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

> But to the people in power, only symbols and power are important.

A general statement that is universal across time and geography. Nothing special about the gulf

We also have humans in space at the moment. Normally the answer would be fault tolerance or similar engineering solutions.

Furthermore, if the building is decently isolated (HR++ sun-blocking glass exists), it should be able to handle some air conditioning downtime.

No. It's neither about race nor ethnicity; it's about culture and religion. It's not about the people, either, since the differences from person to person are as pronounced there as everywhere. It is, though, about the society built with the culture in question as a foundation. You can criticize societies everywhere, starting from your own - it's normal, healthy, and has nothing to do with racism.

Disclaimer: Qatar is a terrible place when it comes to treatment of migrant workers. The following is not meant as a defense of Qatar. It is meant to correct one particular thing that most reporting gets wrong.

The part where it talks about 6500 migrant worker deaths over the decade of World Cup facility construction has a serious error. It fails to look at the death rate.

Qatar has around 2 million migrant workers, and the 6500 deaths are all deaths of migrants in the country rather than just work related deaths. 6500 deaths over 10 years in a population of 2 million is a death rate of 32.5/100k/year.

A death rate of 32.5/100k/year should raise questions, especially if we assume that migrant workers in Qatar skew younger, but the question should be why is it so low?

For comparison the death rate for 15-24 year old males in the US is 100/100k/year, and for 25-34 year old males it is 177/100k/year.

It's possible that Qatar's poor treatment of migrant workers does result in an unusually high job-related death rate but something else Qatar does results in an unusually low death rate when not at work with the net result being the overall death rate is low.

In the US the top causes of death of young males are poisoning (which includes drug overdoses), suicide, automobile accidents, and homicide.

Qatar is very anti-drug, with harsh penalties and almost no tolerance, giving them a drug death rate around 4% of the US drug death rate.

They are also much more intolerant of drunk driving, which is a major contributor to automobile deaths in the US. In Qatar if there is any detectable alcohol in your blood after an accident you are considered to have been drunk driving. That threshold is so low that you would be considered drunk if you were in an accident in the morning and had one drink the night before. Also I'd expect that most migrant workers use some other form of transport most of the time.

Their homicide rate is also very low.

Are those enough to offset a high work-related death rate. I don't know. I should know because all of the articles I've seen talking about migrant worker deaths in Qatar should have looked into this.

There are two types of such big projects out there.

There are those grandiose mega projects purely for the rich, purely for vanity and showing off wealth and meant attract outside attention... like "The Line" for example...

...but there also are more sensible projects, that are actually meant to help the local populace, improve conditions, and fight poverty... like "The Al Baydha Project" just for one example.

It's totally possible to do something ambitious and impressive, and with historic significance without becoming completely detached from reality.