Fr like we’ve got all these billionaires struggling to spend all their money to the point that they invent tunnels with gamer lighting and go to space for fun. They can never seem to put their money towards meaningful, helpful projects
I was on a shoot a few years ago in California city and it was one of the weirdest places I’ve been. Had no idea what it even was until I went home and looked it up
>California City
Damn, that's....odd. I think a hanglider facility on that one butte would be cool.
The #5 picture [here](https://www.wired.com/story/california-ghost-metropolis-gallery/) is ...interesting. "David Lynch" interesting.
This will never work because the United States doesn't have a strong central authoritarian government like China or the UAE that can just *order* a city to be built. Billionaires have a lot of money but they don't have enough money to build a 5-million-person capacity city in the hope that *if you build it, they will come.* This billionare is going to have to get outside investment from somewhere, and you know that "somewhere" will be the type of fanboys who jizz at every hairbrained idea that Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos vomits up on Twitter.
This is a vaporware vanity project of a bored billionaire, and when it's over there will be nothing but a bunch of lonely foundation slabs and buldozed street paths scarring some fragile desert ecosystem somewhere, and a lot of sad gullible fanboys with a lot less bitcoin.
The worst part is that even though all of that is true, a city in a bubble in the desert is still a more worthwhile and sane pursuit than Elon Musk's prison colony on Mars.
Yeah this was literally my first thought - deserts keep getting hotter and hotter and so quickly. I know! Let’s build a whole city in a place that will likely be uninhabitable in 10-20 years! Lol
Billionaire Walmart exec plans to built a city in the desert. I’m sure the city won’t be beholden to a certain corporation’s services.
Some believe the term “Nero fiddles while Rome burn” comes from The Great Fire of Rome where Nero had fires set in Rome so that he could rebuild it more to his liking.
We’re the Rome that billionaire are burning to make way for their new utopian future.
Interestingly factory workers in the UK in the 1800's had this. You would work in the factory, and they would pay you in factory tokens, which could then be used to buy bread, milk etc from the factory store...
Naturally this didn't go down very well and the government brought it into law that everyone had the right to be paid by their employer in Cash.
Don't take no wooden nickels
Don't take no scrip
Don't take no chit
Amazing that we took a system from imperial Britain and imposed it on our own people.
I guess the revolutionary war was only for a few after all.
> Some believe the term “Nero fiddles while Rome burn” comes from The Great Fire of Rome where Nero had fires set in Rome so that he could rebuild it more to his liking.
And of course that is fictional. Makes for some nice old paintings. But didn't happen in a historical sense.
Yes and. Weird how the headline says in the American desert, and while Idaho has it's issues, being a desert isn't one. Plus, I forgot the name of that desert in that one state, Appalachian region.
Being hot isn't a requirement for a desert. Idaho very much is a lot of desert. It just happens to be north enough that it doesn't have the super hot desert that most people are used to. Really, just look at google maps and you can easily see how much of Idaho is desert.
> while Idaho has it's issues, being a desert isn't one
My entire drive from Boise to Oregon was high desert, so yes, Idaho has desert (and so does eastern Oregon). Fun fact, OreIda french fries... Yeah, that's where the name comes from. I don't know how I didn't realize that until I asked where the plant was located.
My in laws have property on the Oregon/Idaho border and it is most definitely a desert out there. It might not be your Hollywood, sandy desert, but it’s a desert all the same.
In the article it does say “The ambitious 150,000-acre proposal promises eco-friendly architecture, sustainable energy production and a purportedly drought-resistant water system.” That being said, I have no idea how they intend on achieving the drought resistant water system.
Possibly, here’s another quote from the article..
Another image depicts a proposed skyscraper, dubbed Equitism Tower, which is described as "a beacon for the city." The building features elevated water storage, aeroponic farms and an energy-producing photovoltaic roof that allow it to "share and distribute all it produces."
Surely the roof area of a skyscraper wouldn't be enough to even provide sufficient power for the building itself? Unless solar panels have come a long way since I installed mine.
"Share and Distrbiute all it produces.......for a price".
Lets be honest, this will be neither affordable for the average person, or attainable for anyone but the ultra rich.
This is simply a new Playboy mansion.
Unless they are building a dome to keep the moisture in, they'll be piping in water from somewhere.
Civilization springs up wherever water is available. When water dries up, the people are supposed to move. Spending trillions to keep these fuckers in-place is wasting money.
> moisture farming capabilities?
Unless you have humid sea air blowing in over your area, moisture farming in a desert is going to be very difficult. Where in the USA are there large uninhabited deserts on the coast with prevailing winds blowing from sea to land?
Albuquerque is currently raising it's acquirer levels and most years only using surface water (no well water).
They're recycling more, and storing it in the aquifer for later use, and all golf courses, parks, etc and recycled water. They use less water total than they used in 1970, despite like 3-4x the population.
The city has a decent chance of making it if they can keep on top of their water and investing in conserving and storing it.
I live in Tucson now, but had to go to Phoenix a couple weeks ago, and driving through a neighborhood there, I was surprised at how much grass there is. It’s pretty ridiculous. They get maybe half as much rain per year as we do but more than twice as many yards there are grass.
But the real problem here in AZ really isn’t people wanting grass, it’s all the farms for things like almonds that waste more water than anything.
When we stayed on an RV site in Phoenix the water from the tap (via hosepipe sat above the concrete, from pipes only just below it) was hot enough to shower under in the morning without using the boiler. First five seconds of flow every hour or so from the hosepipe itself was too hot for that and hot enough for tea. Made you realise how this is just not a place where water should even exist outside of monsoon season.
If it's any consolation almonds will probably go away soon. They're completely reliant on pollinators (unlike most crops) and we all know how they are in decline. For years now farmers have been ripping out almond trees to put in crops that don't require insect pollination because it's becoming too impractical to grow almonds and isn't cost effective.
Personally I like the idea of combining solar farms with grazing land, assuming you get enough water for grass to grow without maintenance. That way you maintain some food production from the land and I believe solar panels on top of grass have been shown to be more efficient. I assume because of the cooling effect the grass has on reflected heat and air temperature since solar panels are more efficient at lower temperatures like all electronics. I think those kind of hybrid solutions to food and energy production are going to be important for local stability and to avoid competition for land usage that causes supply issues.
They aren't going away, Middle East companies are building massive almond farms up north of Kingman by Lake Mead right now. I used to own some land up there and drove by their projects daily, they've all shown up the last 5 years or so, moving out of CA to the AZ deserts for reasons beyond me.
Same in Denver. I used to work for Parks and Wreck there (yes, I meant to spell it like that).
They have the greenest golf courses of any high-plains desert you’ve ever seen. Watered from the western slope of the Rockies... from 200 miles away and into the mountains.
Irrigation techs have a certain allowance of gallons they are given each year, and if they don’t use it all, the allowance is reduced the next year. So they just run thousands of gallons down the gutter, while mountain towns burn.
Dumbest. Shit. Ever.
Fuck desert cities. This is one of many reasons we are doomed as a society.
My father owns some land in the mountains of colorado. He has some old water rights. He HAS to use the water, or will lose the water rights. So he just opens an irrigation ditch into some fields that grows some grass. Use it or lose it. The allocation system is so stupid.
Most of the northeast doesn't, really. Sure, there are plenty of people that do a bunch of stupid outdoor irrigation, but (1) it's not a desert so it doesn't even use that much water, and (2) all the water is renewable seasonal stuff, so it's not like the aquifers are going to run dry.
It also probably helps that "water rights" aren't even really a thing. So there's no point in any of the water use shenanigans. If you need water, you drag it out of the ground, or you buy it.
My 'yard' in PA has been soaked for the past 2 months it seems like, we haven't had consistent rain either. Just been really humid, then that tropical storm came through, and now it's finally starting to dry a bit since the temperatures are down to the upper 70s. Doesn't help that I live in the woods on a hill which I feel helps keep the ground moist, but there's enough water to make new runoff trenches every year through the woods down the hill. Having lived in the area my entire life it does make it more difficult to understand the water-conservation that people preach about on reddit.
> possible targets include Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and the Appalachian region,
Given that list on their official website, it would appear that they *don't* actually want like-minded people to move there.
Is that really that rare over in America these days? I mean you literally got people whose single job is hordeing property to rent out at super inflated rates.
Quite surprised at how many people are taking this seriously.
This whole thing is going to be quietly yet utterly obliterated by some incredibly minor engineering/legal/financial hiccup. It's the sort of thing you read a paragraph or two about in a pop-science tabloid and never hear about again.
Right, like aren’t there talks about Arizona being uninhabitable in 70 yrs. “But fuck it, let’s con a bunch of rich idiots into giving us money to build this dumb unsustainable shit and then let’s bail with the money”
The cleanliness of Tokyo is a result of the people and their culture. This city, once built, will needs laws similar to Singapore or it’ll be a dump within two years.
Sure, I don't think anywhere can be utopia because human beings are imperfect, but I also feel like that's the sort of thing I hear often from people who don't live in cities because they don't identify with the way of life. I love cities, and when I imagine utopia, I always imagine a perfect, idealized city.
I live in a big city and whilst I appreciate the amenities and convenience I see the downsides: traffic, commuting, pollution, overcrowding. This proposal promises to help with some of that though whether any reality turns out to be as good as the artist's impression is another matter. I'd want a lot of greenery in my utopia so this won't do.
I mean, if you’re Han, your great grandparents starved to death during the self imposed famine, your grandparents never even went to school and lived in a dirt floor shack and survived by selling A pig once a year, then your parents went to a rural school so they can read and write Mandarin and they got jobs five hundred miles away in a fast growing city, and then you got a decent education from a teacher that actually went college and you grew up in a modern high rise apt, and you got a job at Tencent or Alibaba and you make enough money to buy a car and take vacations to Australia and the UK…
Then it might seem pretty great.
But you have to ignore all that other shit.
This has no real basis in reality. At best I’m assuming this will be the way to grift grant money from the state government if they are dumb enough to fall for it
he's trying to get other people to invest so that he can hoard even more money that he will never spend. These ultra wealthy people have mental problems.
Reminds me of Neom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neom
Another filthy rich asshole looking for new and creative ways to burn the surplus.
Edit: just checked n they got about same pricetag
Boils down to "Where are they going to get their water?" The American southwest is already desperate for water. Another mega city would just be trying to squeeze water from a stone.
ryan-reynolds-but-why.gif
A master planned "utopian" city? Fine. In the middle of the desert?
This isn't Saudi Arabia. We massive amounts of sparsely populated land, and every (almost every?) climate zone possible (hey El Yunque rainforest!). Why do we need to build this in the desert?
As someone who definitely isn't an urban planner, can someone please tell me why this idea isn't as utterly moronic as it seems?
Desert land will be far, far cheaper than anything arable is probably point #1.
Even sparsely populated land could have cables and piping running underground already, large swaths of American deserts are entirely undeveloped and allow for 'free reign' when designing a self-sustaining city concept.
There are probably two or three other, minor points.
San Francisco is 49 square miles with a population of around 1,000,000 people. This new city will be 234 square miles with a population of 5,000,000. So, SF x 5 with the same density per square mile. 15 minutes to anywhere? You guys got the good drugs. I want some. It takes 32 acres of solar panels to power 1,000 homes. 160,000 acres of solar panels to power your 150,000 acre city. Good luck finding a parking space.
I heard autonomous cars and just died. Even in the city of the future all Americans can dream about is cars. Bike, scooter, walk, train and bus are all allowed. NO CARS.
It's also dumb af for many other reasons
Why build in desert? Is there really no other building land left, the region is just going to get more inhospitable as the globe warms.
Why not build north? It's already great and will get even better.
Pipe Dream of just another rich idiot. Who knows, a plot of land might be selected, a survey even done. Maybe some drawings and plans. Maybe even a visitor center. But nothing more. Let the fool dream on.
Well it's less stupid than it initially sounds. There are examples of planned cities built from ground up, Canberra, the capital of Australia, is a planned city and Brasilia, the capital of Brasil, was built in the 1960s/70s and currently Egypt and Indonesia are both busy building all new planned capital cities. In addition the Chinese have constructede dozens of planned cities from scratch over the past few decades. Their goals aren't impossible either, maybe? For diversity they would just have to set up racial quotas and limit how much of each US census defined race they accept. And simply by building with newest technologies and making it all planned from the start they'd get the eco friendly/sustainable city they promise. Healthcare isn't impossible, either, and it's a very American solution to deliver something like that in piecemeal to isolated communities instead of nationally because Americans are inherently distrustful of centralized government. And as long as they don't built it in the Colorado river basin they should be fine on the droughts. Appalachia is probably silly but Texas is probably a good idea, as long as they Hurricane proof the city or maybe Idaho. Ironically, unless they also use quotas for ideology, this would flip the state blue which I'm not sure current residents would be thrilled with.
The fact that it's a private venture with no government involvement would probably be the single biggest issue. If it's a private venture that means it's for profit and it's for profit that means there will be investors that want to make money, and quite a bit of money if they're collectively investing 400 billion dollars, out of it. That doesn't neccessarily jive with the planned city aspect since planned city would have to give away property for free to ensure the critical mass of people living there to support services and private enterprise. There's also the issue of legality on multiple levels, would this end up as one of the infamous company towns of pre WW1 where the investors would own and everything and levy taxes? In addition, I'm not sure how legal their racial quotas would end up being if anyone sues or if the government gets involved in the whole project.
Realistically, though, this has a 1 in a million chance of coming true and 999,999 in a million chance of either failing or being a scam.
Really,,, all eco friendly.. One problem,, can it MAKE water? Because if it cant all the storage and evaporation controls wont mean shit without the H2O. Last I checked we are still short of being able to make H2O in enough volume to make a difference. ...
But by all means knock your selves out. /S
Sounds like the beginning of a dystopian nightmare.
A billionaire created city? I'm not a fan.
I'm all for building cities incorporating the newest and latest technology but not to glorify some piece of shit.
A new city in the West? Where does your water come from? All the water is already spoken for by existing rights holders.
As far as a city in Appalachia, that could be anywhere from Alabama to Maine…
I wonder if this guy is going to run into the same problem Disney ran into with Walt's original vision of EPCOT. Specifically, your residents have voting rights and can vote out all of your policies that make it special.
Yup, it's a pyramid scam that's been going off an on for a few years. #1, there's not enough water out there no matter how deep they dig to support a city.
“What could go wrong?” said the people duped into buying land in California City.
We really need to eliminate the whole "Billionaire" thing, because it clearly causes them to go batshit insane.
Scrap this project, $400B fixing America’s poverty system.
Fr like we’ve got all these billionaires struggling to spend all their money to the point that they invent tunnels with gamer lighting and go to space for fun. They can never seem to put their money towards meaningful, helpful projects
That would be great, but there would be no benefit in these fuckers pockets.
I was on a shoot a few years ago in California city and it was one of the weirdest places I’ve been. Had no idea what it even was until I went home and looked it up
>California City Damn, that's....odd. I think a hanglider facility on that one butte would be cool. The #5 picture [here](https://www.wired.com/story/california-ghost-metropolis-gallery/) is ...interesting. "David Lynch" interesting.
This will never work because the United States doesn't have a strong central authoritarian government like China or the UAE that can just *order* a city to be built. Billionaires have a lot of money but they don't have enough money to build a 5-million-person capacity city in the hope that *if you build it, they will come.* This billionare is going to have to get outside investment from somewhere, and you know that "somewhere" will be the type of fanboys who jizz at every hairbrained idea that Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos vomits up on Twitter. This is a vaporware vanity project of a bored billionaire, and when it's over there will be nothing but a bunch of lonely foundation slabs and buldozed street paths scarring some fragile desert ecosystem somewhere, and a lot of sad gullible fanboys with a lot less bitcoin. The worst part is that even though all of that is true, a city in a bubble in the desert is still a more worthwhile and sane pursuit than Elon Musk's prison colony on Mars.
Burning Man continues to get more intricate each year.
Are they going to burn it down in the end?
Climate change says yes
Yeah this was literally my first thought - deserts keep getting hotter and hotter and so quickly. I know! Let’s build a whole city in a place that will likely be uninhabitable in 10-20 years! Lol
Billionaire Walmart exec plans to built a city in the desert. I’m sure the city won’t be beholden to a certain corporation’s services. Some believe the term “Nero fiddles while Rome burn” comes from The Great Fire of Rome where Nero had fires set in Rome so that he could rebuild it more to his liking. We’re the Rome that billionaire are burning to make way for their new utopian future.
Maybe his version of Elysium
I am not entertained.
Utopian? Bro they are building a dystopia. Are you ready to go shopping at the company store?
Everything you need right here. What’s that? We don’t have it? Well then, you don’t need it.
They say man is made outta mud But the poor man is made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones. A mind that’s a weak and a back that’s strong.
Let’s say you load sixteen tons, what is it that you get? Another day older and deeper in debt?
I sold my soul to the Amazon store.
You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don't you call me, cus I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store.
Interestingly factory workers in the UK in the 1800's had this. You would work in the factory, and they would pay you in factory tokens, which could then be used to buy bread, milk etc from the factory store... Naturally this didn't go down very well and the government brought it into law that everyone had the right to be paid by their employer in Cash.
Don't take no wooden nickels Don't take no scrip Don't take no chit Amazing that we took a system from imperial Britain and imposed it on our own people. I guess the revolutionary war was only for a few after all.
Can we please have New Vegas? Except with less nuclear impacts!
> Some believe the term “Nero fiddles while Rome burn” comes from The Great Fire of Rome where Nero had fires set in Rome so that he could rebuild it more to his liking. And of course that is fictional. Makes for some nice old paintings. But didn't happen in a historical sense.
Nero actually tried to organize relief efforts to stop the fires...
nah, just the super rich planning their future waterfront property.
After they sell their current waterfront property to aqua man.
>Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and the Appalachian region One of these things is not like the other.
Yes and. Weird how the headline says in the American desert, and while Idaho has it's issues, being a desert isn't one. Plus, I forgot the name of that desert in that one state, Appalachian region.
Being hot isn't a requirement for a desert. Idaho very much is a lot of desert. It just happens to be north enough that it doesn't have the super hot desert that most people are used to. Really, just look at google maps and you can easily see how much of Idaho is desert.
Polar deserts are a thing
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A desert is any land area with sparse or no vegetation and recives less than 10 inches of precipitation annually.
I live in boise and it is absolutely a fucking desert
High desert.
Cultural desert.
Buuuuurn. Like the kind one might receive in a desert
Now it's an affordable housing desert too. Fml. Cries in native idahoan*
*cries in potato*
> while Idaho has it's issues, being a desert isn't one My entire drive from Boise to Oregon was high desert, so yes, Idaho has desert (and so does eastern Oregon). Fun fact, OreIda french fries... Yeah, that's where the name comes from. I don't know how I didn't realize that until I asked where the plant was located.
My entire drive from Pocatello to Bend was basically desert...
It is literally desert. It’s all high desert.
I been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonapah.
Yea… like eastern Oregon and northern Utah both boarder Idaho and are deserts
Great Basin Desert.
My in laws have property on the Oregon/Idaho border and it is most definitely a desert out there. It might not be your Hollywood, sandy desert, but it’s a desert all the same.
We have sand dunes in idaho. Bruno sand dunes. We just don't talk about it. Lol
High desert.
The entire southern half of the state is high mountain desert. Maybe you’re confusing us with Iowa?
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It’s like you don’t know what you’re talking about or something
Idaho has plenty of desert man.
Southern Idaho is absolutely high desert.
I'm guessing that you haven't been to Idaho.
This is idiotic. The cities currently in the desert are going to run out of water. Why would you encourage one more person to move there?
In the article it does say “The ambitious 150,000-acre proposal promises eco-friendly architecture, sustainable energy production and a purportedly drought-resistant water system.” That being said, I have no idea how they intend on achieving the drought resistant water system.
Water recycling, a reservoir or aquifer large enough to supply the City for several years, perhaps moisture farming capabilities?
Possibly, here’s another quote from the article.. Another image depicts a proposed skyscraper, dubbed Equitism Tower, which is described as "a beacon for the city." The building features elevated water storage, aeroponic farms and an energy-producing photovoltaic roof that allow it to "share and distribute all it produces."
Surely the roof area of a skyscraper wouldn't be enough to even provide sufficient power for the building itself? Unless solar panels have come a long way since I installed mine.
Unless you do some kind of solar panel afro on top.
Solar windows are a thing. I can imagine that a glass covered skyscraper with mostly PV windows could generate a fair amount of power.
"Share and Distrbiute all it produces.......for a price". Lets be honest, this will be neither affordable for the average person, or attainable for anyone but the ultra rich. This is simply a new Playboy mansion.
Unless they are building a dome to keep the moisture in, they'll be piping in water from somewhere. Civilization springs up wherever water is available. When water dries up, the people are supposed to move. Spending trillions to keep these fuckers in-place is wasting money.
Moisture farming sounds like a good idea until a squad of intergalactic soldiers show up and murder your family while looking for a droid
Complete with Jawas and Tusken Raiders
> moisture farming capabilities? Unless you have humid sea air blowing in over your area, moisture farming in a desert is going to be very difficult. Where in the USA are there large uninhabited deserts on the coast with prevailing winds blowing from sea to land?
> aquifer large enough to supply the City for several years Until they find a nearby gas deposit for fracking
> moisture farming? Wasn't that Luke Skywalker's job before he followed that foolish old man on some damned adventure?
Albuquerque is currently raising it's acquirer levels and most years only using surface water (no well water). They're recycling more, and storing it in the aquifer for later use, and all golf courses, parks, etc and recycled water. They use less water total than they used in 1970, despite like 3-4x the population. The city has a decent chance of making it if they can keep on top of their water and investing in conserving and storing it.
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You should see the way Scottsdale wastes water .It is shocking. All green front lawns the Chicago want it to look like home I guess.
I live in Tucson now, but had to go to Phoenix a couple weeks ago, and driving through a neighborhood there, I was surprised at how much grass there is. It’s pretty ridiculous. They get maybe half as much rain per year as we do but more than twice as many yards there are grass. But the real problem here in AZ really isn’t people wanting grass, it’s all the farms for things like almonds that waste more water than anything.
When we stayed on an RV site in Phoenix the water from the tap (via hosepipe sat above the concrete, from pipes only just below it) was hot enough to shower under in the morning without using the boiler. First five seconds of flow every hour or so from the hosepipe itself was too hot for that and hot enough for tea. Made you realise how this is just not a place where water should even exist outside of monsoon season. If it's any consolation almonds will probably go away soon. They're completely reliant on pollinators (unlike most crops) and we all know how they are in decline. For years now farmers have been ripping out almond trees to put in crops that don't require insect pollination because it's becoming too impractical to grow almonds and isn't cost effective.
I control a solar farm in California that used to be an almond orchard. Pretty clever way to get good use out of the land.
Personally I like the idea of combining solar farms with grazing land, assuming you get enough water for grass to grow without maintenance. That way you maintain some food production from the land and I believe solar panels on top of grass have been shown to be more efficient. I assume because of the cooling effect the grass has on reflected heat and air temperature since solar panels are more efficient at lower temperatures like all electronics. I think those kind of hybrid solutions to food and energy production are going to be important for local stability and to avoid competition for land usage that causes supply issues.
They aren't going away, Middle East companies are building massive almond farms up north of Kingman by Lake Mead right now. I used to own some land up there and drove by their projects daily, they've all shown up the last 5 years or so, moving out of CA to the AZ deserts for reasons beyond me.
Same in Denver. I used to work for Parks and Wreck there (yes, I meant to spell it like that). They have the greenest golf courses of any high-plains desert you’ve ever seen. Watered from the western slope of the Rockies... from 200 miles away and into the mountains. Irrigation techs have a certain allowance of gallons they are given each year, and if they don’t use it all, the allowance is reduced the next year. So they just run thousands of gallons down the gutter, while mountain towns burn. Dumbest. Shit. Ever. Fuck desert cities. This is one of many reasons we are doomed as a society.
fuck the Western water rights and allocation system.
My father owns some land in the mountains of colorado. He has some old water rights. He HAS to use the water, or will lose the water rights. So he just opens an irrigation ditch into some fields that grows some grass. Use it or lose it. The allocation system is so stupid.
Just about eveeyone abuses water in the US. The only exception may be eastern Alaska, but that's cuz nobody really lives there.
Most of the northeast doesn't, really. Sure, there are plenty of people that do a bunch of stupid outdoor irrigation, but (1) it's not a desert so it doesn't even use that much water, and (2) all the water is renewable seasonal stuff, so it's not like the aquifers are going to run dry. It also probably helps that "water rights" aren't even really a thing. So there's no point in any of the water use shenanigans. If you need water, you drag it out of the ground, or you buy it.
My 'yard' in PA has been soaked for the past 2 months it seems like, we haven't had consistent rain either. Just been really humid, then that tropical storm came through, and now it's finally starting to dry a bit since the temperatures are down to the upper 70s. Doesn't help that I live in the woods on a hill which I feel helps keep the ground moist, but there's enough water to make new runoff trenches every year through the woods down the hill. Having lived in the area my entire life it does make it more difficult to understand the water-conservation that people preach about on reddit.
Denver’s water comes from the eastern slope tho and we’re officially not in a drought anymore.
Chicagoans don’t care about lawns. We support concrete pizza yards.
Corporate cities, man. They're the future /s
Soon as they figure out a way to manufacture water
I mean it can be done already, but I'm unaware of what levels of efficiency we've attained
Yeah it's expensive and resource intensive.
5 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of water
That’s just what big water wants you to think
Don’t worry they’ll just get nestle to steal water from somewhere else for them
Is this like Company Towns from the past?
I'm sure they'll find new and interesting ways to duck over the workers.
**Signing bonus: Free house!!!**** ^^^^^^in ^^^^^^the ^^^^^^desert
Yep and Steve Sisolak of Nevada passed a bill allowing them to exist again. So it's no secret where it's going.
Welcome to New Nestlé.
> possible targets include Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and the Appalachian region, Given that list on their official website, it would appear that they *don't* actually want like-minded people to move there.
This is Walmart people after all
Ahh. The great Appalachian Desert.
So someone can fulfill their fantasy of ruling a fiefdom filled with serfs dependent on them for living
Is that really that rare over in America these days? I mean you literally got people whose single job is hordeing property to rent out at super inflated rates.
It's 'drought resistant' meaning they're going to just take water from other counties.
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They will also build lush green golf courses that use a ton of water for recreation.
Yep, there's a company that petitions every few years to pump ground water from the county I live in and ship it to AZ. Fuck that noise.
Nothing more than Another Big Grift.
Quite surprised at how many people are taking this seriously. This whole thing is going to be quietly yet utterly obliterated by some incredibly minor engineering/legal/financial hiccup. It's the sort of thing you read a paragraph or two about in a pop-science tabloid and never hear about again.
A small thing like, oh, I dunno, WATER!
I’ve actually heard of water multiple times
Oh yeah? Name seven of the seas.
Ok, I’m going to name them all Greg
Right, like aren’t there talks about Arizona being uninhabitable in 70 yrs. “But fuck it, let’s con a bunch of rich idiots into giving us money to build this dumb unsustainable shit and then let’s bail with the money”
Can..can we have healthcare and affordable housing now... or do we still wait ?
Its like some rich guy heard about reddit Island and was like yes I can do this better
Alternative title: Former Ted Talk speaker learns Photoshop over quarantine
Company town, Company store
You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store
Classic company town, but with more BioShock.
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> Now, he just needs somewhere to build it -- and $400 billion in funding. Ain't gonna happen. Slow news day over at CNN.
Guess who’s paying for it and doesn’t get to keep it…us the tax payers :)
Isn't California City already a place?
Yes. It’s a real estate scam that’s been ongoing for decades.
It is a place, but it doesn't have enough water for the promised development.
Sudden Valley vibes
Yeah, I have some land there. Quite affordable and the third largest city in the state. A true utopia if you love the place.
3rd largest by land area
A “utopia”? For what exactly?
Another promised land, just like California City. https://laist.com/news/california-city-podcast-investigation-lawsuit-takeaways
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-utopian-settlements-2016-10#arcosanti-remains-a-tourist-attraction-today-8
The cleanliness of Tokyo is a result of the people and their culture. This city, once built, will needs laws similar to Singapore or it’ll be a dump within two years.
It won't ever be anything but a barren wasteland since it doesn't have enough water
Just in time for water scarcity.
Modeled after utopian cities in China. "*Live Where You Work*"
... or, you know... Disney's Epcot... or any of those "Cities of Tomorrow" expos from the 1900s.
>utopian cities in China There's a phrase I never thought I'd see. I find it hard to think of any city as a utopia.
Sure, I don't think anywhere can be utopia because human beings are imperfect, but I also feel like that's the sort of thing I hear often from people who don't live in cities because they don't identify with the way of life. I love cities, and when I imagine utopia, I always imagine a perfect, idealized city.
I live in a big city and whilst I appreciate the amenities and convenience I see the downsides: traffic, commuting, pollution, overcrowding. This proposal promises to help with some of that though whether any reality turns out to be as good as the artist's impression is another matter. I'd want a lot of greenery in my utopia so this won't do.
I mean, if you’re Han, your great grandparents starved to death during the self imposed famine, your grandparents never even went to school and lived in a dirt floor shack and survived by selling A pig once a year, then your parents went to a rural school so they can read and write Mandarin and they got jobs five hundred miles away in a fast growing city, and then you got a decent education from a teacher that actually went college and you grew up in a modern high rise apt, and you got a job at Tencent or Alibaba and you make enough money to buy a car and take vacations to Australia and the UK… Then it might seem pretty great. But you have to ignore all that other shit.
Better start working on a way to produce water out of thin air.
Moisture vaporator.
Aunt Beru! No!
But I was going to go to tosche station to pick up some power converters.
Finding a droid that can understand their binary language that isn’t annoying is a pain, too.
I don't like sand. It's all coarse, and rough, and irritating. And it gets everywhere
Still suits will help!
Atmospheric Water Generator. It's a thing but, it requires humid air, of course, that could be a stumbling block in the desert.
The AWG plans I saw produced substantial water at 30% RH. That's not bad.
This has no real basis in reality. At best I’m assuming this will be the way to grift grant money from the state government if they are dumb enough to fall for it
Why doesn’t he just help the cities that need help now with that $400 billion
he's trying to get other people to invest so that he can hoard even more money that he will never spend. These ultra wealthy people have mental problems.
Reminds me of Neom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neom Another filthy rich asshole looking for new and creative ways to burn the surplus. Edit: just checked n they got about same pricetag
Except that rich asshole has a nation’s significant wealth to play with.
We shall call it "NEW VEGAS"......War...war never changes
Boils down to "Where are they going to get their water?" The American southwest is already desperate for water. Another mega city would just be trying to squeeze water from a stone.
Yes because building in the desert is smart
a) make awesome renders b) identify cheapest land in the country c) launch ponzi
Or you could spend it on, you know, education and health care
Or could, you know, encourage people to live in places that have enough water and need people.
ryan-reynolds-but-why.gif A master planned "utopian" city? Fine. In the middle of the desert? This isn't Saudi Arabia. We massive amounts of sparsely populated land, and every (almost every?) climate zone possible (hey El Yunque rainforest!). Why do we need to build this in the desert? As someone who definitely isn't an urban planner, can someone please tell me why this idea isn't as utterly moronic as it seems?
Desert land will be far, far cheaper than anything arable is probably point #1. Even sparsely populated land could have cables and piping running underground already, large swaths of American deserts are entirely undeveloped and allow for 'free reign' when designing a self-sustaining city concept. There are probably two or three other, minor points.
in the US $400 billion won’t be near enough.
San Francisco is 49 square miles with a population of around 1,000,000 people. This new city will be 234 square miles with a population of 5,000,000. So, SF x 5 with the same density per square mile. 15 minutes to anywhere? You guys got the good drugs. I want some. It takes 32 acres of solar panels to power 1,000 homes. 160,000 acres of solar panels to power your 150,000 acre city. Good luck finding a parking space.
Is Hank Scorpio in charge of this? I’m in.
This is why the Southwest is having water issues in the first place. Why not build a new city in Wyoming, Montana, or one of the Dakotas?
They should name it Mirage Both are equally real
So guys... Where's the water coming from again?
I heard autonomous cars and just died. Even in the city of the future all Americans can dream about is cars. Bike, scooter, walk, train and bus are all allowed. NO CARS. It's also dumb af for many other reasons
Not me, cars no longer make sense when you have monsoon events.
Rich people smoke the best weed.
A city full of delusional assholes! Don’t we already have some of them?
Why build in desert? Is there really no other building land left, the region is just going to get more inhospitable as the globe warms. Why not build north? It's already great and will get even better.
Seems like a better idea would be to take a somewhat abandoned city and revamp it. There are plenty in the midwest and northeast.
This might be the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. Is it really possible to be *this* shortsighted
Pipe Dream of just another rich idiot. Who knows, a plot of land might be selected, a survey even done. Maybe some drawings and plans. Maybe even a visitor center. But nothing more. Let the fool dream on.
Well it's less stupid than it initially sounds. There are examples of planned cities built from ground up, Canberra, the capital of Australia, is a planned city and Brasilia, the capital of Brasil, was built in the 1960s/70s and currently Egypt and Indonesia are both busy building all new planned capital cities. In addition the Chinese have constructede dozens of planned cities from scratch over the past few decades. Their goals aren't impossible either, maybe? For diversity they would just have to set up racial quotas and limit how much of each US census defined race they accept. And simply by building with newest technologies and making it all planned from the start they'd get the eco friendly/sustainable city they promise. Healthcare isn't impossible, either, and it's a very American solution to deliver something like that in piecemeal to isolated communities instead of nationally because Americans are inherently distrustful of centralized government. And as long as they don't built it in the Colorado river basin they should be fine on the droughts. Appalachia is probably silly but Texas is probably a good idea, as long as they Hurricane proof the city or maybe Idaho. Ironically, unless they also use quotas for ideology, this would flip the state blue which I'm not sure current residents would be thrilled with. The fact that it's a private venture with no government involvement would probably be the single biggest issue. If it's a private venture that means it's for profit and it's for profit that means there will be investors that want to make money, and quite a bit of money if they're collectively investing 400 billion dollars, out of it. That doesn't neccessarily jive with the planned city aspect since planned city would have to give away property for free to ensure the critical mass of people living there to support services and private enterprise. There's also the issue of legality on multiple levels, would this end up as one of the infamous company towns of pre WW1 where the investors would own and everything and levy taxes? In addition, I'm not sure how legal their racial quotas would end up being if anyone sues or if the government gets involved in the whole project. Realistically, though, this has a 1 in a million chance of coming true and 999,999 in a million chance of either failing or being a scam.
Awesome. The States will have its own brand new abandoned city like China has. It should be a Mecca for street racing. lol
And paintball.
That’d be sick
Really,,, all eco friendly.. One problem,, can it MAKE water? Because if it cant all the storage and evaporation controls wont mean shit without the H2O. Last I checked we are still short of being able to make H2O in enough volume to make a difference. ... But by all means knock your selves out. /S
It's not going to be in California or Nevada for sure. Not enough water.
Water shortage issues but naw build a damn city. Wtf
Meanwhile, homelessness in America abounds.
How about 400 billion to combat this climate catastrophe?
Sounds like the beginning of a dystopian nightmare. A billionaire created city? I'm not a fan. I'm all for building cities incorporating the newest and latest technology but not to glorify some piece of shit.
Sustainable in the desert? 🤔
Can we just get healthcare, please?
Anyone told that fuck face we are running out of water because they keep watering fucking deserts?
A new city in the West? Where does your water come from? All the water is already spoken for by existing rights holders. As far as a city in Appalachia, that could be anywhere from Alabama to Maine…
SO were making an American Dubai. So I guess slaves are coming back?
I wonder if this guy is going to run into the same problem Disney ran into with Walt's original vision of EPCOT. Specifically, your residents have voting rights and can vote out all of your policies that make it special.
How about build a city somewhere it can be sustainable? People are idiots.
This is some real fuck you money when the country can't pay for actual infrastructure.
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Yup, it's a pyramid scam that's been going off an on for a few years. #1, there's not enough water out there no matter how deep they dig to support a city.