if you assume they actually dress like that all of the time. Like nearly every other ethnic group exposed to modernity they will primarily dress in jeans and t shirts. Its more like seeing a photo of Beefeaters and going "that is so British!", like yes, they are wearing a traditional culture dress for the purpose of saying "this is our traditional cultural dress". Said photo probably hangs in a museum in the capital of Sierra Leone with a caption like "Sherbro people in their traditional dress".
It seems reasonable to assume that they do not dress like that all the time. Less so to assume that this outfit is "traditional" or that it is distinctively "ethnic". We just don't know. Would you call cosplays at the San Diego Comic Con the traditional Californian dress?
It's an edge case. The obvious rejoinder is that by calling them "ethnic" you are privileging your own, which is to say Western, experience as being "normal", and appearances that deviate from this as "strange." This can be seen as problematic due to the history of "exoticization" of distant people and it's connection to colonial exploitation. That which is different has often been sold as a product to tourists, with few of the profits going to the exotic foreigners. This is even more problematic in the context of a bunch of rich people buying land for development next to/within the impact range of an indigenous people. This has often not gone well. There are some red flags here. (And yes, this has implications for the entire charter cities movement).
On the other hand, I don't think that Scott meant to imply any of that. I believe his explanation that he saw a picture, found it different, unexpected, and interesting, and simply wanted to share that impression with the rest of us. By itself, that isn't necessarily a problem, provided that one keeps in mind that our view of them isn't necessarily any more important than their view of us (or of the people developing the land).
Undoubtedly, if you were to show them a picture of, say, people in New York, they would express how strange and weird Americans are.
I don't think it's a bad thing for Scott, or any other Westerner for that matter, to privilege their own Western experience as being normal and think of the appearance of non-Westerners outside the West as strange; and I reject the strain of anti-colonialist thought that teaches that this is immoral.
Of course what is strange to one person may not be strange to another, and it's reasonable to think that these specific African people think what they are doing is normal and what Scott (or other Westerners) do is strange. And they probably do say things like that in their native language when they encounter images of western life.
And on the third hand there's the genuine asymmetry that Western, particularly English-speaking culture, has developed a bunch of technologies and global prestige that no other culture in the world has; so these random African people are almost certainly more familiar with the West than we are with them, and if they wanted to tell us about their thoughts about it they'd have to do it in English instead of their native language which would require them to learn to communicate proficiently in English and thereby familiarize themselves at least to some degree with (a particular) Western culture.
"I don't think it's a bad thing for Scott, or any other Westerner for that matter, to privilege their own Western experience as being normal and think of the appearance of non-Westerners outside the West as strange; and I reject the strain of anti-colonialist thought that teaches that this is immoral."
The moral philosophy behind cultural diversity is that cultural homogeneity is a weakness, something that harms both the group practicing it and other groups with whom they interact. The default human psychological state is in-group bias, which requires an active effort on the part of the individual to resist and overcome. Let's give it a name: the problem is ethnocentrism. It's normal, but it is a known source of many problems.
The ethnocentrist is at risk of closing themselves off from a wide array of ideas and insights that might be of benefit to themselves. Like a species, too few individual differences renders a culture vulnerable to intercultural competition. Note how this is especially a problem for indigenous people (ie, they are at risk of ethnocentrism themselves).
Simultaneously, ethnocentrism has a long and very well documented history of being associated with violence, suffering and exploitation. To be clear, ethnocentrism isn't the direct cause of these outcomes, but it is an enabling trait, unopposed by some countervailing moral principle, it increases the risk of social conflict. Some degree of ethnocentrism is inevitable, just as some degree of greed, of jealousy, of resentment are inevitable. They are all character flaws, and each of us is responsible for managing their manifestations.
None of this is meant to imply that one can't celebrate one's own culture or society. I'm damn proud to be an American. This doesn't make me any less wary of hyper-patriotism. "My country, right or wrong" makes me pause. Without itself directly causing any obvious problems, that statement nevertheless appears to facilitate international confrontation. I wouldn't try to stop someone from saying it, but hearing someone saying it would cause me to look to some countervailing ethical principle to bring into play, just in case.
"Look how ethnic those people are" is exactly that kind of statement. Not necessarily problematic by itself, nevertheless that kind of statement appears to create the conditions under which the in-group bias could become stronger. That makes me look around for a countervailing ethical principle to bring into play, just in case.
World #1: Scott doesn't include the picture or mention the group, and thus nobody calls him problematic and racist.
World #2: Scott includes the picture and mentions the group, and people call him problematic and racist.
Seems to me that World #1 is one where we are "closing ourselves off from a wide variety of ideas and insights" from other cultures, to avoid someone trying to dunk on us on the internet.
Scott, if you wish to replace the offensive racist ethnic-disparaging photo with another one of a suitably ethnic sub-culture, I give you full permission to use Irish dance costumes. Go ahead, nobody cares if you insult ginger Paddies!
Modern ones where the competitive sub-culture has gone, to use the technical term, effin' bonkers (the wigs! the make-up! the sequins! the whole trash aesthetic!):
Ah, it's often "Shoe The Donkey" was danced at a wedding! (though if you're dancing it, it's called the Varsovienne; my mother called it "Shoe The Donkey", my father called it "Cock Your Leg Up" 😁)
I initially thought the caption was a bit ethnocentric. But then I figured that both Scott and ACX readers are sophisticated enough to be "ironic" about it, to be conscious of how we are looking at it, and thus that "ethic" or "exotic" -- while being an accurate description of our immediate emotional reaction -- as a question of *fact* simply means "quite a bit different looking than People Like Us".
But thinking about it a bit more makes it more deeply amusing. ACX readers are rather uber-Westerners, differing from typical humans in the same way that Westerners differ, but considerably more so. OTOH, the Sherbro people (who seem to be dressed to the nines, that body paint job must have taken a lot of work and wouldn't hold up under a typical day's work) are agrarian villagers, and thus *far* more similar to the median human across all of history. So the Sherbro look exotic to us but more accurately, we're very exotic to *them* and their judgement is a lot better grounded.
This reminds me of the classic cartoon, with the first panel showing the humans looking through the bars at the monkeys in the zoo, and the second panel from the monkeys' point of view, looking through the bars at the humans.
It's just a whimsical way of observing that they have a strikingly unusual - and pretty - style of bodypainting along with colourful dress. Perhaps it was not the best way to put it in this oversensitive age. Though the ladies in question might well be amused by it.
I read it as Scott standing up for them, despite his affinity for charter cities! This is a *land acknowledgment.*
Developers are calling the site a greenfield, implying it's undeveloped land with no significant population. But there is a town - and even more significantly, an ethnic group for whom the land might be important to their history and community.
If the folks living there were wearing a mix of typical urban African clothes, it would be plausible that they're just random people who could fit in anywhere else, maybe even people that moved there recently. So maybe they're not a tight-knit community that would be devastated by the changes this charter city might cause.
But since they look very different from the average Sierra Leonean, and they've clearly coordinated their garb, it supports the claim of being an ethnic community. That means we need to take the effects of the charter city on them more seriously, since a diaspora of their community could be a significant loss.
It also means we need to listen to them. Scott actually looked into this enough to report on what their leaders think of the project (apparently, they're in favor).
Maybe if you didn't know what a greenfield was you missed this point. That's why there's a picture of people, and that's why it's relevant that they appear to have a united and distinct culture.
Seriously, how people go from "picturing people in their traditional celebration garb" to "you consider them not people"? How that mental process even works? How is it disrespectful? These are clearly not their usual everyday garb (just click the link), they dressed up and painted themselves up and so on because they liked to do so. Just as every other people in every other civilization known like to dress up and show themselves around as beautiful. What's "racist" in that and showing that? Some people just work so hard to find something to be offended by.
Was there an anti-Prospera campaign promise in Honduras, or is it just score settling among the elites? Wondering if there’s a populist anti rich gringo movement.
I was sure the campaign slogans "Let's Join the Gringos!" and "Daddy at your service!" had to be memes edited onto the image afterward, but I am very pleased to report they are not.
According to that video (use yt autotranslate) “ Unámonos a los gringos” means to cede national defense to the US and getting easier US visa, similar like the Marshal Islands. Of course the US was interested in doing that in the Pacific so they have military stations for the navy countering Russia/China. But Honduras has no strategic value I know of?
"You know what is an *Estado Libre Asociado*? It is a configuration which would allow us to have a direct agreement with the United States, like Puerto Rico. Have citizenship, investments, decent work, free trade, real health, education and security."
Translating "Estado Libre Asociado" is tricky because on one hand, it literally means "Associated Free State". On the other hand, it is part of Puerto Rico's oficial name in Spanish while its official name in English is "Commonwealth of Puerto Rico". But those are just names, not a legal status. Legally, Puerto Rico is a territory and not a state.
This is not the same as the "Compact of Free Association" which is the regime of the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and Marshall Islands. Unlike Puerto Ricans, people of those countries are not US citizens. They do have free entry which seems to be Chano's primary goal as judged from his website's front page: "Let's join the Gringos so that they do not deport our migrants".
For what it's worth, I don't think that beach is on Grand Bahama, it appears to be Nassau or vicinity, you can tell by the enormous Atlantis resort in the background. From a bit of triangulation I think it's Cabbage Beach on Paradise Island (formerly Hog Island).
> American street grid, Spanish/Japanese superblocks, and Dutch woonerfs
Every time I hear this sort of thing I think yeah, that kinda makes sense. And then I think about the Garden City Movement, and which said that instead of living in crowded European style cities everyone should live in big, spacious and thoughtfully laid-out low density cities, and which also seemed to make sense at the time. But then they tried it out, and people found they didn't really like it -- people love green space but they hate the fact that everything is too far from everything else. Now all the urban design experts want to go straight in the other direction, back to a high-density mode of living which presumably has its own failure modes that we haven't figured out yet, instead of working to find some kind of happy medium.
The main "failure mode" of high-density living is that it partly conflicts with hundreds of years of American cultural values. I think that other than that, we don't worry too much about uncovering new failure modes.
"Hundreds of years" is overselling it; the suburbanization of America started with the mass adoption of the car, around the 1930s. Before that, for all the agrarian mythology, Americans were moving into big cities just like people were everywhere else. You can use the population of Manhattan as a proxy.
(Fun to note that more people lived on Manhattan in 1880 than in 1980, and more in 1960 than 2020.)
But more to the point, at least the middle class spends a few years living in apartments in a walkable neighborhood when they're in college, and they seem to remember it fondly.
It depends how you count "urbanization", but the trend toward living not-on-farms has been pretty monotonic, and passed the fifty percent mark right around 1910.
I think it's more mythology than practicality. It's like the big trucks that are never actually used to carry anything, or people living in far-flung suburbs who like to believe that they're more connected to the land than those city folk.
Traditional American life was a lot more dense around the turn of the century than it has been since, as long as you don't exclude cities, which I think there's a tendency to do.
I'm going to steelman myself by saying that you never had to actually be a farmer or rancher in order to idealize rural land ownership. Orthogonally to where people lived, Americans had a sense of awe about undeveloped country, along with the freedom and opportunity that country represented.
This was one of the reasons the Western genre was so incredibly popular among metropolitan office workers in the 1960s.
This was in a period of history where America was seeing a lot of immigration from eastern and southern Europe, particularly focused on major east coast cities like New York City. So a substantial percentage of the population of Manhattan at that time was comprised of people who were extremely recent arrivals to the US and hadn't assimilated to American values.
Indeed, according to that Wikipedia article the Manhatten population peaked in 1910, had declined substantially by 1930 (after immigration to the US had been greatly curtailed by the Immigration Act of 1924), mostly declined throughout the 20th century, and only began to consistently increase again the 1990s, a period of time characterized by a new wave of immigration to the US.
If anything, this makes the population of Manhattan look like a proxy for the recent immigrant population; and it suggests that recent immigrants rather than well-established Americans are more interested in living in a big, dense city like Manhattan.
Why do you feel that the Garden City didn't work out? There are lots of successful garden towns like Wewelyn, Hampstead Garden Suburb and Canberra. Like every late 19th century movement thought they were going to complete transform the world and bring in utopia and that didn't happen, but that doesn't like the right bar for success or failure.
We have tried high-density and it works fine. Like, obviously we don't want to live in Kowloon Walled City, but even if you look at the highest-density city in Europe (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density), the commune of Levallois-Perret in Paris at 27,713/km², it can fit inside it parks and plazas and trees lining the streets just fine. Density above all comes from uniformly mid-rise housing and ready access to transport (such that the space isn't used by cars and parking lots), it's perfectly compatible with areas zoned for greenery as well.
Heck, in a sense high density is enabler of greenery: if you look at the Nordic capitals for instance, besides smaller-scale very local pieces of greenery like parks, there's sizeable wedges of nature wedged right next to city centers. Were there substantially more sprawl on account of lower density, well, there certainly would have been more temptation to roll over the nature preserves and zone nearby islands for residential rather than recreation.
We have all kinds of happy mediums in terms of urban intensity. It's all relative and subjective.
Manhattan's population density is something like 60,000 people/sq. mile. Lots of people think Manhattan is way too intense and would never want to live there.
Well San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Philly, and Boston all have pretty similar population densities to each other - somewhere around 16-18,000 people/sq. mile. That seems to be a pretty happy medium. Those are all quite successful cities, and desirable places to live. Lots of people even think those cities are too sleepy and quiet! They might prefer the happy medium of Brooklyn (~39,000)
Portland's a pretty happy medium - walkable, bikeable, decent public transit, tons of street trees and green space. Only 5,000 people/sq. mile. To my taste, Portland makes a much more pleasant environment out of that density than other cities with comparable density, like Vegas. Plenty of people in the suburbs or rural areas of Oregon still think of Portland as unbearably crowded and urban! Well, they still have plenty of options for their own idea of "happy medium."
If you want a happy medium between Portland and the cities I listed above, Seattle and LA are both around 8,000 - but they're totally different from each other in terms of walkability, bikeability, tree coverage, traffic - even at any given population density, different planning decisions can take you in all kinds of directions.
And Manhattan's 60,000 is not a ceiling! There are denser cities around the world, and there are parts of Manhattan that could be built up a lot taller. For someone from Hong Kong, Manhattan might be their happy medium!
For a lot of people, Seattle, Boston, or Brooklyn is their happy medium. And the important point that planning nerds in the US converge on, is that places of that degree of urban intensity are really quite rare in this country, even though tons of people want to live in places like that, as indicated by the high housing prices in those cities! It would be great if we could fill out a lot more of the spectrum of "happy mediums" in between ~16,000 (that whole cluster of cities) and NYC.
High density urban living doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have some overriding need for access to an historically absurd number of people within close physical proximity. The industrial revolution was that thing, but as we are de-industrializing I just don't get it anymore. At this point we're down to scenarios like "I can perform specialized service X that only 1 in 10,000 people have any interest in and must be done in person" and "I need to find 5 other people who share both a specific talent and an interest in this niche subject for a collaborative art project that will require repeated in-person workshopping". I like to play a niche Magic the Gathering format that is unusually exclusive due to price and rarity of the game pieces, which is pretty much out of the question unless you live in a metro of substantial size.
That a few such places exist undoubtedly provides a lot of additional value to the world, keeping very small parts of the long tail alive to be discovered by people to whom they'd have utility. But for the vast majority of people, most of their life is not involved with anything like that. Most of their life is going to some building, working, and coming home and being with their family. In which case having your own 1600+ sq ft house with basically a small private forest in the backyard that you completely control and far fewer people everywhere you go just easily wins. High-density is a necessity for a few things, but it makes no sense to be the model for the future when most people aren't involved in those things and would be happier with something else.
As for failure points, urbanization has already caused a number of problems, such as disease, mass-movement formation, and social disorder. There are enough studies linking urban density to schizophrenia for there to be multiple meta-analyses, though I'm not going to dare presume a causation on this blog of all places. Every interaction with a stranger is a potential source of stress, frustration, or conflict. Maybe a large portion of humans CAN handle that, despite the complete absence of it in our evolution and history until the last 150 years, but I would be stunned if there were not a very large fraction of humans incapable of dealing with urban density for whom this is a nightmare.
It seems like your perspective on this is strongly influenced by personal preferences, and I think you should be cautious about extrapolating to what benefits most people. For example, a private forest in your back yard is something some people like (it sounds nice to me) but lots of people have no interest in that and would rather be able to walk to lots of restaurants. Similarly, lots of people don't find interactions with strangers frustrating. And I don't think niche interests are a key factor for most people who want to be in a major urban area. Consider somebody who has trouble making new friends, but has a handful of friends from college. A city is likely the only way to live near more than one or two of them.
To be clear, I was speaking here of mid- to high-density metros. Low density metros like Wichita and Des Moines with 200-400K residents (not counting exurbs) have a very large number of people by historical standards, a comprehensive variety of services and many opportunities on offer, while still catering primarily to people who live in SFH's on pleasant lots and to renters in duplex neighborhoods or low-density apartment complexes. That's big enough to host any ordinary recreational activity, and if you met your friends at a state college, that's a pretty common place for them to end up.
The number of things that would require you to live in Chicago or NYC or LA, (or even a place like Indianapolis or Cleveland) as opposed to Des Moines are actually quite niche. Unless you're in the top 0.1% of your profession or your aspirations are very eccentric, the immense concentration of people does not do much for you. I suppose there may well be normies of no distinction with utterly mundane interests who nevertheless derive value from being able to easily walk to 50 different places to have people make food for them, but they are paying an awfully steep price for that privilege. It is at the very least not clear that the benefits of more urbanization are so great that density is the way of the future. To the contrary, people created the suburbs and moved there as soon as it was made possible. Urbanists' usual complaint about this is that the suburbs were subsidized by highway construction, or that suburbanites are benefitting from urban centers while not contributing property taxes to them, or that cars have externalities like pollution. These are not appeals to the superiority of urban living, they sound more like concessions that suburban life is better, and it's not fair that we're getting away with something. In which case the aspiration of futurists should not be dense urbanization, but rather finding a way to provide suburban comfort and lebensraum but with mitigated externalities and broader access to the benefits of concentration for those pursuits that require it.
The story I usually hear about why people moved to the suburbs is largely about crime and urban blight, things that are a problem in certain times and places but not inherent to cities. In any case a lot of people like high density urban living but are priced out of it, so "paying a steep price" is accurate in the literal sense. I still think you are picturing it as some big sacrifice to quality of life, when for many people it really isn't.
I agree. And actually, one can argue that different phases of life benefit from different types of land use.
Cities are great for young, childfree adults looking for a mate and a career. That's where access to an absurd number of people within close physical proximity pays off. There's a big dating pool and networking/job-changing opportunities, there's in-person office work for learning professional norms, and there are novel experiences like concerts and fancy restaurants to spend those first big paychecks on and impress your date with. Many of the downsides of noise, crime, proximity to traffic, tiny living spaces, and distance from nature are more surmountable for young adults than other age groups.
Once you find a mate and a career, once you have even one kid, and once concerts and restaurants aren't so impressive and you're ready for the deeper adventure of family life, the suburbs are a better tradeoff for most people. The stereotype of moving to the burbs when you have a kid is true, because it's sensible. Air pollution while pregnant is a significant hazard. 4yos and up should be able to access nature independently. Have you ever tried to transport a 1yo, a 4yo, and a week's worth of groceries for a household of four on foot, bike, bus, or train? Once is a wacky anecdote, twice is a hardship. Etc.
It's interesting that you cite independence for kids as a necessity for rural living, because almost nobody lives on an estate in the wilderness. People move to the suburbs, where you can't walk anywhere, and kids have to be driven to absolutely everything. I'd rather have my kid be able to walk or bike to the park than have to drive them.
For what it's worth, I do grocery shopping with a toddler on a bike. (I have one of those pizza-delivery boxes on the back.) We go more like twice once a week, but it's absolutely doable. It's certainly not a hardship; it's a fun thing to do together, and it's a lot more interactive than having the kid in the back seat watching Bluey on a tablet.
People live in cities with kids, and they reportedly enjoy it. People move out of cities when they have kids, in part, because cities are ruinously expensive to live in, because blue governance has decided that scarcity is cool. But that's not some unchangeable constant of nature.
I didn't mention rural living actually. But in most suburban and rural homes, yes, young kids can safely access nature on their own initiative and can have free play outdoors while parents get stuff done inside the house. You don't need to be in the wilderness; 1/10 acre of whatever grows in your area is enough.
Most suburban (not rural) homes also have safe walking access to other homes, whether via sidewalks, quiet neighborhood streets, backyard access, or paths. My 7yo can easily walk to half a dozen friends and two parks, and that's for a neighborhood of 1/4 acre lots. When he's 8yo I'll let him go alone. Some suburban neighborhoods are also within walking distance of a shopping center, though it doesn't usually have everything you'd need to go to in a given week, and sometimes, as in our case, the distance makes the walk more recreational than practical.
I'm glad you enjoy biking with your kid! We have a 4-kid Bunch Bike for our 3 and counting kids, but I'm more of a wimp about inclement weather, so it is more a recreational thing for us than something we'd be comfortable relying on. You have my respect.
> People move to the suburbs, where you can't walk anywhere, and kids have to be driven to absolutely everything. I'd rather have my kid be able to walk or bike to the park than have to drive them.
When Americans say things like this, I'm never sure whether they're exaggerating or whether they just happen to live in suburbs that are terribly designed. Certainly in a competently-designed suburb you should always have parks, and probably a little strip of shops, within a reasonable walking distance of your house. The American suburbs that I've spent time in have always been like this (albeit not quite as good as a standard Australian suburb) but maybe I haven't seen a representative sample.
If American suburbs in general really are so terribly designed that you can't even walk to the nearest park, then I think this just illustrates the point I was trying to make in the first place, that there's far too much attention given to "urbanism" and not enough attention given to how to design better suburbs.
Yes, it really is that bad, I blame zoning laws. They tend to give you a choice between small houses in an old part of town, but in walking distance of interesting things and endless tracks of housing where you can’t get so much as a carton of milk without a big trip.
The corner shop as it’s known in Britain is not a thing in most of America.
> At this point we're down to scenarios like "I can perform specialized service X that only 1 in 10,000 people have any interest in and must be done in person" and "I need to find 5 other people who share both a specific talent and an interest in this niche subject for a collaborative art project that will require repeated in-person workshopping".
In practice I think the appeal is mostly just "I want to be within convenient walking distance of at least twenty bars, fifty cafes and one hundred different restaurants".
And when I was younger that's how I chose to live, and it was good and I was happy to trade off other things for it. Now I'm older and I have kids and I'm happy to trade off convenience for being able to have a big house with a nice backyard and a pool.
Cities should have housing suitable for all stages of life.
Adding on to Chance, the other failure mode is that by revealed preference nobody want to create a life in these cities (by having children there). Not just cost (e.g. Tokyo, Seoul) basis but an independent factor. People do not prosper in them, as a turn of phrase.
What gives you confidence that it's not just cost that drives young families out of these places? The cost of accommodation in city centres is high because demand is high.
One reads references to Free Cities in European history but I never read up what precisely they were and how they functioned. I recently read in AJP Taylor's book on German history that Napoleon did away with about 300 Free Cities and ecclesiastical states.
Certainly a pity that such a unique political formation does not exist any longer.
Sounds like the Cities of the Hanse (not only Germany) - Germania consisted of nearly 1800 territories - lots of them free cities until Napoleon conquered her (well, the Kaiser was officially their (only) superior, but he was always far, far away, very busy and easily distracted). @ ClanceJ: The ecclesiastical states were as feudalistic hellholes as the other feudalistic hellholes were. And I would prefer an Indian slum in 2025 to a German free city in 1780.
To this date Hamburg and Bremen are city-states within the German federal state. Never visited Bremen but Hamburg is very much a by-the-numbers big German city so it does not seem to have that much impact on the ground.
Natürlich. Even Berlin is a city-state. One of 16 federal Länder. All have their own police, own schools, and even a constitution. But all 16 have to follow the federal laws and tax code - and compared with the federal budget: they are dwarfs. And bankrupt Bremen with its outdated tiny port fully dependent on hand-outs from the federal budget and the Länderfinanzausgleich (rich South bailing out the left North and hopeless East).
I think those were basically the same as any other self-governing city? Think Venice, Athens etc., but usually on a smaller scale. With huge variation in how they were actually governed, anything from an elected council, unelected representatives of different social groups (masons etc.), to basically a king.
The cities you are thinking of I think are the Free Cities of the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon ended them in part by conquest, incorporating them into the Confederation of the Rhine, or them falling into other German states which allied with France, and in part because he forced Austria and the Electors to disband the Holy Roman Empire as terms in one war, I forget which exactly.
These cities were free in that they had the right of Imperial Immediacy, meaning their only overlord was the Emperor, they did not have a feudal relationship with any Duke or Count or some such between them and the Emperor. And since the HRE was a very loose thing by this point and had been for a long time, not really a state, this made the cities little sovereignties of themselves like Venice or Genoa or the other Italian city states.
Though a similar process happened in Italy (outside the HRE), not just via Napoleon as Emperor, before he was Emperor he was a general fighting in north Italy, where France was creating and propping up an Italian Republic.
Similar deal with the ecclesiastical states, these will have been things like the Bishopric of Cologne. Cologne was an ecclesiastical state, the Bishop was it's sovereign, it was also an Elector in the HRE, the Bishop got to vote on the Imperial succession.
A useful reference here could be the sociologist Stein Rokkan's idea of a European "city belt" that stretched from Italy through present-day Germany to the Baltic states. Rokkan argued that the first strong & centralized states in Europe emerged at the periphery of the city belt (Britain, France, Denmark), since the more-or-less autonomous cities in the city belt prevented a strong state to emerge until much later in the state-formation process. (The state subduing regional competitors and establishing strong central rule was easier in the periphery, precisely thanks to fewer strong cities.)
Interested in your definition of the throwaway term NIMBY, often used but rarely with a rational definition behind it. I collect these definitions, and given the rest of the piece, this one should be good! I always hope for something new.
…as it is where I live and work, just asking for clarity re priorities. Does anything qualify as a bar to this year’s project X? If so what, if not why? Happy to take the rap.
Nope. I've met homeowners who are content with apartment complexes is going up in their neighborhood. I wouldn't call them THRILLED but they would never dream of trying to obstruct such development. Real people I have spoken to.
I don't think it's much of a mystery what NIMBY means - it's someone who is opposed to building things near them, because they think those things might cause traffic, disrupt views, change neighborhood character, etc. Were you looking for something more philosophical? If so, can you be more specific?
Usually it seems to be used as shorthand for those who think that their own (environmental) interests are more important than (say) the aggregate interests of a wider community; but of course the NIMBY agent might be arguing for a still wider aggregated interest - say the preservation of a local ecology unique to the region or nation. I was looking for some sort of statement about the balance of interests and their weight. Generally it’s just used as a synonym for ‘selfish’.
Nevis: part of the independent "Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis". Legally, a smart choice as the smaller Nevis has the constitutional right to secede when 2/3 of its 12k people demand so.
"Nevis has considerable autonomy in its legislative branch. The constitution actually empowers the Nevis Island Legislature to make laws that cannot be abrogated by the National Assembly" - much smarter choice than Honduras.
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There’s also Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City which is a charter city for quality of life rather than economic development. Or something. It’s not exactly clear.
It bothers me that Bhutan's harsh religious fundamentalism gets a pass, to an extent, because we don't tend to have a mental model for Buddhist bigotry. (I'm quite fond of Buddhism, personally. The problem is with the Bhutanese government)
I'm pretty disturbed by the Honduras international treaty thing, I don't see how this defensible. Essentially this is a means for a democratically elected government to pass an unrepealable law, binding future governments no matter how much popular support they have. This is pretty blatantly undemocratic. Hell, the original government that signed the treaty might have been actively breaking an election promise not to!
And although in this case the treaty is being used to restrict government power, there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be used for the opposite. (There've already been ideas about mandating minimum tax levels. Also, see the UN regularly condemning the US for violating human rights by...*not* making certain political opinions crimes.)
I think this might be a necessary principle of economics. The Obama administration can take out a loan, but then the Trump administration has to pay it back (or declare bankruptcy, or be in default, or otherwise offend the global economic elite).
In the same way, if the Obama administration asks Japanese investors to go 50-50 with American investors on a factory located in American territory, then the Trump administration can't steal the Japanese's share in the factory and give it to Americans without offending global economic norms etc.
I think the Prospera case is just part of the more general version of this.
I admit there are ways to make this extremely bad (eg Obama takes out a $10 trillion loan and gives it to himself, is Trump obligated to respect this), but it seems like a matter of degree and hard to do anything about consistently.
Maybe but...taking a loan means you've taken something from another country, and so they have a right to get that something back. If they don't they've lost a tangible thing. That seems clearly defined and limited in potential scope in a way these non-revokable treaties aren't.
Additionally, I have an issue with things that can't actually be enforced but we all need to pretend they can be. If we all just said "if Honduras doesn't honour the agreement, no one will ever invest there again" I would have no problem. But saying they've violated international law? Saying they have "no power" to revoke the charters? Unless another country is going to go to war with them, they clearly do have that power (economic consequences aside) right?. But we're all supposed to pretend they don't.
Most of the rest of international law seems to work like this as well. I always get such "Emperor has no clothes" or, alternatively, "thunder comes before lightning" feelings on this.
My impression, at least when I studied it 20 years ago, is that *most* countries don't pay back their loans.
So why do people ever invest there again? I'm guessing it's some combination of 1) administrations and economies change fast enough that things might arguably be different next time, 2) high default rates are priced into high interest rates for such countries, 3) people feel sorry for these countries and give them more chances and/or lower interest rates as a sort of charitable development aid, and 4) sometimes giving a loan buys you soft power with the administration to get other political priorities done, even if you never get your actual money back.
Largely correct only considering points 2 & 4 (I won't comment about 1 & 3).
2) It's largely priced in. Consider that a loan at 8% interest doubles every 9 years; since the countries have to be on average paying the loans down, that means as long as the average time between defaults is more than 9 years, you've still made your money back.
Ecuador, for instance, defaulted in 2008. If you lent money in 2009, you still would have made 16% profit by the time they defaulted again in 2020!
Also, creditors rarely lose everything; there's typically a restructuring.
4) Ecuador owes China a LOT of money, and gives China a LOT of oil. And of course, it's not like Correa cared whether or not it got paid back in 20 years... he stuffed his own pockets before he left office:
> "Maybe but...taking a loan means you've taken something from another country, and so they have a right to get that something back. If they don't they've lost a tangible thing. "
I don't see a difference between that vs. investors paying Honduras tens of millions of dollars to build buildings/infrastructure/etc in Prospera on the grounds that it will have a business-friendly climate, and then taking away the business-friendly climate. In either case, they've lost tens of millions of dollars.
I also don't understand your "international law has no clothes" argument. If international law had no clothes, there's no problem - Honduras can simply say it is cancelling Prospera, and nobody can stop them. We're only having this debate because in fact international law has teeth and people can stop them. I think the exact enforcement mechanism is that if Honduras confiscates international investor assets within Honduras, then the investors can sue to confiscate Honduran-owned assets abroad. I'm not sure what teeth you want beyond this.
I don't think "international law has teeth" is quite the right summary here. If it was the US cancelling a commitment to Hondurans, rather than vice versa, I would be surprised if international law made a difference.
I think it's probably more "The US has teeth, and one of the ways it can bite is through the international legal system".
I don't think this is correct, though I'm not an expert. I think if the US confiscated another country's property, the other country would consult international courts, the courts would order some remedy, and the US would comply or else be kicked out of whatever investment treaty was involved (so other countries might have more ability to cheat US patents, or to raise trade barriers against the US). I agree the US might get slight special treatment, but I don't think they could get away with robbery in broad daylight.
I am glad India hasn't joined this racket. A convenient type of setup for Third world kleptocrats.
We do have a similar situation ongoing with Devas vs Antrix arbitration. In 2005 some very senior retired bureaucrats of Indian space agency got together, incorporated a startup abroad and got a very sweet deal with the space agency. Naturally the deal was questioned and cancelled by the government. But they had planned for this and took government to international arbitration and got 560 million dollar award. But Indian government didn't play nice and fought the arbitration. Now Devas appears to be heading for liquidation.
I think I want people to not speak of "international law" in a way that implies it's anything more than a generalised description of the fact that if a sovereign country does something untoward some other sovereign countries may or may not (but probably will) retaliate by doing otherwise-untoward things back to them. Assuming "other countries doing otherwise-untoward things back to them" remains the extent of the enforcement mechanism. (When there's an actual international army that answers to the UN, we can reevaluate).
I strongly suspect but can't prove that people talk in such a way because they want people to implicitly and falsely assume that international law has more power than it does, and I am against such dishonesty.
Are you allowed to speak of normal (national) law in terms that imply it's anything more than a generalized description of the fact that if a person hurts other people, then some set of people may or may not (but probably will) retaliate by punishing them?
The US government will probably retaliate if Hondurans try to pull anything. Brimen (head of Prospera) paid a good amount of money to get them on his side. From Wikipedia:
> The founder of Próspera, Erick Brimen, also has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby U.S. legislators to put sanctions on Honduras and end U.S. aid to the country if the Honduran government does not allow Próspera to continue operations. In 2024, U.S. Representative Steven Horsford pressured Honduras by advocating for denying visas to their government officials if Honduras did not do as Próspera wanted (Brimen donated $5,000 to Horsford's campaign in 2023). In the 2024 U.S. House budget, members also tried to pressure Honduras to allow ZEDEs to continue how they wish. U.S. Representative María Elvira Salazar has claimed that the current Honduran leadership are socialists who don't care about their country when they don't allow ZEDEs to do as they like. As of 2025, ZEDEs—including Próspera—remain operational despite ongoing legal disputes.
I think that you are overestimating the power of the "international treaty thing": This binds future governments to respect the agreement... or pay a fine.
If the People in the future democratically believe that breaking the agreement is worth the fine, they will pay it. If they don't, they won't.
This is pretty standard for Free Trade Agreements, and there's a reason for that: What investors need to invest is *certainty*. This binding mechanism creates certainty that they will see a ROI, whether through investment or by paying the fines.
And don't be alarmed by the disproportionate fine that Prospera is asking for: It's pretty common in these arbitration to start with a big number, only to make it come down later on the negotiations. And as Scott mentioned, Prospera doesn't want the fine anyways.
In practice, future governments have all the power to break these treaties, although they likely pay a metaphorical fine through lesser investment due to the juridical uncertainty that their actions create. Look at the Brexit (the UK tearing up an agreement), the renegotiation of NAFTA into USMCA (the US tearing up an agreement), etc...
And this isn't counting the idea that the arbitration might just side with the new government anyways. Ten years ago, in El Salvador (neighboring Honduras), a Canadian gold mining company sued the government for something like $1 Billion USD (20% of annual government budget), for not getting permissions to mine gold. El Salvador argued that the company never had the environmental protections that the law demanded at the time. The nation won, and the company had to pay the arbitration fees.
Such treaties are a diplomatic embodiment of the saying "Beggars cannot be choosers."
If a relatively poor country with a history of bad governance wants to attract investments, they need to provide a relatively big symbolic collateral against the risk of destroying said investments later. You don't need such specific treaty guarantees in Denmark or Switzerland, but in Central America...
Honduras is still a relatively reliable "beggar" compared to, say, some African countries which would not be able to close even this sort of deal.
It's not that the government can't do it. It's that there are consequences for doing it the government wants to wriggle out of. The government can absolutely abolish Prospera. It just needs to pay a fine. It can also not pay the fine. But then it will undoubtedly lose the aid and trade it relies on. It's coercive in the sense that it's coercive to refuse to continue doing business with someone who broke a deal.
This isn't different from adding anything else into a constitution, binding future legislators to it. And similarly, if a government writes a business contract, it has to mean something.
Not that I'm a big fan of this specific use case of charter cities, but long-term binding laws in general are useful and necessary, because some things just can't be done properly within one election cycle. A government can fail using that tool profitably, but a government without it can never succeed with it.
>the UN regularly condemning the US for violating human rights by...*not* making certain political opinions crimes
I'm skeptical, do you have a citation for this?
Anyways, I'd say ability to bind oneself with a treaty makes a person or group *more* free, not less. Please don't restrict my ability to sign contracts in the name of protecting my freedom!
"CERD also called on the Government to ensure that the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly are not exercised with the aim of destroying or denying the rights and freedoms of others, and also asked it to provide the necessary guarantees so that such rights are not misused to promote racist hate speech and racist crimes."
"The convention also requires its parties to criminalize hate speech and criminalize membership in racist organizations."
And binding your own future decisions with a contract...is possibly compatible with freedom. Binding *other people's* future decisions (such as those too young to vote at the time the original treaty was adopted, assuming it was even done according to popular will as I addressed)...absolutely definitely isn't.
There, a guy noticed that this West Texas county has about $60m in oil revenue but fewer than 100 registered voters ( many of whom don't even live there). So he's encouraging his social media followers to move to Texas and take up residence on some cheap land so that they can all democratically take over the county government and do what they want with the $60m.
Definitely an innovative solution to the sustainability problem plaguing other model cities. Also a better place name.
With regard to Sherbro Island City, I'm going to do some brainstorming because I'm excited by the anti-poverty potential of this project. Have they thought about applying for development dollars at all? A lot of Gates philanthropy goes to Africa, yes? Imagine if Gates agreed to match investments in Sherbro Island City dollar-for-dollar, for example.
In terms of bootstrapping Sherbro, my understanding is that the regulatory environment in Africa is extremely unfavorable to entrepreneurs. Magatte Wade has written many notes and blogposts on Substack about this issue; here is a recent one: https://substack.com/@magattew/note/c-169164344
I understand that a lot of African businesses operate under the table to escape the notice of regulators, or struggle to get consistent access to electricity. So one path would be to scour the continent for successful small business owners who are sick of blackouts and bad regulation, and entice them to move to Sherbro. Of course, these same issues would also be expected to apply to non-African multinationals who are looking to expand their footprint in Africa. Presumably some fraction of these businesses don't require as much critical mass in terms of civilization, so are more interested as early adopters. The best seed might even be a sort of "company town" for some multinational.
In principle I think existing Sherbro inhabitants can be a significant benefit for the project, if the project means bringing good jobs to the area. It's definitely an important relationship to manage. I would start by doing ordinary development stuff focused on delivering benefits for island inhabitants (fresh water, school, library, whatever they want/need), then once some trust has been built, get them to sign a document which unlocks further development aid, and a chunk of equity so they will share in the benefits if the city is successful.
Another way to think about it is that manufacturing exists on a spectrum. Something really bulky, like concrete, will generally be manufactured locally. Something tiny and complex, like a microchip, will be imported into Africa from elsewhere for the time being. The sweet spot is something medium-heavy, maybe something you can make with a 3d printer, maybe refining of raw materials which Africa exports, where it's medium-punishing to transport it from place to place. If it was heavier, doing it on an island would be too much trouble. If it was lighter, importing it from abroad would be too easy.
Sierra Leone import/export data could be a good place to start, either take a raw material they're exporting and refine it first, or identify something they're importing and see if it could be made locally: https://oec.world/en/profile/country/sle It looks like the country actually imports a fair amount of cement and is doing a tariff to try to build indigenous cement manufacturing capacity, so that could even be a good place to start perhaps?
An AI tells me: "Despite having favorable conditions for rice cultivation, the country’s domestic production is low due to poor investment in agriculture over many years, partly linked to historical policies in the 1980s that encouraged imports rather than supporting local farming. Rapid population growth has also outpaced local production capacity. Additionally, many consumers, especially in urban areas like Freetown, prefer imported rice because it is perceived as cleaner and free from impurities like stones, which can be present in locally grown rice."
How about a business which buys locally grown rice and uses robotics techniques to purify it? How about an academy for farmers from the mainland which teaches them farming techniques and sells them farming supplies?
Do you even need robotics? I would have thought that some sort of centrifuging tech would suffice to get stones out of rice. At a lower level there is winnowing. Of course you'd need to be selling it in reasonably large quantities, and maybe that's not the way the domestic market operates.
Then again I've read that bread in Middle Age Europe would grind down your teeth over time due to the little bits of millstone in it...
Yeah on second thought I would start with very little machinery and hire local laborers, since labor is likely to be cheap, people probably need jobs. Bring in some food scientists and industrial engineers to optimize the pipeline. Idris Elba could check for quality and put his face on every package. "Idris Elba's Favorite Premium Native Grown Sierra Leone Rice." Maybe they could even export internationally some day. Heck, partner with a multinational right from the beginning even.
Then on every package of rice they could have a little box explaining about Sherbro Island City, enticing business owners and entrepreneurs to come set up shop in order to be connected with foreign investors and so forth.
I think this is fairly synergistic with the farmer academy idea. Bring farmers in during the dry season, teach them about irrigation and techniques for maximizing yield and minimizing impurities, establish supplier relationships. The more ownership the corporation can establish over the supply chain, the higher quality product they should be able to produce.
Even without robotics I would probably employ computer vision for quality control though. It should be better at spotting small rocks than a human.
(1) For Solano, good luck with the shipbuilding. There's good reasons that the former big shipbuilding industries have mostly gone away and the East has taken over.
(2) Re: Prospera, I would cynically suggest the problem with the unconstitutionality could be solved by changing the constitution (that's what the Repeal movement for abortion did in my country). I have little sympathy for Prospera itself and thought this would be the exact outcome: the government changes and the new government revokes all agreements made by the previous one
(3) Re: Sierra Leone, again - best wishes and good luck, but it's Sierra Leone.
A large part of the problem seems to be that demand for big ships isn't a steady one year-on-year, and it takes a long time to build a big ship. So you're trying to get contracts for building, then you're tied up for a while, and how do you keep the shipyards open when customers are "thanks, we have enough vessels for now"?
"Conversations with veteran industrialists about the state of shipbuilding today do not yield whimsical reminiscence of the good old days. Instead they produce regrets that tough commercial decisions – of the kind that saw France and Germany aggressively pursue markets such as nuclear power or premium cars – were not made in Britain in the 70s and 80s. Sir John Parker, the former chief executive of Harland and Wolff, the much-diminished Belfast shipbuilder, said the industry missed an opportunity in the Thatcher era.
"One of my big industrial disappointments or even failures is that I failed to persuade the government of the day that there was a big future in building cruise ships. Whoever used run-of-the-mill bulk carriers or tankers drifted to the lowest-cost country. So how you survived in higher-cost countries was more sophisticated ships like cruise ships. I saw that there was going to be a lot of growth in cruise ship building so we demonstrated that this was a real growth industry. And nearly 25 years on, those forecasts would have underestimated the demand." Thus the industry drifted to the east."
"Following the end of WWII, UK shipbuilding appeared ascendant. The shipbuilding industries of most other countries had been devastated by the war (or were, like Japan, prevented from building new ships), and in the immediate years after the war the UK built more ship tonnage than the rest of the world combined.
But this success was short-lived. The UK ultimately proved unable to respond to competitors who entered the market with new, large shipyards which employed novel methods of shipbuilding developed by the US during WWII. The UK fell from producing 57% of world tonnage in 1947 to just 17% a decade later. By the 1970s their output was below 5% of world total, and by the 1990s it was less than 1%. In 2023, the UK produced no commercial ships at all.
Ultimately, UK shipbuilding was undone by the very thing that had made it successful: it developed a production system that heavily leveraged skilled labor, and minimized the need for expensive infrastructure or management overheads. For a time, this system had allowed UK shipbuilders to produce ships more cheaply and efficiently than almost anywhere else. But as the nature of the shipping market, and of ships themselves, changed, the UK proved unable to change its industry in response, and it steadily lost ground to international competitors."
And of course, I have to link to the song "Shipbuilding":
""Shipbuilding" is a song with lyrics by Elvis Costello and music by Clive Langer. Written during the Falklands War of 1982, Costello's lyrics highlight the irony of the war bringing back prosperity to the traditional shipbuilding areas of Clydeside, Merseyside (Cammell Laird), North East England and Belfast (Harland and Wolff) to build new ships to replace those being sunk in the war, whilst also sending off the sons of these areas to fight and, potentially, lose their lives in those same ships."
There's probably incentive to automate with robots, since Claude tells me:
"Hampton Roads [VA] [the largest shipyard area in the US] is currently short roughly 10,000 workers in shipbuilding and ship repair, including welders, electricians, painters, and pipefitters."
Other Claude tidbits:
"Virginia ranks first among all U.S. states in shipbuilding with 63,650 jobs."
"Newport News Shipbuilding [in Hampton roads, VA] serves as the sole provider of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and one of two providers of U.S. Navy submarines" - this seems like a geostrategic vulnerability?!
"The United States builds about 0.2% of the world's tonnage."
"The industry appears substantially larger than in 2005." I asked for this comparison because I visited Newport News Shipbuilding around 2005. A college club I was part of handed out donuts to the shipyard workers as they walked into a massive ship for work. We had to get there before dawn. It was cold and misty, and the ship loomed impressively. I was struck by how large the metal lunchboxes most of the workers carried were. They were a pretty solemn crowd that early in the morning.
In principle US shipbuilders should, in theory, have an advantage in the local market due to the Jones Act. The US has an amazing internal river system which is underutilized due to the Jones Act.
"Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on 'AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories'."
Why the need for AI, or is this just a case of "AI all the things"?
Not sure why a CNC machine with the right cutting tool could not be used to mass produce stone ornamentation.
I suspect that at least part of the problem might involve the fact that stone is not a perfectly homogeneous medium, and stonecutters need to learn how to adapt their design to the grain structure they find as they start cutting parts away. I think this is the meaning of Michelangelo’s quote about “removing everything that doesn’t look like David”.
I did avoid assuming we'd need to replicate the c. 1900 look (think "Victorian gingerbread house") where new machining techniques made identical decoration cheaper.
But even when you go earlier, to cathedrals or temples, although you have plenty of unique statues or friezes, the majority of the decoration is identical fluting, molding, buttressing, columns, etc. It would look strange and be difficult engineering if all those pieces were unique.
But maybe we can make it work! I'm thinking about gardens now, as I used to be a landscape designer. Although many formal gardens have long attempted to standardize some of the plants via planting them in lines or pruning them to identical sizes, it's always delightful to have some freeform plants for contrast. And with plants there's always a little randomness. You can scatter a dozen clipped boxwood balls of various sizes throughout a garden and it provides a sense of orderly grounding yet the size difference emphasizes how they grow. Maybe you could put lots of different width columns in a building and it would feel a bit like being in a forest, or put lots of different sized decorations along a roof edge and it would remind people of icicles, etc. So ok, maybe there's more room for aesthetically pleasant variation than I thought.
I should add that I consider Prospera's whole regulatory regime to protect consumers basically a lie. They chartered a bank, Seshat Bank, in which I deposited a decent amount of money in 2022, to be returned on a very short (3 month!) timeline. The bank refused to return my money for over 2 years, and I was trying to be in contact with both the bank and Prospera's regulators for that whole time, but they were all very unresponsive. Eventually Prospera issued a statement of liquidation of the bank in early 2024. Now it's been another year and there has been no movement. As far as I can tell, the money is gone. I thought the bank was a real bank and thought Prospera had a reasonably competent regulator, but neither seems to have been the case; I thin it was basically a scam.
I would question why you would ever deposit money in a bank located in a place where the whole point of setting up shop is to avoid regulations, but you do you. The place exists to skirt financial and medical laws. If you're not doing that, Prospera isn't of any interest to you.
I'm sorry they lost your money! Regulation or no, banking relies on trust, and it's unfortunate that they are apparently even less trustworthy than expected. Thanks for sharing a relevant data point.
I attended the Prospera meetup in NYC a month and change ago: based on what the Brimen claimed there, they seem to have good, continuing growth, mainly in companies registered as digital residents, enough that if growth continues, they may break start breaking even around 2026 or 2027 (based on current claims of $400k in tax revenue in 2024, and estimating $1.2M in 2025, and needing to hit a $5M/year rate to break even, which seemed oddly low).
That said, I came away from the meeting pretty cold. My own politics have changed considerably over the last few years and I'm much less partial towards grand libertarian projects than I was then, which accounts for part of it. But I also couldn't shake an impression of shallowness.
The initial speaker was a junior employee who gave a very surface-level, pro-free market sweep of history spiel that didn't inspire confidence. Brimen was much more charismatic, but also not inspirational. He recalled his 'somewhat privileged' childhood in Venezuela, looking out the window of his chauffered car at the impoverished people selling fruit on the side of the road, and how it tugged at his heartstrings, how as a young man he wanted socialist policies in order to help them, but he ultimately learned that the only way to actually help them is to trust the market. He went as far as to call entrepreneurs the 'heroes of society' and compared them to Jesus Christ, since the free market is the best way to help people at scale.
That's a tried and true libertarian perspective, a bit strong on the rhetorical side but not otherwise unusual. But from there he went on to present his model of charter cities as the way to accomplish those goals, with Dubai as the explicit example to imitate and surpass. This really, really didn't inspire confidence in the future direction of Prospera.
He expressed some optimism about the upcoming Honduran election, pretty much regardless of who won, on the theory that the incoming party would want to wash their hands of the Prospera suit and settle quickly; take that with the requisite grain of salt.
They also announced the upcoming release of their 'Jurisdictional API' which would allow people to programmatically register businesses in Prospera. They spun it mainly as a fun, techy side project -- who wouldn't prefer to do their paperwork via an API? -- but as much as I'm usually amused by that kind of thing, a tool to programmatically apply for business registrations at high volume seems like it would mainly be used for abusive purposes, even if the applications still need to be reviewed by humans.
It looks increasingly likely that at some point within the next 5 years, Prospera will be self-sustaining and accomplish some of its goals. But I'm no longer confident that it will be a positive force on the world at large. I'll hopefully find some time to visit in the next couple years and see what it's like on the ground for myself.
What do you think would have made it a positive force on the world at large? Honest question - I'm curious what you liked before and think is missing now.
Largely it's that I used to believe a lot more in free market doctrine, and in particular the idea that a less-regulated market like Prospera could lead to substantial, concentrated innovations in pharmaceutics and biotechnology. They're still advertising that, but my own beliefs have changed and I'm much less willing to entertain the innovation fetish. The closest I've seen out of them is Unlimited Bio, which claims to be doing reverse aging, but I see no reason to trust the word of a company that uses AI images as the first thing you see on their website.
Well, one thing that's slowing down progress is the inability to easily test remedies on human subjects, and given that Prospera is surrounded by a lot of people who really need money...
Very imperfectly. Selling shares in your startup essentially tells you the sum of the expected values of the drugs you're developing. Each drug has an EV equal to the product of probability it will come to market, profit per sale, and sales volume conditional on it getting to market. Those factors further decompose into approval/disapproval by specific regulators, insurance approval, number of competitor drugs, manufacturing cost, market size, and so forth.
So as a consumer, I care less about startup valuation and care more about forecasts regarding: adverse events, clinical trial results, and how regulators/insurers will react to the drug.
Another factor: I think it's hard to short sell shares in pre-IPO startups? So looking at share price tells you what the optimists think, but not so much the pessimists.
Yeah, a lot of what turned me off about Prospera was all the PR about what it could do for *you*, the outside investor/foreign expat coming to live there. Not so much about the native Hondurans (well of course there will always be maids and landscapers needed, right? and the cost of hiring them will be *so* cheap, and it will all be under *our* laws not Honduran laws so don't worry about pesky employment laws).
Reports of tussles with other settlements on their island/in the vicinity didn't endear them to me either, though there was the usual problem of two sides to every story: where the Prosperans trying to control and indeed subjugate the local village via water supply, or were the villagers just blackening the name of Prospera because they were jealous/trying to extort them?
This "a rising tide lifts all boats" thinking doesn't impress me, because I've seen some of those rising tides and it's the yachts that get lifted, while the leaky small boats most in need of patching and repair are left to just sink.
I think as long as people are free to leave (no passport confiscation or other shenanigans), and have accurate information about the place, it shouldn't be a problem.
I found this post by Caplan kind of depressing, he’s praising a country with very little political freedom for citizens as the ideal country because it’s a good place to invest. Libertarians who don’t care about civil liberties, man, I don’t know.
A world where every night, everyone votes on what sort of food to serve, and all across the city, every restaurant serves that particular cuisine. Tonight it's Mexican cuisine for everyone! (This is an allegory for democracy. Easy to see how it gets people fighting.)
A world where every night, everyone goes to whatever restaurant matches the cuisine they, in particular, want. Japanese for me, Italian for you, burgers for her, etc.! (This is an allegory for open borders.)
I'm not an open borders maximalist. Some "cuisines" should take the form of societies with strict standards for admission, if only to serve as containers for immigration restrictionists! But I do think that freedom of where to live is, in some meaningful and important sense, a more important freedom than the freedom to vote.
Do workers in Dubai have a lot of personal freedom? Democracy and political freedom is mostly a means to an end (good governance), but what matters for most of us in daily life is personal freedom.
It's popular with either the desperately poor or high level international professionals. The former need money no matter how poorly they are treated (I have seen Indian workers in the Gulf States kept in cages) and the latter are afforded special privileges not unlike aristocrats of old. Medieval aristocrats would have scoffed at the concept of common freedoms as well; who needs common freedoms when you can have the particularized, limited variety.
Well, look at Saudi Arabia, where the guy in charge had a lot of rich people check into a luxury hotel and then wouldn’t let them leave until they’ve given him a lot of their money. Kings can be funny that way.
I sure hope the California Forever people are not too rigid about the street grid plan. Having a visual terminus does wonders for a sense of place and scale, and organically delineating neighborhoods, and you lose that with an uninterrupted street grid. It also implies indifference to local topography and other geographical features, which again would be detrimental to a sense of place.
I enjoyed your coverage of the complex, convoluted, and deeply rooted permitting process that commercial developers face, as you so aptly described. What a mess! There is a long history of rewards and risks facing commercial ventures across North America, dating back to the Hudson Bay Company in Canada around 1670. I wish great success to modern-era, large-scale development financiers as they pursue their various hopeful, sensitive, and profitable projects, including Elon Musk in Texas, Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs in California, and Bill Gates in Arizona. Studies show, unsurprisingly, that gaining public support requires mutually beneficial elements such as affordable housing, reasonable living costs, well-designed infrastructure, community beautification, and strong corporate citizenship. While I haven't kept up closely with the projects, I do hope that top architects are involved in the planning and construction. I believe serious consideration should be given to firms like AECOM, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Elkus Manfredi, HDR, Kohn Pedersen Fox, Olson Kundig, OMA, Pelli Clarke & Partners, SOM, Studio Gang, and Weiss Manfredi (among others, I'm sure, that didn't make my short list); to help achieve outstanding results.
I know the charter city people have thought about this problem very carefully but it seems like a common theme here is "the government that actually owns the land can just decide arbitrarily that you don't get to play anymore, and they can do pretty much anything, up to and including showing up with guns, to stop you."
I am glad that Prospera has sophisticated legal armor, but that only goes so far. Hong Kong itself is a good example of the limits of technically-legally-protected. Then again, true independence does not guarantee success either. That map of Sierra Leone showcases another "charter city" that did start with full self-determination -- the country of Liberia.
Unless you have the backing of a much bigger government with much bigger guns. In this case, the US. In practice, that just makes the place a US colony with some legal autonomy, but... maybe that's just what the market needs. There are certain businesses that would be beneficial to the US, but are problematic for it to directly associate itself with.
Yeahhhh Belle Isle ain't happening. Not only is it owned by the city of Detroit (which is currently far more interested in reforming itself than it would be in entertaining this), not the Feds , but it's also a terrible spot to try to build. On top, you'll have roughly 5 million people who actually like the park being a park to NIMBY that project - it's unserious.
For the money, Rod could just buy out the whole city of Highland Park if he wanted instead. It's about twice the land area, has barely over 8k residents, is actually hooked up to utilities and transportation, is still inside Detroit, has decent ground to build on, etc. This is literally a place they could pay people to leave - go on Zillow and look at average property values. A few shell companies, a few years, and you can have the place free and clear. Plus something something Highland Park Plant.
I was thinking along similar lines. Apart from the aesthetics of setting up your enclave on a literal island, Belle Isle has very little to recommend it relative to a ton of other currently underpopulated land in the area that the city of Detroit and/or Wayne County would probably be happy to offload responsibility for.
" Prospera’s investors have already sued for $11 billion - a third of Honduras’ GDP. The case is currently tied up in international courts,"
In wikipedia for Prospero, the relevant link is paywalled so I could not see what is this "international court" they are talking about.
In any case, it seems a very bad idea for leaders of a country to involve their country in such murky waters and in hook for large fraction of their GDP. A pity that US congressmen could be purchased for as little as 5000 dollars.
By coincidence, on the same day as reading this post, I heard about a plan for a sort-of charter city near Cambridge, UK, known for the time being as “Forest City 1”
"...I wanted to live, and have my kids grow up, in a place that appreciates craft and beauty."
Rectifying the damage done by the soulless, mass-produced inhumanity of the Bauhaus architectural school should not and cannot include using robot routing arms to inundate our built environment with AI slop. People don't miss the beauty of old-world architecture because there aren't enough curved lines or cherubs, they miss the small human connection that comes from seeing the work of skilled artisans - other human beings imbued with creative spirit and dedicated to a craft. Ornament has never been cheap, that's the whole point. When the oligarchs of the past covered the façades of their buildings with baroque cherubs or classical linework they were paying a living, breathing, dreaming human to do it and generations of people walked in the shadow of their decades of passion and skill. Handing that over to AI and glorified CNC machines won't bring soul and beauty back to architecture, they'll just make it even harder for us to relate on a human level with our built environment.
The Charter City idea must be the most US thing existing alongside apple pie. The desire to set up small, utopian, semi-autonomous communities (including cities) appears to be part of your cultural DNA. 150 years ago, these social experiments tended to be socialist or religious in their ideology; these days they are libertarian (or sometimes identity-based?). But the underlying idea is similar. I love the optimism of it.
Related, the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull set up one of these autonomous communes, named ”Oleanna”, in Pennsylvania in 1852. Think of it as a would-be Prospero. It failed spectacularly. Leading to this satirical song, which could perhaps be made into an anthem of all attempts to finally establish the true Shining City on the Hill:
It seems like an extension of federalism, and also an implementation of the pro-freedom principles of "let them go to hell in their own way" and "no skin off my nose." If a weird religious group or something wants to build their own community and live under their own rules, there are going to be some limits (we're not going to let them have slave markets or sacrifice children to Moloch), but we ought to be able to tolerate the existence of communities of people with weird beliefs without needing to either go in and make them live the right way or wanting to steal their stuff.
A charter city seems like an extension of this idea.
Could someone do a charter city like thing on an Indian Reservation? Like, can an Indian reservation build a medical clinic that does treatments the FDA doesn't approve or import doctors from overseas/use telemedicine from overseas to lower costs?
It seems to me to be deeper than mere federalism - it is the original idea of the Mayflower settlers, put on repeat again and again. That's why I think it must be a US cultural DNA thing.
These days the idea is exported as well (most Charter Cities are elsewhere, like Prospero), but the ideological base of these exports is still the US. Actually, exporting the idea is also nothing new. The most ambitious attempt was the founding of Liberia in 1847. Which has fairly recently been through two first-class civil wars (1989-1997).
While at it, Pete Seeger's version of "Oleanna" is shorter than the original, which also contains a gender-related verse not quotable today. So perhaps the world progresses after all. Here, just for fun, is the original, with English subtitles:
I just don't respect or trust the profit motive enough to support a corporate charter city. I believe the admin will try to turn the city into Singapore. Ugh.
I know Singapore is an economic powerhouse. I don't care. And I'm comfortable imposing my anti-benevolent-dictatorship prejudice on the world, much as I am comfortable imposing my anti-rape vision on the world.
I'd rather risk becoming part of a pyramid of skulls than see my world turn into Singapore. Not that I'm especially worried about that risk. Which is vastly overstated by lovers of the status quo. I can't take a centrist's concern for my bodily health very seriously when said centrist is evidently trying to destroy my soul.
Then let them have their benevolent dictatorship somewhere else, not here. I will do everything in my power to keep dictatorship out of my country, however popular it may be with my fellow citizens. I do not recognize that they have the right to impose a dictatorship on me and force me to choose between accepting it or leaving.
Nor would I be content with any isolated zones of dictatorship nestled within my democracy. I demand a dictatorship free zone throughout our entire territory.
What's wrong with having a few Singapores in the world? It's clear that liberal democracy is, well, inefficient, and there are businesses that have good reason to want to avoid such inefficiency. You can stay in your democracy while still reaping the benefits of this offshore efficiency.
I place higher value on democracy than on efficiency.
That said, I have no wish to penalize Singapore. I don't think our State Department should be pressuring Singapore to be like just like us. Just keep that stuff outside of American territory.
How much of a dictatorship is it? It is a one party state (there are some small alternatives but they have no power) but there seems to be some genuine ability to have freedoms of speech and mount political opposition- it is just that the populace overwhelmingly supports the ruling party that seems to keep delivering success. They have sufficient control of the country that I don’t doubt that if their power started to slip they could probably abuse such power to maintain control- but it seems like they don’t need to. Not an expert here - so please correct me if there is some corruption I’m unaware of.
I had to look up your use of "moots." The noun version which I am used to means "to render irrelevant", but clearly not here. Of course, you're using it as a verb which according to AHCD means "to bring up as a subject for discussion or debate", which may be pretty soft compared to what you intended.
But Oxford American Writers Thesaurus equates the verb with "raise." Further synonyms include "bring up, put forward, introduce, propose..." But that's not what I got from AHCD (American Heritage College Dictionary).
So I pull out the heavyweight Garner's Modern American Usage. And I am fool for not starting with it. "As a Verb. Historically the verb of moot meant to raise or bring forward for discussion. That sense is formally common in American English but today is current mostly in British English. An American legal usage since about 1950, a new sense of moot has taken hold: "to render a question mute or of no practical significance" (Black Law Dictionary 11th edition)."
And they cite a Richard Posner and William Landis article from 1994!
How much interaction do most people living there have with the rest of Honduras? Like, are you going from Prospera out to the countryside to buy from the local farmers or to go on nature hikes? Do locals come into town to work or shop?
I think this is one of the most under-appreciated facts about Prospera:
- we interact with the local communities on a daily basis, I'm sure I've directly worked together with close to 100 local businesses, Prospera itself created 1000+ local jobs directly and indirectly, i.e. locals go in an out all the time to work (e.g. construction, hospitality) or sending their kids to school in Pristine Academy
- the island is a tourism hub, i.e. "a local farmer" won't give you the right impression; we buy our food in the largest supermarket just like everyone else on the island, we go to the same restaurants on the island as everyone else (in the Beta District there are 2 restaurants that are only used by Prospera residents, in Pristine Bay there is 1 restaurant with open access for locals/tourists
- about 50-60% of Prospera residents are Honduran
Of course Prospera has a bit of an international vibe, but the island is mostly English speaking anyway. Go to our sister project Ciudad Morazan on the mainland, and it's pretty much 99% all local Honduran (I think they have 300 residents there now).
I may have a fourth answer for the question why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented. Maybe its dullness and even ugliness not a bug but a feature, a social instrument.
The key is that it's not just architecture but virtually any not mass market form of art.
I describe it in the article below, inspired by your Wither Tartaria? The text is quite long, but the first half is mostly descriptive. The explanation starts with Part V and the answer itself is in the Part X.
About the stone carving, I have been telling Musk (telepathically) for years that all those beautiful slabs of sedimentary rock lying around on Mars are just begging to be turned into building blocks for domes.
With a nuclear power plant and a few simple machines he could be cranking out domes up to fifty meters across over and over again long before humans arrive. With a reflective coating on the inside the domes will hold an atmosphere and it would take a fair sized meteor to put a dent in one, certainly they will be stronger than anything sent up from earth.
Isn't it hard to make things that are strong in tension out of rock? Keeping an atmosphere of air pressure inside a dome requires strength in tension (the forces are trying to pull the walls of the dome apart).
None of the above, each block has a slit or ridge that fits snugly into its neighbours, assuming the dome walls are 30 cm or one foot thick then the weight of the dome, even allowing for the lower gravity, would need a powerful explosion from within to affect the integrity of the dome.
Lighthouses were built in some of the most exposed shores using similar construction,
For low grade areas ( growing pods or storage units) one layer would be enough, for living areas or to protect the most vital equipment put as many layers an needed to withstand a nuke, there is no shortage of rock.
My grandfather was a stonemason who worked on important buildings like, Cathedrals town halls etc, all over the then colonies without ever leaving Scotland. The stone for the buildings was cut from red sandstone, shipped out as ballast which the old sailing ships needed, and assembled on site.
On Mars we can see the rock is sedimentary, so it is easy to split and shape, please Elon, pick up the phone.
Prospera should never have been created. It's unfortunate that they have managed to subvert the will of the Honduran people with legal trickery like that.
Back a few years ago I was invited to the Bahamas by Manifold. I still had to buy my flight but FTX provided room and board? I think? don't remember.
I brought covid from a craaayzy bay area party along with me and spread to everyone there but let's not talk about that.
Anyways, it was such a magical experience in Margaritaville that I instantly left my job to go work for Manifold. And my life has only been flailing uphill since then.
At some point some bad stuff happened to FTX. a liquidity crisis. bankruptcy. apparently FTX owed many people money, including Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville. (Did they ever get paid back? The hotel staff did always treat me well when I was sick. Should I pay for my hotel stay now? Who do I pay?)
That Sam guy went to prison for being too good at lying and too bad at cooking books.
No one else part of FTX went to prison. They all backstabbed him in the end. And he just took it for the team.
Good thing Sam tarnished his reputation but not ours so that now we can buy up the island for cheap.
You might even say, oh how very Altruistic of him. Maybe even Effective.
I might sound bitter but I do think the island should belong to a governance startup rather than a central crypto exchange. central crypto is an oxymoron.
And though I mock Sam for being bad at spending money, he spent some of it on me.
all my wealth so far ultimately came from him investing in manifold and to some extent, me trading AI stocks just like he did (only I do stock market, not venture).
The vocation of Capitalist requires you to allocate Capital carefully and well. He did a bad job and got what he deserved. More than what he deserved. They are not going to let him out. Nobody cares about him enough to bother. Nobody but me I guess.
Maybe if he gets really good at posting on x dot com the everything app, he can convince Elon to convince Trump to let him out.
Or a more fun alternative: maybe if Sam can, within the prison system, convince ziz to start a transgender gang for trans women in men's prisons, then i can be bothered to get off my ass, talk to my sf bathhouse friends, and get them to get Thiel to get Elon to get Trump to get Sam out.
Or if somehow Trump reads this comment, perhaps because g*d forbid someone showed it to him, I have an even more fun alternative:
Yo prez can we build a white collar private prison for transgenders and weird internet celebs? Ask Jimmy Buffet, or some other hospitality guy. Maybe even you.
Then you put Luigi and Sam up in the penthouse cell, and the transgenders in all the other ones. Live stream every room 24/7. it will be clean and 100% violence free. Maybe add a few privacy booths that cost $30 an hour. And vegan options available in the commissary. Let's call it The Panopticon.
...
I still love Sam. I love everyone who gives me money. But you know, I am kind of a capitalist too and I gotta get back to work. Unlike sooome people I am not afraid. I will never be put in the camps and i will never go to prison. Unless it is a very nice ingroup prison, then maybe I'll go try to be the Amanda Waller of prison tpot. Otherwise, it is back to being a degen gambler just like my mama and my grandma were before me.
Hey, maybe one day I will become rich enough to build a private prison for all my friends.
Here I am reading along only to be shocked by casual racism. I’d love to know why you didn’t provide pictures of other ethnic groups native to the various lands mentioned in this article? Or is it that you don’t consider Sierra Leonians people? How dare you caption the picture “Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic”. Throwing in pictures of people in traditional garb with pictures of maps and mountains and such is incredibly disrespectful, racist, totally unnecessary and completely repugnant. I couldn’t unsubscribe fast enough.
Banned for this comment.
I didn't see the comment but La Gazzetta Europea does seem reasonable elsewhere albeit talking about the hot topic of immigration to the West.
Maybe Hippolyta should be ignored as they are more likely the racist. Hypocrisy comes naturally to such types that are keen to accuse others of the same.
I’d love to here what he has to say but I don’t think he meant it in that way
Wow, that was unexpected.
The relevance of the Sherbro people is that there is an island. It is being planned for a charter city. It got described as a "greenfield site", ie one with no people. However, there is an entire ethnic group called the "Sherbro people" located on the island. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherbro_people . To me, this is surprising and relevant in the way that, say, the fact that there are ten ranchers living in a part of Solana County that nobody ever denied had some ranchers in it is not.
As for the picture, I looked into them and thought it was a pretty exotic looking picture that accurately conveyed the idea of "ethnic group living on a far-off little-known African island" and I found it interesting.
I think you are coming from a place where noticing that an ethnic group is interesting, or different-looking, is automatically belittling of that ethnic group. I don't have that instinct, and I think it is fine and good to be delighted by how different and unusual different groups can be.
The caption raised eyebrows for me (I did wonder if it was a reference to something I didn't understand). I didn't know the term 'greenfield', so I didn't realise the comment about the town and the ethnic group was supposed to be a counterpoint to the greenfield claim. So it did seem like a bit of a non sequitur to me (but also, you're just listing off a variety of facts about each one).
I am glad to read this comprehensive reply to that comment, because it makes connections I didn't make on my own.
I thought the cheeky caption was fine.
What I think he meant is that the Sherbro people picture ticks every box in the criteria for a portrait of an exotic ethnic group, to the point where it might as well be AI or a header for a dictionary article on Ethnicity. It's got topless, darkskinned women in colourful skirts and bodypaint, standing a in a line in a jungle. I've seen dozens of similar pictures from Borneo to Tierra del Fuego.
"Racist" was not the best word, but it is certainly "ethnocentric" to hold that the more exotic a group of people are (from the perspective of a well-off urban white Westerner), the more they count as "being ethnic". Much of the humor in Scott's comment is precisely that "being ethnic" is itself a strange turn of phrase. "Ethnic" is not something you are: it is a property of how some groups are defined.
Online encyclopedias ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicity , https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethnicity ) are in fact not fond of half-naked people in the jungle to illustrate the general concept of ethnicity.
Or, we could pretend like we're adults reading a blog, that the people in that picture are supremely unlikely to know or care that some obscure American writing a blog somewhere thousands of miles away thinks they're interestingly exotic, and that the whole thing of labeling stuff like this racist and problematic is a net loss for mankind.
We're adults reading a (broadly defined) philosophy blog with a huge comments section. Comments trying to discern what philosophical attitudes might be behind the author's or the commenters' words seem to be on point, regardless of whether the people being originally written about know or care.
Are you protesting against my using the label "ethnocentric"? I explicitly rejected the label "racist" and did not us the much too vague "problematic". I guess it is true that I view ethnocentrism as mildly "problematic", just like an infinity of things in the world. If your point is that it is not OK to imply that anything from the author or fellow commenters is "problematic" in any way, sort or kind... that means you refuse any sort of criticism, even mild. Not workable.
Orthogonal to the above, Scott is certainly not obscure.
Knowing what “greenfield” means is key.
I knew the term and got the intention, and if I didn't I would have looked it up before accusing the author of racialism
Fine post, fine answer; wonderful caption, A+, made my day; would pay-subscribe just for this, only trouble: I am already a paid-subscriber. And will remain so as long as Scott will remain Scott. Hypoclites are hardly the target group of ACX. God bless them and I wish them a wonderful day. Scott: give Kai a hug and feel loved. Because you are.
Personally I was delighted to learn that that particular clothes-and-makeup situation had been invented on this Earth, A+ cool picture that taught me a thing I didn't already know. Also yeah, calling the whole island a greenfield site when there's already a town there is misleading and I'm glad you pointed it out.
I’m not sure if “greenfield” means “no inconvenient people already living there”. History doesn’t seem to support it. I think the term was created to contrast “brownfield”.
Though, calling something with inconvenient people living there a “greenfield” could be construed as kinda racist. Seems obvious to me that the picture (and the caption) was included to point out the kinda-racist use of “greenfield”.
(But I knew what greenfield/brownfield meant.)
Tell me more about how you interpret greenfield vs. brownfield?
I was under the impression of the opposite of davep - the term greenfield came first (probably coined in mid-century suburban expansion if I had to guess) to refer to development in open spaces, which are typically marked as green on maps.
Then with deindustrialization as a lot of cities started to have these abandoned or under-utilized industrial/warehouse districts in the middle of the city, "brownfield" was coined as a contrast to greenfield, for urban revitalization of industrial areas. I think this coinage may have not come until the late '70s or the '80s, as it's sort of a progressive urban planning concept—redeveloping uninhabited warehouse districts was seen as a lower-harm alternative to doing things Robert Moses style.
Dogpatch or Mission Bay are easy examples of brownfield development in SF.
Are there any examples of "greenfield" being used outside of a development context? I don't think anybody referred to places that colonized or expanded into as "greenfields". I don't think the terms are (generally) used to refer to "open spaces" (which are usually not open for development).
Put another way “open spaces”/“green spaces” are things meant to be preserved as such. “Greenfields” are meant to be developed.
With "open spaces" and "green spaces", it doesn't seem like "greenfields" adds any extra meaning.
It's widely used in the tech industry to refer to coding something from scratch instead of bolting features on something that's already there. Often with a connotation that it is a lot easier to make fast progress: I can write ten thousand lines of greenfield code in the same time as one thousand on existing project, simply because the cognitive load is so much lower. On the other hand someone else coming after me will not have such an easy time.
Since it's widespread in tech the term is probably ambient in the Bay Area.
Brownfield also implies that there may be issues with ground pollution that would be rectified during development but add an extra hurdle.
The “extra hurdles” (not limited to ground water issues) are a defining property of brownfields. Greenfields don’t have the extra hurdles.
"Brownfield" refers to land that has extra development costs (like waste cleanup); "Greenfield" refers to land/property that doesn't have this cost. The etymology might be that "greenfield" was created to indicate things that weren't "brownfields". Both are "developer" terms.
https://www.aeroqual.com/blog/brownfield-vs-greenfield-sites
Hm, I wonder if that's how they're using it here. Surely nobody expects there to be a lot of toxic waste on an island in Sierra Leone.
Their use of the term "greenfield" here seems odd to me.
It seems "greenfield"/"brownfield" are developer jargon.
They are developers. So it seems fitting to me that they are using developer/real-estate jargon. It also seems fitting they are ignoring people who live there.
I don't think anybody uses the term "greenfield" in discussions about clear-cutting Amazon rainforests (for example) or even farmland (another example).
To be clear, "brownfields" is a euphemism.
I thought the caption was fine, and funny.
Also, I don't see a picture of a load of women who've laboriously painted their entire bodies, put on their brightest coloured skirts and posed, beaming, before a photographer who is presumably of a different ethnicity, and think "these women would be upset if I joked about our cultural differences, I'd better treat this image with solemn, sober respect."
Because in real life when you meet someone with their traditional glad rags on and that look on their face, in my very limited experience, generally they're as excited to show off their culture as you are interested in it, and usually it's a mutual interest too and you're all in for a cracking evening talking about who's culinary traditions make the least sense or what have you.
Priggish aversion to pointing out the cultural differences of a group of people who've lined up conspicuously to show off their cultural differences is in its own way offensive.
Except many times they do it because that is the only way they can make money, by parading around for tourists. It's not necessarily a bad thing, especially when it gives them income they otherwise would not be able to obtain. But it also sucks that that's their only option and it should make decent people at least feel some unease about the situation.
Given that this particular island is relatively undeveloped, that seems plausible. I will need to sit with that thought for a while to find out if it affects my position in general.
I still feel like it would be presumptuous to let that colour my impression of this particular photo of these particular women, and my default presumption should remain that they are dressing up for their own reasons, because to suppode otherwise with no other context seems uncharitable.
If that is their situation (who knows?), it seems bad, but not made worse by noticing that the striking and interesting photo of these women is indeed striking and interesting. How would not including that photo or clucking about how insensitive the photo is help them, again?
I don't think there's any reason to suppose that the photographer was necessarily of a different ethnicity, as opposed to someone from their ethnicity who fully understood the cultural context of whatever was going on, which I take to be some kind of festival or other special occasion I don't know all the details of. Anyway, whatever it was, I hope the women involved were having a good time and would be pleased to know that random foreigners think their colorful skirts and elaborate body paint are neat.
That's totally fair. I can't remember why I presumed the photographer was of a different ethnicity, if I had to rationalise it I would say that since the subject seems to be the women and their dress, rather than anything specifically they're doing, it seems like a photograph an outsider would be more interested in taking, whereas somebody from that culture would tend to focus on whatever celebration / festival was actually taking place. But actually I have taken photographs like that myself, not because western party clothes are interesting to me as a subject but because the people are family and friends and the photos are for home consumption. So on reflection, it could easily just be a line up of someone's sisters or friends.
Here I thought people were going to complain about seeing titties at work. But without constructing various racisms, I agree the vibe is off. Point-and-laugh always runs the risk of falling flat, whatever your intentions.
I love the sentiment at the end of this paragraph. Ethnic just means a characteristic relating to a distinct people, in other words it's anything cool about a people that isn't part of the consumerist monoculture slop machine. This has all gotten so politically loaded. The value of a culture is in its most distinctive aspects, I get why rhetoric shifted to talking about our "shared humanity" that unites us and all these universalist platitudes, but that's the boring part about any people. If you weren't previously inclined to invade and oppress a group using otherization as a technology of power and subjugation then we should trust you to find exotic garb cool without that becoming a vector of oppression. (And for that matter, pointing out the apparent distinctive cultural value of a group of people on an island that's about to be developed seems like something the anti-colonialist types would want to be noted.)
Yes I also found it to be a celebration of human uniqueness. Glad you attacked the underlying assumption of the original poster, which is that we must conform and must not celebrate difference.
> I think you are coming from a place where noticing that an ethnic group is interesting, or different-looking, is automatically belittling of that ethnic group. I
I think that's the general idea. I personally don't endorse this view, since one can't go through life being perpetually offended at everything -- that way lies madness. Still I can somewhat understand it.
Imagine that you posted a picture of your family on some e.g. East Asian or African forum, and people reply by saying, "wow, those are definitely Americans all right, look at how fat and gun-happy and loud they are", or "yep, they're barbecuing, it's the kind of food Americans eat all the time". That's not too bad, but now imagine this happens everywhere all the time wherever you go. I can see how one might get a bit annoyed at that.
This is fair if you assume they actually dress like that all of the time. Like nearly every other ethnic group exposed to modernity they will primarily dress in jeans and t shirts. Its more like seeing a photo of Beefeaters and going "that is so British!", like yes, they are wearing a traditional culture dress for the purpose of saying "this is our traditional cultural dress". Said photo probably hangs in a museum in the capital of Sierra Leone with a caption like "Sherbro people in their traditional dress".
It seems reasonable to assume that they do not dress like that all the time. Less so to assume that this outfit is "traditional" or that it is distinctively "ethnic". We just don't know. Would you call cosplays at the San Diego Comic Con the traditional Californian dress?
To the last paragraph, that's precisely how most europeans talk about & view the US. Including the educated, left-leaning ones.
Source: Being european.
It's an edge case. The obvious rejoinder is that by calling them "ethnic" you are privileging your own, which is to say Western, experience as being "normal", and appearances that deviate from this as "strange." This can be seen as problematic due to the history of "exoticization" of distant people and it's connection to colonial exploitation. That which is different has often been sold as a product to tourists, with few of the profits going to the exotic foreigners. This is even more problematic in the context of a bunch of rich people buying land for development next to/within the impact range of an indigenous people. This has often not gone well. There are some red flags here. (And yes, this has implications for the entire charter cities movement).
On the other hand, I don't think that Scott meant to imply any of that. I believe his explanation that he saw a picture, found it different, unexpected, and interesting, and simply wanted to share that impression with the rest of us. By itself, that isn't necessarily a problem, provided that one keeps in mind that our view of them isn't necessarily any more important than their view of us (or of the people developing the land).
Undoubtedly, if you were to show them a picture of, say, people in New York, they would express how strange and weird Americans are.
I don't think it's a bad thing for Scott, or any other Westerner for that matter, to privilege their own Western experience as being normal and think of the appearance of non-Westerners outside the West as strange; and I reject the strain of anti-colonialist thought that teaches that this is immoral.
Of course what is strange to one person may not be strange to another, and it's reasonable to think that these specific African people think what they are doing is normal and what Scott (or other Westerners) do is strange. And they probably do say things like that in their native language when they encounter images of western life.
And on the third hand there's the genuine asymmetry that Western, particularly English-speaking culture, has developed a bunch of technologies and global prestige that no other culture in the world has; so these random African people are almost certainly more familiar with the West than we are with them, and if they wanted to tell us about their thoughts about it they'd have to do it in English instead of their native language which would require them to learn to communicate proficiently in English and thereby familiarize themselves at least to some degree with (a particular) Western culture.
"I don't think it's a bad thing for Scott, or any other Westerner for that matter, to privilege their own Western experience as being normal and think of the appearance of non-Westerners outside the West as strange; and I reject the strain of anti-colonialist thought that teaches that this is immoral."
The moral philosophy behind cultural diversity is that cultural homogeneity is a weakness, something that harms both the group practicing it and other groups with whom they interact. The default human psychological state is in-group bias, which requires an active effort on the part of the individual to resist and overcome. Let's give it a name: the problem is ethnocentrism. It's normal, but it is a known source of many problems.
The ethnocentrist is at risk of closing themselves off from a wide array of ideas and insights that might be of benefit to themselves. Like a species, too few individual differences renders a culture vulnerable to intercultural competition. Note how this is especially a problem for indigenous people (ie, they are at risk of ethnocentrism themselves).
Simultaneously, ethnocentrism has a long and very well documented history of being associated with violence, suffering and exploitation. To be clear, ethnocentrism isn't the direct cause of these outcomes, but it is an enabling trait, unopposed by some countervailing moral principle, it increases the risk of social conflict. Some degree of ethnocentrism is inevitable, just as some degree of greed, of jealousy, of resentment are inevitable. They are all character flaws, and each of us is responsible for managing their manifestations.
None of this is meant to imply that one can't celebrate one's own culture or society. I'm damn proud to be an American. This doesn't make me any less wary of hyper-patriotism. "My country, right or wrong" makes me pause. Without itself directly causing any obvious problems, that statement nevertheless appears to facilitate international confrontation. I wouldn't try to stop someone from saying it, but hearing someone saying it would cause me to look to some countervailing ethical principle to bring into play, just in case.
"Look how ethnic those people are" is exactly that kind of statement. Not necessarily problematic by itself, nevertheless that kind of statement appears to create the conditions under which the in-group bias could become stronger. That makes me look around for a countervailing ethical principle to bring into play, just in case.
World #1: Scott doesn't include the picture or mention the group, and thus nobody calls him problematic and racist.
World #2: Scott includes the picture and mentions the group, and people call him problematic and racist.
Seems to me that World #1 is one where we are "closing ourselves off from a wide variety of ideas and insights" from other cultures, to avoid someone trying to dunk on us on the internet.
Nobody has advocated for World #1.
Scott, if you wish to replace the offensive racist ethnic-disparaging photo with another one of a suitably ethnic sub-culture, I give you full permission to use Irish dance costumes. Go ahead, nobody cares if you insult ginger Paddies!
Slightly more traditional from 1983:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejHFTYSHZBc
And 1993:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JRc-opqfCU&list=RDejHFTYSHZBc
Modern ones where the competitive sub-culture has gone, to use the technical term, effin' bonkers (the wigs! the make-up! the sequins! the whole trash aesthetic!):
https://www.tayloririshdancingdresses.com/irish-dance-solo-dresses
https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/world-irish-dancing-championships-stream-online
Ah, it's often "Shoe The Donkey" was danced at a wedding! (though if you're dancing it, it's called the Varsovienne; my mother called it "Shoe The Donkey", my father called it "Cock Your Leg Up" 😁)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4j_Pz-kiZo&list=RDejHFTYSHZBc&index=9
I initially thought the caption was a bit ethnocentric. But then I figured that both Scott and ACX readers are sophisticated enough to be "ironic" about it, to be conscious of how we are looking at it, and thus that "ethic" or "exotic" -- while being an accurate description of our immediate emotional reaction -- as a question of *fact* simply means "quite a bit different looking than People Like Us".
But thinking about it a bit more makes it more deeply amusing. ACX readers are rather uber-Westerners, differing from typical humans in the same way that Westerners differ, but considerably more so. OTOH, the Sherbro people (who seem to be dressed to the nines, that body paint job must have taken a lot of work and wouldn't hold up under a typical day's work) are agrarian villagers, and thus *far* more similar to the median human across all of history. So the Sherbro look exotic to us but more accurately, we're very exotic to *them* and their judgement is a lot better grounded.
This reminds me of the classic cartoon, with the first panel showing the humans looking through the bars at the monkeys in the zoo, and the second panel from the monkeys' point of view, looking through the bars at the humans.
I'm genuinely not sure if this is a troll comment or not.
Probably not a troll, bluesky gonna bluesky.
I had the same question.
Banned for a month for this comment.
"I couldn’t unsubscribe fast enough."
Oh dear how sad never mind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4uivPpzCGo
This comment finally moved me to subscribe. Thank you for giving me a push to overcome my procrastination.
(If your comment was tongue-in-cheek, then, uh, well-trolled.)
It's just a whimsical way of observing that they have a strikingly unusual - and pretty - style of bodypainting along with colourful dress. Perhaps it was not the best way to put it in this oversensitive age. Though the ladies in question might well be amused by it.
I read it as Scott standing up for them, despite his affinity for charter cities! This is a *land acknowledgment.*
Developers are calling the site a greenfield, implying it's undeveloped land with no significant population. But there is a town - and even more significantly, an ethnic group for whom the land might be important to their history and community.
If the folks living there were wearing a mix of typical urban African clothes, it would be plausible that they're just random people who could fit in anywhere else, maybe even people that moved there recently. So maybe they're not a tight-knit community that would be devastated by the changes this charter city might cause.
But since they look very different from the average Sierra Leonean, and they've clearly coordinated their garb, it supports the claim of being an ethnic community. That means we need to take the effects of the charter city on them more seriously, since a diaspora of their community could be a significant loss.
It also means we need to listen to them. Scott actually looked into this enough to report on what their leaders think of the project (apparently, they're in favor).
Maybe if you didn't know what a greenfield was you missed this point. That's why there's a picture of people, and that's why it's relevant that they appear to have a united and distinct culture.
Very cool photo, caption was funny and made my day; no conceivable way that a reasonable person could find it insulting or disrespectful in any way
Seriously, how people go from "picturing people in their traditional celebration garb" to "you consider them not people"? How that mental process even works? How is it disrespectful? These are clearly not their usual everyday garb (just click the link), they dressed up and painted themselves up and so on because they liked to do so. Just as every other people in every other civilization known like to dress up and show themselves around as beautiful. What's "racist" in that and showing that? Some people just work so hard to find something to be offended by.
Was there an anti-Prospera campaign promise in Honduras, or is it just score settling among the elites? Wondering if there’s a populist anti rich gringo movement.
Yes, there was a lot of populist/nationalist concern about "selling off the nation to foreigners".
I was sure the campaign slogans "Let's Join the Gringos!" and "Daddy at your service!" had to be memes edited onto the image afterward, but I am very pleased to report they are not.
I couldn't find good information on the Christian Democrats and wonder if they really want to become the 51st state or are only joining us in spirit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfrm7VNtwk4
According to that video (use yt autotranslate) “ Unámonos a los gringos” means to cede national defense to the US and getting easier US visa, similar like the Marshal Islands. Of course the US was interested in doing that in the Pacific so they have military stations for the navy countering Russia/China. But Honduras has no strategic value I know of?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_of_Free_Association
Chano claims to really want annexation, although not as the 51st state. From his campaign website:
https://soychanorivera.com/y-si-honduras-se-asociara-a-estados-unidos-la-propuesta-que-sacude-la-campana/
"You know what is an *Estado Libre Asociado*? It is a configuration which would allow us to have a direct agreement with the United States, like Puerto Rico. Have citizenship, investments, decent work, free trade, real health, education and security."
Translating "Estado Libre Asociado" is tricky because on one hand, it literally means "Associated Free State". On the other hand, it is part of Puerto Rico's oficial name in Spanish while its official name in English is "Commonwealth of Puerto Rico". But those are just names, not a legal status. Legally, Puerto Rico is a territory and not a state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_(U.S._insular_area)
This is not the same as the "Compact of Free Association" which is the regime of the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and Marshall Islands. Unlike Puerto Ricans, people of those countries are not US citizens. They do have free entry which seems to be Chano's primary goal as judged from his website's front page: "Let's join the Gringos so that they do not deport our migrants".
I'm not sure whether that would be a great deal for the US but honestly it sounds like it might be a pretty good deal for Hondurans.
In all fairness, the "Let's Join the Gringos!" party seems to be a minor party with less than 2% support.
Thank you for satisfying my curiosity. I too thought it was unlikely those were the real slogans.
For what it's worth, I don't think that beach is on Grand Bahama, it appears to be Nassau or vicinity, you can tell by the enormous Atlantis resort in the background. From a bit of triangulation I think it's Cabbage Beach on Paradise Island (formerly Hog Island).
> American street grid, Spanish/Japanese superblocks, and Dutch woonerfs
Every time I hear this sort of thing I think yeah, that kinda makes sense. And then I think about the Garden City Movement, and which said that instead of living in crowded European style cities everyone should live in big, spacious and thoughtfully laid-out low density cities, and which also seemed to make sense at the time. But then they tried it out, and people found they didn't really like it -- people love green space but they hate the fact that everything is too far from everything else. Now all the urban design experts want to go straight in the other direction, back to a high-density mode of living which presumably has its own failure modes that we haven't figured out yet, instead of working to find some kind of happy medium.
The main "failure mode" of high-density living is that it partly conflicts with hundreds of years of American cultural values. I think that other than that, we don't worry too much about uncovering new failure modes.
"Hundreds of years" is overselling it; the suburbanization of America started with the mass adoption of the car, around the 1930s. Before that, for all the agrarian mythology, Americans were moving into big cities just like people were everywhere else. You can use the population of Manhattan as a proxy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Manhattan
(Fun to note that more people lived on Manhattan in 1880 than in 1980, and more in 1960 than 2020.)
But more to the point, at least the middle class spends a few years living in apartments in a walkable neighborhood when they're in college, and they seem to remember it fondly.
Wasn't the USA pretty damn rural before 1910? Small plot farming was a foundation of American life.
It depends how you count "urbanization", but the trend toward living not-on-farms has been pretty monotonic, and passed the fifty percent mark right around 1910.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Urban_and_rural_populations_in_the_United_States_(US_Census_Bureau_(1790_to_2010)),_OWID.svg
I think it's more mythology than practicality. It's like the big trucks that are never actually used to carry anything, or people living in far-flung suburbs who like to believe that they're more connected to the land than those city folk.
Traditional American life was a lot more dense around the turn of the century than it has been since, as long as you don't exclude cities, which I think there's a tendency to do.
I'm going to steelman myself by saying that you never had to actually be a farmer or rancher in order to idealize rural land ownership. Orthogonally to where people lived, Americans had a sense of awe about undeveloped country, along with the freedom and opportunity that country represented.
This was one of the reasons the Western genre was so incredibly popular among metropolitan office workers in the 1960s.
This was in a period of history where America was seeing a lot of immigration from eastern and southern Europe, particularly focused on major east coast cities like New York City. So a substantial percentage of the population of Manhattan at that time was comprised of people who were extremely recent arrivals to the US and hadn't assimilated to American values.
Indeed, according to that Wikipedia article the Manhatten population peaked in 1910, had declined substantially by 1930 (after immigration to the US had been greatly curtailed by the Immigration Act of 1924), mostly declined throughout the 20th century, and only began to consistently increase again the 1990s, a period of time characterized by a new wave of immigration to the US.
If anything, this makes the population of Manhattan look like a proxy for the recent immigrant population; and it suggests that recent immigrants rather than well-established Americans are more interested in living in a big, dense city like Manhattan.
My sense of NYC makes Queens the hothouse of immigration lately .
When I visited Barcelona I remember a fair amount of trees and green space in the superblocks.
Why do you feel that the Garden City didn't work out? There are lots of successful garden towns like Wewelyn, Hampstead Garden Suburb and Canberra. Like every late 19th century movement thought they were going to complete transform the world and bring in utopia and that didn't happen, but that doesn't like the right bar for success or failure.
We have tried high-density and it works fine. Like, obviously we don't want to live in Kowloon Walled City, but even if you look at the highest-density city in Europe (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density), the commune of Levallois-Perret in Paris at 27,713/km², it can fit inside it parks and plazas and trees lining the streets just fine. Density above all comes from uniformly mid-rise housing and ready access to transport (such that the space isn't used by cars and parking lots), it's perfectly compatible with areas zoned for greenery as well.
Heck, in a sense high density is enabler of greenery: if you look at the Nordic capitals for instance, besides smaller-scale very local pieces of greenery like parks, there's sizeable wedges of nature wedged right next to city centers. Were there substantially more sprawl on account of lower density, well, there certainly would have been more temptation to roll over the nature preserves and zone nearby islands for residential rather than recreation.
Thanks, sorry, fixed.
I completely agree. I think the thing to make the difference is public spaces.
You need enough gardens and playgrounds to support all the high density.
But you don't need so much that you have low density.
Also the parks have to be connected, good and nice enough to walk through, with maybe some shops?
I was pretty impressed with Mexico City, around Roma and the big parks.
really nice to walk, trees, lots of businesses and street vendors and a lot of parks.
We have all kinds of happy mediums in terms of urban intensity. It's all relative and subjective.
Manhattan's population density is something like 60,000 people/sq. mile. Lots of people think Manhattan is way too intense and would never want to live there.
Well San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Philly, and Boston all have pretty similar population densities to each other - somewhere around 16-18,000 people/sq. mile. That seems to be a pretty happy medium. Those are all quite successful cities, and desirable places to live. Lots of people even think those cities are too sleepy and quiet! They might prefer the happy medium of Brooklyn (~39,000)
Portland's a pretty happy medium - walkable, bikeable, decent public transit, tons of street trees and green space. Only 5,000 people/sq. mile. To my taste, Portland makes a much more pleasant environment out of that density than other cities with comparable density, like Vegas. Plenty of people in the suburbs or rural areas of Oregon still think of Portland as unbearably crowded and urban! Well, they still have plenty of options for their own idea of "happy medium."
If you want a happy medium between Portland and the cities I listed above, Seattle and LA are both around 8,000 - but they're totally different from each other in terms of walkability, bikeability, tree coverage, traffic - even at any given population density, different planning decisions can take you in all kinds of directions.
And Manhattan's 60,000 is not a ceiling! There are denser cities around the world, and there are parts of Manhattan that could be built up a lot taller. For someone from Hong Kong, Manhattan might be their happy medium!
For a lot of people, Seattle, Boston, or Brooklyn is their happy medium. And the important point that planning nerds in the US converge on, is that places of that degree of urban intensity are really quite rare in this country, even though tons of people want to live in places like that, as indicated by the high housing prices in those cities! It would be great if we could fill out a lot more of the spectrum of "happy mediums" in between ~16,000 (that whole cluster of cities) and NYC.
High density urban living doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have some overriding need for access to an historically absurd number of people within close physical proximity. The industrial revolution was that thing, but as we are de-industrializing I just don't get it anymore. At this point we're down to scenarios like "I can perform specialized service X that only 1 in 10,000 people have any interest in and must be done in person" and "I need to find 5 other people who share both a specific talent and an interest in this niche subject for a collaborative art project that will require repeated in-person workshopping". I like to play a niche Magic the Gathering format that is unusually exclusive due to price and rarity of the game pieces, which is pretty much out of the question unless you live in a metro of substantial size.
That a few such places exist undoubtedly provides a lot of additional value to the world, keeping very small parts of the long tail alive to be discovered by people to whom they'd have utility. But for the vast majority of people, most of their life is not involved with anything like that. Most of their life is going to some building, working, and coming home and being with their family. In which case having your own 1600+ sq ft house with basically a small private forest in the backyard that you completely control and far fewer people everywhere you go just easily wins. High-density is a necessity for a few things, but it makes no sense to be the model for the future when most people aren't involved in those things and would be happier with something else.
As for failure points, urbanization has already caused a number of problems, such as disease, mass-movement formation, and social disorder. There are enough studies linking urban density to schizophrenia for there to be multiple meta-analyses, though I'm not going to dare presume a causation on this blog of all places. Every interaction with a stranger is a potential source of stress, frustration, or conflict. Maybe a large portion of humans CAN handle that, despite the complete absence of it in our evolution and history until the last 150 years, but I would be stunned if there were not a very large fraction of humans incapable of dealing with urban density for whom this is a nightmare.
It seems like your perspective on this is strongly influenced by personal preferences, and I think you should be cautious about extrapolating to what benefits most people. For example, a private forest in your back yard is something some people like (it sounds nice to me) but lots of people have no interest in that and would rather be able to walk to lots of restaurants. Similarly, lots of people don't find interactions with strangers frustrating. And I don't think niche interests are a key factor for most people who want to be in a major urban area. Consider somebody who has trouble making new friends, but has a handful of friends from college. A city is likely the only way to live near more than one or two of them.
To be clear, I was speaking here of mid- to high-density metros. Low density metros like Wichita and Des Moines with 200-400K residents (not counting exurbs) have a very large number of people by historical standards, a comprehensive variety of services and many opportunities on offer, while still catering primarily to people who live in SFH's on pleasant lots and to renters in duplex neighborhoods or low-density apartment complexes. That's big enough to host any ordinary recreational activity, and if you met your friends at a state college, that's a pretty common place for them to end up.
The number of things that would require you to live in Chicago or NYC or LA, (or even a place like Indianapolis or Cleveland) as opposed to Des Moines are actually quite niche. Unless you're in the top 0.1% of your profession or your aspirations are very eccentric, the immense concentration of people does not do much for you. I suppose there may well be normies of no distinction with utterly mundane interests who nevertheless derive value from being able to easily walk to 50 different places to have people make food for them, but they are paying an awfully steep price for that privilege. It is at the very least not clear that the benefits of more urbanization are so great that density is the way of the future. To the contrary, people created the suburbs and moved there as soon as it was made possible. Urbanists' usual complaint about this is that the suburbs were subsidized by highway construction, or that suburbanites are benefitting from urban centers while not contributing property taxes to them, or that cars have externalities like pollution. These are not appeals to the superiority of urban living, they sound more like concessions that suburban life is better, and it's not fair that we're getting away with something. In which case the aspiration of futurists should not be dense urbanization, but rather finding a way to provide suburban comfort and lebensraum but with mitigated externalities and broader access to the benefits of concentration for those pursuits that require it.
The story I usually hear about why people moved to the suburbs is largely about crime and urban blight, things that are a problem in certain times and places but not inherent to cities. In any case a lot of people like high density urban living but are priced out of it, so "paying a steep price" is accurate in the literal sense. I still think you are picturing it as some big sacrifice to quality of life, when for many people it really isn't.
I agree. And actually, one can argue that different phases of life benefit from different types of land use.
Cities are great for young, childfree adults looking for a mate and a career. That's where access to an absurd number of people within close physical proximity pays off. There's a big dating pool and networking/job-changing opportunities, there's in-person office work for learning professional norms, and there are novel experiences like concerts and fancy restaurants to spend those first big paychecks on and impress your date with. Many of the downsides of noise, crime, proximity to traffic, tiny living spaces, and distance from nature are more surmountable for young adults than other age groups.
Once you find a mate and a career, once you have even one kid, and once concerts and restaurants aren't so impressive and you're ready for the deeper adventure of family life, the suburbs are a better tradeoff for most people. The stereotype of moving to the burbs when you have a kid is true, because it's sensible. Air pollution while pregnant is a significant hazard. 4yos and up should be able to access nature independently. Have you ever tried to transport a 1yo, a 4yo, and a week's worth of groceries for a household of four on foot, bike, bus, or train? Once is a wacky anecdote, twice is a hardship. Etc.
It's interesting that you cite independence for kids as a necessity for rural living, because almost nobody lives on an estate in the wilderness. People move to the suburbs, where you can't walk anywhere, and kids have to be driven to absolutely everything. I'd rather have my kid be able to walk or bike to the park than have to drive them.
For what it's worth, I do grocery shopping with a toddler on a bike. (I have one of those pizza-delivery boxes on the back.) We go more like twice once a week, but it's absolutely doable. It's certainly not a hardship; it's a fun thing to do together, and it's a lot more interactive than having the kid in the back seat watching Bluey on a tablet.
People live in cities with kids, and they reportedly enjoy it. People move out of cities when they have kids, in part, because cities are ruinously expensive to live in, because blue governance has decided that scarcity is cool. But that's not some unchangeable constant of nature.
I didn't mention rural living actually. But in most suburban and rural homes, yes, young kids can safely access nature on their own initiative and can have free play outdoors while parents get stuff done inside the house. You don't need to be in the wilderness; 1/10 acre of whatever grows in your area is enough.
Most suburban (not rural) homes also have safe walking access to other homes, whether via sidewalks, quiet neighborhood streets, backyard access, or paths. My 7yo can easily walk to half a dozen friends and two parks, and that's for a neighborhood of 1/4 acre lots. When he's 8yo I'll let him go alone. Some suburban neighborhoods are also within walking distance of a shopping center, though it doesn't usually have everything you'd need to go to in a given week, and sometimes, as in our case, the distance makes the walk more recreational than practical.
I'm glad you enjoy biking with your kid! We have a 4-kid Bunch Bike for our 3 and counting kids, but I'm more of a wimp about inclement weather, so it is more a recreational thing for us than something we'd be comfortable relying on. You have my respect.
> People move to the suburbs, where you can't walk anywhere, and kids have to be driven to absolutely everything. I'd rather have my kid be able to walk or bike to the park than have to drive them.
When Americans say things like this, I'm never sure whether they're exaggerating or whether they just happen to live in suburbs that are terribly designed. Certainly in a competently-designed suburb you should always have parks, and probably a little strip of shops, within a reasonable walking distance of your house. The American suburbs that I've spent time in have always been like this (albeit not quite as good as a standard Australian suburb) but maybe I haven't seen a representative sample.
If American suburbs in general really are so terribly designed that you can't even walk to the nearest park, then I think this just illustrates the point I was trying to make in the first place, that there's far too much attention given to "urbanism" and not enough attention given to how to design better suburbs.
Yes, it really is that bad, I blame zoning laws. They tend to give you a choice between small houses in an old part of town, but in walking distance of interesting things and endless tracks of housing where you can’t get so much as a carton of milk without a big trip.
The corner shop as it’s known in Britain is not a thing in most of America.
> At this point we're down to scenarios like "I can perform specialized service X that only 1 in 10,000 people have any interest in and must be done in person" and "I need to find 5 other people who share both a specific talent and an interest in this niche subject for a collaborative art project that will require repeated in-person workshopping".
In practice I think the appeal is mostly just "I want to be within convenient walking distance of at least twenty bars, fifty cafes and one hundred different restaurants".
And when I was younger that's how I chose to live, and it was good and I was happy to trade off other things for it. Now I'm older and I have kids and I'm happy to trade off convenience for being able to have a big house with a nice backyard and a pool.
Cities should have housing suitable for all stages of life.
The endless struggle between Country Mouse and Town Mouse will never end.
Adding on to Chance, the other failure mode is that by revealed preference nobody want to create a life in these cities (by having children there). Not just cost (e.g. Tokyo, Seoul) basis but an independent factor. People do not prosper in them, as a turn of phrase.
What gives you confidence that it's not just cost that drives young families out of these places? The cost of accommodation in city centres is high because demand is high.
A lot of very smart and talented people grew up in New York City…
One reads references to Free Cities in European history but I never read up what precisely they were and how they functioned. I recently read in AJP Taylor's book on German history that Napoleon did away with about 300 Free Cities and ecclesiastical states.
Certainly a pity that such a unique political formation does not exist any longer.
It seems a very peculiar European institution.
The ecclesiastical states were such feudalistic hellholes, though. Good riddance.
Very Napoleonic of you.
One of France's best monarchs.
But the free cities, I think, had a large role in the Reformation, didn't they?
Sounds like the Cities of the Hanse (not only Germany) - Germania consisted of nearly 1800 territories - lots of them free cities until Napoleon conquered her (well, the Kaiser was officially their (only) superior, but he was always far, far away, very busy and easily distracted). @ ClanceJ: The ecclesiastical states were as feudalistic hellholes as the other feudalistic hellholes were. And I would prefer an Indian slum in 2025 to a German free city in 1780.
To this date Hamburg and Bremen are city-states within the German federal state. Never visited Bremen but Hamburg is very much a by-the-numbers big German city so it does not seem to have that much impact on the ground.
Port cities are among the least likely to be poor.
Bremen is somewhat notorious for having bad public education, though.
Natürlich. Even Berlin is a city-state. One of 16 federal Länder. All have their own police, own schools, and even a constitution. But all 16 have to follow the federal laws and tax code - and compared with the federal budget: they are dwarfs. And bankrupt Bremen with its outdated tiny port fully dependent on hand-outs from the federal budget and the Länderfinanzausgleich (rich South bailing out the left North and hopeless East).
I think those were basically the same as any other self-governing city? Think Venice, Athens etc., but usually on a smaller scale. With huge variation in how they were actually governed, anything from an elected council, unelected representatives of different social groups (masons etc.), to basically a king.
The cities you are thinking of I think are the Free Cities of the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon ended them in part by conquest, incorporating them into the Confederation of the Rhine, or them falling into other German states which allied with France, and in part because he forced Austria and the Electors to disband the Holy Roman Empire as terms in one war, I forget which exactly.
These cities were free in that they had the right of Imperial Immediacy, meaning their only overlord was the Emperor, they did not have a feudal relationship with any Duke or Count or some such between them and the Emperor. And since the HRE was a very loose thing by this point and had been for a long time, not really a state, this made the cities little sovereignties of themselves like Venice or Genoa or the other Italian city states.
Though a similar process happened in Italy (outside the HRE), not just via Napoleon as Emperor, before he was Emperor he was a general fighting in north Italy, where France was creating and propping up an Italian Republic.
Similar deal with the ecclesiastical states, these will have been things like the Bishopric of Cologne. Cologne was an ecclesiastical state, the Bishop was it's sovereign, it was also an Elector in the HRE, the Bishop got to vote on the Imperial succession.
There were free cities after Napoleon. Danzig and Dubrovnik come to mind.
Also in Italy before the Risorgimento or however it's spelled.
A useful reference here could be the sociologist Stein Rokkan's idea of a European "city belt" that stretched from Italy through present-day Germany to the Baltic states. Rokkan argued that the first strong & centralized states in Europe emerged at the periphery of the city belt (Britain, France, Denmark), since the more-or-less autonomous cities in the city belt prevented a strong state to emerge until much later in the state-formation process. (The state subduing regional competitors and establishing strong central rule was easier in the periphery, precisely thanks to fewer strong cities.)
Alternative first heading: "It's one Bahamas, Michael, how much could it cost?"
There's always money in the Bahamas sand!
+1
Interested in your definition of the throwaway term NIMBY, often used but rarely with a rational definition behind it. I collect these definitions, and given the rest of the piece, this one should be good! I always hope for something new.
Oh goodness, you've stirred the hornets nest. This is YIMBY country.
…as it is where I live and work, just asking for clarity re priorities. Does anything qualify as a bar to this year’s project X? If so what, if not why? Happy to take the rap.
I don't know what the definition of NIMBY is, but a YIMBY is just a NIMBY who doesn't actually own a backyard yet.
Nope. I've met homeowners who are content with apartment complexes is going up in their neighborhood. I wouldn't call them THRILLED but they would never dream of trying to obstruct such development. Real people I have spoken to.
I don't think it's much of a mystery what NIMBY means - it's someone who is opposed to building things near them, because they think those things might cause traffic, disrupt views, change neighborhood character, etc. Were you looking for something more philosophical? If so, can you be more specific?
Usually it seems to be used as shorthand for those who think that their own (environmental) interests are more important than (say) the aggregate interests of a wider community; but of course the NIMBY agent might be arguing for a still wider aggregated interest - say the preservation of a local ecology unique to the region or nation. I was looking for some sort of statement about the balance of interests and their weight. Generally it’s just used as a synonym for ‘selfish’.
> Vintage Freeport. I think this casino is now closed, but I can’t figure out what exactly happened to it, or whether the building still stands.
The building still stands, but it doesn't look to be in very good condition.
Street View: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bahamas+Princess+Resort+%26+Casino+Freeport+Resort+Club/@26.5172238,-78.6979664,3a,75y,300.36h,84.95t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sCIABIhAGbwPTiS06CWfEriAADP11!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2Fgpms-cs-s%2FAPRy3c_ilxCp8CSpWmxLWxju1gXEG5TdFmp8M5jjP3lUlXUdOmUv2aq1Cr4ZCAyhwOx81SpeS97GeEY_teeT1u4b_8tp5nOorOjqPqrfTVuObwci-Tyugg904-sLW1HY-qfBYfSjG5Hfate03Icd%3Dw900-h600-k-no-pi5.051328427433859-ya154.243360378333-ro0-fo100!7i10560!8i5280!4m6!3m5!1s0x892727cc7edb48ed:0x5db9988cf23c9250!8m2!3d26.5177136!4d-78.6981036!16s%2Fg%2F1tc_9jrs?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTAyMi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Nevis: part of the independent "Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis". Legally, a smart choice as the smaller Nevis has the constitutional right to secede when 2/3 of its 12k people demand so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevis#Politics
"Nevis has considerable autonomy in its legislative branch. The constitution actually empowers the Nevis Island Legislature to make laws that cannot be abrogated by the National Assembly" - much smarter choice than Honduras.
Amazing how all polls agree that Salvador Nasralla will get exactly 27% of the votes.
Hi sorry to message on the post but can't see how to message Scott off post. I just found out that my subscription auto renewed, much as I enjoy the posts I did not actually want to pay for another year's subscription as I like to vary my substacks, and would like to request a refund from Scott please. Sorry
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This comment doesn’t seem to advance the conversation but I’m surprised it earned an indefinite suspension with no comment explaining why.
It clearly is a no-value-added LLM summary. It's a good idea to discourage such things.
There’s also Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City which is a charter city for quality of life rather than economic development. Or something. It’s not exactly clear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelephu_Special_Administrative_Region#:~:text=Gelephu%20Special%20Administrative%20Region%20(stylized,from%20the%20country's%20existing%20laws.
I wrote about this one at https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/156163841/you-had-me-at-dragon-king
It bothers me that Bhutan's harsh religious fundamentalism gets a pass, to an extent, because we don't tend to have a mental model for Buddhist bigotry. (I'm quite fond of Buddhism, personally. The problem is with the Bhutanese government)
I'm pretty disturbed by the Honduras international treaty thing, I don't see how this defensible. Essentially this is a means for a democratically elected government to pass an unrepealable law, binding future governments no matter how much popular support they have. This is pretty blatantly undemocratic. Hell, the original government that signed the treaty might have been actively breaking an election promise not to!
And although in this case the treaty is being used to restrict government power, there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be used for the opposite. (There've already been ideas about mandating minimum tax levels. Also, see the UN regularly condemning the US for violating human rights by...*not* making certain political opinions crimes.)
This sort of thing absolutely shouldn't exist.
I think this might be a necessary principle of economics. The Obama administration can take out a loan, but then the Trump administration has to pay it back (or declare bankruptcy, or be in default, or otherwise offend the global economic elite).
In the same way, if the Obama administration asks Japanese investors to go 50-50 with American investors on a factory located in American territory, then the Trump administration can't steal the Japanese's share in the factory and give it to Americans without offending global economic norms etc.
I think the Prospera case is just part of the more general version of this.
I admit there are ways to make this extremely bad (eg Obama takes out a $10 trillion loan and gives it to himself, is Trump obligated to respect this), but it seems like a matter of degree and hard to do anything about consistently.
There are very few formal restrictions on the power of the UK Parliament, but one thing it cannot do is bind any future Parliament.
Maybe but...taking a loan means you've taken something from another country, and so they have a right to get that something back. If they don't they've lost a tangible thing. That seems clearly defined and limited in potential scope in a way these non-revokable treaties aren't.
Additionally, I have an issue with things that can't actually be enforced but we all need to pretend they can be. If we all just said "if Honduras doesn't honour the agreement, no one will ever invest there again" I would have no problem. But saying they've violated international law? Saying they have "no power" to revoke the charters? Unless another country is going to go to war with them, they clearly do have that power (economic consequences aside) right?. But we're all supposed to pretend they don't.
Most of the rest of international law seems to work like this as well. I always get such "Emperor has no clothes" or, alternatively, "thunder comes before lightning" feelings on this.
My impression, at least when I studied it 20 years ago, is that *most* countries don't pay back their loans.
So why do people ever invest there again? I'm guessing it's some combination of 1) administrations and economies change fast enough that things might arguably be different next time, 2) high default rates are priced into high interest rates for such countries, 3) people feel sorry for these countries and give them more chances and/or lower interest rates as a sort of charitable development aid, and 4) sometimes giving a loan buys you soft power with the administration to get other political priorities done, even if you never get your actual money back.
Largely correct only considering points 2 & 4 (I won't comment about 1 & 3).
2) It's largely priced in. Consider that a loan at 8% interest doubles every 9 years; since the countries have to be on average paying the loans down, that means as long as the average time between defaults is more than 9 years, you've still made your money back.
Ecuador, for instance, defaulted in 2008. If you lent money in 2009, you still would have made 16% profit by the time they defaulted again in 2020!
https://tradingeconomics.com/ecuador/interest-rate
Also, creditors rarely lose everything; there's typically a restructuring.
4) Ecuador owes China a LOT of money, and gives China a LOT of oil. And of course, it's not like Correa cared whether or not it got paid back in 20 years... he stuffed his own pockets before he left office:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Ecuador_relations#Loan_agreements
> "Maybe but...taking a loan means you've taken something from another country, and so they have a right to get that something back. If they don't they've lost a tangible thing. "
I don't see a difference between that vs. investors paying Honduras tens of millions of dollars to build buildings/infrastructure/etc in Prospera on the grounds that it will have a business-friendly climate, and then taking away the business-friendly climate. In either case, they've lost tens of millions of dollars.
I also don't understand your "international law has no clothes" argument. If international law had no clothes, there's no problem - Honduras can simply say it is cancelling Prospera, and nobody can stop them. We're only having this debate because in fact international law has teeth and people can stop them. I think the exact enforcement mechanism is that if Honduras confiscates international investor assets within Honduras, then the investors can sue to confiscate Honduran-owned assets abroad. I'm not sure what teeth you want beyond this.
I don't think "international law has teeth" is quite the right summary here. If it was the US cancelling a commitment to Hondurans, rather than vice versa, I would be surprised if international law made a difference.
I think it's probably more "The US has teeth, and one of the ways it can bite is through the international legal system".
I don't think this is correct, though I'm not an expert. I think if the US confiscated another country's property, the other country would consult international courts, the courts would order some remedy, and the US would comply or else be kicked out of whatever investment treaty was involved (so other countries might have more ability to cheat US patents, or to raise trade barriers against the US). I agree the US might get slight special treatment, but I don't think they could get away with robbery in broad daylight.
The investors sue in say American courts--then presumably American law applies. If they sue in British courts, then presumably British law applies.
Which courts use "international law" ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Centre_for_Settlement_of_Investment_Disputes
I am glad India hasn't joined this racket. A convenient type of setup for Third world kleptocrats.
We do have a similar situation ongoing with Devas vs Antrix arbitration. In 2005 some very senior retired bureaucrats of Indian space agency got together, incorporated a startup abroad and got a very sweet deal with the space agency. Naturally the deal was questioned and cancelled by the government. But they had planned for this and took government to international arbitration and got 560 million dollar award. But Indian government didn't play nice and fought the arbitration. Now Devas appears to be heading for liquidation.
I think I want people to not speak of "international law" in a way that implies it's anything more than a generalised description of the fact that if a sovereign country does something untoward some other sovereign countries may or may not (but probably will) retaliate by doing otherwise-untoward things back to them. Assuming "other countries doing otherwise-untoward things back to them" remains the extent of the enforcement mechanism. (When there's an actual international army that answers to the UN, we can reevaluate).
I strongly suspect but can't prove that people talk in such a way because they want people to implicitly and falsely assume that international law has more power than it does, and I am against such dishonesty.
Are you allowed to speak of normal (national) law in terms that imply it's anything more than a generalized description of the fact that if a person hurts other people, then some set of people may or may not (but probably will) retaliate by punishing them?
Agreed.
The US government will probably retaliate if Hondurans try to pull anything. Brimen (head of Prospera) paid a good amount of money to get them on his side. From Wikipedia:
> The founder of Próspera, Erick Brimen, also has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby U.S. legislators to put sanctions on Honduras and end U.S. aid to the country if the Honduran government does not allow Próspera to continue operations. In 2024, U.S. Representative Steven Horsford pressured Honduras by advocating for denying visas to their government officials if Honduras did not do as Próspera wanted (Brimen donated $5,000 to Horsford's campaign in 2023). In the 2024 U.S. House budget, members also tried to pressure Honduras to allow ZEDEs to continue how they wish. U.S. Representative María Elvira Salazar has claimed that the current Honduran leadership are socialists who don't care about their country when they don't allow ZEDEs to do as they like. As of 2025, ZEDEs—including Próspera—remain operational despite ongoing legal disputes.
I think that you are overestimating the power of the "international treaty thing": This binds future governments to respect the agreement... or pay a fine.
If the People in the future democratically believe that breaking the agreement is worth the fine, they will pay it. If they don't, they won't.
This is pretty standard for Free Trade Agreements, and there's a reason for that: What investors need to invest is *certainty*. This binding mechanism creates certainty that they will see a ROI, whether through investment or by paying the fines.
And don't be alarmed by the disproportionate fine that Prospera is asking for: It's pretty common in these arbitration to start with a big number, only to make it come down later on the negotiations. And as Scott mentioned, Prospera doesn't want the fine anyways.
In practice, future governments have all the power to break these treaties, although they likely pay a metaphorical fine through lesser investment due to the juridical uncertainty that their actions create. Look at the Brexit (the UK tearing up an agreement), the renegotiation of NAFTA into USMCA (the US tearing up an agreement), etc...
And this isn't counting the idea that the arbitration might just side with the new government anyways. Ten years ago, in El Salvador (neighboring Honduras), a Canadian gold mining company sued the government for something like $1 Billion USD (20% of annual government budget), for not getting permissions to mine gold. El Salvador argued that the company never had the environmental protections that the law demanded at the time. The nation won, and the company had to pay the arbitration fees.
Such treaties are a diplomatic embodiment of the saying "Beggars cannot be choosers."
If a relatively poor country with a history of bad governance wants to attract investments, they need to provide a relatively big symbolic collateral against the risk of destroying said investments later. You don't need such specific treaty guarantees in Denmark or Switzerland, but in Central America...
Honduras is still a relatively reliable "beggar" compared to, say, some African countries which would not be able to close even this sort of deal.
It's not that the government can't do it. It's that there are consequences for doing it the government wants to wriggle out of. The government can absolutely abolish Prospera. It just needs to pay a fine. It can also not pay the fine. But then it will undoubtedly lose the aid and trade it relies on. It's coercive in the sense that it's coercive to refuse to continue doing business with someone who broke a deal.
This isn't different from adding anything else into a constitution, binding future legislators to it. And similarly, if a government writes a business contract, it has to mean something.
Not that I'm a big fan of this specific use case of charter cities, but long-term binding laws in general are useful and necessary, because some things just can't be done properly within one election cycle. A government can fail using that tool profitably, but a government without it can never succeed with it.
>the UN regularly condemning the US for violating human rights by...*not* making certain political opinions crimes
I'm skeptical, do you have a citation for this?
Anyways, I'd say ability to bind oneself with a treaty makes a person or group *more* free, not less. Please don't restrict my ability to sign contracts in the name of protecting my freedom!
https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/08/563722
"CERD also called on the Government to ensure that the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly are not exercised with the aim of destroying or denying the rights and freedoms of others, and also asked it to provide the necessary guarantees so that such rights are not misused to promote racist hate speech and racist crimes."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Convention_on_the_Elimination_of_All_Forms_of_Racial_Discrimination
"The convention also requires its parties to criminalize hate speech and criminalize membership in racist organizations."
And binding your own future decisions with a contract...is possibly compatible with freedom. Binding *other people's* future decisions (such as those too young to vote at the time the original treaty was adopted, assuming it was even done according to popular will as I addressed)...absolutely definitely isn't.
Does Loving County, Texas, count as a Model City?
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/loving-county-texas-takeover-malcolm-tanner/
There, a guy noticed that this West Texas county has about $60m in oil revenue but fewer than 100 registered voters ( many of whom don't even live there). So he's encouraging his social media followers to move to Texas and take up residence on some cheap land so that they can all democratically take over the county government and do what they want with the $60m.
Definitely an innovative solution to the sustainability problem plaguing other model cities. Also a better place name.
With regard to Sherbro Island City, I'm going to do some brainstorming because I'm excited by the anti-poverty potential of this project. Have they thought about applying for development dollars at all? A lot of Gates philanthropy goes to Africa, yes? Imagine if Gates agreed to match investments in Sherbro Island City dollar-for-dollar, for example.
In terms of bootstrapping Sherbro, my understanding is that the regulatory environment in Africa is extremely unfavorable to entrepreneurs. Magatte Wade has written many notes and blogposts on Substack about this issue; here is a recent one: https://substack.com/@magattew/note/c-169164344
I understand that a lot of African businesses operate under the table to escape the notice of regulators, or struggle to get consistent access to electricity. So one path would be to scour the continent for successful small business owners who are sick of blackouts and bad regulation, and entice them to move to Sherbro. Of course, these same issues would also be expected to apply to non-African multinationals who are looking to expand their footprint in Africa. Presumably some fraction of these businesses don't require as much critical mass in terms of civilization, so are more interested as early adopters. The best seed might even be a sort of "company town" for some multinational.
In principle I think existing Sherbro inhabitants can be a significant benefit for the project, if the project means bringing good jobs to the area. It's definitely an important relationship to manage. I would start by doing ordinary development stuff focused on delivering benefits for island inhabitants (fresh water, school, library, whatever they want/need), then once some trust has been built, get them to sign a document which unlocks further development aid, and a chunk of equity so they will share in the benefits if the city is successful.
Another way to think about it is that manufacturing exists on a spectrum. Something really bulky, like concrete, will generally be manufactured locally. Something tiny and complex, like a microchip, will be imported into Africa from elsewhere for the time being. The sweet spot is something medium-heavy, maybe something you can make with a 3d printer, maybe refining of raw materials which Africa exports, where it's medium-punishing to transport it from place to place. If it was heavier, doing it on an island would be too much trouble. If it was lighter, importing it from abroad would be too easy.
Sierra Leone import/export data could be a good place to start, either take a raw material they're exporting and refine it first, or identify something they're importing and see if it could be made locally: https://oec.world/en/profile/country/sle It looks like the country actually imports a fair amount of cement and is doing a tariff to try to build indigenous cement manufacturing capacity, so that could even be a good place to start perhaps?
An AI tells me: "Despite having favorable conditions for rice cultivation, the country’s domestic production is low due to poor investment in agriculture over many years, partly linked to historical policies in the 1980s that encouraged imports rather than supporting local farming. Rapid population growth has also outpaced local production capacity. Additionally, many consumers, especially in urban areas like Freetown, prefer imported rice because it is perceived as cleaner and free from impurities like stones, which can be present in locally grown rice."
How about a business which buys locally grown rice and uses robotics techniques to purify it? How about an academy for farmers from the mainland which teaches them farming techniques and sells them farming supplies?
Do you even need robotics? I would have thought that some sort of centrifuging tech would suffice to get stones out of rice. At a lower level there is winnowing. Of course you'd need to be selling it in reasonably large quantities, and maybe that's not the way the domestic market operates.
Then again I've read that bread in Middle Age Europe would grind down your teeth over time due to the little bits of millstone in it...
Yeah on second thought I would start with very little machinery and hire local laborers, since labor is likely to be cheap, people probably need jobs. Bring in some food scientists and industrial engineers to optimize the pipeline. Idris Elba could check for quality and put his face on every package. "Idris Elba's Favorite Premium Native Grown Sierra Leone Rice." Maybe they could even export internationally some day. Heck, partner with a multinational right from the beginning even.
Then on every package of rice they could have a little box explaining about Sherbro Island City, enticing business owners and entrepreneurs to come set up shop in order to be connected with foreign investors and so forth.
I think this is fairly synergistic with the farmer academy idea. Bring farmers in during the dry season, teach them about irrigation and techniques for maximizing yield and minimizing impurities, establish supplier relationships. The more ownership the corporation can establish over the supply chain, the higher quality product they should be able to produce.
Even without robotics I would probably employ computer vision for quality control though. It should be better at spotting small rocks than a human.
(1) For Solano, good luck with the shipbuilding. There's good reasons that the former big shipbuilding industries have mostly gone away and the East has taken over.
(2) Re: Prospera, I would cynically suggest the problem with the unconstitutionality could be solved by changing the constitution (that's what the Repeal movement for abortion did in my country). I have little sympathy for Prospera itself and thought this would be the exact outcome: the government changes and the new government revokes all agreements made by the previous one
(3) Re: Sierra Leone, again - best wishes and good luck, but it's Sierra Leone.
" There's good reasons"
To be more specific, there were good reasons for that in the 1980s or the 1990s.
Maybe shipbuilding can be revived with enough robots instead of people, plus enough money and a competent manager?
After all, Starship building in Boca Chica seems to be fairly efficient and quick, even though the workers there are American citizens.
A large part of the problem seems to be that demand for big ships isn't a steady one year-on-year, and it takes a long time to build a big ship. So you're trying to get contracts for building, then you're tied up for a while, and how do you keep the shipyards open when customers are "thanks, we have enough vessels for now"?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/nov/06/uk-shipbuilding-industry-bae-portsmouth
"Conversations with veteran industrialists about the state of shipbuilding today do not yield whimsical reminiscence of the good old days. Instead they produce regrets that tough commercial decisions – of the kind that saw France and Germany aggressively pursue markets such as nuclear power or premium cars – were not made in Britain in the 70s and 80s. Sir John Parker, the former chief executive of Harland and Wolff, the much-diminished Belfast shipbuilder, said the industry missed an opportunity in the Thatcher era.
"One of my big industrial disappointments or even failures is that I failed to persuade the government of the day that there was a big future in building cruise ships. Whoever used run-of-the-mill bulk carriers or tankers drifted to the lowest-cost country. So how you survived in higher-cost countries was more sophisticated ships like cruise ships. I saw that there was going to be a lot of growth in cruise ship building so we demonstrated that this was a real growth industry. And nearly 25 years on, those forecasts would have underestimated the demand." Thus the industry drifted to the east."
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-the-uk-lost-its-shipbuilding
"Following the end of WWII, UK shipbuilding appeared ascendant. The shipbuilding industries of most other countries had been devastated by the war (or were, like Japan, prevented from building new ships), and in the immediate years after the war the UK built more ship tonnage than the rest of the world combined.
But this success was short-lived. The UK ultimately proved unable to respond to competitors who entered the market with new, large shipyards which employed novel methods of shipbuilding developed by the US during WWII. The UK fell from producing 57% of world tonnage in 1947 to just 17% a decade later. By the 1970s their output was below 5% of world total, and by the 1990s it was less than 1%. In 2023, the UK produced no commercial ships at all.
Ultimately, UK shipbuilding was undone by the very thing that had made it successful: it developed a production system that heavily leveraged skilled labor, and minimized the need for expensive infrastructure or management overheads. For a time, this system had allowed UK shipbuilders to produce ships more cheaply and efficiently than almost anywhere else. But as the nature of the shipping market, and of ships themselves, changed, the UK proved unable to change its industry in response, and it steadily lost ground to international competitors."
And of course, I have to link to the song "Shipbuilding":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipbuilding_(song)
""Shipbuilding" is a song with lyrics by Elvis Costello and music by Clive Langer. Written during the Falklands War of 1982, Costello's lyrics highlight the irony of the war bringing back prosperity to the traditional shipbuilding areas of Clydeside, Merseyside (Cammell Laird), North East England and Belfast (Harland and Wolff) to build new ships to replace those being sunk in the war, whilst also sending off the sons of these areas to fight and, potentially, lose their lives in those same ships."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Res3-YX4X8g&list=RDRes3-YX4X8g&start_radio=1
"It's just a rumor that was spread around town
A telegram or a picture postcard
Within weeks they'll be re-opening the shipyard
And notifying the next of kin
Once again
It's all we're skilled in
We will be shipbuilding
With all the will in the world
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls"
The link at Construction Physics was extremely interesting, thank you.
There's probably incentive to automate with robots, since Claude tells me:
"Hampton Roads [VA] [the largest shipyard area in the US] is currently short roughly 10,000 workers in shipbuilding and ship repair, including welders, electricians, painters, and pipefitters."
Other Claude tidbits:
"Virginia ranks first among all U.S. states in shipbuilding with 63,650 jobs."
"Newport News Shipbuilding [in Hampton roads, VA] serves as the sole provider of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and one of two providers of U.S. Navy submarines" - this seems like a geostrategic vulnerability?!
"The United States builds about 0.2% of the world's tonnage."
"The industry appears substantially larger than in 2005." I asked for this comparison because I visited Newport News Shipbuilding around 2005. A college club I was part of handed out donuts to the shipyard workers as they walked into a massive ship for work. We had to get there before dawn. It was cold and misty, and the ship loomed impressively. I was struck by how large the metal lunchboxes most of the workers carried were. They were a pretty solemn crowd that early in the morning.
I’m curious about those shipbuilding constraints. Was it just unable to compete with cheaper Chinese labor? Environmental protections? Raw materials?
Does everyone who wants a cargo ship have one already? How long does an average oceangoing vessel last, anyway?
Sure, circa 1950 we had steel, oil, and skilled labor to spare. I don’t know when or why that changed.
In principle US shipbuilders should, in theory, have an advantage in the local market due to the Jones Act. The US has an amazing internal river system which is underutilized due to the Jones Act.
One of the Bahama beach photos is broken.
"Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on 'AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories'."
Why the need for AI, or is this just a case of "AI all the things"?
Not sure why a CNC machine with the right cutting tool could not be used to mass produce stone ornamentation.
I suspect that at least part of the problem might involve the fact that stone is not a perfectly homogeneous medium, and stonecutters need to learn how to adapt their design to the grain structure they find as they start cutting parts away. I think this is the meaning of Michelangelo’s quote about “removing everything that doesn’t look like David”.
I suspect they don't want huge numbers of identical sculptures
If you're decorating a building facade, you do.
If you're using AI, you don't have to, no?
Fair enough.
I did avoid assuming we'd need to replicate the c. 1900 look (think "Victorian gingerbread house") where new machining techniques made identical decoration cheaper.
But even when you go earlier, to cathedrals or temples, although you have plenty of unique statues or friezes, the majority of the decoration is identical fluting, molding, buttressing, columns, etc. It would look strange and be difficult engineering if all those pieces were unique.
But maybe we can make it work! I'm thinking about gardens now, as I used to be a landscape designer. Although many formal gardens have long attempted to standardize some of the plants via planting them in lines or pruning them to identical sizes, it's always delightful to have some freeform plants for contrast. And with plants there's always a little randomness. You can scatter a dozen clipped boxwood balls of various sizes throughout a garden and it provides a sense of orderly grounding yet the size difference emphasizes how they grow. Maybe you could put lots of different width columns in a building and it would feel a bit like being in a forest, or put lots of different sized decorations along a roof edge and it would remind people of icicles, etc. So ok, maybe there's more room for aesthetically pleasant variation than I thought.
I should add that I consider Prospera's whole regulatory regime to protect consumers basically a lie. They chartered a bank, Seshat Bank, in which I deposited a decent amount of money in 2022, to be returned on a very short (3 month!) timeline. The bank refused to return my money for over 2 years, and I was trying to be in contact with both the bank and Prospera's regulators for that whole time, but they were all very unresponsive. Eventually Prospera issued a statement of liquidation of the bank in early 2024. Now it's been another year and there has been no movement. As far as I can tell, the money is gone. I thought the bank was a real bank and thought Prospera had a reasonably competent regulator, but neither seems to have been the case; I thin it was basically a scam.
I would question why you would ever deposit money in a bank located in a place where the whole point of setting up shop is to avoid regulations, but you do you. The place exists to skirt financial and medical laws. If you're not doing that, Prospera isn't of any interest to you.
I'm sorry they lost your money! Regulation or no, banking relies on trust, and it's unfortunate that they are apparently even less trustworthy than expected. Thanks for sharing a relevant data point.
Boy am I glad I opened this on my phone instead of my work computer
I attended the Prospera meetup in NYC a month and change ago: based on what the Brimen claimed there, they seem to have good, continuing growth, mainly in companies registered as digital residents, enough that if growth continues, they may break start breaking even around 2026 or 2027 (based on current claims of $400k in tax revenue in 2024, and estimating $1.2M in 2025, and needing to hit a $5M/year rate to break even, which seemed oddly low).
That said, I came away from the meeting pretty cold. My own politics have changed considerably over the last few years and I'm much less partial towards grand libertarian projects than I was then, which accounts for part of it. But I also couldn't shake an impression of shallowness.
The initial speaker was a junior employee who gave a very surface-level, pro-free market sweep of history spiel that didn't inspire confidence. Brimen was much more charismatic, but also not inspirational. He recalled his 'somewhat privileged' childhood in Venezuela, looking out the window of his chauffered car at the impoverished people selling fruit on the side of the road, and how it tugged at his heartstrings, how as a young man he wanted socialist policies in order to help them, but he ultimately learned that the only way to actually help them is to trust the market. He went as far as to call entrepreneurs the 'heroes of society' and compared them to Jesus Christ, since the free market is the best way to help people at scale.
That's a tried and true libertarian perspective, a bit strong on the rhetorical side but not otherwise unusual. But from there he went on to present his model of charter cities as the way to accomplish those goals, with Dubai as the explicit example to imitate and surpass. This really, really didn't inspire confidence in the future direction of Prospera.
He expressed some optimism about the upcoming Honduran election, pretty much regardless of who won, on the theory that the incoming party would want to wash their hands of the Prospera suit and settle quickly; take that with the requisite grain of salt.
They also announced the upcoming release of their 'Jurisdictional API' which would allow people to programmatically register businesses in Prospera. They spun it mainly as a fun, techy side project -- who wouldn't prefer to do their paperwork via an API? -- but as much as I'm usually amused by that kind of thing, a tool to programmatically apply for business registrations at high volume seems like it would mainly be used for abusive purposes, even if the applications still need to be reviewed by humans.
It looks increasingly likely that at some point within the next 5 years, Prospera will be self-sustaining and accomplish some of its goals. But I'm no longer confident that it will be a positive force on the world at large. I'll hopefully find some time to visit in the next couple years and see what it's like on the ground for myself.
What do you think would have made it a positive force on the world at large? Honest question - I'm curious what you liked before and think is missing now.
Largely it's that I used to believe a lot more in free market doctrine, and in particular the idea that a less-regulated market like Prospera could lead to substantial, concentrated innovations in pharmaceutics and biotechnology. They're still advertising that, but my own beliefs have changed and I'm much less willing to entertain the innovation fetish. The closest I've seen out of them is Unlimited Bio, which claims to be doing reverse aging, but I see no reason to trust the word of a company that uses AI images as the first thing you see on their website.
Well, one thing that's slowing down progress is the inability to easily test remedies on human subjects, and given that Prospera is surrounded by a lot of people who really need money...
How about cryptocurrency prediction markets regarding whether the pharma/bio innovations (a) work and (b) have nasty side effects?
Couldn't you just do this via selling shares in your biotech startup?
Very imperfectly. Selling shares in your startup essentially tells you the sum of the expected values of the drugs you're developing. Each drug has an EV equal to the product of probability it will come to market, profit per sale, and sales volume conditional on it getting to market. Those factors further decompose into approval/disapproval by specific regulators, insurance approval, number of competitor drugs, manufacturing cost, market size, and so forth.
So as a consumer, I care less about startup valuation and care more about forecasts regarding: adverse events, clinical trial results, and how regulators/insurers will react to the drug.
Another factor: I think it's hard to short sell shares in pre-IPO startups? So looking at share price tells you what the optimists think, but not so much the pessimists.
Yeah, a lot of what turned me off about Prospera was all the PR about what it could do for *you*, the outside investor/foreign expat coming to live there. Not so much about the native Hondurans (well of course there will always be maids and landscapers needed, right? and the cost of hiring them will be *so* cheap, and it will all be under *our* laws not Honduran laws so don't worry about pesky employment laws).
Reports of tussles with other settlements on their island/in the vicinity didn't endear them to me either, though there was the usual problem of two sides to every story: where the Prosperans trying to control and indeed subjugate the local village via water supply, or were the villagers just blackening the name of Prospera because they were jealous/trying to extort them?
This "a rising tide lifts all boats" thinking doesn't impress me, because I've seen some of those rising tides and it's the yachts that get lifted, while the leaky small boats most in need of patching and repair are left to just sink.
Bryan Caplan likes Dubai: https://www.betonit.ai/p/reflections-on-abu-dhabi-and-dubai
I think as long as people are free to leave (no passport confiscation or other shenanigans), and have accurate information about the place, it shouldn't be a problem.
I found this post by Caplan kind of depressing, he’s praising a country with very little political freedom for citizens as the ideal country because it’s a good place to invest. Libertarians who don’t care about civil liberties, man, I don’t know.
Which world would you prefer to live in:
A world where every night, everyone votes on what sort of food to serve, and all across the city, every restaurant serves that particular cuisine. Tonight it's Mexican cuisine for everyone! (This is an allegory for democracy. Easy to see how it gets people fighting.)
A world where every night, everyone goes to whatever restaurant matches the cuisine they, in particular, want. Japanese for me, Italian for you, burgers for her, etc.! (This is an allegory for open borders.)
I'm not an open borders maximalist. Some "cuisines" should take the form of societies with strict standards for admission, if only to serve as containers for immigration restrictionists! But I do think that freedom of where to live is, in some meaningful and important sense, a more important freedom than the freedom to vote.
Not only investors but Dubai is popular with workers too. People flock to be able to work in Dubai.
What has political freedom got us? Except for agitators and activists and professional politicians, who cares for political freedom?
Do workers in Dubai have a lot of personal freedom? Democracy and political freedom is mostly a means to an end (good governance), but what matters for most of us in daily life is personal freedom.
It's popular with either the desperately poor or high level international professionals. The former need money no matter how poorly they are treated (I have seen Indian workers in the Gulf States kept in cages) and the latter are afforded special privileges not unlike aristocrats of old. Medieval aristocrats would have scoffed at the concept of common freedoms as well; who needs common freedoms when you can have the particularized, limited variety.
Well, look at Saudi Arabia, where the guy in charge had a lot of rich people check into a luxury hotel and then wouldn’t let them leave until they’ve given him a lot of their money. Kings can be funny that way.
Sherbro? Sure, bro.
I sure hope the California Forever people are not too rigid about the street grid plan. Having a visual terminus does wonders for a sense of place and scale, and organically delineating neighborhoods, and you lose that with an uninterrupted street grid. It also implies indifference to local topography and other geographical features, which again would be detrimental to a sense of place.
I enjoyed your coverage of the complex, convoluted, and deeply rooted permitting process that commercial developers face, as you so aptly described. What a mess! There is a long history of rewards and risks facing commercial ventures across North America, dating back to the Hudson Bay Company in Canada around 1670. I wish great success to modern-era, large-scale development financiers as they pursue their various hopeful, sensitive, and profitable projects, including Elon Musk in Texas, Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs in California, and Bill Gates in Arizona. Studies show, unsurprisingly, that gaining public support requires mutually beneficial elements such as affordable housing, reasonable living costs, well-designed infrastructure, community beautification, and strong corporate citizenship. While I haven't kept up closely with the projects, I do hope that top architects are involved in the planning and construction. I believe serious consideration should be given to firms like AECOM, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Elkus Manfredi, HDR, Kohn Pedersen Fox, Olson Kundig, OMA, Pelli Clarke & Partners, SOM, Studio Gang, and Weiss Manfredi (among others, I'm sure, that didn't make my short list); to help achieve outstanding results.
I know the charter city people have thought about this problem very carefully but it seems like a common theme here is "the government that actually owns the land can just decide arbitrarily that you don't get to play anymore, and they can do pretty much anything, up to and including showing up with guns, to stop you."
I am glad that Prospera has sophisticated legal armor, but that only goes so far. Hong Kong itself is a good example of the limits of technically-legally-protected. Then again, true independence does not guarantee success either. That map of Sierra Leone showcases another "charter city" that did start with full self-determination -- the country of Liberia.
Unless you have the backing of a much bigger government with much bigger guns. In this case, the US. In practice, that just makes the place a US colony with some legal autonomy, but... maybe that's just what the market needs. There are certain businesses that would be beneficial to the US, but are problematic for it to directly associate itself with.
Yeahhhh Belle Isle ain't happening. Not only is it owned by the city of Detroit (which is currently far more interested in reforming itself than it would be in entertaining this), not the Feds , but it's also a terrible spot to try to build. On top, you'll have roughly 5 million people who actually like the park being a park to NIMBY that project - it's unserious.
For the money, Rod could just buy out the whole city of Highland Park if he wanted instead. It's about twice the land area, has barely over 8k residents, is actually hooked up to utilities and transportation, is still inside Detroit, has decent ground to build on, etc. This is literally a place they could pay people to leave - go on Zillow and look at average property values. A few shell companies, a few years, and you can have the place free and clear. Plus something something Highland Park Plant.
I was thinking along similar lines. Apart from the aesthetics of setting up your enclave on a literal island, Belle Isle has very little to recommend it relative to a ton of other currently underpopulated land in the area that the city of Detroit and/or Wayne County would probably be happy to offload responsibility for.
"they signed international treaties giving charter city investors the right to sue Honduras"
International treaties mean treaty with other countries so did they sign with USA or does it mean something else entirely?
" Prospera’s investors have already sued for $11 billion - a third of Honduras’ GDP. The case is currently tied up in international courts,"
In wikipedia for Prospero, the relevant link is paywalled so I could not see what is this "international court" they are talking about.
In any case, it seems a very bad idea for leaders of a country to involve their country in such murky waters and in hook for large fraction of their GDP. A pity that US congressmen could be purchased for as little as 5000 dollars.
By coincidence, on the same day as reading this post, I heard about a plan for a sort-of charter city near Cambridge, UK, known for the time being as “Forest City 1”
https://www.forestcity.uk/
Here's El Casino on google maps. Streetview has images from Feb 2025, it's a husk now.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/26%C2%B031'03.3%22N+78%C2%B041'53.3%22W
"...I wanted to live, and have my kids grow up, in a place that appreciates craft and beauty."
Rectifying the damage done by the soulless, mass-produced inhumanity of the Bauhaus architectural school should not and cannot include using robot routing arms to inundate our built environment with AI slop. People don't miss the beauty of old-world architecture because there aren't enough curved lines or cherubs, they miss the small human connection that comes from seeing the work of skilled artisans - other human beings imbued with creative spirit and dedicated to a craft. Ornament has never been cheap, that's the whole point. When the oligarchs of the past covered the façades of their buildings with baroque cherubs or classical linework they were paying a living, breathing, dreaming human to do it and generations of people walked in the shadow of their decades of passion and skill. Handing that over to AI and glorified CNC machines won't bring soul and beauty back to architecture, they'll just make it even harder for us to relate on a human level with our built environment.
The Charter City idea must be the most US thing existing alongside apple pie. The desire to set up small, utopian, semi-autonomous communities (including cities) appears to be part of your cultural DNA. 150 years ago, these social experiments tended to be socialist or religious in their ideology; these days they are libertarian (or sometimes identity-based?). But the underlying idea is similar. I love the optimism of it.
Related, the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull set up one of these autonomous communes, named ”Oleanna”, in Pennsylvania in 1852. Think of it as a would-be Prospero. It failed spectacularly. Leading to this satirical song, which could perhaps be made into an anthem of all attempts to finally establish the true Shining City on the Hill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgjrz8FwQ68&list=RDfgjrz8FwQ68&start_radio=1
It seems like an extension of federalism, and also an implementation of the pro-freedom principles of "let them go to hell in their own way" and "no skin off my nose." If a weird religious group or something wants to build their own community and live under their own rules, there are going to be some limits (we're not going to let them have slave markets or sacrifice children to Moloch), but we ought to be able to tolerate the existence of communities of people with weird beliefs without needing to either go in and make them live the right way or wanting to steal their stuff.
A charter city seems like an extension of this idea.
Could someone do a charter city like thing on an Indian Reservation? Like, can an Indian reservation build a medical clinic that does treatments the FDA doesn't approve or import doctors from overseas/use telemedicine from overseas to lower costs?
It seems to me to be deeper than mere federalism - it is the original idea of the Mayflower settlers, put on repeat again and again. That's why I think it must be a US cultural DNA thing.
These days the idea is exported as well (most Charter Cities are elsewhere, like Prospero), but the ideological base of these exports is still the US. Actually, exporting the idea is also nothing new. The most ambitious attempt was the founding of Liberia in 1847. Which has fairly recently been through two first-class civil wars (1989-1997).
While at it, Pete Seeger's version of "Oleanna" is shorter than the original, which also contains a gender-related verse not quotable today. So perhaps the world progresses after all. Here, just for fun, is the original, with English subtitles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBQBG5nZ-lc&list=RDbBQBG5nZ-lc&start_radio=1
I just don't respect or trust the profit motive enough to support a corporate charter city. I believe the admin will try to turn the city into Singapore. Ugh.
I know Singapore is an economic powerhouse. I don't care. And I'm comfortable imposing my anti-benevolent-dictatorship prejudice on the world, much as I am comfortable imposing my anti-rape vision on the world.
I'd rather risk becoming part of a pyramid of skulls than see my world turn into Singapore. Not that I'm especially worried about that risk. Which is vastly overstated by lovers of the status quo. I can't take a centrist's concern for my bodily health very seriously when said centrist is evidently trying to destroy my soul.
What issues do you have with Singapore?
The fact that it's a dictatorship.
But people want to get into Singapore, --Singapore has no walls to keep people in.
There are many flavors of dictatorship, and people do find some dictatorships not so bad.
"dictablanda"
Then let them have their benevolent dictatorship somewhere else, not here. I will do everything in my power to keep dictatorship out of my country, however popular it may be with my fellow citizens. I do not recognize that they have the right to impose a dictatorship on me and force me to choose between accepting it or leaving.
Nor would I be content with any isolated zones of dictatorship nestled within my democracy. I demand a dictatorship free zone throughout our entire territory.
They may not have the "right" to impose anything but they might well have the "power" to impose what they want to.
I have god-given right to walk all over the earth. But others have power to stop me from doing so.
Ok?
What's wrong with having a few Singapores in the world? It's clear that liberal democracy is, well, inefficient, and there are businesses that have good reason to want to avoid such inefficiency. You can stay in your democracy while still reaping the benefits of this offshore efficiency.
I place higher value on democracy than on efficiency.
That said, I have no wish to penalize Singapore. I don't think our State Department should be pressuring Singapore to be like just like us. Just keep that stuff outside of American territory.
How much of a dictatorship is it? It is a one party state (there are some small alternatives but they have no power) but there seems to be some genuine ability to have freedoms of speech and mount political opposition- it is just that the populace overwhelmingly supports the ruling party that seems to keep delivering success. They have sufficient control of the country that I don’t doubt that if their power started to slip they could probably abuse such power to maintain control- but it seems like they don’t need to. Not an expert here - so please correct me if there is some corruption I’m unaware of.
Admittedly, I've only consulted Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Singapore#Political_climate
I had to look up your use of "moots." The noun version which I am used to means "to render irrelevant", but clearly not here. Of course, you're using it as a verb which according to AHCD means "to bring up as a subject for discussion or debate", which may be pretty soft compared to what you intended.
But Oxford American Writers Thesaurus equates the verb with "raise." Further synonyms include "bring up, put forward, introduce, propose..." But that's not what I got from AHCD (American Heritage College Dictionary).
So I pull out the heavyweight Garner's Modern American Usage. And I am fool for not starting with it. "As a Verb. Historically the verb of moot meant to raise or bring forward for discussion. That sense is formally common in American English but today is current mostly in British English. An American legal usage since about 1950, a new sense of moot has taken hold: "to render a question mute or of no practical significance" (Black Law Dictionary 11th edition)."
And they cite a Richard Posner and William Landis article from 1994!
Niklas here - Prospera resident for the past 3.5 years. I came because of Scott's original "Prospectus on Prospera" article.
Back then I took a bet on Prospera surviving the socialists, and if anything the chances have increased since then.
Ask me anything!
How much interaction do most people living there have with the rest of Honduras? Like, are you going from Prospera out to the countryside to buy from the local farmers or to go on nature hikes? Do locals come into town to work or shop?
I think this is one of the most under-appreciated facts about Prospera:
- we interact with the local communities on a daily basis, I'm sure I've directly worked together with close to 100 local businesses, Prospera itself created 1000+ local jobs directly and indirectly, i.e. locals go in an out all the time to work (e.g. construction, hospitality) or sending their kids to school in Pristine Academy
- the island is a tourism hub, i.e. "a local farmer" won't give you the right impression; we buy our food in the largest supermarket just like everyone else on the island, we go to the same restaurants on the island as everyone else (in the Beta District there are 2 restaurants that are only used by Prospera residents, in Pristine Bay there is 1 restaurant with open access for locals/tourists
- about 50-60% of Prospera residents are Honduran
Of course Prospera has a bit of an international vibe, but the island is mostly English speaking anyway. Go to our sister project Ciudad Morazan on the mainland, and it's pretty much 99% all local Honduran (I think they have 300 residents there now).
I may have a fourth answer for the question why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented. Maybe its dullness and even ugliness not a bug but a feature, a social instrument.
The key is that it's not just architecture but virtually any not mass market form of art.
I describe it in the article below, inspired by your Wither Tartaria? The text is quite long, but the first half is mostly descriptive. The explanation starts with Part V and the answer itself is in the Part X.
https://nextathens.substack.com/p/the-fucking-owl
About the stone carving, I have been telling Musk (telepathically) for years that all those beautiful slabs of sedimentary rock lying around on Mars are just begging to be turned into building blocks for domes.
With a nuclear power plant and a few simple machines he could be cranking out domes up to fifty meters across over and over again long before humans arrive. With a reflective coating on the inside the domes will hold an atmosphere and it would take a fair sized meteor to put a dent in one, certainly they will be stronger than anything sent up from earth.
Isn't it hard to make things that are strong in tension out of rock? Keeping an atmosphere of air pressure inside a dome requires strength in tension (the forces are trying to pull the walls of the dome apart).
None of the above, each block has a slit or ridge that fits snugly into its neighbours, assuming the dome walls are 30 cm or one foot thick then the weight of the dome, even allowing for the lower gravity, would need a powerful explosion from within to affect the integrity of the dome.
Lighthouses were built in some of the most exposed shores using similar construction,
For low grade areas ( growing pods or storage units) one layer would be enough, for living areas or to protect the most vital equipment put as many layers an needed to withstand a nuke, there is no shortage of rock.
My grandfather was a stonemason who worked on important buildings like, Cathedrals town halls etc, all over the then colonies without ever leaving Scotland. The stone for the buildings was cut from red sandstone, shipped out as ballast which the old sailing ships needed, and assembled on site.
On Mars we can see the rock is sedimentary, so it is easy to split and shape, please Elon, pick up the phone.
Is anyone focusing on less desirable land, like the arctic?
I dunno but Greenland looks interesting. The name itself was a sales pitch.
Prospera should never have been created. It's unfortunate that they have managed to subvert the will of the Honduran people with legal trickery like that.
Back a few years ago I was invited to the Bahamas by Manifold. I still had to buy my flight but FTX provided room and board? I think? don't remember.
I brought covid from a craaayzy bay area party along with me and spread to everyone there but let's not talk about that.
Anyways, it was such a magical experience in Margaritaville that I instantly left my job to go work for Manifold. And my life has only been flailing uphill since then.
At some point some bad stuff happened to FTX. a liquidity crisis. bankruptcy. apparently FTX owed many people money, including Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville. (Did they ever get paid back? The hotel staff did always treat me well when I was sick. Should I pay for my hotel stay now? Who do I pay?)
That Sam guy went to prison for being too good at lying and too bad at cooking books.
No one else part of FTX went to prison. They all backstabbed him in the end. And he just took it for the team.
Good thing Sam tarnished his reputation but not ours so that now we can buy up the island for cheap.
You might even say, oh how very Altruistic of him. Maybe even Effective.
I might sound bitter but I do think the island should belong to a governance startup rather than a central crypto exchange. central crypto is an oxymoron.
And though I mock Sam for being bad at spending money, he spent some of it on me.
all my wealth so far ultimately came from him investing in manifold and to some extent, me trading AI stocks just like he did (only I do stock market, not venture).
The vocation of Capitalist requires you to allocate Capital carefully and well. He did a bad job and got what he deserved. More than what he deserved. They are not going to let him out. Nobody cares about him enough to bother. Nobody but me I guess.
Maybe if he gets really good at posting on x dot com the everything app, he can convince Elon to convince Trump to let him out.
Or a more fun alternative: maybe if Sam can, within the prison system, convince ziz to start a transgender gang for trans women in men's prisons, then i can be bothered to get off my ass, talk to my sf bathhouse friends, and get them to get Thiel to get Elon to get Trump to get Sam out.
Or if somehow Trump reads this comment, perhaps because g*d forbid someone showed it to him, I have an even more fun alternative:
Yo prez can we build a white collar private prison for transgenders and weird internet celebs? Ask Jimmy Buffet, or some other hospitality guy. Maybe even you.
Then you put Luigi and Sam up in the penthouse cell, and the transgenders in all the other ones. Live stream every room 24/7. it will be clean and 100% violence free. Maybe add a few privacy booths that cost $30 an hour. And vegan options available in the commissary. Let's call it The Panopticon.
...
I still love Sam. I love everyone who gives me money. But you know, I am kind of a capitalist too and I gotta get back to work. Unlike sooome people I am not afraid. I will never be put in the camps and i will never go to prison. Unless it is a very nice ingroup prison, then maybe I'll go try to be the Amanda Waller of prison tpot. Otherwise, it is back to being a degen gambler just like my mama and my grandma were before me.
Hey, maybe one day I will become rich enough to build a private prison for all my friends.