Saudi Arabia 'Forced To Scale Back' Plans For Desert Megacity (theguardian.com) 199
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It was billed as a glass-walled city of the future, an ambitious centerpiece of the economic plan backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to transition Saudi Arabia away from oil dependency. Now, however, plans for the mirror-clad desert metropolis called the Line have been scaled down and the project, which was envisaged to stretch 105 miles (170km) is expected to reach just a mile and a half by 2030. Dreamed up as a linear city that would eventually be home to about 9 million people on a footprint of just 13 sq miles, the Line is part of a wider Neom project. Now at least one contractor has begun dismissing workers. The scaling down of Prince Mohammed's most grandiose project was reported by Bloomberg, which said it had seen documents relating to the project.
A Walkable City? (Score:5, Insightful)
105 miles long, 13 square miles gives a width of 650 feet. So, walkable in one direction. Not so much the other.
13 square miles as a square would have been 3.6 x 3.6 miles. I could walk that.
Re:A Walkable City? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: A Walkable City? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not really a waste of space. The design is already as high rise towers, so it's dense by design. Within your local neighborhood, it would be as dense and non wasteful as a typical city.
The bigger issue is how to handle transportation between neighborhoods. I wonder how much was hand waved and if there are any designs for how trains would be scheduled.
Re: A Walkable City? (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing complicated there - just rational city design.
No cars. They've been designed out at the start. Similarly, no roads - just walk ways and cycle ways. This may sound heretical in some parts of the world.
Re:A Walkable City? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's that in normal people's measurements?
Re:A Walkable City? (Score:5, Informative)
You want it in football fields?
So that would be over 1800 football fields long, but only 2 football fields wide.
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Football football or American football fields?
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How many Olympic-sized swimming pools?
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French? I think you are confused.
The game of modern football was mostly influenced by the Cambridge Rules. The word "soccer" is Oxford slang, similar to rugger, fiver, tenner, and so on.
The French call it "le football", or "foot" for short, both borrowed from the English.
Re:A Walkable City? (Score:5, Informative)
Ireland, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Pakistan, Namibia, New Zealand, Liberia, Lesotho, and the Philippines also use the "soccer" term.
Many other countries (Afganistan, Algeria, Armenia, Bahrain, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Croatia, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Greece, - you know what fuck it I'm to the G's and I'm tired of typing them) call the game by some local name which sometimes translates to "foot ball" but not always.
Bottom line - this website is based in the US. Most of its users are from the US. Its not going to be uncommon for US English - where the game is called soccer - to be the language used here.
Re:A Walkable City? (Score:5, Interesting)
105 miles long, 13 square miles gives a width of 650 feet. So, walkable in one direction. Not so much the other.
Walkable has zero to do with dimensions. It has to do with lifestyle and not requiring the use of a car. Paris is a walkable city. You don't need to own a car to live. My aunt on the other hand lives in a small town that is literally 1mile x 0.8miles in size. It's not walkable because all required necessities in life aren't available within that town and you there's no suitable public transport to the next town over.
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No, we should define "walkable" as not needing to own a private jet! (/s)
Defining it as "you can use mass transit" is silly -- unless you live in Airstrip One, "walkable" should have something to do with pedestrian accessibility rather than with substituting one form of vehicular transport for another.
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I'm utterly baffled. Why is walking for a few mins, sitting on a tram/bus/light-rail for a few mins, and walking for a few more a bad thing? Do you have the same issue with escalators/elevators/travelators? Is this a cultural dislike of public transport - is there a taboo against using it where you are?
It would be incredibly inefficient to replicate every service a person might need every mile or so. Remember, you need to account for those who have mobility problems too, so you can't just presume a six mile
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Why is walking for a few mins, sitting on a tram/bus/light-rail for a few mins, and walking for a few more a bad thing?
Nobody said that's a bad thing, but if that's how you define "walkable" then you are being deeply dishonest.
Re: A Walkable City? (Score:3)
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I'll quote from the Wikipedia Article [wikipedia.org]: "In urban planning, walkability is the accessibility of amenities by foot." It is important to contrast this with the practices it was intended to counter (again from the same article): "... urban spaces should be more than just transport corridors designed for maximum vehicle throughput."
Transit is an integral part of walkable planning simply because it gets people *into* neighborhoods so they can do things on foot. But cars are a way to get people into an area too
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By your definition, a car that one drives while standing would be a walkable amenity. I'll leave it to readers smarter than you to decide whether that makes any sense at all.
Re:A Walkable City? (Score:5, Informative)
Broadly missing the point.
A "linear" city is 100% suitable for transit. No cars at all.
The problem is how this city was being setup to fail. Like other Arabian megaprojects, they are extremely short-term thinking. The Burj Khalifa is an epic disaster of non-stop garbage and sewer trucks trucking away trash and sewage because the building was built without any consideration of the surroundings.
There are only two correct city designs.
"Hub-and-spoke", where the center of the city is maybe 2 stories tall, and the surroundings gradually get larger, and taller and every city block as it goes outward is bigger than the ones closer to the inside. That way you have a city laid out like hard drive sectors, faster to travel from two points on the inside than the outside. You run all your express trains on the spokes, and all your rapid transit on the circulars. So anyone who wants to travel from their home only takes at most one transfer. You walk to the end of your block, get on the spoke or circular train in the direction your destination is, and then the other spoke or circular to end up at your destination. Everything is served.
The other is the "stacked grid" which means the entire city is built in 3D where every tower 100m x 100m, with each tower having the transit levels with the retail restaurant levels, and the commercial office space levels in every building. All residential space above the 5th floor. Everyone theoretically lives within 100m of everything they need then. No townhouses, no single family homes, only 4 bedroom homes. Because every tower has to be identical.
The problem with "the line" is that what it really is, is two continuous towers that act as a wall and cut off environment connections. A linear city is best build this way, yes, but it needs to be built like a sandwich where all the necessary services (water, sewage, electricity, gas, internet, parcel delivery) is built up to the second story level before any "Tower" commercial and residential space is built. You simplify all the switches and valves needed in the services by not needing them to go in any direction that splits it. But you are effectively limited to your starting variables. If your water treatment and sewage treatment plant is only good enough for "9 million people", then that capacity has to be built from the start.
You see the problem. You can't "gradually" build out a linear city. Now if you take the more conventional 3D city design, and instead of making it a wall, you make it alternating buildings with a common transport podium, with the residential homes on the south "wall" and the retail/offices on the "north wall" , you connect every thing with bridges at every building so everyone can get to point A to B without having to take transit unless their visit is on the other side of the city.
In practice, cities aren't built this way, because what really happens is the city doesn't own the land, only the infrastructure, and they have to build a LOT of infrastructure to support a grid layout that doesn't build upward. All cities should be building 100m tall sky scrapers before they build additional city blocks, to give you the correct idea. If an entire city of 1m people can be supported in 10 100mx100m towers, then that makes far more sense than building 100,000 single family homes that need to individually be serviced.
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A backyard where I can hang with friends, brew beer, fire up my smoker and grills are a necessity to me. I like my veggie garden too...
Re: A Walkable City? (Score:3)
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Townhomes can actually be quite good... as long as you've got a thick concrete wall separating your house from the neighbor's house. I'd argue that my back yard (surrounded by an 8-foot concrete wall, with aluminum-framed screen cage above it like you'd normally find around Florida swimming pools) is MORE private than my parents' yard (separated from their neighbors' with a chainlink fence on one side, and wood-plank fence on the other).
That said, I really like having my own yard and roof, and would hate li
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Look up "streetcar suburb." This would be exactly what you're looking for.
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"Hub-and-spoke", where the center of the city is maybe 2 stories tall, and the surroundings gradually get larger, and taller and every city block as it goes outward is bigger than the ones closer to the inside.
That's some pretty draconian urban planners required to get people to build skyscrapers on new developments.
And no suburbs? You're going to need a pretty awesome city to get families to be willing to move there without yards.
The other is the "stacked grid" which means the entire city is built in 3D where every tower 100m x 100m, with each tower having the transit levels with the retail restaurant levels, and the commercial office space levels in every building. All residential space above the 5th floor. Everyone theoretically lives within 100m of everything they need then. No townhouses, no single family homes, only 4 bedroom homes. Because every tower has to be identical.
Again, no families unless you somehow get a NYC or London level of culture going.
I have a hard time seeing either city being viable outside of a city builder sim game.
The problem with "the line" is that what it really is, is two continuous towers that act as a wall and cut off environment connections. A linear city is best build this way, yes, but it needs to be built like a sandwich where all the necessary services (water, sewage, electricity, gas, internet, parcel delivery) is built up to the second story level before any "Tower" commercial and residential space is built. You simplify all the switches and valves needed in the services by not needing them to go in any direction that splits it. But you are effectively limited to your starting variables. If your water treatment and sewage treatment plant is only good enough for "9 million people", then that capacity has to be built from the start.
Huh? If you need more water capacity you just build more along the line, that actually seems to be one of the small adva
Re: A Walkable City? (Score:2)
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What? Lolno, this isn't new, it's the default. French Renaissance sized lawns in America were a mid-20th century suburban fad that's basically died as being wildly impractical for everyone involved. I live in a 1928 house (eg, when people still primarily walked everywhere) and the back and front yards are large enough for a decent vegetable garden or to entertain outside but still small enough it's not contributing significantly to spawl and mowing only takes like 20 minutes with a reel mower.
It's not a passing fad, it's just economics.
In larger urban centers land prices are going up, so density is increasing, and lawns are the first thing to shrink.
In smaller cities or even towns land prices are much lower so they typically still have big yards.
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This megacity "the Line" isn't doomed because the architecture is a bad idea, it's doomed because if there isn't already a city there then it's probably a bad place to build a city. That being said, "the Line" is a uniquely bad architecture since by design most of the city will be in places that are a bad place to build a city.
Pretty much all of those middle east cities are in the center of inhospitable desert areas but when they add the desalination plants to provide drinkable water, and all the artificial high tech city infrastructure then it works. I wouldn't count them out just because there isn't anything in the area currently. Especially since for their people it's basically this desert place or another city in the same situation, it isn't as if they're choosing from an alpine lake town and a modern line city in the deser
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This megacity "the Line" isn't doomed because the architecture is a bad idea, it's doomed because if there isn't already a city there then it's probably a bad place to build a city. That being said, "the Line" is a uniquely bad architecture since by design most of the city will be in places that are a bad place to build a city.
Pretty much all of those middle east cities are in the center of inhospitable desert areas but when they add the desalination plants to provide drinkable water, and all the artificial high tech city infrastructure then it works. I wouldn't count them out just because there isn't anything in the area currently. Especially since for their people it's basically this desert place or another city in the same situation, it isn't as if they're choosing from an alpine lake town and a modern line city in the desert.
The capital seems to have formed because it was the central city for surrounding farms [wikipedia.org] (so not dessert).
Other Saudi cities seem to follow the predictable pattern, interior cities surrounded by decent farmland or coastal cities with fishing and trade.
Who do you think is going to live in the line city? If you're drilling oil you live near the oil fields, if you're a farmer you live near farmlands, if you're a fisher or sailor you live on the coast, and if you're in the service industry you live near those oth
Re: A Walkable City? (Score:2)
Riyadh isn't walkable beyond few sections. I don't think they care but yes it is why nobody builds cities like that - but the idea with the wall sections is that you live basically in an arc like in simcity.
The locals would prefer gated compounds with houses though.
Re: A Walkable City? (Score:2)
Re:A Walkable City? (Score:5, Insightful)
Walkable cities are egalitarian by nature, The Line was designed to SEPARATE walking people by distance so they could never reach their betters to complain/kill
Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
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agreed - the first thing i thought about when i watched that video "they seriously used a young girl dressed in western cloths as their main character?"
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I can't comment on whether the individual goals are good ones, but Saudi Arabia is not wrong for wanting to get away from oil. What they're trying to do, austerity and infra
Re:Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:5, Informative)
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Did John Maynard Keynes' theories envisage a future where energy (oil+gas) wasn't as plentiful as it was when he was alive?
No? Well we can drop that theory into the bin.
Re: Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:2)
To be replaced by other sources energy. Time to move that mindset on.
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Did John Maynard Keynes' theories envisage a future where energy (oil+gas) wasn't as plentiful as it was when he was alive?
They did. You would know this if you read books instead of viral nonsense on the internet.
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Implicit in this theory is that you have notion of where and what the next boom will be.
I am just making up a an example here; but if in the middle of the recession you decide to invest billions into building out the Arizona dessert and then woops turns out the next boom is off shore wind projects in the gulf and all the manufacturing you can do with cheap electricity on the near shore you now how two problems, a bunch of stuff in AZ the locals don't need and can't afford to maintain, and spent the capital
Re:Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:4, Insightful)
Implicit in this theory is that you have notion of where and what the next boom will be.
As long as people are not blinded by greed or pessimism, it isn't all that difficult.
Let's take an example from me - and I'm not that smart.
When I saw the first ads on Yahoo in late 1999, offering incredible low repayments for mortgage payments, like finance a million dollars with monthly payments around 299 dollars, I knew that was not good. After some investigations that confirmed this was legit, It started a clock for me.
Then I saw people getting 50 year mortgages. It was more obvious that this wasn't going to end well.
Background here - People only live a certain amount of time. We are born, become adults, work, and die at pretty pretty standard ages We haven't transformed the upper limits of lifespan even if more people live to be older.
There was an interesting story online about an 80 year old man that just picked up a 50 year mortgage. Figure he was going to pay it off when he was 130 years old?
Of course, those easy payment mortgages were ARM's, so the people who could only afford the really low initial payments were going to be out on their asses soon.
Selling of mortgages meant that the originator of the mortgage had no responsibility for what happened later, as the subprime lending took over. So people who never should have obtained a mortgage got to buy a way overpriced home.
But back to the obvious - at least to me.
I knew where this was going, and when we were almost at SHTF days, I heard a "respected" economist report on NPR. He claimed that we had entered a debt society, where every major expense would be handled by refinancing our homes, that our homes would never decrease in value, and we'd buy stuff off that. He reported this as a good thing.
Now just between us, that's an equation with infinity in it, always going to fail. And sure enough, it failed hard.
Billions of dollars the evaporated overnight. And we almost drug the world into a real depression, but some smart adults finnessed it into a "mere" recession.
And like one economist predicted this - he was hailed as some kind of prescient genius. While dumb old me had been saying it was going to happen since 1999.
Numbers and finances and economics are not quite as complicated as some would have us think. But greed and suspension of disbelief always has most of us screwing up big time. At some point, without checks and balances, new grifts will appear, and many will fall for them. And if enough stupid greedy people fall for them, they'll drag the rest of us down with them.
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Labor costs... thats rich.
Look into who builds these buildings in Saudi Arabia.
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Try learning about macroeconomics somewhere other than Fox News.
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lol....ok, you lost me there on that one....haha
That one's pretty basic in economics...
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Oh & BTW, they never "print" money in a stimulus package, they simply issue more currency through the central bank.
An important thing to remember about cur
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Well, you can stick to your Fox News faith-based economics if you like.
Ooooh, such a brilliant burn! ...for a leftist that is, I guess. That is to say I've seen three-year-olds who barely know how to speak come up with cleverer insults.
Which recessions are Keynesian economics responsible for?
I already told you.
And we had no recessions or depressions ever until that bastard came along, amirite?
Back before John Maynard Keynes was a gleam in his daddy's eyes one evening, there was a real boom and bust cycle here, I posted a bit of an essay in here some years back, every couple years things would swing one way or the other. And rather than your apparent go to leftist pejorative for anyone who disagrees with you, they were not caused by John Maynard Keynes, nor far left ideology.
Indeed, the proximate cause was m
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The less scrupulous economists have worked out that telling the rich what they want to hear is a great way to get promoted & get lucrative consultancy & research work so I doubt it'll ever go away.
Those with ethical principles try to follow what the best evidence available says... & apparently the distortions of Adam Smith's ideas, among others,
Re:Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:4, Insightful)
The 1% have access to financial instruments, and most importantly the know-how on how to use them to evade inflation
The 1% have the most hoarded cash, and the 1% of the 1% has more than the rest. Corporations and the wealthiest individuals alike currently have the highest cash reserves they have had in all of history. The rest of us don't. Inflation affects the value of those cash reserves. Normal people buy houses on credit, and inflation combats the interest they pay on their loans by reducing the value of the principal.
HOWEVER, you cannot have steady inflation without screwing the poor if you don't tie the minimum wage to inflation. The inflation itself is not the problem. The failure to advance wages to match is. The FMW (federal minimum wage) affects the FPL (federal poverty level) which in turn determines eligibility for social welfare programs like SNAP, AFDC, and Medicare, which is one of the biggest reasons they don't want to increase it. Allowing the wealthy in shithole states to underpay their employees is the other big reason. (Civilized states already have minimum wages well in excess of the FMW.)
The middle class has access to investment, because all it takes is having money. They, too, can dodge inflation. The wealthy has all the money, though, and refusing to spend it is doing harm to the poorer classes. Money can't employ anyone if it's being sat upon like an egg. It's those wealthy who don't want inflation the most, because it affects their hoards, and it's their words you're amplifying.
Re: Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:2)
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LOL, no they don't. They have *wealth*, in form of stock, investments, property, and other financial instruments, not some ScroogeMcDuck-style Money Bin.
You have no fucking clue what you are on about. Yes, they have those things, but they ALSO have larger cash reserves than they ever have had before. To wit:
https://www.newyorkfed.org/med... [newyorkfed.org]
https://www.ft.com/content/079... [ft.com]
https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com]
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vague goal of "urbanization" as one part of the three part plan.
1. Urbanize
2. ???
3. Profit!
It seems they went "nah, let's skip to part 3"!
Re: Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:3)
Or just basic sanitation, housing, education etc. but MBS would prefer to waste billions on vanity projects and boondoggles.
Re: Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:5, Informative)
& that's just where the Saudi subjects live (they're not citizens, it's a monarchy). If you look around the areas where migrant workers live, & that's a lot of people, you'll see unsanitary, cramped, dangerous slum conditions with next to no infrastructure. But they're kept out of sight, out of mind but they're only infidels so who cares? I don't call that modern.
Re: Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:2)
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It doesn't really matter what religion they are, depending on where they're from and what they've signed up to do. Being an immigrant worker anywhere in the Middle East can be kinda sketchy, and potentially fatal.
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Riyadh has a bus service, they even have enclosed air conditioned bus stops which shelter you from both the heat and the sandstorms.
They are also building a metro system in Riyadh.
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Re: Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever been there? Saudi is not some desert shithole
Considering that it's actually still a crime there to be LGBTQ+, that's a resounding hell no from me. Their tourism FAQ [visitsaudi.com] basically says you have to follow their laws, which is pretty much impossible when they've outlawed an immutable part of your being.
There are so many other amazing places I've yet to visit where I don't have to worry about being thrown in jail for being gay that I'm perfectly fine to go my entire life never having set foot in Saudi Arabia.
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Re: Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:5, Informative)
So, gender is fully mutable, a person born male can magically just become female
That is literally the opposite of the trans position, which is that a person can be born male but with female bits or vice versa. And since people can in fact be born with all kinds of unusual arrangements which are then surgically altered in what we call "gender assignment surgery" you ALREADY are supporting the belief that gender can be assigned after birth simply by supporting the status quo.
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So, gender is fully mutable, a person born male can magically just become female, and we all must go along, but ... preferences are not mutable?
That's because so-called ex-gay "treatments" are all quackery, but gender reassignment surgery is based on fact-based medical understanding of plastic surgical procedures. If a fact-based method to alter sexual orientation was possible, there'd certainly be some serious ethical concerns involved, likely on a similar level as the concept of eugenics.
Also, I don't think anyone would take them just so they could visit Saudi Arabia.
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If you visit there alone as a gay man what do you think is going to happen?
The US's travel advisory on Saudi Arabia [state.gov] basically spells it out:
LGBTI Travelers: Same-sex sexual relations, even when consensual, are criminalized in Saudi Arabia. Violations of Saudi laws governing perceived expressions of, or support for, same-sex sexual relations, including on social media, may be subject to severe punishment. Potential penalties include fines, jail time, or death. See our LGBTI Travel Information page and section 6 of the Department of State's Human Rights report for further details.
So, they can go through your social media accounts. Or just in my case, I have a partner I've lived with for nearly a decade and a half. If it isn't obvious we're a couple when we're together, you'd have to be blind.
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Saudi Arabia has slums, and crime, and drugs just like everywhere else. They don't like to mention it but it's all there in the underclasses of their society and easy to read about. And the point here is that there are real problems that they could solve with public spending instead of boondoggles. The Line is one example but there are others, like Mukaab (an enormous building in the shape of a giant golden cube), or Qiddya turning an entire valley into a theme park / sports complex. Half of Saudi Arabia's
Re: Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:4, Insightful)
free for all citizens.
Part of the problem that an awful lot of non-citizens are needed to support that lifestyle.
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Have you ever been there? Saudi is not some desert shithole, it's highly developed with infrastructure everywhere.
Education is free for all citizens. The only problem is its focus on Islamic learning which MBS is dragging into the 20th century with changes to the curriculum.
Weel, it is apparently as perfect country with only 1 problem. That's a lot less problems then say the USA - So pack up your family and move to the one almost perfect country in the world! Who knew?
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It's a medieval monarchy.
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There have geniunely been advances in women's rights in Saudi Arabia. They're still a very long way behind most of the rest of the world, but you have to look at where they started. Until recently, women weren't even allowed to drive there. To get from A to D you have to go through B and C (assuming they ever want to get to D at all). You'd have to keep in mind that they don't necessarily understand the benefits of having their female population being economically productive, because, as I understand, even
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Exactly this, there are clear advances in women's rights in the past few years and as they say - rome wasn't built in a day.
Saudi companies typically now have quite a lot of women working for them and often in fairly senior roles, women now drive on their own and go out in public without their hair or faces covered.
Despite no longer being a legal requirement, many people still choose to cover themselves because they don't want to suffer sunburn in their climate.
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That's worked out so well for the west.
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Would I rather live in a regressive petro state with a medieval patriarchy enforced by law where women are little more than chattel slavery and legally regarded as less than a toddler boy? No. I like women as people equal to me in every respect, thanks. That said, I'm also not really fond of 'corrective' sexism where women are a 'favored victim class' long past the point of equality; it's been pretty solid for years that more girls go to college than boys - have the preferential admissions ceased? No? W
Re: Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:2)
Re: Well, well, quite a surprise... (Score:2)
I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
How much time separated an advisor saying "my glorious prince, this is simply not a workable idea" from that advisor's dismembered body being loaded into a freezer?
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You are totally off base...
They went into a suitcase.
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Hard to suck dick for money without touching someone.
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Leave it to economists to figure out how. There are entire markets buying and selling grain futures where almost none of the people involved want or need grain or have the infrastructure to transport or receive it.
You don't say!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Such a surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously, these people got rich by accident and will never not be oil dependent. As the importance of oil diminishes, so will they until they are back were they started. Only that their great efforts to push oil will have made the dessert a lot more deadly.
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Got rich by supplying global warming.
They have a lot of sand and sun. Pave the desert in solar panels, supply cheap and abundant energy to their near neighbours, turn oil tankers into batteries.. They've got a lot of options for redemption if they can learn to be less greedy and more generous.
Re: Such a surprise (Score:3)
All the wealthy families of Europe got wealthy the same way: accident of history. Once they ran out of gold to steal, they might have crumbled back into the typical pattern of Euro-barbarism. But instead, they left behind the legacy of the enlightenment.
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their great efforts to push oil will have made the dessert a lot more deadly.
Those luqaimat will certainly clog your arteries xD
well duh (Score:4, Insightful)
This project was stupid in every conceivable way and should have been laughed out of the room. Environmentally, logistically, technologically, economically. It was a joke. Except it was the brain child of a psychopathic despot and who is going tell that guy? Wonder how many people died to get it this far even.
"scaling down" (Score:3, Funny)
Reducing something to just over 1 % of its original planned size isn't "scaling down". That's an euphemism for "giving up, just finishing the stuff we've already largely built".
Converted to your typical house, it means instead of building the whole house you're building the tiny guest toilet and nothing else.
Good that was a nightmare design. (Score:2)
That thing gave me claustrophobia just thinking about it. 150 meters (490 feet) waay too thin especially after you lose a big chunk of that width to the transportation system. Sorry the conditions would F people up.
to transition away from oil dependency (Score:2)
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They can sell their oil because people like you buy it.
We buy it because we're not offered an affordable alternative. We don't have the time or resources to develop an alternative. That has to be done by governments or corporations, but the former is run by the latter and is operating mostly in the name of protecting their profits. We call this fascism and you are here for it.
Shame (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How is having a city in one big line a great idea? It's a monumentally dumb idea. Do you know any livable city on Earth where the furthest points are 170km apart? If you made it a square or a circle, you'd cover the same surface area with a much smaller maximum distance between two points in the city.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like to see the giant desalinization design built and iterated. Once past the new design teething pains that'll have application w
Nobody saw THAT coming... (Score:2)
Wow, so the megaproject failed? Well, nobody saw that coming.
Except, of course, for everybody.
Irony, anyone? (Score:2)
A "glass-walled city of the future" built and operated by a country run by murderous fanatics desperately hanging onto the past.
I can't wait to see what other fundamentalists come up with...a "Rapture Machine", perhaps?
It's always been a prison. (Score:2)
1. Everyone and everything is indoors. The outside world is literally desert.
2. Government controls your access to adjacent neighborhoods and can divide the "city" into zones arbitrarily cutting off all traffic with a single barrier (that will probably be automated).
3. It's trivial to monitor the entire thing centrally.
4. Your infrastructure cost is now approximately 2x because you're laid out in a line instead of a grid. Wire, plumbing and transport runs between any two random points in the city are now
Re: (Score:2)
Build cubes. Your base unit could be a 'city block', something big enough to be a distinct neighbourhood. 200m on each side means your cube will be 60 stories tall - you definitely build up as much as out.
For security, you limit inter-cube traffic to choke points. Sure, you have six to cover but it's not impossible. The checkpoints can lead to high-volume laneways running alongside the cubes.
Gravity will naturally cause cube traffic to dominate the horizontal dimension. In a lot of ways you'd be buildi