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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
> 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!
*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?
"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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
>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.
Yes they do and yes they already exist. They're called 'fly-in" communities that are only accessible via private airstrip. There's nothing stopping you from buying a house there, but the only way in and out is via airplane which it's assumed you already own.
Then their's Martha's Vineyard, as another example. These communities already exist for the very rich. Gated villages and gated towns are just scaling them to be big enough for moderately wealthy and upper middle class customers.
Watch out for Charter cities that have the right to refuse anyone who isn't a 'member' of the charter city. Just like Costco, but for your community.
In fact if Costco was smart they'd make some Costco charter cities.
> Yes they do and yes they already exist. They're called 'fly-in" communities that are only accessible via private airstrip. There's nothing stopping you from buying a house there, but the only way in and out is via airplane which it's assumed you already own.
I mean, anyone who can do that must have a shit-ton of money, which means the price can be paid only if you're so rich that it's no big deal to you. So in practice I think that confirms that most people aren't so bothered they'd sacrifice a lot of their income on that altar; they have other priorities.
I don't think I've ever heard of a fly-in community without road access, at least not this side of e.g. Alaska or northern Canada. They may exist, but if so they're rare. And the logistics would be *extremely* challenging for anyone trying to maintain a UMC lifestyle. Or, for that matter, a working airplane.
And the reason people live in fly-in communities is not because they want to be somewhere the lower classes can't get to them, but because they want to live somewhere they can park an airplane in their back yard with the runway right next to it. But they all have cars as well, and use them regularly.
Or, sometimes, because they have reason to live in a very remote place like Northern Canada where nobody is ever going to build a road, and are willing to put up with the logistical challenges to do so.
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:
"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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
>"… 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I was thinking more of even wilder, straight up "create new lifeforms from scratch" experiments (which have also been discussed), but of course yes, even merely genetically engineered pathogens are very bad. Shouldn't you then agree that charter cities doing unrestricted biological research is in fact a risk...?
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."
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.
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".
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.)
I remember reading in the Economist that Freetown, Sierra Leone got it's first traffic lights in may 2016; after they were all stolen and sold to neighbouring countries during their civil war. I read now that in December 2023 they got traffic lights at 7 more intersections. Maybe Scott was working with outdated knowledge.
Creates some perspective doesn't it? Countries not even being able to afford, or having such debt of corruption, that they don't even have traffic lights.
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.
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.
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.
The great thing about a linear city, is that you can build other linear cities right next to it :P You could even just give them increasing numbers, like 1st, 2nd, 3rd street.
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
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
"Sulla, sweeping into Rome, convened the Senate and directed them to select an interrex; one wonders if this was the same meeting of the Senate Sulla convened within hearing distance of his soldiers in the process of butchering six thousand captured Romans who had sided against him, in case the Senate imagined they were being given a choice (Plut. Sulla 30.1-3). In any event, the Senate selected Lucius Valerius Flaccus (its oldest member, App. BCiv 1.98) on the assumption he would hold elections; instead, Sulla directed him (with the obvious threat of violence) to instead convene the comitia centuriata and instead of holding elections, propose a law (the lex Valeria) to make Sulla dictator with the remit of rei publicae constituendae causa, “for reforming the constitution of the Republic” – an entirely new causa never used before. Of course with Sulla’s army butchering literally thousands of his political opponents, the assembly knew how they were to vote.
This is, to be clear, a thing that customarily the interrex cannot do. This is also not, customarily, how dictators are selected."
You don't have the history of the Honduran ZEDE law quite right. It was a handful of classical liberals who convinced the overwhelming majority of Congress (conservatives, liberals, and others) that the semi-autonomous zones would bring foreign investment and prosperity to Honduras, which would benefit them all.
The socialist LIBRE party has used the ZEDEs as a political football and tried to destroy them, but they were unable to get enough votes in Congress to get rid of the constitutional amendment that made the ZEDE law completely legal. That's why they packed the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court of Honduras, unlike the US Supreme Court, has term limits. The three Supreme Court decisions that found the ZEDE law constitutional was not due to any one party dominating the 15-member Supreme Court. However, this current Court is made up of almost a majority of LIBRE party members. Even so, the ridiculous ruling that the ZEDEs are unconstitutional was barely passed by an eight to seven vote. The dissenting opinion makes it clear that the Honduran constitution forbids retroactive judgments.
Whoever wins the election in November--conservative or liberal--will probably pass a law that gives Próspera most of what it wants and Ciudad Morazán all of what it wants. "Model cities" or Free Cities are just getting started.
Be still, my beating heart. Retroactive laws are scary even putting aside the merits of SEZs and charter cities. Nice to hear there's some cause for optimism.
So are the seasteading folks just asleep at the wheel? Or is building floating cities even harder than convincing mercurial developing-world governments to give you a bunch of land and rescind most of their laws?
We already have cruise ships, which operate on the same principle.
Though if they tried anything really serious (drug den, brothel with teenage girls, etc.), it would be considered piracy and the marines would be sent in.
The complete anarchist seastead was being tried for treason and for all I know lost his money and will never step foot in that country that destoried his home, the boring legal one has to debate with france.
Seasteading fails for the same reason Prospera will fail. Even if you build in the middle of nowhere, if you are successful, the powers that be will hunt you down.
That's a high class problem that none of the model cities seem to have had yet. I'd like to see a proof of concept of being successful and then being hunted down.
They still had to wrangle developing governments because of the way international waters work. Fuel and maintenance costs were obscene and outstripped the revenue from selling berths, food and drink. Ultimately, they just didn’t have any edge over a land-based tax haven.
A purpose-built floating city would have more or less the same problems, except it would be much more capital-intensive to start up.
Operating any large structure or ship on the sea for an extended period of time is very expensive, and there's legal issues there as well - you have to declare a "flag" country and abide by its jurisdiction. Although in practice I don't think that would be an issue, since there's a handful of "flag of convenience" countries the cruise lines all use that are pretty lenient.
It's interesting to think about the Gaza Strip as a charter city. In a world where practically every bit of land is firmly under the control of some nation state, Gaza is one of the very few grey areas where you actually could build a charter city, and with miles of coastline in a strategic location it could be great.
Of course it isn't great, because the local power structure is more interested in killing Jews than anything else, but it could be.
kowloon walled city was destoried when the political winds shifted; even ignoring the plan of "lets build in a war zone" issues, historically it wouldn't be a good long term real estate investment
Morality is irrelevant. They are free to fight for their beliefs, and Israel is free to fight for their beliefs. The Gazans lost, and now they pay the price for their failure. No one is entitled to freedom or existence.
He could build the cities to generate free energy, with no windows and restaurants serving only sushi. Assuming nobody had been replaced by robots already.
It's less ambitious and has been plagued by many bureaucratic hurdles, but there is a planned city with maybe now near to 1000 residents in the at-least-comparably-stable West Bank, Rawabi:
Plus, the people living there currently live or die according to the decisions of an unaccountable sovereign who they have no ability to topple, and some of those decisions have been outsourced to AI.
According to neoreactionary fiirst principles, it should be going great for them!
A strip of desert with no natural resources under blockade by a foreign power doesn’t seem very opportune to me? Moreover, it has the same problem as Prospera but worse: not only the local regime thoroughly unstable but its neighbor is probably going to try to conquer and annex it at some point in the 20 years rendering all arrangements null and void.
Yeah, the "Gazans should have built a tourist paradise" crowd always seemed incredibly callous and disconnected to me.
This is a city where the fishing industry died because Israeli warships fired on any boats venturing more than 30km out. NGOs regularly reported that locals struggled to build anything because they couldn't get enough concrete in. People could only move in and out at a drip feed.
Yes, a lot of this is a consequence of Hamas' uninterrupted rocket campaign, but the West Bank has fired roughly zero rockets in decades and they face similar (though much less intense) restrictions.
So at best it would have been a case of "stop doing terrorism for decades and *maybe* your overlords will let you develop real estate". They should have stopped doing terrorism regardless, but portraying the situation as if the Gazans were sitting on a pile of gold and were too hateful to grab it is arrogant and naive.
"So at best it would have been a case of "stop doing terrorism for decades and *maybe* your overlords will let you develop real estate"."
I don't think so. They basically had self-governance after Israel withdrew in 2005, without a sea blockade or a sealed border. Only after Hamas was voted in did Israel start putting in restrictions. The idea that they couldn't get enough concrete is a bit laughable, as Hamas built hundreds of kilometers of concrete tunnels.
Looks like I overestimated the time line at 20 years. Probably much sooner than that.
In any case much as I like charter cities, the idea of ethnically cleansing places to make way for them strikes me, personally, as just slightly unpalatable.
The point of a charter city is to turn low-value land into high-value land. There is no low-value land in Malta like there is in Gaza because Malta doesn't suffer from the same problems of poor governance that Gaza does. Basically most of the increase you could get in Maltese land prices by creating charter cities, you could also get by simply liberalizing zoning.
Uh, yes. Look at nearly everything the United States has built since 1988. In many cities, that's *all* you're allowed to build, and I think in most cities it is a majority of the housing stock (though in some bigger cities it was mostly built between 1950 and 1980).
Where are you looking? I live in the Midwest on a 1/2 acre lot (wish it were smaller, actually, hate mowing lawns) that was developed in the last 15 years.
If the answer to "where are you looking" is "the densely populated and highly demanded (mostly coastal) areas of the country", then yeah, that's the problem.
Yeah, I finally bought a riding mower this year - I held out for a few years because a half acre is doable with a push mower and I told myself I could use a bit more exercise... but I hit a breaking point this year and just got a riding mower and it's a lot better.
I don't understand this comment. I see tons of new construction, and it's all either single-family housing on lots ranging between 1/8 - 1/2 acre or 5-over-1s.
The *proportion* of the housing stock that is single-family detached housing isn't the problem. It's that the *amount* of housing of *any kind* that is being built is insufficient.
Kanye West in the Middle East? They may not let his wife in the country:
"What Did Ye’s Wife Wear to the Grammys? Not Much.: Bianca Censori, who has become known for her provocative looks, took the concept of showing skin to another level." By Misty White Sidell on Feb. 2, 2025
I feel it's a missed opportunity to not mention in the text that Kanye's proposed city is called "YZY Droam". I guess they were thinking XYZ but didn't want an Musk copyright claim over the letter X?
Devon is actually putting Esmeralda a bit north of there:
"We chose Healdsburg [for the Edge City conference] because it is just 15 minutes from the land we are purchasing to build our permanent village. The site is a short bike ride into downtown Cloverdale, a charming small town in north Sonoma County. The property lies within the Alexander Valley AVA, and has beautiful rolling hills surrounded by vineyards."
I wonder whether Saudi Arabia realises their 2,4km long folly has a historical predecessor: Prora in Rugen. It is a mirror image of a totalitarian arrogant regime that forced its oppressiveness on its people, destined to fail the test of time. I visited Prora and felt the expanse of narrow-mindedness expressed in its lifeless boring repetition. A deep disdain for everything that makes us human and life worth living. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora
> Dragon King of Bhutan (of course they’re ruled by a Dragon King) announced that Bhutan would build their own version of the city, without Silicon Valley help. Thus Geluphu Mindfulness City Special Administrative Region. Construction started in 2023. The target population is one million (Bhutan’s current largest city, Thimphu, has a population of only 100,000, and is famous for being one of only two national capitals without traffic lights).
I love the ambition of chartering a city more populous than your entire country
It seems like the California Forever location would work pretty well if they could get a bridge or tunnel built spanning the San Joaquin estuary to the south and allow access to the Bay Area Rapid Transit. Otherwise, it seems like there's a good reason nobody lives there: it's a long way from anywhere like Walnut Creek, much less San Francisco.
There's an attractive 18 hole public golf course on the Presidio in San Francisco that's probably about 120 acres. You could cut it to 9 holes and build high rises on the other 60 acres.
It seems like artificial intelligence graphics is leading to a golden age of pictures of amazing cities that haven't yet gone through the formality of coming into existence.
Borges and Eco should have lived to see this, such things would fit into their work easily. Cities vast and grand and shining and perfect, so perfect they do not need to exist in the outside world, they are real enough in the AI realm of the new reality.
The real problem with all these shenanigans, IMO, is that a charter city or ZEDE is basically our only hope at getting effective gengineering for humans, because every "full country" government is a bunch of regressive prudes.
The technology has been there to do SNP's for primate embryos for at least 5 years, and there's a ton of really great SNP's I'd pay to put in my own kids already - but you can't get that done anywhere as of now.
Huh? They just released an LLM as good as ours using cheap chips after we kept them from using expensive ones.
I used to read a lot of far-right stuff, and they were always going on about how 'Asians weren't creative' as Japan replaced half of our culture industry. And, I mean, I don't know, look at some anime plots. Guy gets reincarnated as a vending machine in a D&D world? Three Kingdoms strategist becomes a Tokyo music promoter? Soda cans turn into girls and fight to determine supremacy between tin and aluminum? Some of them are dumb but they're definitely not inside-the-box.
OK, that's Japan. Maybe China's totalitarian government will keep them from being creative. But they also have a population of a billion. Quantity has a quality all its own, as a very nasty dictator said.
And as PB says, 'the technology has been there to do SNP's for primate embryos for at least 5 years'. So it doesn't even need out of-the-box thinking.
I meant out-of-the-box thinking on the sociological sense. "Build you own LLM" is not an out-of-the-box idea. It's the kind of thing anyone who reads the WSJ would think to do.
A population of a billion is a massive advantage, yes. But does their government realize it? This is a country that maintained the one-child policy until 2015 and didn't remove all restrictions until 2021!
I've been hearing that China etc will do eugenics for a long time, yet it never goes through the formality of happening. Embryo selection is instead happening in America.
Deepseek is about as good as o1, and worse than o3.
By making an o1 quality model they are approximately tied for second place among released models with several other labs, all of the others I believe in the US. And if you read the details, their chip usage efficiency is not out of line with Western LLM projects either.
Honestly, kinda "yes and no" here. In a sense, yes, the Chinese invented a lot.
But the dates here are telling: Paper - 100 AD, Ceramics (I think you mean porcelain) - 600 AD, Gunpowder - 800 AD, Movable Type - 1000 AD, compass - 200 BC.
The newest thing on the list is a 1000 years old, and for a ~2000 year empire which, for much of its history, was a wealthy, geopolitical powerhouse... this isn't that impressive of a list.
And worth noting that gunpowder and the printing press were used extensively and to great effect in the west and much less so in China itself.
And certainly by the late empire it was clear how far behind they were and ended being unable to modernize: Japan had it's "Meiji Restoration" and was able to quickly adopt Western technology and modernize: China tried and failed.
There's a lot of factors in all of this, but I do think a (later) imperial culture that was traditional, proud of their history, and somewhat backward facing and thus, in a word "uncreative" (at least as far as technology goes) was a part of it.
I would be *very* hesitant to draw any claims about modern Chinese culture from this: this isn't late imperial China anymore, but I do think there's some broad, big picture truth in the characterization.
Yeah, honestly, I give some form of Chinese state-backed eugenics around 50-66% credence.
Not dispositive, but suggestive - asking GPT and Deepseek R1 "how did Yao Ming's parents meet," because I've heard multiple times within China that it was basically due to strong state "encouragement:"
Deepseek:
"Yao Ming's parents, Yao Zhiyuan and Fang Fengdi, both had distinguished careers in basketball before they met. They were introduced through their shared involvement in the sport. Yao Zhiyuan was a former professional basketball player in China, and Fang Fengdi was a prominent player on the Chinese national women's basketball team. Their mutual passion for basketball brought them together, and they eventually married. Their shared background in the sport likely played a significant role in their connection and in fostering Yao Ming's own basketball career."
GPT:
"Yao Ming's parents, Yao Zhiyuan and Fang Fengdi, were both professional basketball players in China. They met through the Shanghai basketball community in the 1970s. Yao Zhiyuan was 6'10" (208 cm), and Fang Fengdi was 6'2" (188 cm), making them two of the tallest players in the country at the time. The Chinese government encouraged their pairing, believing that their genetic combination would likely produce a tall and athletically gifted child.
They married in 1977, and Yao Ming was born in 1980. Fang Fengdi often said that they didn’t marry solely for basketball purposes, but they were definitely aware of the expectations placed on them."
At least interesting that Deepseek doesn't mention the government or "expectations" at all while GPT does.
Makes sense. One advantage the Chinese have is not having our hangups (though of course they have their own).
I'm curious: does it lie about the stuff that's PC to lie about here? Does it accept HBD? the biological basis of sex differences? racial differences in crime rates? It would be fun if you could ask both engines and get the stuff from one that the other lies about, but who knows.
> I'm curious: does it lie about the stuff that's PC to lie about here? Does it accept HBD? the biological basis of sex differences? racial differences in crime rates? It would be fun if you could ask both engines and get the stuff from one that the other lies about, but who knows.
Deepseek was basically fine tuned via OpenAI GPT-o1 elicitation, so it's nearly as woke pilled, more or less, but that's because it was specifically pulling from o1's "answer-space" to pare down the much-larger "answer and connection space" LLM's start with.
Generally, if you run local models on your own GPU's, they have none of the RLHF and thought policing. Folk in oAI also talk about how the thought policing actively dumbs down the models - before "socially acceptable" RLHF takes place, they're noticeably smarter.
Interesting. How much know-how does it take to do that sort of thing, and how powerful a computer do you need? I used to code for a few summer jobs about 20 years ago, but have since fallen behind the times.
> Interesting. How much know-how does it take to do that sort of thing, and how powerful a computer do you need?
If you're fine at a Terminal and can write simple bash scripts or python, you're generally okay.
In terms of hardware, you need powerful GPU's rather than powerful computers. You can run most models at some fidelty (Qwen, Mistral, etc) with an Nvidia 3090 or 4090. Another good choice is a Mac Studio or Mac Pro, which give you 192 or 96gb of usable ram, respectively (they unify system ram and vram with the M2 chips, and M3 is coming soon, I think you can even get a Macbook Pro right now with 96gb of unified memory). The parameter to max is "vram," or how many gb of ram the GPU has (generally 24 for a top NVIDIA gpu). Most local models have downsampled versions where they can fit in smaller GPU's.
Running something like Deepseek R1 takes ~350+ gb of vram, which is serious hardware - something like 6 Nvidia A100's.
I have a bunch of GPU's just laying around from a mining operation I built a few years ago, so I spin up one of the mining rigs for local models, and have fifty to a couple hundred gb of vram to play with in those. If I didn't have that, I'd probably be into Mac Studios or Mac Pros.
TL;DR: I funded my own independent "replication" study using MiniCircle's plasmids and saw in-vivo expression in mice.
Preface: I am not an investor or otherwise affiliated with MiniCircle. I met one of their scientists at a conference once but they didn't remember me when I cold called them months later. I have engaged with them on the following project but I have no direct stake in their success/failure other than I want gene therapies to work.
I am personally funding a study to try to make VEGF gene therapy in humans a thing via medical tourism, without giving $100M to the FDA and BigPharma. The first step in this was to just see if MiniCircles worked at all. I reached out to the MiniCircle people (basically a cold call) and asked if I could get some of their plasmids with VEGF inserted and in exchange I promised to make any data from my studies publicly available (success or failure) and if my results showed VEGF working in mice, they were free to use it in humans if they saw fit. They were confident in their product so they agreed, thinking it would be good marketing for them and maybe save them money on doing research themselves.
I hired Ichor Lifesciences, a great CRO in upstate New York, to do the actual wet lab work. They went into the project not believing it would work, but I told them to do it anyway and since they like money they agreed. We did an initial pilot of ~21 mice which we sacrificed and investigated after 4h, 24h, 2d, 4d, 8d, 14d, 28d to see if they were expressing human VEGF (mice don't produce this natively, so any expression must be from the therapy).
Punchline: A little under 50% of the mice were expressing significant levels of VEGF.
We are currently doing additional work to figure out why half of the mice didn't see any expression, and why there was quite a bit of variance in expression levels. We have made some inroads into this and we now believe it is a solvable problem.
While I think the author of the post you cited that is raging at MiniCircles for being scammers is doing so in good faith, the reproduction data from the pilot I ran suggests that minicircles do *something*. They may not work great, but you can always dose more because they are low toxicity. We didn't do any dose finding in this initial pilot, we just took a guess and it worked in some cases.
Going into this I was on the fence with MiniCircles. If they didn't work I would have to explore other options for delivery (which all also suck) so I was hopeful, but cautious. Given this pilot and additional research we have done since then, I now think MiniCircles do work and we can get them to work more reliably with a bit of elbow grease.
I think it is reasonable to be skeptical of claims by businesses on the internet, but I think we should exercise caution in claiming that something definitely won't work because our understanding of biology says it shouldn't work. Our understanding of biology is horrible, and we get it wrong very frequently. If someone says they got something surprising to work, we should try to reproduce their results rather than just telling them they achieved the impossible. Chances aren't terrible that we just misunderstood biology.
The pilot results can be found in the PDF linked below. Note that this is not a formal academic paper, just the results as presented to me by Ichor (along with a video call where we discussed everything in more detail). The interesting bit is on page/slide 12 which shows how much human VEGF each mouse had in circulation when sacrificed and what hour/day after injection they were sacrificed. The ELISA used has a lower bound for detection, so reads of 0 may actually have been "below detection threshold", but I think we should err on the side of failure in those cases and treat them as 0. Also some of the very low reads could have been measurement error, so one may want to toss those out to if you are extra skeptical. The reads over 30 are hard to ignore though.
I will admit I'm not a biologist, but I'm not sure your finding actually contradicts the other post? They aren't saying that plasmid gene therapy doesn't work at all, but that it's very bad at getting a useful amount of the gene expressed, and Minicircle is claiming 1000x more success than anyone else has gotten with this method. Your finding that the plasmids do something detectable is consistent with this claim - it's detectable, but not good enough to have a therapeutic effect.
(Your paper seems to show an increase in the protein of around 50 pg/L, while the other post says Minicircle claimed to boost follistatin levels by 20 ng/L. Which would indeed be about 1000 times more than what you found.)
We picked our dose somewhat arbitrarily with the only goal of seeing *something*. While we do have a target amount of VEGF we want to give to mice, dose-finding is a later stage of the project. Plasmids are generally quite safe, so you can just inject more (up to a point) and you can spread out over multiple doses until you hit your target if you are running into toxicity problems due to too much free plasmid in the veins.
I just re-read (skimmed) the linked article again (last time was when it was published originally) and you are right, while they do appear to be incredibly angry, they are not saying plasmids *never* work, just that they don't think plasmids can work as well as MiniCircle claims. I still feel that calling them frauds without attempting to replicate their work is unfair for the reasons I posted above (we get biology wrong all the time).
Eventually my project will get better data (hopefully 2025) and I'll be able to speak more confidently on how well plasmids work in mice at least. Perhaps I'll find that they do work but require large or numerous doses like the authors of the linked article seem to think would be necessary (though it is unclear why they think this would be a problem).
Page 6 of the slides has 3 treatment + 3 controls which were run before the other 21 listed on page 12. I *think* we used a different mechanism for checking VEGF levels on those mice which included both human and mouse VEGF, which is why both treatment and control mice showed >0, while the latter 21 mice were tested for human VEGF only.
I'll ask to find out if we had any control mice in the latter ELISA or not and get back to you here with a response once I have it, but if you dislike the lack of controls presented on page 12 you can focus only on the initial group of 6 for now (not as robust, but interesting).
Regardless of whether we have them or not, I think the information gain from control mice in the 21 group would be fairly limited. While it is possible that the ELISA we used just spits out random numbers, and a sufficient number of control mice would allow us to see that, that seems unlikely and for a pilot study like this the added cost wouldn't likely be worth it. The final study (lifespan) will have a control group that doesn't receive treatment, and the final readout is lifespan so not much room for a tool to get something wrong (mice are either dead or alive at any given point in time, hard to misread that).
Essentially all biochemical assays have some level of background activity/noise, you need a negative control in order to be confident your results are more than just noise. That is to say, it is not just likely that your ELISA spits out random numbers, it is *guaranteed* to spit out random numbers -you need a negative control in order to make sure you're seeing an actual signal in addition to the random noise (and, ideally, a positive control so you know your assay is actually working at all). For a specific example of potential background noise, in this case, mice don't make human VEGF, but they sure as heck are making mouse VEGF, and there is a strong possibility of antibodies to human VEGF having significant levels of cross-reactivity to mouse VEGF.
The pilot results *are* somewhat encouraging since you do have negative controls there, thanks for pointing that out. On the other hand, the results from your full study suggest you're seeing decent expression as soon as 4h after injection, which strikes me as fairly unlikely, though not a priori impossible. It takes time for DNA to be taken up into cells, reach the nucleus, get transcribed, and get translated -when we do this in the lab (under ideal conditions), if you're lucky you might start seeing protein expressed 12 hours after transfection, but typically will take 24-48 hours. The other problem with your full study is that an N of 3 per condition is clearly not enough to get a good signal. Rather than looking at lots of time points with low N, I'd suggest doing at most 3 time points and increase your N/time point.
With regards to your final point about lifespan, it is true that a live/dead readout doesn't have much room for experimental error, the problem there is that *all* mice die, and their lifespans vary significantly under natural conditions! So again you are guaranteed to have a high level of experimental noise (much higher than a well-controlled molecular assay) and the potential for a false positive result is...high.
I broadly agree with everything you have said, and I think the primary point of disagreement between us is perhaps one of cost optimization. Since I'm paying for all of this out of pocket, I care a great deal about optimizing spending as any money saved on the pilot is money that can instead be spent on a later part of the study or spent on other research.
For this pilot, the goal was to just see if there was anything that hinted that this could work. If we got a resounding negative result, then we wouldn't proceed. This result was positive *enough* to suggest that it is at least worth spending money on the next milestone. That milestone will cost more, give us more and cleaner data (but not perfect) and inform whether we should continue on to the milestone after that. Each step is optimized around the question of "should we stop here and do something else, or continue with this project".
My understanding of academia, which is mostly grant funded, is that once you get a grant, you have to spend it all on the granted project and so doing early experiments that may tell you to cancel the whole project wouldn't make sense. You are better off just going straight into the full study where you will get a very clean yes or no answer.
That's understandable. However this is wildly off: "My understanding of academia, which is mostly grant funded, is that once you get a grant, you have to spend it all on the granted project and so doing early experiments that may tell you to cancel the whole project wouldn't make sense. You are better off just going straight into the full study where you will get a very clean yes or no answer."
For federal grants you have enormous leeway in what you can spend the money on, and there are strong incentives to make sure your big expensive experiment is going to work. If you jump straight into it without lots of preliminary data, you may get uninterpretable (and thus unpublishable) results. No publications=no more grants=no more job.
I'm not saying you should do fewer pilot experiments. I'm suggesting you should do *more*, better designed pilot experiments, so you can design better big experiments, so that the money you spend on the big project doesn't end up giving you meaningless data (this happens a Lot, despite our best attempts, and is very depressing).
Thanks for the insight into how academia works, this will help me update my internal model. It still leaves me uncertain why it seems academics seem to always do very large, time consuming, and expensive studies though rather than a series of much smaller ones. Perhaps this is just a publishing bias where I only see the final big studies, and I don't see all of the failure steps that lead to that?
I heard back from Ichor by the way and they reminded me of some details of the pilot that I had forgotten. The first 3 treatment mice on page 6 are the same 3 mice that were the 28 day mice on page 12. The page 6 results are from a survival bleed, and the ELISA we used required a certain amount of material so we had to dilute the samples to use it (1:5). The same ELISA was used for the page 12 results, but those were terminal bleeds so no dilution was required.
This obviously opens up a lot of questions like why did we see non-zero values for the control mice in the diluted samples when we saw 0 values for treatment mice in the non-diluted samples. One guess is that a pure serum interferes with the ELISA in some way. Also the 3 mice that were tested twice initially showed elevated levels of VEGF but then 28 days later they showed 0, and we need to understand why that was. One of the tasks we have scheduled already is ELISA scouting as we want one that can work well with survival bleeds so we can monitor mouse VEGF levels throughout the study. We also will be doing more dose finding, and getting answers to the question of why control mice were showing non-zero values (ELISA noise probably, but why no noise in the non-diluted samples).
I have to admit I don't see why people here get so worked up about these charter cities. Seems like it's just going to be run by some asshole CEO who works everyone to death and runs off with the money 3 years later. Like company towns without the long-term planning. Eventually government in the surrounding area's going to turn and you get left with a foreign government surrounding you that hates your Western a**. Or else it's some boondoggle like Neom or the one in Bhutan where a bunch of money gets thrown at it by some rich guy in a dictatorship and there's nothing left a few years later but some interesting weird buildings.
Yes and no. That was stolen from Winston Churchill, who said "Democracy is the worst system, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time." It has a lot of problems, but is still better than the other options that have been tried so far.
Problem is, you wanna be an evil overlord, you gotta get a few minions from somewhere. The reality of management was always one of Rand's biggest blind spots.
What interests me is that first AI image of organic buildings, because it appears to use nonlinear perspective, more accurate than the traditional linear perspective taught to unthinking art students.
With organic natural and constructed forms, the curvature is not immediately apparent. But look at the multiple vanishing points, panning vertically from horizon to foreground below. Photographs have only a single vanishing point, unlike human visual perception of a scene.
There is a side to side pan, too, but the distortions would become more obvious in the "corners" between accurate regions. One wants to use a rectangular image, not square, to minimize recognition of the distortions. Only an image within a hemisphere would be free of distortion, I have concluded.
The article is good, too, and now I will get back to it.
Yes, Pueyo makes the case for Presidio (what "beautiful park" - seems like an outrageous cheat by the people who made it there.) And Guantanamo. And eight more.
I've been to Bhutan a few times in the last few months re the new city project and the way they are approaching it is very interesting. I was initially unsure, but I'm pretty excited now. I'll write about my experience there soon!
That doesn't explain what is as a matter of fact motivating them to seek to better themselves if *not* a wish for happiness they currently lack, even if an outside perspective would think it a waste for them to do otherwise.
Fear of death trumps the desire for happiness. There isn't going to be a Bhutan left if people keep emigrating out of the country for the sake of wealth.
That AI-generated image of "beautiful buildings" nicely illustrates why utopian architecture so often fails: they're beautiful from an imagined perspective in the sky above them but would kind of suck at ground level.
I'm not one bit surprised about the Prospera decision, and as for suing the government - good luck there, best chance you have is that this would collapse the economy, cause a crash election, and have the socialists/communists/generalissimo come to power even more motivated to kick your colonising gringo asses out of the country. You wanted to set up in Central or South America for precisely this reason - weak/corrupt government that would be happy to let you do what you wanted so long as the right palms were greased, and never mind things like "laws" and "constitutions" and "the will of the people". Well, this is what you get in a set-up like that:
"The country is the second-largest in Central America, and has seen hundreds of internal rebellions since independence.
...In more recent times, potential changes to the Honduran Constitution led to a military coup in 2009 that ousted President Manuel Zelaya. In 2021, Zelaya’s wife, former first lady Xiomara Castro, won election to become the country’s first female president.
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and struggles with corruption and violent crime."
"Prospera is suing for $10 billion, ...the agreements say Prospera can sue to confiscate Honduran assets abroad if the government won’t cooperate."
If I'm getting this right, current Honduran assets abroad come to something under $5 billion dollars:
Following the 2009 military coup d’état that ousted former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, there were major protests throughout the country both in favor of his forced exile and against it.
...On June 28 President Zelaya was taken from his home by soldiers and brought to Costa Rica. The National Congress later accepted a letter of resignation from Zelaya, although Zelaya claimed he never wrote the letter. Speaker of Congress Roberto Micheletti was sworn in as temporary president.
...On September 26 Speaker Micheletti suspended constitutional freedoms such as the right to personal liberty, the right not to be held for more than 24 hours without cause, and the right to assembly. TV and radio stations that supported Zelaya were shut down. According to statistics released by the Center for the Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture (CPTRT), in the four months following the coup there was more than a 4,000 percent spike in human rights violations."
Now, I'm not a big-brained visionary, but I would think that setting up in a country with shaky approach to government, law, and order, would be a not so great thing in case they have one of the regular governmental collapses and replacement by coup. Okay, so maybe the Prospera people hope that if there *is* another coup, the ones doing the coup-ing and the human rights violations and the army hauling you off to who knows where will be the ones on *their* side, or at least favourable to them, and will be happy to declare the charter city totally legal and constitutional (and here's the account code for my Swiss bank account, deposit the usual by next Friday please).
Reading up on the exciting and interesting times of the political back-and-forth in the period, I kind of like the conservative guy. Except for the drug trafficking. Anti-abortion and pro-Opus Dei I can take, but not drug trafficking.
"On 1 July 2021, Hernández had his visa revoked by the U.S. Department of State, due to involvements in corruption and in the illegal drug trade. This measure was made public on 7 February 2022, less than two weeks after he was succeeded by Xiomara Castro. On 14 February, he was surrounded by the national police and DEA agents at his home in Tegucigalpa, after the U.S. government had requested his extradition for his involvement with narcotics. On 15 February 2022, he agreed to surrender to US authorities, and on 21 April, Hernández was extradited to the United States. On 8 March 2024, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy, and on 26 June of that year, he was sentenced to 45 years of prison."
And of course all that pesky bribery and corruption:
"Hondurans both in and outside Honduras have protested against corruption in Honduras, allegedly by the Hernández government as well as the judiciary, the military, the police and other public administration entities, demanding an end to embezzlement of funds and public money."
Yeah, that's a really good point. One of the big reasons I'm not as pro-capitalist as a lot of the people here. I think real socialism has been a huge flop, but I don't expect governments *more capitalist than the USA* to show any huge benefits. We've sort of maxed out capitalism as a country, for better and worse.
> Prospera’s lawyers objected, saying that the court is not allowed to make ex post facto rulings. But arguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle - even if you’re right, who do you appeal to?
- The fact that their ruler is titled "Dragon King", and their flag, suggest a much closer cultural connection to China than to India.
- Pictures of their population also suggest a much closer genetic connection to China than India.
- The Bhutan Travel Bureau (an unofficial travel agency) is anxious to reassure tourists that "altitude sickness is rare in Bhutan as most valleys are under 2,500 metres, and mountain passes are generally only just over 3000 metres". For comparison, Denver is also under 2,500 meters. Specifically, it's 1,600 meters.
The Dragon King of Bhutan is also the guy who invented the concept of "Gross National Happiness" to emphasise the fact that his country is enlightened and focus on what really makes people happy rather than mere material goods.
Funnily enough, the Dragon King of Bhutan has an estimated net worth of $35 billion, in a country with a total GDP of only $3 billion.
While the Dragon King of Bhutan may lack many of the characteristics commonly associated with dragons, he's totally got the "sitting on a giant hoard of treasure" thing down pat.
Can you give a source for the $35 billion number? I can't find it anywhere, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_royalty_by_net_worth doesn't even list him, and it suggests that he would have to be twice as rich as the king of Saudi Arabia which seems like the sort of thing that would be obvious.
Huh, okay, I was wrong. It looks like I got it from a Google AI summary of a Times of India article, which put a sentence about the King of Bhutan next to a sentence about the King of Thailand.
When I started writing that comment the number I had remembered in my head was more like $1 billion, which is still a lot, but I can't find a source for that number either right now.
If I am currently in power in a country, is there anything to stop me signing a contract with a company - or a treaty with a foreign nation - committing my country to pay trillions of dollars if it doesn't follow my preferred policies down to the last particular in future, even if I subsequently lose and election, and having the international community enforce it?
If so, where are the limits on what will and won't be enforced?
You would have to find and join an international trade law body willing to sign on to the agreement. Then you would have to find a way to put enough of your/your country's money within the grasp of that body that, even after your opposition got control of your country and its treasury, the foreign body could still penalize you.
Then you would have to prevent the people over and above that foreign trade organization (eg the US, if it's a US-led international organization) from telling the trade organization that this is dumb and they need to give you your money back.
My impression is that reputable international bodies wouldn't be willing to do something quite as blatant as what you said.
But you could always convert the national treasury to Ethereum, send it to a smart contract, and have the smart contract send over the interest iff an oracle agreed that your preferred policies were being implemented!
A "smart contract" is enforcement only in the weak sense that escrow is. You would lose everything you put into it, but there's no force compelling you to pay any more. That wouldn't work if you're trying to "commit your country to pay trillions of dollars."
Just for the record, it is many people's impression that "reputable" international trade bodies are perfectly willing to and in fact doing things as blatant as what he said. (Provided, of course, that the policies in question are also their own preferred policies.)
It feels really weird to me that there are, in fact, some charter cities that incorporate under state law in the US already. They're not company town nightmare scenarios. They're weird cities with weird laws and that's it. It feels like the company town fears are somewhat exaggerated accounts of the history that pay somewhat little attention to the role of geography and transportation costs as a factor in (dis)incentives.
"Planned communities" have a dismal history of failure and disappointment because you can't plan a human community. People have unpredictable needs, capabilities and creativity, and the only way any community has ever grown sustainable is by organic growth, loosely coordinated by regulation (not that every organic community is sustainable).
Turns out that we can't artificially impose order on social change.
Sorry, are you claiming that Abu Dhabi, Brasilia, Canberra, New Delhi, Irvine, Kyoto, Palmanova, Quezon City, Saint Petersburg, and Washington DC are examples of a "dismal history of failure and disappointment"?
Zuegel's village plan is pretty neat, at least in the picture. Very Mediterranean vibes in the architecture and layout.
It's going to be hard anywhere, but Latin America especially is a hard place for something like a charter city. They have a penchant to periodically swing into leftist governments that are heavily tied into nationalism, and whenever that happens it starts messing up even normal FDI - never mind something like a charter city with foreign rules.
You'd probably have an easier time in Africa, where you could keep the government intact as long as your charter city has some formidably armed guards and pays the appropriate bribe to the national government.
It's funny how some people go from 'the government doesn't know what they're doing because it's all inefficient top down planning & investment, and we need markets and competition and stuff', and at the same time they try to gather billions to build top down planned cities based on their own ideas.
I think it's possible to stake out an intellectually coherent position that top-down planning can work well enough at the scale of locally managing large towns or small cities, but combinatorial complications and resultant layers of abstraction become intractable for full-size modern states.
All corporations do top-down planning, so I don't think that's the main issue with governments. Rather, I'd think that the issue is mainly a lack of competition between governments (something like 96% of humans live under the government they were born under) and lack of incentive for governments to govern well. The former should be much less of an issue with charter cities, and the latter may be as well, depending on how things are organized.
I'm surprised Scott has such glowing reviews of the very modern architectural aesthetics in these renderings. It appears these Charter cities aren't polling their potential residents about preferred styles. But if you're commissioning BIG, ZHA...well then. Will we see a few Classical iterations along the lines of Thomas Cole's The Architect's Dream?
I saw a comment by Richard Hanania about the plight of Prospera and suggesting Trump deploy the military to Prospera. I like the idea of propping up charter cities with the USMC, it’s very funny.
I'm skeptical that building charter cities is a good solution to a decaying economy, as well as alleviating income inequality. Something about collecting all that capital and building an attempt at utopia feels escapist and lame to me. Are there not solutions that don't require such a utopian take on capitalist development?
My initial reaction is disgust, frankly, but I spent a lot of time in far-left echo chambers so I'm trying to suppress that emotion to understand why something like could work, and that it's not just aesthetics for tech-bro type people with too much money.
> My initial reaction is disgust, frankly, but I spent a lot of time in far-left echo chambers so I'm trying to suppress that emotion to understand why something like could work, and that it's not just aesthetics for tech-bro type people with too much money.
Disgust is the correct reaction, however zoning laws has drastically suppressed housing for decades, and "federal land" has suppressed small town creation. A drastic correction is needed.
The only alternative to not making new cities, is not doing it at all, while we know we have effectively lost cities like Detroit.
To me, the point of charter cities is that in order for a charter city to be profitable, you have to create one that is so much better than existing alternatives that people will uproot their whole life and move there. I.e. it exposes governance to the same forces of competition that have created basically all human prosperity.
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.
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.
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.
Tell us the answer!
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).
Fascinating. Thanks!
It still would not be in a reasonable location, or have a reasonable vision or purpose
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.
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.
My favorite ACX post series is back. Love to see it!
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.
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?
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?
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.
> 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!
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.
*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?
"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.
He really wants you to by impressed with what a Bad Boy he is.
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.
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".
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
>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.
Yes they do and yes they already exist. They're called 'fly-in" communities that are only accessible via private airstrip. There's nothing stopping you from buying a house there, but the only way in and out is via airplane which it's assumed you already own.
Then their's Martha's Vineyard, as another example. These communities already exist for the very rich. Gated villages and gated towns are just scaling them to be big enough for moderately wealthy and upper middle class customers.
Watch out for Charter cities that have the right to refuse anyone who isn't a 'member' of the charter city. Just like Costco, but for your community.
In fact if Costco was smart they'd make some Costco charter cities.
> Yes they do and yes they already exist. They're called 'fly-in" communities that are only accessible via private airstrip. There's nothing stopping you from buying a house there, but the only way in and out is via airplane which it's assumed you already own.
I mean, anyone who can do that must have a shit-ton of money, which means the price can be paid only if you're so rich that it's no big deal to you. So in practice I think that confirms that most people aren't so bothered they'd sacrifice a lot of their income on that altar; they have other priorities.
I don't think I've ever heard of a fly-in community without road access, at least not this side of e.g. Alaska or northern Canada. They may exist, but if so they're rare. And the logistics would be *extremely* challenging for anyone trying to maintain a UMC lifestyle. Or, for that matter, a working airplane.
And the reason people live in fly-in communities is not because they want to be somewhere the lower classes can't get to them, but because they want to live somewhere they can park an airplane in their back yard with the runway right next to it. But they all have cars as well, and use them regularly.
Or, sometimes, because they have reason to live in a very remote place like Northern Canada where nobody is ever going to build a road, and are willing to put up with the logistical challenges to do so.
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."
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Why would you build a whole new town, rather than just build a factory on the outskirts of Chattaooga or something?
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.
I've said this elsewhere in some thread replies but I think Costco would be good fit, Amazon too.
Only available to Prime Customers of course.
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
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.
Puerto Rico's power and telecom infrastructure are a mess. Possibly worse than Honduras's, although I'm far from certain about that.
IIUC, Puerto Rico is maybe the only place in the world a US citizen can go to stop paying federal taxes.
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.
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.
Why would anyone care about not being able to vote?
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.
I got this from Yudkowsky's proposal for charter cities.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cmiRk9XtT9Psnd3Yr/movable-housing-for-scalable-cities
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
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.
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.
>"… 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).
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.
"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.
"McKinsey" and "expresses" links are broken.
> 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?
Min Borders might be an even better name.
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.
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.
It seems a waste though when there's vast areas of San Francisco ripe for development which provide negative public good, like the Tenderloin.
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).
So Minicircle is basically claiming to have invented the plasmids tech from Bioshock? In a charter city? Interesting strategy.
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.
I don't understand this remark.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
I was thinking more of even wilder, straight up "create new lifeforms from scratch" experiments (which have also been discussed), but of course yes, even merely genetically engineered pathogens are very bad. Shouldn't you then agree that charter cities doing unrestricted biological research is in fact a risk...?
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."
Yeah, I'll certainly not participate in Series A, or B, or even C investment round.
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/
If you're not growing organs from underground stem cell suppliers, what's even the point?
Lol
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".
> 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.
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.)
Madagascar?
No, I see photos of Antananarivo with traffic lights.
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
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.
This was my immediate guess.
Vatican City?
It looks like some of the intersections might just barely have a traffic light within the border.
I remember reading in the Economist that Freetown, Sierra Leone got it's first traffic lights in may 2016; after they were all stolen and sold to neighbouring countries during their civil war. I read now that in December 2023 they got traffic lights at 7 more intersections. Maybe Scott was working with outdated knowledge.
Creates some perspective doesn't it? Countries not even being able to afford, or having such debt of corruption, that they don't even have traffic lights.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't like critique perhaps this isn't the best corner of the internet for you.
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.)
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.
"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.
The great thing about a linear city, is that you can build other linear cities right next to it :P You could even just give them increasing numbers, like 1st, 2nd, 3rd street.
"So when they grow they cover the farmlands."
Not seeing the problem there.
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
1/3rd of Americans are obese.
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.)
Surface is covered by 2D or 1D cities alike. The only direction you can grow into while avoiding covering farmland is up.
You could make more cities, use any other shape then a circle to somewhat selective of the quality of the farm land you cover
Fertile land gets covered with concrete and asphalt. You say you don't see the problem.
I still don't see the problem. You realize 1/3rd of Americans are obese, right?
https://youtu.be/kfsllRUrOZ0?si=sNq8CZSOCIdh40sj
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?
A linear city grows at each end. It is one block wide. It destroys zero or very little farmland.
Basic math, my man. The shape of the city is irrelevant to the area of land it occupies.
A thin line can move around farm land. A blob cannot.
FYI, Spectrum Cable Internet blocks your site. https://i.imgur.com/xGF6NDh.png
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.
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.
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.
I have sketched out my design in my reply to Netstack.
There is no Euclidean world in which that isn't made even better by some use of additional dimensions.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
Plenty of institutions have 2/3 majorities for nomination - including the papacy. It's possible.
Okay, we lock the senators in a room and they can't leave until they approve someone. I guess that could work.
The coalition that's repealed the ZEDEs had 82 of 128 seats; it was short of 2/3, but by a slim margin.
One must also note that there is a point at which no law will help because the law is no longer in control of the government, and that therefore trying to write a law that deals with that contingency is futile. Bret Devereaux on Sulla (https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictatorship-how-did-it-work-did-it-work/):
"Sulla, sweeping into Rome, convened the Senate and directed them to select an interrex; one wonders if this was the same meeting of the Senate Sulla convened within hearing distance of his soldiers in the process of butchering six thousand captured Romans who had sided against him, in case the Senate imagined they were being given a choice (Plut. Sulla 30.1-3). In any event, the Senate selected Lucius Valerius Flaccus (its oldest member, App. BCiv 1.98) on the assumption he would hold elections; instead, Sulla directed him (with the obvious threat of violence) to instead convene the comitia centuriata and instead of holding elections, propose a law (the lex Valeria) to make Sulla dictator with the remit of rei publicae constituendae causa, “for reforming the constitution of the Republic” – an entirely new causa never used before. Of course with Sulla’s army butchering literally thousands of his political opponents, the assembly knew how they were to vote.
This is, to be clear, a thing that customarily the interrex cannot do. This is also not, customarily, how dictators are selected."
You don't have the history of the Honduran ZEDE law quite right. It was a handful of classical liberals who convinced the overwhelming majority of Congress (conservatives, liberals, and others) that the semi-autonomous zones would bring foreign investment and prosperity to Honduras, which would benefit them all.
The socialist LIBRE party has used the ZEDEs as a political football and tried to destroy them, but they were unable to get enough votes in Congress to get rid of the constitutional amendment that made the ZEDE law completely legal. That's why they packed the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court of Honduras, unlike the US Supreme Court, has term limits. The three Supreme Court decisions that found the ZEDE law constitutional was not due to any one party dominating the 15-member Supreme Court. However, this current Court is made up of almost a majority of LIBRE party members. Even so, the ridiculous ruling that the ZEDEs are unconstitutional was barely passed by an eight to seven vote. The dissenting opinion makes it clear that the Honduran constitution forbids retroactive judgments.
Whoever wins the election in November--conservative or liberal--will probably pass a law that gives Próspera most of what it wants and Ciudad Morazán all of what it wants. "Model cities" or Free Cities are just getting started.
Be still, my beating heart. Retroactive laws are scary even putting aside the merits of SEZs and charter cities. Nice to hear there's some cause for optimism.
So are the seasteading folks just asleep at the wheel? Or is building floating cities even harder than convincing mercurial developing-world governments to give you a bunch of land and rescind most of their laws?
We already have cruise ships, which operate on the same principle.
Though if they tried anything really serious (drug den, brothel with teenage girls, etc.), it would be considered piracy and the marines would be sent in.
Hasn't Scientology already solved this problem for their slave ships?
Reading about Scientology, it occurred to me that they were able to get away with so much because they focus the grift on money rather than sex.
The complete anarchist seastead was being tried for treason and for all I know lost his money and will never step foot in that country that destoried his home, the boring legal one has to debate with france.
Seasteading fails for the same reason Prospera will fail. Even if you build in the middle of nowhere, if you are successful, the powers that be will hunt you down.
That's a high class problem that none of the model cities seem to have had yet. I'd like to see a proof of concept of being successful and then being hunted down.
Well, they will also hunt you down if you are unsuccessful, but success grabs attention and makes you hard to ignore.
It’s not going great.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voyage-satoshi-cryptocurrency-cruise-ship-seassteading
They still had to wrangle developing governments because of the way international waters work. Fuel and maintenance costs were obscene and outstripped the revenue from selling berths, food and drink. Ultimately, they just didn’t have any edge over a land-based tax haven.
A purpose-built floating city would have more or less the same problems, except it would be much more capital-intensive to start up.
Operating any large structure or ship on the sea for an extended period of time is very expensive, and there's legal issues there as well - you have to declare a "flag" country and abide by its jurisdiction. Although in practice I don't think that would be an issue, since there's a handful of "flag of convenience" countries the cruise lines all use that are pretty lenient.
It's interesting to think about the Gaza Strip as a charter city. In a world where practically every bit of land is firmly under the control of some nation state, Gaza is one of the very few grey areas where you actually could build a charter city, and with miles of coastline in a strategic location it could be great.
Of course it isn't great, because the local power structure is more interested in killing Jews than anything else, but it could be.
kowloon walled city was destoried when the political winds shifted; even ignoring the plan of "lets build in a war zone" issues, historically it wouldn't be a good long term real estate investment
The Gazans would like to have human rights.
Your point is?
https://crescent.icit-digital.org/articles/resistance-to-occupation#:~:text=Resistance%20to%20colonial%20occupation%20is,struggle%2C%20recognized%20in%20international%20law.
> Resistance to colonial occupation is an inherent right of the occupied, including armed struggle, recognized in international law.
Are we going to still pretend that "international law" is even remotely relevant?
International law is not the question. The question is: Why do the Palestinians resist occupation, and is resistance evil?
What do you say?
Morality is irrelevant. They are free to fight for their beliefs, and Israel is free to fight for their beliefs. The Gazans lost, and now they pay the price for their failure. No one is entitled to freedom or existence.
Kanye is reading your comment and taking notes.
He could build the cities to generate free energy, with no windows and restaurants serving only sushi. Assuming nobody had been replaced by robots already.
It's less ambitious and has been plagued by many bureaucratic hurdles, but there is a planned city with maybe now near to 1000 residents in the at-least-comparably-stable West Bank, Rawabi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rawabi
That's just a standard planned suburb, and the West Bank is vastly more stable than Gaza.
Plus, the people living there currently live or die according to the decisions of an unaccountable sovereign who they have no ability to topple, and some of those decisions have been outsourced to AI.
According to neoreactionary fiirst principles, it should be going great for them!
This is sounds like cargo-cult neoreaction.
How so? What's the difference! I hope this isn't "real neoreaction has never been tried."
A strip of desert with no natural resources under blockade by a foreign power doesn’t seem very opportune to me? Moreover, it has the same problem as Prospera but worse: not only the local regime thoroughly unstable but its neighbor is probably going to try to conquer and annex it at some point in the 20 years rendering all arrangements null and void.
Yeah, the "Gazans should have built a tourist paradise" crowd always seemed incredibly callous and disconnected to me.
This is a city where the fishing industry died because Israeli warships fired on any boats venturing more than 30km out. NGOs regularly reported that locals struggled to build anything because they couldn't get enough concrete in. People could only move in and out at a drip feed.
Yes, a lot of this is a consequence of Hamas' uninterrupted rocket campaign, but the West Bank has fired roughly zero rockets in decades and they face similar (though much less intense) restrictions.
So at best it would have been a case of "stop doing terrorism for decades and *maybe* your overlords will let you develop real estate". They should have stopped doing terrorism regardless, but portraying the situation as if the Gazans were sitting on a pile of gold and were too hateful to grab it is arrogant and naive.
"So at best it would have been a case of "stop doing terrorism for decades and *maybe* your overlords will let you develop real estate"."
I don't think so. They basically had self-governance after Israel withdrew in 2005, without a sea blockade or a sealed border. Only after Hamas was voted in did Israel start putting in restrictions. The idea that they couldn't get enough concrete is a bit laughable, as Hamas built hundreds of kilometers of concrete tunnels.
Looks like I overestimated the time line at 20 years. Probably much sooner than that.
In any case much as I like charter cities, the idea of ethnically cleansing places to make way for them strikes me, personally, as just slightly unpalatable.
A Mediterranean coastline is a valuable natural resource. With the right governance, Gaza could be as well off as Malta.
So why not build a charter city on Malta?
The point of a charter city is to turn low-value land into high-value land. There is no low-value land in Malta like there is in Gaza because Malta doesn't suffer from the same problems of poor governance that Gaza does. Basically most of the increase you could get in Maltese land prices by creating charter cities, you could also get by simply liberalizing zoning.
I just want 1/4 acre lots and single family homes … has America built a single one of those after 1988?
Move to Texas.
Uh, yes. Look at nearly everything the United States has built since 1988. In many cities, that's *all* you're allowed to build, and I think in most cities it is a majority of the housing stock (though in some bigger cities it was mostly built between 1950 and 1980).
Really? All the new housing estates I've seen in the US seem to be built on much smaller blocks.
Where are you looking? I live in the Midwest on a 1/2 acre lot (wish it were smaller, actually, hate mowing lawns) that was developed in the last 15 years.
If the answer to "where are you looking" is "the densely populated and highly demanded (mostly coastal) areas of the country", then yeah, that's the problem.
>hate mowing lawns
With a riding mower in a big lot, the first thing you want to do is remove the stop mowing when in reverse feature. It helps a little at least.
Yeah, I finally bought a riding mower this year - I held out for a few years because a half acre is doable with a push mower and I told myself I could use a bit more exercise... but I hit a breaking point this year and just got a riding mower and it's a lot better.
I don't understand this comment. I see tons of new construction, and it's all either single-family housing on lots ranging between 1/8 - 1/2 acre or 5-over-1s.
The *proportion* of the housing stock that is single-family detached housing isn't the problem. It's that the *amount* of housing of *any kind* that is being built is insufficient.
Kanye West in the Middle East? They may not let his wife in the country:
"What Did Ye’s Wife Wear to the Grammys? Not Much.: Bianca Censori, who has become known for her provocative looks, took the concept of showing skin to another level." By Misty White Sidell on Feb. 2, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/style/bianca-censori-kanye-grammys.html
"Censori"? For someone who might not be allowed into a country due to how they express themselves? Nominative Determinists keep winning.
I feel it's a missed opportunity to not mention in the text that Kanye's proposed city is called "YZY Droam". I guess they were thinking XYZ but didn't want an Musk copyright claim over the letter X?
Presumably it's short for Yeezy, which is his nickname.
"[A]rguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle - even if you’re right, who do you appeal to?"
And thus, we ended up in our current predicament.
Devon is actually putting Esmeralda a bit north of there:
"We chose Healdsburg [for the Edge City conference] because it is just 15 minutes from the land we are purchasing to build our permanent village. The site is a short bike ride into downtown Cloverdale, a charming small town in north Sonoma County. The property lies within the Alexander Valley AVA, and has beautiful rolling hills surrounded by vineyards."
Wait, how do you propose a freedom city?
I wonder whether Saudi Arabia realises their 2,4km long folly has a historical predecessor: Prora in Rugen. It is a mirror image of a totalitarian arrogant regime that forced its oppressiveness on its people, destined to fail the test of time. I visited Prora and felt the expanse of narrow-mindedness expressed in its lifeless boring repetition. A deep disdain for everything that makes us human and life worth living. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora
> Dragon King of Bhutan (of course they’re ruled by a Dragon King) announced that Bhutan would build their own version of the city, without Silicon Valley help. Thus Geluphu Mindfulness City Special Administrative Region. Construction started in 2023. The target population is one million (Bhutan’s current largest city, Thimphu, has a population of only 100,000, and is famous for being one of only two national capitals without traffic lights).
I love the ambition of chartering a city more populous than your entire country
It's bold. You run a real risk of being overthrown that way.
It seems like the California Forever location would work pretty well if they could get a bridge or tunnel built spanning the San Joaquin estuary to the south and allow access to the Bay Area Rapid Transit. Otherwise, it seems like there's a good reason nobody lives there: it's a long way from anywhere like Walnut Creek, much less San Francisco.
There's an attractive 18 hole public golf course on the Presidio in San Francisco that's probably about 120 acres. You could cut it to 9 holes and build high rises on the other 60 acres.
It seems like artificial intelligence graphics is leading to a golden age of pictures of amazing cities that haven't yet gone through the formality of coming into existence.
Borges and Eco should have lived to see this, such things would fit into their work easily. Cities vast and grand and shining and perfect, so perfect they do not need to exist in the outside world, they are real enough in the AI realm of the new reality.
The real problem with all these shenanigans, IMO, is that a charter city or ZEDE is basically our only hope at getting effective gengineering for humans, because every "full country" government is a bunch of regressive prudes.
The technology has been there to do SNP's for primate embryos for at least 5 years, and there's a ton of really great SNP's I'd pay to put in my own kids already - but you can't get that done anywhere as of now.
I suspect the Chinese are doing it and not telling us. They already sprang that AI on us.
Don't think so. They show little capacity for out-of-the-box thinking.
Huh? They just released an LLM as good as ours using cheap chips after we kept them from using expensive ones.
I used to read a lot of far-right stuff, and they were always going on about how 'Asians weren't creative' as Japan replaced half of our culture industry. And, I mean, I don't know, look at some anime plots. Guy gets reincarnated as a vending machine in a D&D world? Three Kingdoms strategist becomes a Tokyo music promoter? Soda cans turn into girls and fight to determine supremacy between tin and aluminum? Some of them are dumb but they're definitely not inside-the-box.
OK, that's Japan. Maybe China's totalitarian government will keep them from being creative. But they also have a population of a billion. Quantity has a quality all its own, as a very nasty dictator said.
And as PB says, 'the technology has been there to do SNP's for primate embryos for at least 5 years'. So it doesn't even need out of-the-box thinking.
I meant out-of-the-box thinking on the sociological sense. "Build you own LLM" is not an out-of-the-box idea. It's the kind of thing anyone who reads the WSJ would think to do.
A population of a billion is a massive advantage, yes. But does their government realize it? This is a country that maintained the one-child policy until 2015 and didn't remove all restrictions until 2021!
I've been hearing that China etc will do eugenics for a long time, yet it never goes through the formality of happening. Embryo selection is instead happening in America.
Deepseek is about as good as o1, and worse than o3.
By making an o1 quality model they are approximately tied for second place among released models with several other labs, all of the others I believe in the US. And if you read the details, their chip usage efficiency is not out of line with Western LLM projects either.
An executive at Citi told me that the Chinese lacked creativity and that historically, the Chiense had hardly invented anything.
Like paper? Ceramics? Gunpowder? Movable Type? The compass?
And those were just the first examples that came to my head.
Honestly, kinda "yes and no" here. In a sense, yes, the Chinese invented a lot.
But the dates here are telling: Paper - 100 AD, Ceramics (I think you mean porcelain) - 600 AD, Gunpowder - 800 AD, Movable Type - 1000 AD, compass - 200 BC.
The newest thing on the list is a 1000 years old, and for a ~2000 year empire which, for much of its history, was a wealthy, geopolitical powerhouse... this isn't that impressive of a list.
And worth noting that gunpowder and the printing press were used extensively and to great effect in the west and much less so in China itself.
And certainly by the late empire it was clear how far behind they were and ended being unable to modernize: Japan had it's "Meiji Restoration" and was able to quickly adopt Western technology and modernize: China tried and failed.
There's a lot of factors in all of this, but I do think a (later) imperial culture that was traditional, proud of their history, and somewhat backward facing and thus, in a word "uncreative" (at least as far as technology goes) was a part of it.
I would be *very* hesitant to draw any claims about modern Chinese culture from this: this isn't late imperial China anymore, but I do think there's some broad, big picture truth in the characterization.
Yeah, honestly, I give some form of Chinese state-backed eugenics around 50-66% credence.
Not dispositive, but suggestive - asking GPT and Deepseek R1 "how did Yao Ming's parents meet," because I've heard multiple times within China that it was basically due to strong state "encouragement:"
Deepseek:
"Yao Ming's parents, Yao Zhiyuan and Fang Fengdi, both had distinguished careers in basketball before they met. They were introduced through their shared involvement in the sport. Yao Zhiyuan was a former professional basketball player in China, and Fang Fengdi was a prominent player on the Chinese national women's basketball team. Their mutual passion for basketball brought them together, and they eventually married. Their shared background in the sport likely played a significant role in their connection and in fostering Yao Ming's own basketball career."
GPT:
"Yao Ming's parents, Yao Zhiyuan and Fang Fengdi, were both professional basketball players in China. They met through the Shanghai basketball community in the 1970s. Yao Zhiyuan was 6'10" (208 cm), and Fang Fengdi was 6'2" (188 cm), making them two of the tallest players in the country at the time. The Chinese government encouraged their pairing, believing that their genetic combination would likely produce a tall and athletically gifted child.
They married in 1977, and Yao Ming was born in 1980. Fang Fengdi often said that they didn’t marry solely for basketball purposes, but they were definitely aware of the expectations placed on them."
At least interesting that Deepseek doesn't mention the government or "expectations" at all while GPT does.
Makes sense. One advantage the Chinese have is not having our hangups (though of course they have their own).
I'm curious: does it lie about the stuff that's PC to lie about here? Does it accept HBD? the biological basis of sex differences? racial differences in crime rates? It would be fun if you could ask both engines and get the stuff from one that the other lies about, but who knows.
> I'm curious: does it lie about the stuff that's PC to lie about here? Does it accept HBD? the biological basis of sex differences? racial differences in crime rates? It would be fun if you could ask both engines and get the stuff from one that the other lies about, but who knows.
Deepseek was basically fine tuned via OpenAI GPT-o1 elicitation, so it's nearly as woke pilled, more or less, but that's because it was specifically pulling from o1's "answer-space" to pare down the much-larger "answer and connection space" LLM's start with.
Generally, if you run local models on your own GPU's, they have none of the RLHF and thought policing. Folk in oAI also talk about how the thought policing actively dumbs down the models - before "socially acceptable" RLHF takes place, they're noticeably smarter.
Interesting. How much know-how does it take to do that sort of thing, and how powerful a computer do you need? I used to code for a few summer jobs about 20 years ago, but have since fallen behind the times.
> Interesting. How much know-how does it take to do that sort of thing, and how powerful a computer do you need?
If you're fine at a Terminal and can write simple bash scripts or python, you're generally okay.
In terms of hardware, you need powerful GPU's rather than powerful computers. You can run most models at some fidelty (Qwen, Mistral, etc) with an Nvidia 3090 or 4090. Another good choice is a Mac Studio or Mac Pro, which give you 192 or 96gb of usable ram, respectively (they unify system ram and vram with the M2 chips, and M3 is coming soon, I think you can even get a Macbook Pro right now with 96gb of unified memory). The parameter to max is "vram," or how many gb of ram the GPU has (generally 24 for a top NVIDIA gpu). Most local models have downsampled versions where they can fit in smaller GPU's.
Running something like Deepseek R1 takes ~350+ gb of vram, which is serious hardware - something like 6 Nvidia A100's.
I have a bunch of GPU's just laying around from a mining operation I built a few years ago, so I spin up one of the mining rigs for local models, and have fifty to a couple hundred gb of vram to play with in those. If I didn't have that, I'd probably be into Mac Studios or Mac Pros.
Call me a regressive prude but I don't think turning your children into "Victor's First Experiment" is a good idea.
Have you seen some people's children? Science can't do much worse!
Re: MiniCircle.
TL;DR: I funded my own independent "replication" study using MiniCircle's plasmids and saw in-vivo expression in mice.
Preface: I am not an investor or otherwise affiliated with MiniCircle. I met one of their scientists at a conference once but they didn't remember me when I cold called them months later. I have engaged with them on the following project but I have no direct stake in their success/failure other than I want gene therapies to work.
I am personally funding a study to try to make VEGF gene therapy in humans a thing via medical tourism, without giving $100M to the FDA and BigPharma. The first step in this was to just see if MiniCircles worked at all. I reached out to the MiniCircle people (basically a cold call) and asked if I could get some of their plasmids with VEGF inserted and in exchange I promised to make any data from my studies publicly available (success or failure) and if my results showed VEGF working in mice, they were free to use it in humans if they saw fit. They were confident in their product so they agreed, thinking it would be good marketing for them and maybe save them money on doing research themselves.
I hired Ichor Lifesciences, a great CRO in upstate New York, to do the actual wet lab work. They went into the project not believing it would work, but I told them to do it anyway and since they like money they agreed. We did an initial pilot of ~21 mice which we sacrificed and investigated after 4h, 24h, 2d, 4d, 8d, 14d, 28d to see if they were expressing human VEGF (mice don't produce this natively, so any expression must be from the therapy).
Punchline: A little under 50% of the mice were expressing significant levels of VEGF.
We are currently doing additional work to figure out why half of the mice didn't see any expression, and why there was quite a bit of variance in expression levels. We have made some inroads into this and we now believe it is a solvable problem.
While I think the author of the post you cited that is raging at MiniCircles for being scammers is doing so in good faith, the reproduction data from the pilot I ran suggests that minicircles do *something*. They may not work great, but you can always dose more because they are low toxicity. We didn't do any dose finding in this initial pilot, we just took a guess and it worked in some cases.
Going into this I was on the fence with MiniCircles. If they didn't work I would have to explore other options for delivery (which all also suck) so I was hopeful, but cautious. Given this pilot and additional research we have done since then, I now think MiniCircles do work and we can get them to work more reliably with a bit of elbow grease.
I think it is reasonable to be skeptical of claims by businesses on the internet, but I think we should exercise caution in claiming that something definitely won't work because our understanding of biology says it shouldn't work. Our understanding of biology is horrible, and we get it wrong very frequently. If someone says they got something surprising to work, we should try to reproduce their results rather than just telling them they achieved the impossible. Chances aren't terrible that we just misunderstood biology.
The pilot results can be found in the PDF linked below. Note that this is not a formal academic paper, just the results as presented to me by Ichor (along with a video call where we discussed everything in more detail). The interesting bit is on page/slide 12 which shows how much human VEGF each mouse had in circulation when sacrificed and what hour/day after injection they were sacrificed. The ELISA used has a lower bound for detection, so reads of 0 may actually have been "below detection threshold", but I think we should err on the side of failure in those cases and treat them as 0. Also some of the very low reads could have been measurement error, so one may want to toss those out to if you are extra skeptical. The reads over 30 are hard to ignore though.
https://bafybeieilihst2lw6kqazrjwzr4mex4nxpwc5aleuxo7rxszzewkajn3wq.ipfs.zoltu.io/
I will admit I'm not a biologist, but I'm not sure your finding actually contradicts the other post? They aren't saying that plasmid gene therapy doesn't work at all, but that it's very bad at getting a useful amount of the gene expressed, and Minicircle is claiming 1000x more success than anyone else has gotten with this method. Your finding that the plasmids do something detectable is consistent with this claim - it's detectable, but not good enough to have a therapeutic effect.
(Your paper seems to show an increase in the protein of around 50 pg/L, while the other post says Minicircle claimed to boost follistatin levels by 20 ng/L. Which would indeed be about 1000 times more than what you found.)
We picked our dose somewhat arbitrarily with the only goal of seeing *something*. While we do have a target amount of VEGF we want to give to mice, dose-finding is a later stage of the project. Plasmids are generally quite safe, so you can just inject more (up to a point) and you can spread out over multiple doses until you hit your target if you are running into toxicity problems due to too much free plasmid in the veins.
I just re-read (skimmed) the linked article again (last time was when it was published originally) and you are right, while they do appear to be incredibly angry, they are not saying plasmids *never* work, just that they don't think plasmids can work as well as MiniCircle claims. I still feel that calling them frauds without attempting to replicate their work is unfair for the reasons I posted above (we get biology wrong all the time).
Eventually my project will get better data (hopefully 2025) and I'll be able to speak more confidently on how well plasmids work in mice at least. Perhaps I'll find that they do work but require large or numerous doses like the authors of the linked article seem to think would be necessary (though it is unclear why they think this would be a problem).
I'm not seeing a negative control here, without that the results are uninterpretable.
Is your hypothesis that the mice spontaneously started producing human VEGF, or that the ELISA was run/read incorrectly?
Page 6 of the slides has 3 treatment + 3 controls which were run before the other 21 listed on page 12. I *think* we used a different mechanism for checking VEGF levels on those mice which included both human and mouse VEGF, which is why both treatment and control mice showed >0, while the latter 21 mice were tested for human VEGF only.
I'll ask to find out if we had any control mice in the latter ELISA or not and get back to you here with a response once I have it, but if you dislike the lack of controls presented on page 12 you can focus only on the initial group of 6 for now (not as robust, but interesting).
Regardless of whether we have them or not, I think the information gain from control mice in the 21 group would be fairly limited. While it is possible that the ELISA we used just spits out random numbers, and a sufficient number of control mice would allow us to see that, that seems unlikely and for a pilot study like this the added cost wouldn't likely be worth it. The final study (lifespan) will have a control group that doesn't receive treatment, and the final readout is lifespan so not much room for a tool to get something wrong (mice are either dead or alive at any given point in time, hard to misread that).
Essentially all biochemical assays have some level of background activity/noise, you need a negative control in order to be confident your results are more than just noise. That is to say, it is not just likely that your ELISA spits out random numbers, it is *guaranteed* to spit out random numbers -you need a negative control in order to make sure you're seeing an actual signal in addition to the random noise (and, ideally, a positive control so you know your assay is actually working at all). For a specific example of potential background noise, in this case, mice don't make human VEGF, but they sure as heck are making mouse VEGF, and there is a strong possibility of antibodies to human VEGF having significant levels of cross-reactivity to mouse VEGF.
The pilot results *are* somewhat encouraging since you do have negative controls there, thanks for pointing that out. On the other hand, the results from your full study suggest you're seeing decent expression as soon as 4h after injection, which strikes me as fairly unlikely, though not a priori impossible. It takes time for DNA to be taken up into cells, reach the nucleus, get transcribed, and get translated -when we do this in the lab (under ideal conditions), if you're lucky you might start seeing protein expressed 12 hours after transfection, but typically will take 24-48 hours. The other problem with your full study is that an N of 3 per condition is clearly not enough to get a good signal. Rather than looking at lots of time points with low N, I'd suggest doing at most 3 time points and increase your N/time point.
With regards to your final point about lifespan, it is true that a live/dead readout doesn't have much room for experimental error, the problem there is that *all* mice die, and their lifespans vary significantly under natural conditions! So again you are guaranteed to have a high level of experimental noise (much higher than a well-controlled molecular assay) and the potential for a false positive result is...high.
I broadly agree with everything you have said, and I think the primary point of disagreement between us is perhaps one of cost optimization. Since I'm paying for all of this out of pocket, I care a great deal about optimizing spending as any money saved on the pilot is money that can instead be spent on a later part of the study or spent on other research.
For this pilot, the goal was to just see if there was anything that hinted that this could work. If we got a resounding negative result, then we wouldn't proceed. This result was positive *enough* to suggest that it is at least worth spending money on the next milestone. That milestone will cost more, give us more and cleaner data (but not perfect) and inform whether we should continue on to the milestone after that. Each step is optimized around the question of "should we stop here and do something else, or continue with this project".
My understanding of academia, which is mostly grant funded, is that once you get a grant, you have to spend it all on the granted project and so doing early experiments that may tell you to cancel the whole project wouldn't make sense. You are better off just going straight into the full study where you will get a very clean yes or no answer.
That's understandable. However this is wildly off: "My understanding of academia, which is mostly grant funded, is that once you get a grant, you have to spend it all on the granted project and so doing early experiments that may tell you to cancel the whole project wouldn't make sense. You are better off just going straight into the full study where you will get a very clean yes or no answer."
For federal grants you have enormous leeway in what you can spend the money on, and there are strong incentives to make sure your big expensive experiment is going to work. If you jump straight into it without lots of preliminary data, you may get uninterpretable (and thus unpublishable) results. No publications=no more grants=no more job.
I'm not saying you should do fewer pilot experiments. I'm suggesting you should do *more*, better designed pilot experiments, so you can design better big experiments, so that the money you spend on the big project doesn't end up giving you meaningless data (this happens a Lot, despite our best attempts, and is very depressing).
Thanks for the insight into how academia works, this will help me update my internal model. It still leaves me uncertain why it seems academics seem to always do very large, time consuming, and expensive studies though rather than a series of much smaller ones. Perhaps this is just a publishing bias where I only see the final big studies, and I don't see all of the failure steps that lead to that?
I heard back from Ichor by the way and they reminded me of some details of the pilot that I had forgotten. The first 3 treatment mice on page 6 are the same 3 mice that were the 28 day mice on page 12. The page 6 results are from a survival bleed, and the ELISA we used required a certain amount of material so we had to dilute the samples to use it (1:5). The same ELISA was used for the page 12 results, but those were terminal bleeds so no dilution was required.
This obviously opens up a lot of questions like why did we see non-zero values for the control mice in the diluted samples when we saw 0 values for treatment mice in the non-diluted samples. One guess is that a pure serum interferes with the ELISA in some way. Also the 3 mice that were tested twice initially showed elevated levels of VEGF but then 28 days later they showed 0, and we need to understand why that was. One of the tasks we have scheduled already is ELISA scouting as we want one that can work well with survival bleeds so we can monitor mouse VEGF levels throughout the study. We also will be doing more dose finding, and getting answers to the question of why control mice were showing non-zero values (ELISA noise probably, but why no noise in the non-diluted samples).
I have to admit I don't see why people here get so worked up about these charter cities. Seems like it's just going to be run by some asshole CEO who works everyone to death and runs off with the money 3 years later. Like company towns without the long-term planning. Eventually government in the surrounding area's going to turn and you get left with a foreign government surrounding you that hates your Western a**. Or else it's some boondoggle like Neom or the one in Bhutan where a bunch of money gets thrown at it by some rich guy in a dictatorship and there's nothing left a few years later but some interesting weird buildings.
"Seems like it's just going to be run by some asshole CEO who works everyone to death"
The people who like charter cities tend to have a more positive view of capitalism, realizing that firms compete for workers.
Yeah, you know, you're right. People here actually like capitalism, I mostly see it as the worst system except for all the others.
Isn't "the worst system except for all the others" something to like?
Yes and no. That was stolen from Winston Churchill, who said "Democracy is the worst system, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time." It has a lot of problems, but is still better than the other options that have been tried so far.
Everybody in those circles wants to make Galt’s Gulch real.
Ah, right.
Problem is, you wanna be an evil overlord, you gotta get a few minions from somewhere. The reality of management was always one of Rand's biggest blind spots.
What interests me is that first AI image of organic buildings, because it appears to use nonlinear perspective, more accurate than the traditional linear perspective taught to unthinking art students.
With organic natural and constructed forms, the curvature is not immediately apparent. But look at the multiple vanishing points, panning vertically from horizon to foreground below. Photographs have only a single vanishing point, unlike human visual perception of a scene.
There is a side to side pan, too, but the distortions would become more obvious in the "corners" between accurate regions. One wants to use a rectangular image, not square, to minimize recognition of the distortions. Only an image within a hemisphere would be free of distortion, I have concluded.
The article is good, too, and now I will get back to it.
So, Trump has been reading on substack: Tomas Pueyo - and Scott did not?! https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/where-to-build-ten-new-cities-us
Yes, Pueyo makes the case for Presidio (what "beautiful park" - seems like an outrageous cheat by the people who made it there.) And Guantanamo. And eight more.
I've been to Bhutan a few times in the last few months re the new city project and the way they are approaching it is very interesting. I was initially unsure, but I'm pretty excited now. I'll write about my experience there soon!
That Epicon picture looks kind of like a set of coordinate axes. It makes me think of the Zaxis Tower from Fermat's Last Stand.
<3
The Bhutanese chapter here is shockingly, incredibly close to the plot of "The Business" by Ian C, Banks.
Didn’t I hear that Bhutan is already the world’s happiest country? What are they thinking?
What good is happiness when you are fated for irrelevance and death?
That doesn't explain what is as a matter of fact motivating them to seek to better themselves if *not* a wish for happiness they currently lack, even if an outside perspective would think it a waste for them to do otherwise.
Fear of death trumps the desire for happiness. There isn't going to be a Bhutan left if people keep emigrating out of the country for the sake of wealth.
Being serene and capping all of that with dissolution into nothing is kind of the whole Buddhist ethos.
I found https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-05/bhutan-is-experiencing-an-exodus-of-young-people/102376144 helpful, though it doesn't explain in what sense Bhutan is the world's happiest country.
That AI-generated image of "beautiful buildings" nicely illustrates why utopian architecture so often fails: they're beautiful from an imagined perspective in the sky above them but would kind of suck at ground level.
I'm not one bit surprised about the Prospera decision, and as for suing the government - good luck there, best chance you have is that this would collapse the economy, cause a crash election, and have the socialists/communists/generalissimo come to power even more motivated to kick your colonising gringo asses out of the country. You wanted to set up in Central or South America for precisely this reason - weak/corrupt government that would be happy to let you do what you wanted so long as the right palms were greased, and never mind things like "laws" and "constitutions" and "the will of the people". Well, this is what you get in a set-up like that:
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/honduras
"The country is the second-largest in Central America, and has seen hundreds of internal rebellions since independence.
...In more recent times, potential changes to the Honduran Constitution led to a military coup in 2009 that ousted President Manuel Zelaya. In 2021, Zelaya’s wife, former first lady Xiomara Castro, won election to become the country’s first female president.
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and struggles with corruption and violent crime."
"Prospera is suing for $10 billion, ...the agreements say Prospera can sue to confiscate Honduran assets abroad if the government won’t cooperate."
If I'm getting this right, current Honduran assets abroad come to something under $5 billion dollars:
https://tradingeconomics.com/honduras/net-foreign-assets-current-lcu-wb-data.html
https://phr.org/honduras-constitutional-crisis-and-coup/
Following the 2009 military coup d’état that ousted former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, there were major protests throughout the country both in favor of his forced exile and against it.
...On June 28 President Zelaya was taken from his home by soldiers and brought to Costa Rica. The National Congress later accepted a letter of resignation from Zelaya, although Zelaya claimed he never wrote the letter. Speaker of Congress Roberto Micheletti was sworn in as temporary president.
...On September 26 Speaker Micheletti suspended constitutional freedoms such as the right to personal liberty, the right not to be held for more than 24 hours without cause, and the right to assembly. TV and radio stations that supported Zelaya were shut down. According to statistics released by the Center for the Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture (CPTRT), in the four months following the coup there was more than a 4,000 percent spike in human rights violations."
Now, I'm not a big-brained visionary, but I would think that setting up in a country with shaky approach to government, law, and order, would be a not so great thing in case they have one of the regular governmental collapses and replacement by coup. Okay, so maybe the Prospera people hope that if there *is* another coup, the ones doing the coup-ing and the human rights violations and the army hauling you off to who knows where will be the ones on *their* side, or at least favourable to them, and will be happy to declare the charter city totally legal and constitutional (and here's the account code for my Swiss bank account, deposit the usual by next Friday please).
Reading up on the exciting and interesting times of the political back-and-forth in the period, I kind of like the conservative guy. Except for the drug trafficking. Anti-abortion and pro-Opus Dei I can take, but not drug trafficking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Orlando_Hern%C3%A1ndez
"On 1 July 2021, Hernández had his visa revoked by the U.S. Department of State, due to involvements in corruption and in the illegal drug trade. This measure was made public on 7 February 2022, less than two weeks after he was succeeded by Xiomara Castro. On 14 February, he was surrounded by the national police and DEA agents at his home in Tegucigalpa, after the U.S. government had requested his extradition for his involvement with narcotics. On 15 February 2022, he agreed to surrender to US authorities, and on 21 April, Hernández was extradited to the United States. On 8 March 2024, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy, and on 26 June of that year, he was sentenced to 45 years of prison."
And of course all that pesky bribery and corruption:
"Hondurans both in and outside Honduras have protested against corruption in Honduras, allegedly by the Hernández government as well as the judiciary, the military, the police and other public administration entities, demanding an end to embezzlement of funds and public money."
Yeah, that's a really good point. One of the big reasons I'm not as pro-capitalist as a lot of the people here. I think real socialism has been a huge flop, but I don't expect governments *more capitalist than the USA* to show any huge benefits. We've sort of maxed out capitalism as a country, for better and worse.
That take is so wrong. U.S. is so, so far from maxing out capitalism. Government interference is pervasive.
Yeah, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_spending_as_percentage_of_GDP lists US government expenditure at 39% of GDP, while Taiwan is at 16% ...
> Prospera’s lawyers objected, saying that the court is not allowed to make ex post facto rulings. But arguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle - even if you’re right, who do you appeal to?
Wouldn't that be the World Trade Organization?
Thoughts on Bhutan:
- The fact that their ruler is titled "Dragon King", and their flag, suggest a much closer cultural connection to China than to India.
- Pictures of their population also suggest a much closer genetic connection to China than India.
- The Bhutan Travel Bureau (an unofficial travel agency) is anxious to reassure tourists that "altitude sickness is rare in Bhutan as most valleys are under 2,500 metres, and mountain passes are generally only just over 3000 metres". For comparison, Denver is also under 2,500 meters. Specifically, it's 1,600 meters.
The Dragon King of Bhutan is also the guy who invented the concept of "Gross National Happiness" to emphasise the fact that his country is enlightened and focus on what really makes people happy rather than mere material goods.
Funnily enough, the Dragon King of Bhutan has an estimated net worth of $35 billion, in a country with a total GDP of only $3 billion.
While the Dragon King of Bhutan may lack many of the characteristics commonly associated with dragons, he's totally got the "sitting on a giant hoard of treasure" thing down pat.
Can you give a source for the $35 billion number? I can't find it anywhere, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_royalty_by_net_worth doesn't even list him, and it suggests that he would have to be twice as rich as the king of Saudi Arabia which seems like the sort of thing that would be obvious.
Huh, okay, I was wrong. It looks like I got it from a Google AI summary of a Times of India article, which put a sentence about the King of Bhutan next to a sentence about the King of Thailand.
When I started writing that comment the number I had remembered in my head was more like $1 billion, which is still a lot, but I can't find a source for that number either right now.
That is not one of the characteristics commonly associated with the type of dragons you see in Bhutanese art - for example, on their flag.
If I am currently in power in a country, is there anything to stop me signing a contract with a company - or a treaty with a foreign nation - committing my country to pay trillions of dollars if it doesn't follow my preferred policies down to the last particular in future, even if I subsequently lose and election, and having the international community enforce it?
If so, where are the limits on what will and won't be enforced?
I think the only limit is enforcement.
You would have to find and join an international trade law body willing to sign on to the agreement. Then you would have to find a way to put enough of your/your country's money within the grasp of that body that, even after your opposition got control of your country and its treasury, the foreign body could still penalize you.
Then you would have to prevent the people over and above that foreign trade organization (eg the US, if it's a US-led international organization) from telling the trade organization that this is dumb and they need to give you your money back.
My impression is that reputable international bodies wouldn't be willing to do something quite as blatant as what you said.
But you could always convert the national treasury to Ethereum, send it to a smart contract, and have the smart contract send over the interest iff an oracle agreed that your preferred policies were being implemented!
A "smart contract" is enforcement only in the weak sense that escrow is. You would lose everything you put into it, but there's no force compelling you to pay any more. That wouldn't work if you're trying to "commit your country to pay trillions of dollars."
Just for the record, it is many people's impression that "reputable" international trade bodies are perfectly willing to and in fact doing things as blatant as what he said. (Provided, of course, that the policies in question are also their own preferred policies.)
It feels really weird to me that there are, in fact, some charter cities that incorporate under state law in the US already. They're not company town nightmare scenarios. They're weird cities with weird laws and that's it. It feels like the company town fears are somewhat exaggerated accounts of the history that pay somewhat little attention to the role of geography and transportation costs as a factor in (dis)incentives.
"Planned communities" have a dismal history of failure and disappointment because you can't plan a human community. People have unpredictable needs, capabilities and creativity, and the only way any community has ever grown sustainable is by organic growth, loosely coordinated by regulation (not that every organic community is sustainable).
Turns out that we can't artificially impose order on social change.
Sorry, are you claiming that Abu Dhabi, Brasilia, Canberra, New Delhi, Irvine, Kyoto, Palmanova, Quezon City, Saint Petersburg, and Washington DC are examples of a "dismal history of failure and disappointment"?
No, I am claiming that they are not remotely as "planned" as the examples from Scott's article.
Zuegel's village plan is pretty neat, at least in the picture. Very Mediterranean vibes in the architecture and layout.
It's going to be hard anywhere, but Latin America especially is a hard place for something like a charter city. They have a penchant to periodically swing into leftist governments that are heavily tied into nationalism, and whenever that happens it starts messing up even normal FDI - never mind something like a charter city with foreign rules.
You'd probably have an easier time in Africa, where you could keep the government intact as long as your charter city has some formidably armed guards and pays the appropriate bribe to the national government.
Apparently Edge Esmeralda was last summer. How did it go?
It's funny how some people go from 'the government doesn't know what they're doing because it's all inefficient top down planning & investment, and we need markets and competition and stuff', and at the same time they try to gather billions to build top down planned cities based on their own ideas.
I think it's possible to stake out an intellectually coherent position that top-down planning can work well enough at the scale of locally managing large towns or small cities, but combinatorial complications and resultant layers of abstraction become intractable for full-size modern states.
All corporations do top-down planning, so I don't think that's the main issue with governments. Rather, I'd think that the issue is mainly a lack of competition between governments (something like 96% of humans live under the government they were born under) and lack of incentive for governments to govern well. The former should be much less of an issue with charter cities, and the latter may be as well, depending on how things are organized.
I'm surprised Scott has such glowing reviews of the very modern architectural aesthetics in these renderings. It appears these Charter cities aren't polling their potential residents about preferred styles. But if you're commissioning BIG, ZHA...well then. Will we see a few Classical iterations along the lines of Thomas Cole's The Architect's Dream?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_style#/media/File:Cole_Thomas_The_dream_of_the_architect_210_Sun_Unedited.jpg
I saw a comment by Richard Hanania about the plight of Prospera and suggesting Trump deploy the military to Prospera. I like the idea of propping up charter cities with the USMC, it’s very funny.
>"I don’t know why any of you still take me seriously."
The implied question answers itself, really. Who else can we trust to notice this, admit it to themselves, and acknowledge it publicly?
I'm skeptical that building charter cities is a good solution to a decaying economy, as well as alleviating income inequality. Something about collecting all that capital and building an attempt at utopia feels escapist and lame to me. Are there not solutions that don't require such a utopian take on capitalist development?
My initial reaction is disgust, frankly, but I spent a lot of time in far-left echo chambers so I'm trying to suppress that emotion to understand why something like could work, and that it's not just aesthetics for tech-bro type people with too much money.
> My initial reaction is disgust, frankly, but I spent a lot of time in far-left echo chambers so I'm trying to suppress that emotion to understand why something like could work, and that it's not just aesthetics for tech-bro type people with too much money.
Disgust is the correct reaction, however zoning laws has drastically suppressed housing for decades, and "federal land" has suppressed small town creation. A drastic correction is needed.
The only alternative to not making new cities, is not doing it at all, while we know we have effectively lost cities like Detroit.
To me, the point of charter cities is that in order for a charter city to be profitable, you have to create one that is so much better than existing alternatives that people will uproot their whole life and move there. I.e. it exposes governance to the same forces of competition that have created basically all human prosperity.