258 Comments

If Neom decides to build a 2.4 km square instead of a line then it would be a reasonable shaped, reasonable size (small) city.

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Yep. or in Arabic: Nam. - This Neom thing is so Saudi ... hard to believe a government can be that deluded, unless you lived a few years in Saudia. As I did. How did my workplace - King Saud University - make it into the top 500 - lol, each expat knows the answer.

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4dEdited

I suspect its a similar answer to how King Fahed University (KFUPM) is ranked 4th in the world for a patents and 101st this year in the QS rankings... Number fudging galore.

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Tell us the answer!

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Oil-Money buys points. Obviously, it is NOT the "scientific research work" being done there. Rolling. On the floor. Laughing. - They mailed all professors who do a reasonable amount of "valuable-for-rating" publishing. And offered them 50.000$+ a year if they agreed to name KSU as their "second university" in their publications. As KSU is rich and "prestigious", they even tried to make it look kinda believable by inviting them over for a visit and some silly project (think "volcano" at the chemistry faculty). Worked out well enough. - I taught a course called "translation of medical texts" - what we did: doing the "health"-units in beginner-books (A1/A2 level), as that was the level of the better students. Check the TIMMS results for the rich Gulf-region. When we did "numbers", some KSU-students had trouble with 7+5 (having only ten fingers).

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Fascinating. Thanks!

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It still would not be in a reasonable location, or have a reasonable vision or purpose

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Those aren't requirements for the city to have some existence. I still doubt Neom will be a city of note but unlike a giant line that is completely impractical building a small square city is within the realm of vanity projects.

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They may not be building the whole thing, but they've already blasted and bulldozed a truly insane 153km-long line through the pristine desert.

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My favorite ACX post series is back. Love to see it!

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I have a feeling that those charter cities in the US are going to end up looking a lot like old-school company towns... Of course, we do have a lot of demand for cheap labor, and "scrip" is such an innovative concept for maximizing value.

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Why? Do you think some particular company would be involved? Or is this just because someone would have to be the flagship employer to get people to a random desert?

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It's more just the incentives at play. Since they're within US borders, they're still ultimately at the mercy of the federal government, and the only reason you'd bother investing that much money into building a city from scratch is to do something you can't do elsewhere. And given that the administration seems intent on crippling global trade, it seems prudent to start moving manufacturing and resource extraction efforts to the states.

Of course, to justify such efforts, you need cheap labor. Very cheap labor. And if you can develop a charter city away from prying eyes, that's cordoned off from the rest of the country and its regulations... Well, it's just a no-brainer, isn't it?

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I feel like there isn't actually any substantive evidence for this and it's just projecting the maximally cynical take onto your ideological enemies.

"Why would we make charter cities, except to get cheap labor?" For lots of reason, I'd imagine, many of them probably rhyme with the reasons the idea is popular in other countries.

To pick an easy one that's alluded to in the post: lots of people (on both sides) subscribe to a "housing theory of everything" where housing shortages are a huge problem - and if NIMBYs are going to block you from building where they've already got entrenched interests, building a brand new city seems like an obvious (if not obviously successful) idea.

And just in general, I think a lot of people have the (probably at least somewhat true) idea that a lot of issues with cities are "legacy issues". "We could have great public transit, but we'd have to run it through places where people already live and Robert Moses is dead". Build a new city, plan in modern transit from the start, and maybe you just get a better city.

And then, yeah, you've got the ideas that would rely on letting some of these cities operate under different rules. I'm a little surprised a coastal "Jones Act Free" city hasn't already been suggested in the comments, given how popular that idea is around here.

I don't really think jumping to "the republicans want a source for their serf labor that can be 'away from prying eyes' (whatever that means in 21st century America)" is particularly merited.

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4dEdited

> it's just projecting the maximally cynical take onto your ideological enemies

Who said I was being cynical? Honestly, I'm getting excited just thinking about this. Society just has so many inefficiencies that the idea of making things work better is just... utterly intoxicating. I'm sure Musk can back me up on this.

We could also use them to solve the immigration crisis! Companies could sponsor immigrants on the condition that they can't leave the city until they pay off their debt. We would get to have the benefits of immigrant labor without any of the drawbacks!

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It's frustrating when you write up a serious reply to someone and they reply with something like this.

Hopefully I'll remember not to engage with you in the future and save myself the frustration.

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*sigh* You can't just dismiss people's takes just because their views don't align with your own. I mean, you can, but it means you'll be turning a blind eye to anything that contradicts your worldview. Is it so difficult to believe that people could find optimizing systems to be so enthralling that they'd sacrifice countless lives to fulfill that desire?

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"Hopefully I'll remember not to engage with you in the future and save myself the frustration. "

That's also the conclusion I came to with this particular person. But crucially, I don't think this person is being sarcastic, unserious or dishonest about their beliefs[1]: you're just behind the times. Which is an easy thing to be right now: the right edge of the Overton Window has taken a huge lurch farther right over the last few months, and hasn't actually settled down. This take is only slightly worse than some of the things I've seen seriously floated *from official sources*, and it's far from the most awful and inhumane thing I've seen seriously argued on ACX/SSC. There are very few positions so weird or shocking that *someone, somewhere* doesn't seriously believe them, and if they feel comfortable doing so, they'll gladly share them. Expect to see much more of this over the coming months.

[1] If they are, they've kept it up for every post across many different threads over many different topics, and I've never yet seen them break kayfabe.

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He really wants you to by impressed with what a Bad Boy he is.

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Well, private prisons and corporations benefiting from prison labor are definitely a thing. No doubt someone could investigate which candidates such entities tend to support. Spun the right way, a federal contract for such a "rules relaxed" Special Economic Zone could be seen as a valuable asset to the right bidder. Not that the current administration would engage in cronyism. If Trump is serious about his deportation plans, why wouldn't people end up in camps, as they're being processed and repatriated etc? If they could totally optionally make some sick Yeezy sneakers while waiting, that's just good business.

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4dEdited

This just feels like baiting an argument about the deportation or prison labor that isn't relevant to this conversation. Whatever you feel about that, or the concept of prison labor or deportation I don't think "build ten new charter cities" is somehow secret code for "temporary work camps for deported workers".

It would be very nice if we could talk about the actual proposals and didn't just use it as a creative writing prompt for "what's the most dystopian possible interpretation of this proposal, regardless of any actual evidence that it's a likely outcome".

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> It would be very nice if we could talk about the actual proposals

Theres always the chance history repeats; american cults, the coal towns, doting the west every 10 miles; the idealism. We've been here before with grand visions. If we dont talk about company towns and their abuses the chance of avoiding it is unnecessarily high.

Proto communist religious communes, the Chinese dying like fly's building rail roads, and company script (trump and elon play games with nfts). Dont ignore history, especially if your in favor of the plan.

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I don't think it's secret code for that either, and I'm certainly not suggesting there's concrete public evidence that such plans are in the works. I was just speculating on a plausible path from here to there. Something in the probability ballpark near "Trump attempts (passes?) a constitutional amendment". I think it's much more likely they fail in the normal way things fail (nothing ever happens).

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3dEdited

Well, the big problem with building new cities is persuading people that they want to live there. (Things like the Presidio or Irvine don't count, that's just adding density or sprawl to existing cities.)

How could you persuade a hundred thousand people to move to a particular spot that isn't close to existing cities? You need some sort of big economic incentive to get things going.

Relaxed immigration laws or relaxed labour laws or both might create the right sort of conditions to start a city from nothing, with the caveat that the city will be filled with poorly treated third world immigrants. But what else can? We need to be realistic about the sorts of things that would need to be on offer.

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While the comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, I feel that it does echo the complaints about ICE deportations seen online; people tweeting (and other social media platforms) about how their workplace was deserted today as all the workers were at home for fear of being deported.

The seeming lack of recognition that they were angry about "we rely on the exploitation of cheap foreign labour to run our business/the services we consume, and we don't want that interfered with by the government" rather than the ostensible "no human is illegal, this is racist discrimination", and that point doesn't appear to have dawned on them, is what makes me smile wryly at the suggestion of a charter company town built on and by cheap foreign labour that can be easily exploited.

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I think Robert A. Heinlein makes a good case for why given certain economic conditions people simply keep reinventing slavery over and over again in his novelette "Logic of Empire", and Heinlein wasn't known to be a bleeding heart liberal.

The incentives seem pointed pretty clearly in one direction. If you want to do something in a charter city, you want some added value from not being bound to common laws/regulations to compensate for the added cost of not being just in an already very well-established city. What's that added value? Which regulations are you seeking to escape? There are more innocuous options - e.g. simply city planning stuff, you just want space to build a lot of shit real quick - but obviously plenty of labour laws are VERY convenient to ignore if you're trying to make a quick buck and pay off your initial investment, and as anomie said there's other incentives that specifically make it attractive.

When these things come up, the problem isn't "capitalists are evil". It's "economic pressures around this have a certain shape that means those who aren't evil will go bankrupt and only the evil ones will thrive".

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There are more incentives and other reasons to invest in such a city from scratch than just cheap labour. One of those that is often not discussed is the ability to exclude, and if you want to be specific, exclude homeless people. Everyone wants to live in a 'walkable medium density' neighbourhood of a nice city, and when you read between the lines that basically describes a college campus. Everyone wants to live in a high trust neighbourhood but those are a few and far between these days. Starting from scratch is less about avoiding labour laws and more about dodging the homeless and the NIMBY/charity/NGO/bureaucratic complex that enables them.

And there's demand for it. Everyone who lived in the mini village built by Mr.Beast for his version of SquidGames loved it and many wished they could just move in permanently. There is rising demand for Neo-feudalism in reaction to the lowering standard of living everywhere else caused by vetocracy.

That's the justification, that's the market, and that is what will be implied in the marketing. Move to a charter city to work at your startup or raise your family and you can do it all on clean safe streets. It's the natural evolution of a gated community–a gated city.

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3dEdited

Do people place some value on having no homeless people around? Maybe, though keeping a city in that state means either giving everyone a house or literally shipping out instantly anyone who ends up homeless, as it happens inevitably in the process of a city being a city.

Do people place enough value on it to be worth the enormous cost of building a new city from scratch? Yeah, hard doubt on that.

> That's the justification, that's the market, and that is what will be implied in the marketing. Move to a charter city to work at your startup or raise your family and you can do it all on clean safe streets. It's the natural evolution of a gated community–a gated city.

The problem is not how it starts. I don't doubt the places will start like little perfect paradises. The problem is how the system behaves under the wear and tear of life and how is it going to need to evolve if it turns out that the original model isn't quite as viable as they thought it would be, influx of new inhabitants bringing in fresh money tapers out, and the honeymoon ends.

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One example of a planned community is Ave Maria in Florida. I don't know if it's a company town, but it hasn't (yet) met the goals that the founder hoped for. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be a dystopian dictatorship, while on the gripping hand it probably is a bit too overtly Catholic for a lot of people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria,_Florida

"Ave Maria, Florida, United States, is a planned community and census-designated place located in Collier County, Florida, consisting of approximately 5,000 acres (2,023 ha). The population was 6,242 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Naples-Marco Island, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area.

...In a 2007 interview with CNN, Monaghan stated that his 10-year plan was for Ave Maria to have 11,000 homes, 25,000 residents and 5,000 students at Ave Maria University. He wanted to build a community where "a particular number of Catholics, particularly serious Catholics, would want to live around a really high-quality Catholic university."

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Im an ancap, this is the closest thing to a policy proposal I have

Half of them will likely be hellscape company towns that should hang the mayor

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> Do you think some particular company would be involved?

Under the current administration a Musk company seems likely no?

I'm sure Elon didn't fund Trump's campaign just for fundsies.

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He may have thought that another Biden or Harris term was an existential threat to Tesla and SpaceX, given how he was snubbed by the Dems on arrival in 2021.

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If he just thought the alternative was an existential threat, you wouldn't expect him to be so actively involved in this administration. Especially since it seems very likely that there will some day be a time that a person other than Donald Trump is elected president - affiliating so prominently with this administration doesn't seem to be a good strategy for avoiding what you see as an existential threat any time someone else is elected.

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Not if his model of the threat is SJ as a whole, rather than just Harris (and it is, if perhaps more because of the Xavier Musk -> Vivian Wilson issue than because of the Revenge for Twitter). Trump's first term didn't accomplish much of note against SJ; hence, Musk probably figures Trump needs somebody competent there with him and obviously Musk's #1 pick for "competent person" is himself (not entirely without reason).

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Yeah, people tend to downplay the personal element but I'd bet a huge amount of his venom is related to effectively losing a child to the ideology. It's not just that they're trans--they hate him now.

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There's very few places in the US that could meaningfully support a "company town" type structure these days. Companies like Amazon which need enormous facilities would rather build them on the suburbs of large cities in order to get access to a large pool of labour.

The one place that I think _could_ benefit from this kind of structure is SpaceX's Starbase in Boca Chica. With very little else going on in that particular corner of Texas, there's presumably going to be a need to construct a whole lot of upper middle class type housing nearby.

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The idea is that we could use these towns to bring manufacturing back to the US. Which will be important if there's tariffs everywhere.

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Why would you build a whole new town, rather than just build a factory on the outskirts of Chattaooga or something?

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Because, again, they would be charter cities. Self-governed, independent cities with its own rules and regulations. Thus, you avoid most of the caveats of setting up shop in the US, such as minimum wage and compliance with stringent regulations.

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3dEdited

Unironically there are (or could be) economies of scale that recommend this though. I'm thinking about google and other tech campuses. Might be the closest thing we can possibly get to "walkable cities with a focus on community and quality of life" (subsidized daycare, green space, affordable cafeterias, etc). Maybe I'm naive though

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Honduras? Guantanamo bay? SAN FRANCISCO?!?@@?!?!!

I'm amazed nobody is suggesting something in Puerto Rico. It's tropical, it's under American jurisdiction and security, land isn't too expensive, and it's quite close by.

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Puerto Rico's power and telecom infrastructure are a mess. Possibly worse than Honduras's, although I'm far from certain about that.

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IIUC, Puerto Rico is maybe the only place in the world a US citizen can go to stop paying federal taxes.

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If a bunch of high-earning Americans moved there, the federal government would decide to change that law and said high-earners would find themselves in one of the few places in the world a US citizen can go and not be able to vote in federal elections.*

*Technically, PR sends a representative to congress...who can't vote.

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4dEdited

Seems like a more than fair trade - a lot of said high-earners are currently living in places like California, one of the many places where a US citizen can go and may as well not bother to vote in federal elections.

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Why would anyone care about not being able to vote?

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If I understand correctly, someone living in Puerto Rico and working remotely for a US company would still have to pay federal income taxes. And anybody working in Puerto Rico still has to pay FICA taxes. (Some googling suggests there may be some useful loopholes for wealthy businesspeople, and maybe retirees.)

It's really quite staggering how poor Puerto Rico is compared to Mississippi.

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Would the US be open to doing a charter city though? I feel like this kind of thing is more for 3rd world goverments with some authoritarianism to make themselves feel better about not helping their people

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Probably not a true charter city. But in theory there would be a lot of value in simply having new cities with good governance and maybe a positive selection effect if you get ambitious people to move there. However, the agglomeration effects thing is a tough hurdle.

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Having been stationed at Guantanamo Bay for several years I'd be thrilled if it became a charter city. Regrettably, it's probably not feasible. you'd nee to do some combination of improving relations with Cuba (but hey, maybe this is a good opportunity to normalize) and building out infrastructure to handle importing construction materials and housing a larger population.

The legal status of the land is a little murky - the post-revolution Cuban government has, to the best of my knowledge, never recognized the prior agreement that established the base even though, again to the best of my knowledge the US continues to pay a nominal rent based on that agreement. It would be very useful to be able to transport things to the base via Cuba and use its airspace, neither of which are currently allowed. The only airfield is on the opposite side of the bay from most of the land / existing facilities and requires a somewhat unpleasant, sharp corkscrew landing pattern.

Plus, because the base is split in two by the bay, you have to use ferries to cross. Being able to transit Cuban territory would make life easier. You could build a bridge but at that point it might be easier (if it's feasible) to just build a new airport on the other side.

Assuming that the political status quo holds, you'll also need to bring in a lot of equipment and supplies via ship. There are some port facilities and some larger ships do stop there, but nothing that's really equipped to efficiently handle cargo in bulk.

But if some or all of those problems could be solved I'd love to move back. Excellent snorkeling. The hiking might get worse depending on the size of the charter city but them's the breaks of civilization.

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>"… the post-revolution Cuban government has, to the best of my knowledge, never recognized the prior agreement that established the base …"

AIUI, Castro cashed the first check the US sent after the revolution, which the US interprets as implicit recognition (even though the subsequent checks – still dutifully sent – are file drawered by the regime).

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That's essentially the version I heard, minus cashing the first check. Tough to know what was true versus rumor in that hen's nest.

The most notable for longevity, variety, and fervent desire by the spreaders was, of course, that a Taco Bell would be opening. It was always around six months away and the faithful dismissed every missed deadline with some excuse - usually the same one; Taco Bell corporate vetoed it because they couldn't be sure of reliably receiving sufficiently fresh ingredients. This alleged barrier was no impediment to the McDonald's or obligatory base Subway.

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"We signed that treaty under duress!!"

Yeah, you and every other nation that had territory taken from them. Annexations are only reversed if you have the military or economic power to make that happen.

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"McKinsey" and "expresses" links are broken.

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> trump charter cities

> 10 spots

> contest

... well thats one way to make my politics happy. Will it be a shit show where amazon imports the 3rd world to stock the mega warehouse tho?

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Min Borders might be an even better name.

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I think Max works better - if you think about it, every ZEDE style charter city makes new borders separating it from the host country, so charter cities could lead to a fractal pattern of new borders.

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Living in San Francisco, the Presidio seems like /far/ less of a public good than Golden Gate Park. The marginal benefit of the park space of the Presidio is small when GGP is right there. As long as certain sections of parkland are preserved in the Presidio (Lovers' Lane, the Lands' End Trail), I have absolutely no objection to developing a hell of a lot more of it. And since access to hiking and biking in the North Bay is such a popular amenity of living in San Francisco, a lot of people would be hyped to live that close to the bridge.

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It seems a waste though when there's vast areas of San Francisco ripe for development which provide negative public good, like the Tenderloin.

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The Tenderlois is already fairly densely developed - it's a lot more expensive to tear down 3-6 story buildings and replace them with bigger buildings than it is to build in a park next to a park (especially when you have to evict a lot of people to do it).

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So Minicircle is basically claiming to have invented the plasmids tech from Bioshock? In a charter city? Interesting strategy.

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I think less then you think, you can debate whos right about biology and the political taboos, but there is a view point here about organic systems being better then designed ones "consider the lilys, see them toil not, yet they grow"

The book is effectively gone, but "the lily" swapped between economic theory and biological theory, intentionally.

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I don't understand this remark.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5OAibHjbws

the far far right has strong opinions on biology; it doesnt bother me one bit that some startup city is researching neo-biology, it be stranger if it didn't. If it was easy to articulate, presumably everyone would start agreeing with me.

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Ah, I see. Thanks.

No, of course, "where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality" is obviously a good place for … unconventional biology research.

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leftist morality is petty, yes, with the whole canceling thing; must be a quote from a great man I sure hope he lived up to his principals

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I mean, it would bother me a bit if I thought there was a reasonable chance for it to achieve certain kinds of results, especially if only by mistake. Synthetic biology can potentially be a very scary thing. I mean world-destroyingly bad at the extreme.

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What exactly do you think the lab leak theory is? What if they made ebola "gain-o-function" and spread across several animals?

The 2nd use of "dual use loophole" is bio weapons

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What do you guys think the odds are that any of these projects actually get off the ground? For me when it comes to charter cities, I can't help but assent to that eternal catchphrase: "nothing ever happens."

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Yeah, I'll certainly not participate in Series A, or B, or even C investment round.

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Ciudad Morazán (the other Honduran ZEDE projects) already exists and 200 middle class Hondurans live there. It just seems to not get any press because they're not going for SV backed startup beach resort vibes.

https://www.morazan.city/

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If you're not growing organs from underground stem cell suppliers, what's even the point?

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Lol

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When something DOES happen, it is usually not at the hands of a guy who made a shiny website and a slide deck shouting "we will make the thing happen, give us a few billion dollars in investment and you'll see".

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> one of only two national capitals without traffic lights

What's the second? I read it's the only one.

EDIT: Maybe it's outdated info about Pyongyang, which introduced traffic lights in 2009.

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Maybe Nauru's capital? (I admit I had to look up its name; apparently it's Yaren, and it's just a tiny district considered the de facto capital. I can't see anything on Google Maps that looks like a traffic light.)

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Madagascar?

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No, I see photos of Antananarivo with traffic lights.

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4dEdited

According to Wikipedia, the other one is Ngerulmud, the capital of Palau. Which is kind of cheating, seeing as the "city's" population is literally 0.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngerulmud

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Freetown in Sierra Leone has one set of traffic lights and they don’t work, so that’s got to be a contender.

Antananarivo has traffic lights; I’ve been.

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This was my immediate guess.

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Vatican City?

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It looks like some of the intersections might just barely have a traffic light within the border.

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Here is my model city, inspired by Neom and 98% different.

Rodes.pub/Carfree

One of the problems with conventional cities is that they are ringed by farmlands. So when they grow they cover the farmlands.

Another intrinsic problem is that because they are two dimensional they require a two-dimensional subway, which is far more complex than a linear subway. The density and volume per mile of a linear subway is much greater.

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Here is a idea, you can take your linear city, and bend it to connect it back to itself to make a circle. Then you can flip half of it and get a figure 8 (or the infinity symbol depending on your angle) This way the point where the still single line crosses itself can become a proper downtown, everyone is much closer to the center, connectivity between suburbs is still good and everyone still lives next to nature. Linear cities don't exist for very good reasons. Leaving land undeveloped that close to the center of your city just doesn't make sense. The cost of complex subway systems is worth it even when they have to be retrofitted to an old city. If you're starting from scratch you can build a radial system for cheap. Gaps between the branches can be used for parks/natural environments. No difference in cost than having the same number of stations in a single line. Except the commuting distances are vastly decreased. Again, Linear cities just don't really make sense.

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I am working with the idea of a linear city. You don't like the idea of a linear city. That's fine: write a paper that describes your model city.

When you are done, send me a link and I will comment constructively while accepting your fundamental premise.

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One big problem with your infinity-symbol city is that it can never grow.

(Or it can grow, but then it just becomes an ordinary blob shaped city with a funny shaped train line.)

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That's actually a pretty valid criticism. Although I would argue that unless artificially constrained, linear cities will also become ordinary blob shaped cities with a (less!) funny shaped train line. At the end of the day I don't like either the infinity idea or linear cities. I think incorporating the best features and practices of existing cities is probably the safest path to a truly great planned city.

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"If you're starting from scratch you can build a radial system for cheap. Gaps between the branches can be used for parks/natural environments. "

Indeed, the Copenhagen Finger Plan is the classic example of this.

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"So when they grow they cover the farmlands."

Not seeing the problem there.

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food comes from farms

food is usually considered good

less sarcastically, good cities had good farm land making cheap food, good farm land then paradoxically get used up until theres shit land around the city; peter principal but for civilization

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1/3rd of Americans are obese.

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I still don't see the problem. If the city grows, then new farmland is in easy shipping distance of the city. (And with modern logistics, New Zealand and Chilean farmland are actually in easy shipping distance of most cities.)

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Surface is covered by 2D or 1D cities alike. The only direction you can grow into while avoiding covering farmland is up.

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You could make more cities, use any other shape then a circle to somewhat selective of the quality of the farm land you cover

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Fertile land gets covered with concrete and asphalt. You say you don't see the problem.

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I still don't see the problem. You realize 1/3rd of Americans are obese, right?

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I don't think we're really hurting for farmland though, at least in North America. If you're an urbanist and you like densely populated cities that are generally car free, you want the city to grow, don't you? That means it's successful economically and socially, and it's attracting new residents. Isn't that what you want?

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A linear city grows at each end. It is one block wide. It destroys zero or very little farmland.

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Basic math, my man. The shape of the city is irrelevant to the area of land it occupies.

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A thin line can move around farm land. A blob cannot.

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FYI, Spectrum Cable Internet blocks your site. https://i.imgur.com/xGF6NDh.png

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The reason why cities are two-dimensional is that this minimizes the average pair distance between two points inside them. The natural evolution would be finding ways to make them *three* dimensional, not going the other direction.

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The point is to mimimize TIME difference between two points. If you can go anywhere in the city in 30 minutes, do you care that you moved in a straight line?

The way to do that is to use maglev vacuum transit which moves at 200 mph with zero friction.

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Maglevs with that kind of speed are only useful if you're trying to cover longer distances tho, that doesn't really help with a regular subway – you'll have to start slowing down for the next stop well before you've reached that kind of top speed.

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I have sketched out my design in my reply to Netstack.

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There is no Euclidean world in which that isn't made even better by some use of additional dimensions.

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How viable would this design be without the vactrain?

As appealing as I find the concept, there are reliability and safety hurdles involved. A failure in one vacuum disables *all* travel in that direction—and with no way to return pods, the other direction will eventually have to stop too. I think it’d be better to give each line a separate tube, and to supplement the vactrain lines with more conventional rail. Going from 200 mph to the ~50 mph of heavy rail hurts, though.

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You might want to read the vactrain part of my proposal so that you are addressing my design and not the design in your head. In my design,

There are two vacuum tubes

Each tube has three lanes.

The floors are flat.

Pods are magnetically elevated above the floor and can slide left and right magnetically.

The lane closest to the other tube is the high-speed lane. Pods in this lane travel at speed in convoys of 10 to 20 pods.

The middle lane is the acceleration and deceleration lane.

The third lane is the station lane. This is where pods come to rest and seal themselves to the station so the passengers can leave and enter.

NOTE: Only one pod stops at a station. The other pods in the convoy continue at speed. Stations need only be as long as a pod. They occur one station per mile.

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I tried, but the links give me an access error. Thank you for explaining it here—I see why the tubes can’t be separated.

Still, I’m interested in how the city design would change *if* the vactrain was not an option. Would it be acceptable to push the “all stops accessible in 20 minutes” goal out to 40 or 60 minutes?

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In my mind there is no chance that a linear city would work without a very fast subway. The linesr shape is absolutely ideal for a subway. You don't need any interconnections and you have incredible density to provide passengers for the subway. Passengers buckle up and don't move again until they get to their destination.

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There's problem with stacking courts. It's too easy. It would be good to see top court appointments requiring a 2/3 majority in the legislature or something along those lines.

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In that case nobody will ever get appointed.

Here's an idea: each member of parliament gets to choose a nominee (as long as that nominee meets some criteria like at least 10 years as a judge in a lower court). Then the new justice is appointed at random (weighted by how many nominations they got).

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Plenty of institutions have 2/3 majorities for nomination - including the papacy. It's possible.

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Okay, we lock the senators in a room and they can't leave until they approve someone. I guess that could work.

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