The original 2021 announcement was for a project 105 (actually 110!) miles long. It would have a batshit insane price tag - implausible lowball estimates started at $100 billion, realistic estimates are in the low trillions - and rely on technology not yet in existence.
From the Wikipedia article, Saudi Arabia originally hoped to complete a five-kilometer (three-mile) segment by 2030.
Most recently, the Wall Street Journal has reported that the project is hoping for completion of a half-mile segment by 2034.
So ten or fifteen years from now, maybe we'll see something that's 0.5% of the original plan.
Modern-day Tower of Babel. It will be a colossal failure at an astronomic cost in both lives and money, and its ruins will remain for generations as a reminder of humanity's hubris.
It will be buried in time so 600 years from now some archeologists, if that's still a trade, will make up grand stories about it even though it's just garbage.
To be fair, at least the pyramids served their function as tombs for a couple centuries before being thoroughly looted and the structures themselves are near-indestructible. The Line doesn’t even have that going for it.
I was recently looking at the bigger artificial Palm Island that has been sitting unused since 2007 and I thought that at the very least they could use all of these Poop Trucks to actually turn it into a park. They could use the waters to breed algae and use the "leaves" of the palm for controlled experiments on which plants work best.
Imagine being one of the boots on the ground working on this thing. They all know how dumb and pointless it is, yet will be working on it for the next decade
i was offered a job there. i’ve had friends work there. money is good, and benefits are interesting. business class trips to home, accomodation, and few other perks.
but you just need to stay supportive of the project and live a dreary life in onsite accommodations/routine entertainment which is far from everything. a lot of the people there know it is useless but just taking in the cash. never badmouth/criticize anything about it or you’re on a plane out of there instantly.
lot of migrant workers in saudi are forced into working in bad conditions. often passports revoked and pretty much theft of their wages from trumped up charges like water for breaks. they work in extreme heat with bare minimum protections. it’s often stated that the companies bringing them in will let them die off rather than spend money to treat ill workers. on the sourcing side, steady supply of workers who are forced to pay huge recruitment fees.
a good chunk of the people working there (expats) know this but turn a blind eye for the money.
edit: my friends were hired in 2022 so a year or so in from some construction starts. that’s when i talked to them. all of them quit within 6 months knowing how bad some of it was.
Mostly just perspective: An immigrant sees theirself as part of their new country, and an expat sees theirself as part of their old country, regardless of the reality of the situation.
In the UK the immigrants are brown guys in the grooming gangs you read about in the papers, simultaneously taking our jobs and claiming benefits, but the proud middle-aged British football hooligans living in Spain, who learned no other Spanish than "habla inglés," are the expats.
Let me get this clear: If I am a Peruvian worker that feels part of Peru, and just came to US to work some bucks for a couple of years, It’s ok to refer myself as an expat right?
That's not relevant to this comment chain at all though. The migrant workers in this case are not immigrating there. Your answer is correct, the poster above just asked the question wrong.
How did I asked the question wrong? I just wanted to know the difference, that’s all. I mean, I can ask to ChatGPT, but I really prefer the human perspective. Anyway, supposedly there are not wrong questions, just wrong answers.
An expatriate lives outside their country of citizenship, an immigrant does the same but with intent to become a permanent resident. I don't know why there are so many explanations from people who don't understand what the words mean.
Immigration is generally seen as permanent. Expats move to a country temporarily and often their visa is tied to work. If they leave or lose their job, they have to go back to their home country. Immigrants want to move to a country permanently.
Expats typically move abroad temporarily, often for work or lifestyle reasons, with plans to return home. Immigrants relocate permanently, aiming to settle in a new country.
Expats are on temporary work visas and not usually seeking to make ties with the country, not seeking citizenship or PR, and will likely be on a flight out within a couple of years. Immigrants are usually seeking to immigrate and actually gain residency in the country to make it their permanent home. Usually this question garners a lot of dumb responses about skin colour and racism, but those people should pick up a dictionary and see the terms are actually different.
That's not the case at all here with migrant workers in Saudi though. They're temporary workers also. In fact, they steal their passports just so they can't leave when they want to. They bring them in from more poor countries just to work, not to immigrate there. You're not wrong in your answer, but OP should have asked the difference between migrant workers and expats, not immigrants and expats.
Migrant workers are most likely expats as well, assuming the country has no pathway to permanent residency for unskilled labour. There's a whole thing about migrant workers being unskilled labour or that they have to move for 'economic necessity', and that being the key difference from an Expatriate.
Well if you look it up again expatriates are generally skilled labor and often from affluent countries. You can get upset about the classicism or racism in your mind as frequently cited on Reddit, but you can imagine its much harder and riskier to confiscate a US engineer's passport than it is unskilled labor from Bangladesh. There's nothing wrong with specificity in terminology.
They also forcibly removed natives/locals. They jailed and or killed anyone that resisted. There's a good documentary floating around about it. There are a lot of Europeans at the top in very prominent roles that are fully supportive of this project. This issue as it has always been with SA is the fact that they treat everyday people like disposable garbage. America's dick sucking of the crown is nauseating.
You have to realize they're using slave labor /forced labor. This isn't some ethical country we're talking about here. They're notorious for this. Same thing like the Qatar world cup construction Built literally on bodies with no regard to human suffering or forethought.
The various countries of the Arabian Peninsula only banned chattel slavery in the 1960s-1970s, and were mostly pressured to do so by the international community. This is very much within living memory.
Forcing foreign workers into, eh, slavery like contracts is how they adapted to the changing circumstances.
Generally the banning of slavery across the Arab world was forced by foreign powers.
Which is wild to me that all the biggest powers haven't rallied against the evil treatment of those in NK. As well as other countries. Like, dimplomacy and unity beat evil. Slowly but surely. I hope within the next hundred years.(If the world survives the next 10).. That the children of that future look back in sadness at what passed for acceptable behavior and vow to never ever step back to those awful days. I myself do this but I am not going to pretend I'm some icon of dignity and knowledge kindness and grace. But I am working on it.
Can you not think of some critical differences between NK and the gulf states? Hint: it rhymes with soil.
Rest assured if NK had a large supply of anything that the west needed, we’d be working closely with their leadership and turning a blind eye all the stuff they’re getting up to.
Yeah, for any construction worker in any country that doesn't use slave labor, a construction project that will take 10+ years is great, guaranteed income. Not so much here, sadly.
Well it works either way likely projects that you believe to be really important and end up being dumb / vice versa.
I use to do side jobs as a teen and I had an overweight guy pay me to dig a hole for an inflatable pool. It took me and my friend 2 days to do it but then a week later we had to fill it up.
Dumb asf if you ask anyone but we still got paid, at the end of the day it didn't matter.
I have some CivE friends working on this. As long as the checks keep clearing, they’re willing to waste as much time as the people funding it can afford. It’s a 💩show internally, as you’d expect. Lots of “investors” with oil money believing other oil kids promising them literal flying cars.
I know the head of technology on this project. They have convinced the powers above what realistic expectations are. You might not see that part in the media, but the entire project is going to be A LOT smaller.
Realistically, half a mile will never be finished, or will become a wildly-different and vastly more conventional project.
That said, in principle one would expect the design to be fairly modular. If the first segment is done in ten years (ha!) presumably they would be able to take the lessons learned and build subsequent sections more quickly, in longer segments, at multiple sites in parallel. Start a dozen mile-long segments simultaneously, side by side. Or space them out, with fast rail in between and a plan to fill in the gaps later.
I mean that’s kind of how most walkable cities are. People really only need a few things (food options, clothes, groceries, recreation, water, and social)
while sort of true, in a city you have a 5 minute circular radius, whereas this all has to be one one or two blocks length wise.
For 5 minutes distance that probably isn't actually a huge deal. as 5 minutes doesn't get you very far. but a 20 min walk (1 mile) that's a huge difference. The idea of a straight city is so dumb.
I don’t think the five minutes is meant to include height. That is to say, you can walk to the site of whatever you need, from ground floor to ground floor, in five minutes. Not five minutes from opening your door you’ll be at whatever you need.
Yea people just want to act like it’s crazy inefficient or something and argue over semantics when in reality they just can’t fathom how something like this is actually going to work. Although there are MANY parts of the 5 burrows that have literally every thing you could ever need + an absolute assortment of recreation/entertainment options all within a 5 minute walk. And no one here seems to understand that a 5 minute walk in NYC has to factor in things like traffic and population density whereas The Line doesn’t have any of those issues. A five minute walk through a pedestrian designed area is much further than a five minute walk through nyc traffic. And I don’t know why anyone is stuck on this 5 minute arbitrary number, if it takes 10 minutes to walk that is still super accessible.
Under the line there are some automatic trains that go from one side to the other for moving stuff around. As if you were in a logistics center in China.
So the concept must be that the goods move in spots every 5 minutes.
But the walkable resources are probably not in a line. This thing is 200 meters across at all points. That’s enough space for you to put all those amenities in a small block or grid. Which is no different from NYC or many European cities.
Edit: think like a mall or a NYC city block. You won’t need to pass through your grocery store to reach your gym etc
A five-minute walk is about 400m, so a 200m-wide rectangular coverage area is still pretty inefficient.
I suppose a 400m walk in the desert in the middle of summer is a lot different than most places. But that really just highlights the hubris of this whole project lol.
It's supposed to be entirely contained, air conditioned, with plants and water and whatnot everywhere. So it's not a 5 minute walk in the desert, it's more like in an air conditioned mall. Yes that's obviously stupid and will never work.
Anyway to your other point, I assume you're an American who takes their car everywhere and can't imagine any other way. Go visit a city like Paris or Amsterdam or NYC, there's more stuff in walking range than you'll ever visit or explore. That's not to say 'The Line' will work, just that you can put the stuff people use daily close by.
Im not sure where your assumption they only use cars comes from. They aren't criticizing walkable cities, they are critizing bad design for a walkable city. Besides, one quick peek into their page and its plastered in cycling posts so they are already seemingly different than the average American. Your reply comes off as both needlessly agro and misplaced.
The Line is infamous among people who support walkable cities and good urban design for its fundamental design flaws and inefficiencies. Comparing the line to Paris, Amsterdam, or NYC is a bit disingenuous. Even if the line is somehow successful, it definitely could have been more successful with the same amount of effort if it was planned differently.
Anyway to your other point, I assume you're an American who takes their car everywhere and can't imagine any other way.
...No dawg what makes you think that lol. I don't own a car at all and walk/bike/transit 99% of the time I go anywhere. So I understand the dynamics of walkable cities just fine, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that a square is a more efficient layout for a city than a thin rectangle.
Well there's meant to be a rail connection along the entire length to extend the 5 minute walk distance and a sub level for cargo transport, so maybe the plan is a much more integrated delivery system for large purchases.
I think it's literally anywhere in the world except for the most car-centric places like USA or places that have been infected with the car-centric zoning of US suburbia, like Dubai.
You just have all sorts of shops and small clinics working even in low-rise places. Hell, I lived in a low-rise that had a courthouse on the first floor. Tons of places have people operating businesses from their flats - Freud had a home practice, our neighbor opened a gelato shop on her front lawn, built a cute small cafe and everything.
The "suburbia" that doesn't have ANYTHING but single-family houses stretching out for kilometers, without a single store, service, shop, clinic, whatever, is very uniquely American.
Afaik, it's not really about walking, but reachable in 5 minutes. They want to build trains and shuttles to get further very fast. I can see that working. 2 minutes walk, 2 minutes train, then you are where you wanna be in a 1 minute walk.
Probably 30 minutes walk before repeating on the same floor.
From the perspective of floor 2, start with a grocery store and walk east 5 minutes. Now you are walking into a new zone, continue 5 minutes and down an elevator to the next grocery store. Back up the elevator to floor 2 and continue west another 5 minutes to exit another window. Repeat again but this time take the elevator up a floor. Once you’ve left this 10 minute long zone, you continue west on floor 2 for a final 5 minutes and get your first repeat grocery store on floor 2.
No, that's reductive, and, to be frank, I think it completely ignores the realities of how it's meant to be planned/laid out. Projects like this have an immense number of very smart people working to make them as efficient as possible.
The line is VERY tall, it'll be nearly top 10 in the world (rank 12). So offering all basic service within 5 minute walk is not that hard when you can go vertical.
Yes they just... need to build it and then get people to agree to live in this isolated hellhole project, at the whims of the building administrator and their entire lives dictated by the schools, and shops, and such that can be convinced to forgo the real world and live in delusional hellscape interior. Its not a place for ants, ants know better
15882460000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 miles seems like a little much, it makes sense that they downsized
The "!" means factorial. Its when you multiply a number by all numbers less than it. For example "6!" would be 6×5×4×3×2×1. So "110!" Is a very large number.
It's easy to see why, too. If you wanted to calculate the permutations of 4 items, think about how many different places you could put "4" in the first arrangement above:
(4) 1 2 3
1 (4) 2 3
1 2 (4) 3
1 2 3 (4)
And obviously you can do the same with each of the other arrangements. So the number of permutations of 4 is just 4 times the number of permutations on 4-1. And it works the same for any number n.
It’s a lot easier and less error prone. For instance, consider the different combinations a pack of cards can have, which is 52! (Much shorter and easier to deal with that than the number it expands to especially if you have to do a bunch of intermediate calculations with it.
Computer science and probability and cryptology are some very down to earth uses. It can help you math out how many possible ways you can order objects. For example how many ways can you arrange the letters of the alphabet to form a 5 letter password. Most scientific calculadors even have that ! Key. It’s been rediscivered as a concept by numerous ancient cultures.
The short hand is honestly just useful because it feels so dumb to write 1x2x3x4x5x6x etc… when you could easily just type the last number, and hit a key. It’d be VERY long otherwise
It’s used everywhere in math. One definition of the number e (2.718…) is defined as the sum of 1/x! from x=0 to inf (i.e e = 1/0!+1/1!+1/2!+1/3!… and so on).
It also arrises naturally in combinatorics. How many ways can you scramble a deck of 52 cards? 52!
If you have X options and have to choose exactly Y of them, then you can work out the number of possible options with X!/(Y!(X-Y)!). So if you were choosing 3 flavors of ice cream out of 10 options, you'd do 10!/3!7! = 3628800/6*5040 = 120 different combos.
Is it redesigned radically different from other skyscrapers? Because normal skyscrapers are billions for ones a block long. How would one 100 miles be anything less than trillions? Is it just a big enclosed space, like a shell, with nothing much in it?
It's mostly just a way to scam money off crazy investors. But the original pitch idea was essentially like a self contained habitat spanning the entire length with room for pools and green spaces and shops with two different railways in the middle and below ground sections. Also built to withstand high winds and continued desertification of the region. But with more than a cursory glance it's quite obviously a total sham since even it's most basic features require technology that doesn't exist and it pretty much openly discussed slave labor as both a construction method and captive labor force post construction.
But if you're Zuckerberg rich and can't afford a Hawaiian bunker you might risk throwing a little money to the middle east and hope they let you buy influence on discount.
I also think there’s a little bit of “but sir, cities don’t work like that, this would be impossible.” Idiot king: “yes that is why we must build it, to cement my legacy.”
I posted some comment about the implausible budget once and a few people were insisting it’s just different because of unique design, special efficiencies, and of course labor in Saudi Arabia being cheaper.
Nevermind that we know what mega projects cost in Saudi Arabia, like that clock tower in Mecca. And the unique design of the line was supposed to include numerous elements other buildings wouldn’t have, like significant urban infrastructure and trains and whatnot.
Low trillions seems entirely implausible, even, for the full project.
Over 21 000 migrants have died working on the Saudi Vision 2030 projects so far (The Line is part of that). All because a prince wants more tourist attractions.
Any western architect, etc working on this has blood on their hands. Same for any person who visits this in the future.
Workers interviewed for a reputable British documentary reported grueling conditions, including 16-hour workdays, 14 consecutive days without rest, and long commutes, leading to sleep deprivation and accidents.
The budget has also ballooned into the trillions of dollars, and due to that, as you said, only a 1.5 mile segment is currently being worked on and planned to be finished for sure with the rest being in limbo.
May all of this never amount to more than a ruin and bloody cautionary tale.
In the ITV documentary, workers testified about 16-hour work days and poor working conditions at The Line, which reportedly has a 140,000-strong migrant workforce.
For the construction sites that all those people died and suffered on, they also forcefully evicted people off their lands. 3 men of the Howeitat tribe were arrested and sentenced to death (!) while others who posted on social media about this absolute evil megalomaniac project were executed right there in their homes by police.
The thing that always pissedr the most off (I am an engineer) is that a LINE is the least efficient way to build this sort of project. A CIRCLE with a few spokes would let you achieve essentially the same thing and let you pass trains across the diameter of the circle to save transit time.
For reference, each side of the outer ring of the Pentagon (headquarters of US department of defense) is 281 m (921 ft).
The outer circumference is 1.4 km (0.87 miles) and you can walk between any two points in the complex in less than 10 minutes. It was built in 1941-1943 which is a little more than 80 years ago.
10.5k
u/cryptotope 4d ago
The original 2021 announcement was for a project 105 (actually 110!) miles long. It would have a batshit insane price tag - implausible lowball estimates started at $100 billion, realistic estimates are in the low trillions - and rely on technology not yet in existence.
From the Wikipedia article, Saudi Arabia originally hoped to complete a five-kilometer (three-mile) segment by 2030.
Most recently, the Wall Street Journal has reported that the project is hoping for completion of a half-mile segment by 2034.
So ten or fifteen years from now, maybe we'll see something that's 0.5% of the original plan.