Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

End of the Line? Saudi Arabia to scale back plans for desert megacity

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 448 posts

Re: End of the Line? Saudi Arabia to scale back plans for desert megacity

#231

Post by logicchains »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #43

The only thing the Gulf states have going for them is oil money and a good hub location on the Europe–Southeast Asia airline routes. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Bahrain, Qatar, they all remind me of that quote from King of the Hill—they are monuments to man's arrogance. Desert cities hitting 50+ °C air temperature at midday which means air conditioning everywhere; vapid luxury in the form of expensive garish cars, shop…

>they are monuments to man's arrogance. Desert cities hitting 50+ °C air temperature at midday which means air conditioning everywhere

They are monuments to the brilliance of human engineering, allowing millions of humans to live comfortably in the scorching desert heat.

Re: End of the Line? Saudi Arabia to scale back plans for desert megacity

#233

Post by 0dayz »

smashah wrote: post #170
Simon_ORourke wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> local chiefs who oppose stupid and unrealistic white elephant vanity projects are executed. Let's not gloss over the absolutely appalling respect many of these societies have for human dignity. Public executions and flogging, discrimination and imprisonment based solely on gender, absolutely zero regard for freedom of conscience when it comes to matters of religion. There's only so much you can get away with by say…

[flagged]

No these tyrants survive because of realpolitik.

And Joe Biden has been the first openly hostile/critical president of KSA, while Trump said he didn't know who murdered the American citizen Jamal khashoggi[1] despite clear evidence and information about it, all due to him wanting the business with KSA to continue.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/26/why-intel...

Re: End of the Line? Saudi Arabia to scale back plans for desert megacity

#234

Post by itsoktocry »

keiferski wrote: post #137
lvl102 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about the fact that education is pretty much free there. They even pay for Western institutions to set up satellite campuses. You’d think they should have the most educated and skilled labor in the world. At some point, you have to realize it’s cultural: they don’t want to work. Funny you mention Switzerland because they have some of the highest skilled labor in the world.

You’re generalizing nearly 20 million people in Saudi Arabia alone. How this is even an acceptable thing to say on HN is beyond me. The Gulf countries have more than enough expertise to manage and run their wealth for the foreseeable future. To say they’ll be poor again without oil is simply ignorant of the facts and probably related to the point I made above.

>You’re generalizing nearly 20 million people in Saudi Arabia alone

Yes, this is how you compare populations.

Re: End of the Line? Saudi Arabia to scale back plans for desert megacity

#235

Post by selimthegrim »

dindobre wrote: post #205
cess11 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, they'll still put the money in Luxembourg and Switzerland, but they can exchange gold and diamonds and stuff like that from shady dealings in Africa for money there. If you look into it you'll find that it's a nice marketplace for israeli oligarchs running operations in DR Congo, e.g. for diamonds which Israel exports unexpected amounts of, and you'll also find that the Rapid Support Forces/Janjaweed in…

I find your second paragraph especially interesting, do you have a source (e.g. a book) to get deeper into this?

UAE has basically annexed Socotra.

Re: End of the Line? Saudi Arabia to scale back plans for desert megacity

#236

Post by valval »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #144
zaphirplane wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you dislike gulf countries. The points raised are a mixture of facts, fiction, jealousy and dislike. You want them to boil in desert heat with some environmental appeal, while many countries pump the air full of pollution from factories or massive ICE cars I haven’t heard of back alley executions over there I don’t feel hate towards someone spending their money on 2 cars or a holiday house or whatever luxury…

I'm guessing people's distastefor gulf states can be explained largely by their ranking in the global slavery index [1] (three gulf states in the top ten) the global freedom index [2] (Saudi Arabia in bottom ten) and the global corruption index (gulf states are not as good at corruption as slavery or repression but they still give it a good shot). This seems more likely to me as an explanation than hating on people w…

Ah, the good old western indices that prove that the non-western world is practically in the stone age.

Re: End of the Line? Saudi Arabia to scale back plans for desert megacity

#237

Post by keiferski »

krisoft wrote: post #191
keiferski wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but if the idea is to maximize the open space / city size while maintaining a fast transit system, then the line makes sense to me. I guess I don’t really understand the criticism, most of which seems to be “you should just build something that isn’t the thing you want to build.” There is plenty of aesthetic merit to the linear city idea on its own. To use an example of a place that already exists: the city Łód…

> the city Łódź in Poland is situated along a single linear 4-5km street. Are we just making things up? Just by a single glance at a map of Łódź you can see that this is not true. The city is clearly blob shaped. > I guess I don’t really understand the criticism, most of which seems to be “you should just build something that isn’t the thing you want to build.” The criticism is that there are reasons why cities are b…

Had you taken more than a glance, you would have come across this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piotrkowska_Street

And yes, as I wrote, it is the main axis of the city, even if other neighborhoods branch off of it. This is a basic obvious fact about the city:

From the very beginning this street was the central axis, around which the city grew bigger, and its development spontaneously gave the present shape to its centre. At first the city was mainly the highway, but later it changed into the city's showcase, the leisure and shopping centre, where the life of growing industrial agglomeration could be observed.

Re: End of the Line? Saudi Arabia to scale back plans for desert megacity

#238

Post by seydor »

alangibson wrote: post #134

I want to see someone seriously analyze what would happen if there was a power loss to the Line. Hundreds of thousands of people in a glass box in 50C weather with no AC sounds like a recipe for a record breaking mass casualty event.

The analysis is that the rich will escape using their multicopters, as for the mass of undocumented immigrants , it was the will of god

Re: End of the Line? Saudi Arabia to scale back plans for desert megacity

#239

Post by Moldoteck »

keiferski wrote: post #105

Are there any forums like HN but for architecture, and not prone to devolving into sociopolitical criticism, and instead focusing on the structures themselves? I find experimental architecture fascinating and would rather discuss the merits and flaws of the design itself. Neom reminds me of Łódź, a city in Poland that is built around a single 5km long street. It’s quite cool and the simple geometry is aesthetically a…

thing is, such projects do affect sociopolitical edges of the society. The architecture can influence how people meet, how they protest, how they receive/buy the goods, how easy is it to suppress people that doesn't follow what central party says, etc... Physically, if the environment allows it, there are no reasons to not expand in disc/square form compared to a straight line. You get more economic activity per sq km, more viable public transit, more options to reach same destination and more options to create different business activities and all of this is due to higher density while maintaining high commute speed. It also makes maintenance and infrastructure cheaper(because you are not limited to a line)

Re: End of the Line? Saudi Arabia to scale back plans for desert megacity

#240

Post by actionfromafar »

ctrw wrote: post #222
Simon_ORourke wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> local chiefs who oppose stupid and unrealistic white elephant vanity projects are executed. Let's not gloss over the absolutely appalling respect many of these societies have for human dignity. Public executions and flogging, discrimination and imprisonment based solely on gender, absolutely zero regard for freedom of conscience when it comes to matters of religion. There's only so much you can get away with by say…

Let's not gloss over the fact that we in the west do the same. Only we hide the slaves in sweatshops so our sensibilities aren't triggered. It is after all much easier to change hearts and minds in a democracy.

So many things are exactly the same except for how different they are.
Post reply on HN