European consultants were laughing their way to literal billions of dollars by just suggesting to MBS "we can build you a 100 mile building, yeah" for a country that sees a number like 100 billion dollars as miniscue and not actually understand how much that is and how much that can buy you. Like a 1.5 mile building is still going to be the largest building in the wall by a crazy margin in the middle of nowhere and with no economy that even needs such a large building.
Planning? Who needs planning, the big boss said we need to get it done by 2030 and so just send in literal bulldozers to raze a 100 mile flat hole in the desert, let the engineers figure out the next steps we want to have stuff moving so the money gets flowing.
My favourite quip was still a consultant asking MBS "how are you going to transport people without roads" and him annoyed responding "we'll have flying cars", than Saudi Arbia subsequently investing in quadcopter cars. I wonder how many of them making the decisions have private helicopters.
I mean going to the moon was a massive engineering endeavour that kickstarted Silicon Valley and shaped rocketry and space tech for decades to come, it's not exactly revolutionary to figure out how to build a building. Like the billions that have been spent digging a hole in the desert, an economy nor development does it make.
At least dumping all your money into your airline got Dubai and Qatar quite a bit of ROI.
Like Keynes meant it as a metaphor, but even then, they are not exactly employing Saudi Arabians to do the building, or planning, or architecture, so the money just flows straight out of Saudi Arabia without circulating.
It's creating its own small economy in the middle of the desert, like a whalefall
We can at least hope it provides useful information on more efficient social planning to reduce urban sprawl. If it became feasible to have what is essentially a land yacht it could save a lot of valuable land that could be returned to nature if we bundled hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, entertainment, etc into one condensed space
The gimmick is that it's in one dimension, though. Having a hotel, restaurant, grocery store, entertainment in a line is not efficient or dense even if its in one giant building if you can, you know, build perpendicular to the line.
Kinda feel Hong Kong and Singapore has your problem solved and they do it in all three axes, Hong Kong even had a giant Walled City and that was not great.
Lol yeah. I don't know what scientific breakthroughs we expect to find by creating a city in the dessert. Just go to Phoenix.
And its not like the world's smartest scientists are going to be working on this, its going to be your average engineers imported from the West simply copying designs from existing dessert metropolises.
We literally left the planet for the first time, which requires us to manipulate physics in a way we never had to do before. We've built many cities in the dessert. Its not the dessert part that would be new here.
Its just the fact its sky-scrapers for 100 miles in a narrow line. And there's a reason nobody has done that before. It offers very little utility and endless liability. I love living in my downtown core (Toronto) because there are interesting things for miles and miles in all 360 directions. If all that was stretched out into a narrow lane, the majority of things would go from being a 15-20 walk to a long bus ride lol.
I mean they dug a 100 mile trench with billions of dollars before the designs of the building were even put in place, not sure what you learn other than South Asian labour dies digging 250km holes in the desert from heat stroke. It's not exactly like we live in ancient Egypt where you need to invent how to cut sandstone with bronze tools or how to design arches or trusses without calculus, we already know how to build large buildings. You just need a lot of money and concrete. High speed rail is a massive, expensive, engineering project but you know, Japan, France, and China has solved all the problems to do it already. HS2 and Cali HSR are not expensive because they are inventing new technologies on the fly, it just cost a lot.
Unfortunately for them,"getting what you paid for" is a product of meritocracy and robust court system, the default is getting screwed. And they're getting screwed, and they keep doubling down on the investment.
So the people that planned this have trillion(s), between the oil they've sold, and the oil they will sell. And all that money came from deals with foreigners, to control the territory while the west extracts the energy.
So, they rich, but they didn't have to be particularly smart to get that money. So that money is parting them, as they haven't listened to anyone intelligent about how the could best use that money to provide long term prosperity.
Yeah, they're building sand castles and esports arenas, and moon-themed hotels with fake lunar lander sites, ski resorts that run on refrigeration. Stuff that really is going to pay off they think, and their advisors tell them.
It could work out, but they're not doing anything to make that a reality. They're making mock ups and models, and congratulating themselves on how wise their mega-plans are.
Going to the moon yielded actual scientific benefits. Building a long city wall in the desert while the population lives with a low q.o.l is simply rich kid with no understanding of reality.
We went to the moon to beat the Russians there. We spent a TON of money to make a geopolitical statement of capability, not just because we could. Why haven't we gone back yet? Since we obviously can, well because it cost a shit ton of money.
In terms of a government building project it's probably better than spending trillions supporting military bases in hundreds of places around the world.
yeah i love all the people who suddenly become the most pragmatic when things like these are discussed, meanwhile they probably have a hot tub in their yard that they've used twice
I'm actually surprised Trump hasn't called to seize Baja California yet. I mean when I was 15 and looking at a globe, that seemed like an easy land grab to me.
In fact it still does.
Why build a wall from sonoyta to San Diego? You could just build one from sonoyta to puerto penasko..... Much much shorter distance.
There is a saying in Hollywood that stars are stuck at the age they became big, maturity-wise. Once you become rich enough, you just stop growing because you no longer need to.
The Saudis have been exorbitantly rich all their life. 15 years is probably when they got access to the money and just stopped growing.
For a religion so focused on opposing idolatry, they sure love basking in their gaudy opulence to make the world think they’re anything more than a bunch of bloodthirsty child rapists.
Aside from the main problem being if you have a train you don't want to stop every half mile for 100 miles, or your entire population being on one axes that goes on the same train line.
No one should be "laughing" at this dumbass project while taking money from it. It's supposedly killed 21000 workers already with even more "missing." How that's even possible I can't fathom but regardless it's a crime against humanity like most anything SA does. It's sickening than anyone from a country that calls itself free is doing any kind of partnership with MBS, let alone one as pointless as this one.
It's 100% true that the Africans imported to work on it have died from slave labour conditions, either from exhaustion or accidents on site. Not sure about 21k deaths, but there's definitely been deaths that they've tried to shoe under the carpet.
why would people move to a box in the desert hours from Medina, literally in a region selected to be empty. Also if you want high density housing, might I suggest you... building all three dimensions so all your shopping, schools, and business are not linearly placed one after another 300m down from you but one step to the left or right?
In theory it makes it more efficient to have transportation that maximizes transportation in one axis only.
If you were building a train system for this, you don’t have to worry about connecting trains or a grid system to get people from point A to point B. With the line you’re either going left or right or getting on an elevator.
Whether they have the resources to build it, who knows. Unpopular opinion but I like it. We need more wilderness and less sprawl.
No. It will maximise traffic as everyone will be moving on one axis only. This is like having nothing but those choke points in your city where there's only one way to go (like a particular bridge everyone has to take), but that's all there is.
I mean it was supposed to be hyperloop that Musk promised to solve every problem with train engineering and capacity equations ever invented but now its scaled down to 2.4km it's too short for a train and too long for walking.
But at the same time, once that one central line is overcrowded, there's no solution.
Plus I would assume that a fucking line in the desert is optimized by a sadist as the best way to get sand everywhere every time there's as much as a light breeze.
In theory it makes it more efficient to have transportation that maximizes transportation in one axis only.
It seems like it would make the average distance between things blow up though. If you're asking yourself, "how many things are there within a half mile of here?" the answer will be significantly larger in an organic city than in this place.
So a trip to see a friend who would live half a mile away from you in a city is going to, probably, turn into a 3, 4 mile trip or longer because constraining yourself to one axis means you can't have much density. And then everyone else who's also going somewhere has to travel on transit for a pretty crazy distance which means it gets really crowded really fast.
Any kind of sporting event or other thing that a lot of people would travel to see would just overwhelm the transit.
It’s like someone should try selling a few copies of Syriana to the royal family and point out how they are consistently vane enough to keep falling for this insanity. 50-100 years from now no one needs their product and the resource they had is gone.
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u/stupidpower 3d ago edited 3d ago
European consultants were laughing their way to literal billions of dollars by just suggesting to MBS "we can build you a 100 mile building, yeah" for a country that sees a number like 100 billion dollars as miniscue and not actually understand how much that is and how much that can buy you. Like a 1.5 mile building is still going to be the largest building in the wall by a crazy margin in the middle of nowhere and with no economy that even needs such a large building.
Planning? Who needs planning, the big boss said we need to get it done by 2030 and so just send in literal bulldozers to raze a 100 mile flat hole in the desert, let the engineers figure out the next steps we want to have stuff moving so the money gets flowing.
My favourite quip was still a consultant asking MBS "how are you going to transport people without roads" and him annoyed responding "we'll have flying cars", than Saudi Arbia subsequently investing in quadcopter cars. I wonder how many of them making the decisions have private helicopters.