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Tech Billionaires' Quest to Build a New City in California Goes Terribly
- cratermoon 3y agoWhy don't they just buy an island like other billionaires?
- db48x 3y ago100 years ago people founded cities all the time. Why is it so unpopular today?
- rthomas6 3y agoI think people already lived there and collectively decided to found a city where they were. Rich out of towners swooping in and buying local land hasn't worked out well for the locals historically.
- cratermoon 3y agoYeah, in the US towns tended to grow up organically, after settlement by colonizers who stole the land from the indigenous residents. The white man staked property claims where none existed, and now the descendants of those white settlers live where the Patwin Indians lived and claim the right to exclude others. That said, most of the island that they might buy were also home to other peoples before the current owners.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago>Rich out of towners swooping in and buying local land Exactly how the City of Houston was founded.
- panick21_ 3y agoGuess what in places like Europe founding cities wasnt very common a few 100 years ago. Can you think of a reason why this was normal in the US and not in Europe? And how this could inform the current situation?
- Eisenstein 3y agoBecause all the nice ones that aren't taken already are going to be under water in a few years.
- worksonmine 3y agoInvestment opportunity, get some scientists to figure out where the beachfront is going to end up. Seeing the old cities by boat can also probably be a great tourist attraction, I can already see the memories being made. Grandmother telling the story of how she used to live in that building, and the rent was as cheap as $2000, or the price of a bar of chocolate.
- zug_zug 3y agoOn the one hand it's easy to see this as a "screw the rich billionaires upsetting these poor locals" However, another part of me thinks that if a city was built from the ground up in a thoughtful way it could be so much better than America's best cities. Also more cities would create more housing supply. Plus it feels nice just to root for the optimistic outcome sometime rather than reflexively be bitter. Though my biggest concern is - and we see this in so many online platforms - a lot of tech/ceo types have a very... different... idea of what "optimal" looks like.
- 15457345234 3y ago> very... different... idea of what "optimal" looks like. That's fundamentally the problem; these guys don't really want to build a living breathing vibrant and holistic city, they want to build a giant luxury lifeboat that could, ideally, fly. Left to actually execute with the technology that exists what they inevitably construct is a giant tumor that just sucks the life out of the surroundings. If they could make it nuclear powered and able to literally condense drinking water from the air so they genuinely didn't have to transact with society at all you better believe they'd do exactly that. Ironically enough, if they genuinely could make their little city fly into space probably the best thing we could all do is hurry them along. There won't be a shortage of well-motivated smart people left behind. They'll just be the nice ones. The funny thing about these people is that they're so out of touch and detached that you could literally meme them into naming it Galt's Gulch and they would absolutely do it thinking how cleverly ironic it was, while just not getting it at all.
- stillwithit 3y agoBonobo tribes that kill their alphas live in harmony. I am sick of the euphemisms we give normal people. Traditional human language does nothing but propagate ridiculous hallucination. Billionaires only exist because of propaganda. We could “kill” them easily via taxation. There’s absolutely no reason to foist such privilege on a handful of typical people, many of whom have not been direct contributors to science and engineering in years and just manipulate politics to stay fiat rich
- 3y ago
- lazzlazzlazz 3y agoWas Gizmodo ever great? Sad to see them chase the negative angle.
- AlchemistCamp 3y agoThey were relentlessly negative before all the prestigious news orgs became so technologically-regressive.
- phendrenad2 3y agoSo you prefer news that lies to you to maintain a positive angle?
- achates 3y agoI want them to just tell me what's happening instead of trying to tell me what to think about it by using words like "quixotic" in the opening paragraph.
- phendrenad2 3y agoIt is quixotic. Taking events in isolation without integrating an understanding of the history here would be a wild choice.
- lazzlazzlazz 3y agoI prefer news that doesn't lie by omission or lie by selective retelling. It's naive to believe a story like this is complete and honest. After your work has been covered by the media, you may understand how the trick is executed.
- zpeti 3y agoThere's a lot more people eager to see billionaire's plans fail than billionaires. So if you want clicks and readers for ad revenue, you're not going to spin this positively.
- sharts 3y agoWhy don't these billionaires go to some desert? Or just retire and get out of the way of society.
- tetromino_ 3y agoIt's impossible to judge the merit of the locals' antagonism without at least some information about the new billionaire city plan. The article provides none. Does anyone have a link?
- dzhiurgis 3y agoaka article is completely one sided
- darthrupert 3y agoWhy don't we found new cities anymore? It's not like the pinnacle of urban design was reached centuries ago. Even if it's not doable to control everything, at least you could lay out excellent infrastructure from the beginning with modern tools and methods.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Why don't we found new cities anymore? It's not like the pinnacle of urban design was reached centuries ago. We do, but mostly peripheral cities around existing core cities, because there are geographical/resource things that make city building make sense, and -- other than with discovery of new resources (or technological/economic change making known but not economically exploitable resources exploitable), or some massive project that we have some reason to keep distant from existing settlement -- the places that make sense to build large population agglomerations already have them. Advances in urban design (or changes in urban design fashion) don't create new city locations, so they mostly lead to redevelopment, not new cities.
- panick21_ 3y agoIn places where humans have been a long town you simply dont create new cities. In a place like Switzerland I could imagine what that would even look like. There are villages everywhere, some grew and became small cities, some slighly larger and do on. Founding city only happens if you move lots of people into a lightly lived in area or during a massive population boom due to agroculture. And you dont need new cities to build great infrastrucute. Look at Istanbul. One of the oldest cities and yet the are massivly building out public infrastructure. Copenhagen just added a totally modern subway. Amsterdam and co have totally revolutionized cycling in the last decades. The bones of a city arnt that different. People still happly live in 300 year old city houses just fine. There is little point rebuilding that stuff. There are cities that are 1000+ years old and feel totally modern. Its all about continual improvment and iteration. Most by design cities embrace a bunch of terrible hype ideas. And even in the very best case, like Australia for example, the result isnt better then the older cities. Cities are large enough that you can do large scale expermients within them. Transform one part of town with new methods.
- 3y ago
- darthrupert 3y agoIn Finland and I guess most of Europe, every second city/town was founded because an industrialist put their factories in an area and the factories needed humans to live nearby.
- snowpid 3y agoI disagree to most German towns.
- darthrupert 3y agoYeah, after a bit of thought, this probably doesn't apply to the older nations almost at all.
- panick21_ 3y agoThat hilarously inaccurate. Most towns are far older then the industrial revolution.