241–250 of 264 posts
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> You are of course using dry cleaning services in some form People are moving out of dry cleaning into "wet cleaning" to avoid chemical solvents. Wet cleaning requires a drying machine.
Hot, dry air should be easy enough to get at that location. Just need some means of recovering the water as that will be more scarce.
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Can you provide an example of a city with a grid-like metro? I know many grid like cities. I cannot think of any grid like metros.
Grid like comes with a caveat. Most grids are only in city center (so that lines can connect to every other line in the city with most demand), and subways are not often grids but rather interlocking L shapes and curves depending on which radial direction out of city center got to have a subway first (but usually you can still see distinct gridlike patterns). And then there's geographic impediments like where streets…
I doubt it will get built, but they really have people who understand the fundamental concepts behind Arcology. Honestly I'm surprised at how many parts of the design are well thought-out and well adapted to the desert environment. Sunlight from the sides, but not so much that it overheats the city. Heat escapes up. 5-minute walkable neighborhoods. The proximity to services of cities combined with the roominess of su…
It's also super similar to the dystopian cyberpunk of the 1980s. With the added dimension that it's ruled by an absolute monarch who presently deploys moral police to stop outrageous things like women stepping outside the house without male relatives accompanying never mind outrageous capital crimes like protest, journalism or homosexuality, which is the sort of society you really don't want to have smart autonomous…
By the way, everyone could be writing about how on every American or European-adjacent topic, those governments are involved in terrible things too (need we talk about torturing people, killing civilians, colonization, genocide, racism, etc.) Anyways, with American support for Saudi, everyone is "implicated" in this.
Let it speak for what it is, and stick to the topic. There's a place for these criticisms, and they are sometimes necessary, but they drown out the idea we should be discussing for low-hanging, emotionally-charged fruit.
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A friend of mine works on the NEOM project, and it really is like winning the lottery. Remote work with an occasional field trip to look at the place. But Google level salary to tell them how to save some data. The scale of the feeding trough is unimaginable. I saw an advert for NEOM on Piccadilly Circus, the whole entire e-wall, and the place isn't even built yet, so I'm not sure if they're using it to recruit. It's…
"It's like winning the lottery" "Guy in charge is a bully" I certainly don't want to defend the saudis, but let's face it, everyone views the Saudis as semi-gullible fools to be parted with their money, it wouldn't surprise me if they are a bit gruff. Look, Saudi Arabia should be the ... Saudi Arabia of solar energy, they have a huge amount of capital from oil, and Saudi Arabia is at the juncture of 1) the richest co…
To not assume complete stupidity, I'd imagine the Saudi's are looking at Dubai's success in locking in foreign capital into real-estate speculation, and want to imitate that. I'm sure they're hoping to stir up interest and lock in as much speculative commitment before anything is done and are treating it like the world is their Softbank. Doing this while being surrounded by yes-men and not being grounded in reality i…
Saudi Arabia has a looooong way to go before they can imitate Dubai's (or even the whole of UAE's success). One of the key to Dubai's success is that it's cultural climate is not restrictive and not as repressive as other countries of the middle-east (even the other emirates in UAE are way more open then Saudi Arabia). Compare that with the outlook of Saudi Arabia who think that women need to be segregated into their…
Anyways, we can also say a lot about terrible things happening in the US and Europe, but with Saudi Arabia specifically I think people put misplaced hate on things when there are in reality problems everywhere.
I doubt it will get built, but they really have people who understand the fundamental concepts behind Arcology. Honestly I'm surprised at how many parts of the design are well thought-out and well adapted to the desert environment. Sunlight from the sides, but not so much that it overheats the city. Heat escapes up. 5-minute walkable neighborhoods. The proximity to services of cities combined with the roominess of su…
I’m in love with the concept itself! I’d love to live in something like this. I love the walkability idea and the mirror design on the outside. Sadly, this is not getting built as designed and double sadly is it’s being planned by a PoS running a PoS government. Also I feel like cities aren’t meant to be designed this way. If nobody lives there, people aren’t gonna want to move there. If nobody is moving there, there…
I think the hope is attracting investors maybe like Dubai. Turn it into another international hub. There are strong institutional issues with this (especially considering the Kingdom's saudification drive) but I think building it in a relatively sparser area is an attempt to circumvent this.
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Building something like this in a democratic society is probably impossible. The reason is that there would be massive opposition to this and rhetorically powerful claims that the trillions of dollars this would cost in a Western society could be put to better use. Even if, by some Deus ex machina, one administration managed to get this project going, the next to come into power would likely can it. Space is a perfec…
> There's no technical reason we haven't established footholds on Mars and even the Moon Lack of atmosphere, dangerous voyage, radiation, lack of easily available nutrients, dangerous weather, different gravity, likely one way voyages and of course the everpresent lack of any particular economic incentive to do so
It won't be easy of course, but it's entirely possible. And has been for decades. Wernher von Braun, architect of the Apollo program, was the first individual to lay out technical plans for the colonization of Mars. He would go on to ultimately retire from NASA precisely due to this specific conflict between politics and progress in space.
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Have you been living under a rock? The sheer amount of vitriol Elon gets rivals that Trump gets!
We must measure the amount of unearned or undeserved vitriol. Trump’s is 110% deserved. Musk is at about 83%.
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It's also super similar to the dystopian cyberpunk of the 1980s. With the added dimension that it's ruled by an absolute monarch who presently deploys moral police to stop outrageous things like women stepping outside the house without male relatives accompanying never mind outrageous capital crimes like protest, journalism or homosexuality, which is the sort of society you really don't want to have smart autonomous…
You should edit or remove parts of your comment. There isn't really the so called "moral police" existent to the level you're describing. Lots of my fellow Americans don't really seem to understand the changes Saudi is undergoing, so I'm not surprised someone would write a comment like yours. By the way, everyone could be writing about how on every American or European-adjacent topic, those governments are involved i…
Unlike the paragraph you devoted to "what about the US/Europe" (and discussion of US/European political problems seems to crop up in every discussion of smart city tech in the US/Europe anyway...), which is of no relevance to whether a culturally Saudi $500bn city designed for Mohammed bin Salman's needs would be a utopian dream or a stylish dystopian nightmare. City planning isn't orthogonal to politics either; ask anyone who's paid any attention to Nay Pyi Daw.
As for changes, whether the Crown Prince decision to reduce the formal powers of the "moral police" and make them subordinate to his civil police are characterised more by [slightly] liberalising an extremely illiberal society, window-dressing for Western observers or increasing his personal authority and whether such reforms would accelerate or sharply regress under his successor(s) might have been a more interesting tangent than whether I should shut up. I can understand if you don't wish to speculate on such things, though, especially if you can potentially see yourself living where such discussion is banned in future... in an efficiently monitored, fully-enclosed space shaped like a line.
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"It's like winning the lottery" "Guy in charge is a bully" I certainly don't want to defend the saudis, but let's face it, everyone views the Saudis as semi-gullible fools to be parted with their money, it wouldn't surprise me if they are a bit gruff. Look, Saudi Arabia should be the ... Saudi Arabia of solar energy, they have a huge amount of capital from oil, and Saudi Arabia is at the juncture of 1) the richest co…
I spent two years working in Dubai, from 2019 to 2021. I hardly view them as anything but intelligent and ruthless. The upper - upper-middle class studied in the western world, they know more than you think. Plus they have a shitload of money. Don't underestimate the Saudis just because they stick to some weird customs.
They tried setting up all the satellite colleges in Saudi Arabia, and they couldn't get students to actually try. The US higher ed is full of party students getting rubberstamp diplomas, but there are also a segment (usually harder sciences and premed/prelaw/etc) that work REALLY hard. As I understand it, all of the saudi schools are just rubberstampers, they can't get the hard sciences students.
MBS probably needs to have a really nasty streak, because there is such massive corruption in the Saudi ruling structure.
But again, I don't want to seem like I'm defending them. I cannot wait for alternative energy and BEVs to drop the floor out from under them. They SHOULD have a soft landing with all that sovereign investment money, but... those slush funds can disappear fast... And once America DGAF about the middle east from a security standpoint, they'll just be a bunch of lazy billionaires.
Once the oil is meaningless, America's military shield is gone. Shiite Iran can invade Saudi Arabia, and Iran actually has fighting forces. Saudi Arabia does not.