My crazy/naive idea is to build stable countries in South America and Africa to attract migrants and asylum seekers. It would be more economic and palatable than tackling regime change/culture change in troubled countries (mexico, el salvador, iran, afghanistan) where these migrants came from and lessen the need to beef up local infrastructure. Isn't this how cities emerged in the past?
The country you seek is called Heaven. I don't blame you for recognising the need - I'm the same. Sadly many of our companions would rather see themselves in charge, just to make sure everyone is treated justly of course, but that always causes Hell for somebody.
You can't build stable countries in those places as long as narcotraffickers and commodity smugglers exist, and they will exist as long as we have repressive laws on drug use (in the United States and other Rich Nations) and sanctions on commodities from the same. The problem is these combined policies incentivize defacto states that aren't democratic and will extort or thwart any well meaning developers. In countries without a strong rule of law you won't get far (absent finding a way to monopolize force yourself).
>> (absent finding a way to monopolize force yourself)
Exactly this.
Any person who wants to live a self-determined life, and have a self-determined govt must be (individually or collectively) better armed and better prepared than everyone form the wannabe local lunch bully, regional warlord, or national authoritarian. IF not, they will take your lunch and your government every time.
The GP's plan is great, but (s)he will need to start with a significant well-managed armed force. Otherwise, the local drug lord, warlord, mafia don, or authoritarian will ignore you until you create value, then decide they want it for themselves. If you cannot defend it, it will be theirs until they destroy it.
You’re putting the cart before the horse here. If there isn’t a strong rule of law, any economic activity is going to come under the control of protection rackets and other armed factions. That’s completely independent of any drug prohibitions or commodity sanctions. When it comes to commodity sanctions you’re even reversing cause and effect; the sanctions are usually imposed as a half measure against whatever armed faction ends up controlling commodity extraction in a particular failed state.
>>> If there isn’t a strong rule of law, any economic activity is going to come under the control of protection rackets and other armed factions.
I think you're restating what I said. Narco traffickers are able to subvert the rule of law via corruption. Their ability to perform corruption is a function of their profitability, which in turn is a function of the demand (and their ability to supply it), in rich countries. The demand is unmet domestically because of our prohibitions and draconian federal enforcement.
So the rule of law breaks down there due to strong rule of law here. We are essentially exporting the market making there, and that sort of market making, while risky, is profitable in the extreme.
As for the commodity sanctions while most maybe are well intentioned, they only serve to again allow those willing to take the risk of market making to rack up obscene profits. This is regardless of what circumstances lead to them, they empower actors who aren't particularly altruistic and certainly aren't democratic, to subvert the rule of law.
I’m not. Let me restate what I said, with emphasis:
If there isn’t a strong rule of law, any economic activity is going to come under the control of protection rackets and other armed factions.
Any. Economic. Activity. Not just drug trafficking. I’m very familiar with the argument that drug prohibition creates organized crime, but it’s not a fully general explanation for global instability or the resource curse.
> As for the commodity sanctions while most maybe are well intentioned, they only serve to again allow those willing to take the risk of market making to rack up obscene profits.
You still aren’t explaining how Western sanctions on conflict diamonds are capable of traveling back through time and creating the problem of conflict diamonds in the first place.
Upon reflection, you are right about the cause/effect wrt sanctions. While I don't see how sanctions can be part of a solution, I do now understand that they aren't the cause of instability either, as corrupt actors, or even completely legitimate governments can cause violent conflict over these sanctioned commodities.
But, the part about narco states still stands...I don't see a way to fix the rule of law problem by just "having strong rule of law". Those countries already have laws e.g. against corruption. Especially in South and Central America, narco-organizations and drug related violence predominates the causes of instability.
> I don't see a way to fix the rule of law problem by just "having strong rule of law". Those countries already have laws e.g. against corruption.
El Salvador did it.
At some point, which Mexico already reached a long time ago, cartels metastasize beyond narcotics and can sustain themselves on protection rackets. It’s very tempting to treat drug prohibition as some sort of monocausal explanation for organized crime, but even if that were true at some point, that doesn’t mean legalization would solve the problem. And I think the existence of conflict diamonds and the like already demonstrate that drug prohibition isn’t even necessary for this kind of problem to emerge in the first place.
You can, but it requires a strong authoritarian hand. China used to be rife with corruption and organized crime, now corruption has been significantly reduced and organized crime is essentially nonexistent. Singapore is broadly considered one of the least corrupt countries on the planet. Mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking and people will simply go around your city.
You may think those punishments are unreasonably harsh, but then again you’re probably not a drug trafficker. And it’s not like the American punishments (decades in dangerous prisons) are much better.
Yes, but that is true of many countries at the highest levels.
Example:
New US government memos obtained by Just the News through a FOIA lawsuit reveal that the Obama Administration was still actively communicating with former Ukrainian Prosecutor Victor Shokin after Biden's December 2015 threat to withhold $1 billion in US aid unless then-President Petro Poroshenko fired him.
Senior State Department officials sent a conflicting message to Shokin before he was fired, inviting his staff to Washington for a January 2016 strategy session and sent him a personal note saying they were “impressed” with his office's work.
U.S. officials faced pressure from Burisma emissaries in the United States to make the corruption allegations go away and feared the energy firm had made two bribery payments in Ukraine as part of an effort to get cases settled.
A top U.S. official in Kyiv blamed Hunter Biden for undercutting U.S. anticorruption policy in Ukraine through his dealings with Burisma.
Refugees are trying to flee to a developed country with healthcare, jobs and safety. Why would you want to go to Rwanda? I realize it has improved by leaps and bounds but very few people are going to want to emigrate to an African country.
such places would be flooded by desperate people in millions, creating slum town around it, a good breeding ground for crime. South Africa, once a functioning country got "invaded" by Zimbabweans escaping their hellhole, distorting the labour market and creating tension/crime. Too many people, unless you create hundreds of such experiments around the world.
South Africa was still functional after the end of apartheid. It really only became a failed state during the Zuma administration. Despite the history of institutionalized racism the country had enormous potential, but sadly a few corrupt politicians sacrificed the future of the country for their own benefit.
So... America from 1850 to 1920. If you can anticipate and scale up industrial production to meet the wave of immigration and not just pen them up in refugee camps you have yourself another BRICS nation.
I’m not sure I understand your idea; the only way to build a stable country in these regions would be to regime change a less stable country, or perhaps carve out some territory from the existing countries. At any rate, many of the countries on both of those continents were founded as attempts to build stable countries.
On a happier note, El Salvador seems to have sorted itself out in recent years.
If the settlement is doing better than the actual country it is in, it is going to be overrun with locals. The only way to do that would be to fence out the locals and no country is going to agree to that.
If you know how to do that, please tell the world. Stable countries need a half-century or more to create, and that's with existing institutions and culture, and still the outcome is very uncertain.
1959 was when Yew became Sg's first PM. in his famous televised speech, yew announced the separation from malayasian federation in 1965.
dont forget that singapore was under colonial rule before that. noone can deny the success of singapore, the city state with all the regional challenges. it took them about two decades.
i would give 5-10 years for our nation states to become functionally successful if they split and became city states.
Singapore government definitely made smart moves and had a strong vision. But you can't omit that its geographical position gave it a tremendous advantage with regards to trade. It will be very hard to replicate elsewhere, others will have to find similar stable streams of income.
On top of that, Singapore has access to a very large low-paid workforce in the neighboring countries, which eases offloading necessary but low-value activities.
This is one of my long-term goals with my home country, South Africa. We've got the legal starting point with a progressive constitution and a reasonably independent judiciary/media. The economy could be doing better, though, and we'd need to bring equal opportunity to all. And there's a lot more in the future that could hamstring this idea. But I do believe that it's possible in my lifetime.
"Tens of thousands of homes" on 55,000 acres doesn't sound like a city, it sounds like more climate-torching bullshit. The Flannery parcels are nowhere near any kind of transportation facility, so unless they are planning a maglev to Sacramento, and unless the project is in fact 54,900 acres of open space and 100 acres of urbanism, than I remain highly skeptical.
Antioch BART is just a few miles away. Of course, there’s a river in the way so that would be a 30 min drive unless they extended the line (would take 20-40 years?)
It's a completely separate system running diesel trains on an entirely different rail gauge [0]. It also tends to be inaccessible a lot because BART can't keep the lines running, so getting to SF or Oakland often involves a bus transfer on top.
“[Investors] include Mr. Moritz; Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor; Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, investors at the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payments company Stripe; Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective; and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, entrepreneurs turned investors. Andreessen Horowitz is also a backer”
I think what makes the most sense is to build in plans for future high density from the get go when the zoning is being first written.
So the residential zoning starts out as 8000 square foot lots but each lot is enabled in the future for high density 3 story residential in 30 years. Commercial zoning is enabled for high density residential towers in 30 years as well.
Additionally, while it's still farmland, demarcate the right of way for future train lines, bike paths mass transit and freeways/underpasses.
I think what chafes NIMBY home owners is that the developers are able to change the residential single family zoning to high density residential post facto - and pocket the spoils. Basically changing the rules of the game via lobbying city council members. Meanwhile the rule following NIMBY home owner's zoning remains unchanged and they just have to deal with more traffic and less sunlight.
And then make all home/property buyers sign documents attesting that this is the city charter and cannot be changed.
I don't know if we are still talking about California, but if we are, note that there is not an analog of the federal system within the state. Cities are not independent and do not have powers and cannot abrogate the state's powers with what amounts to an HOA. Cities in California are political subdivisions of the state and they exist to further and promote the policies of the state.
The general idea would fit in with the overarching California initiatives - particularly the California’s Density Bonus Law/Builder's Remedy that recently has been in the news.
The general idea is instead of assuming this new city will always be a sleepy suburban residential until eternity - assume from the get go that it will have the same "where are we going to stick all the 5 story towers" hot potato problem that San Jose/Santa Clara are having right now.
By laying out the future high density area zones on a 30 year zoning map, buyers can know a priori that if they buy the single family house on this street, their grandkids can potentially either expect to stubbornly live there in the shadows of a 5 story condo complex with low income components or cash out for tens of millions to a RE developer.
I think why this hasn't happened before is because it always seems silly when you just look at 500 acres of farmland to throw down BART access right of ways.
But in reality given California's historical growth patterns, its probably realistic if looking at a 25-50 year time horizons.
I think it doesn't matter, grandkids will vote out any development complexex in their time, nimbying out all the plans that were laid out 30 years ago.
The only way I see if the residents cannot own the property and the land. Something like max 15 years rent.
I've driven in NYC. No, it is not. Just about every other city in the US is more driver friendly. Here are others who agree that NYC is not super car-friendly compared to other places.
"Driving in NYC requires some serious skills and patience to conquer. Between the impatient and angry drivers, impossible street parking, inability to turn right on red, and the nightmare of getting stuck in the middle of an intersection, it’s definitely not the place you want to leisurely cruise between destinations. But if you should build the bravery to dive into the sea of yellow taxis in the Big Apple, you’ll want to be prepared with these safety survival tips." - https://shebuystravel.com/driving-in-nyc/
I have been fascinated with the idea of new types of cities for many years.
One of my main ideas is to construct buildings as public or semi-public facilities. Another idea is to have multiple levels of infrastructure such as roadways.
I imagine something like a series of egg-shaped buildings connected by multiple levels of roads for autonomous (mostly single passenger) cars. Inside are several floors of large platforms with modular buildings stacked on them. The superstructure would not need to always provide a perfect climate inside but would aim for making things more tolerable and giving the heating or cooling of the interior modules a headstart.
The buildings could have lush internal landscaping or even some type of agriculture.
Our great tech innovators are now buying real estate, the most regressive, old, non-tech investment. (It's not the first time either.) SV is thoroughly corrupted and needs disruption by some new innovators who actually have some value and ideas.
At this point, even starting a new hi-tech company of any size in the Bay Area immediately runs into the problem of housing. You wanna hire 20,000 workers? Where will they live?
Buying 50,000 acres of land and covering it with manhattan-style skyscrapers full of condos and apartments solves that problem quite nicely.
Its even self-funding, because no matter how high a salary you pay them, they'll pay over half of it back to you. While you are making a huge profit from the sale. Its a brilliant plan, even for high-tech investors.
> ...from farmers for several times more than the market value [emphasis mine] and become the biggest landowners in Solano county, an area 60 miles north-west of San Francisco. The land bought by the firm encircles Travis air force base in Fairfield, a city of about 120,000 residents and home to the Anheuser-Busch Co brewery and the Jelly Belly jelly bean factory.
Wikipedia notes: "Travis Air Force Base handles more cargo and passenger traffic through its airport than any other military air terminal in the United States." So don't expect any "quiet / remote / idyllic" vibes. And a couple quick searches reveal some major soil & groundwater contamination issues at the AFB.
Well...it'll likely be interesting. The article says ~zilch about the ideals of the "SV elites" involved. And notes that they'll probably face a very long, tough slog - through skeptical locals, NIMBYs, regulations, and red tape - before they can actually build much anything.
There were all sorts of rumours, and concerns due its proximity to an important military base. I can't imagine the government and military not knowing that this prominent group were behind it.
There's an interesting discrepancy between two parts of this:
> Flannery has purchased land from farmers for several times more than the market value and become the biggest landowners in Solano county.
> The firm has been sued by farmers who sold their land to the group over what the land owners describe as an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy”.
If a group is buying land at multiples of the market value, you'd think the "price-fixing conspiracy" narrative would come from would-be buyers who were priced out, not from sellers.
Theory (IANAL) - the conspiracy was the secrecy. If the final (say) 20% of the farmers had known, they would have been able to hold out for 10X their lands' previous market value. Or more.
> A mystery company that has been buying up farmland around Travis Air Force Base in California in recent years is now suing the farmers it bought the land from, accusing them of conspiring to inflate the value of their properties.
> Lots of questions and speculation are floating around about the buyer, Flannery Associates, which has invested close to $1 billion to buy more than 50,000 acres farmland in the Jepson Prairie and Montezuma Hills area of Solano County. According to numerous reports, the company is filing suit for at least $510 million against the farmers.
> A lawsuit accusing a group of California landowners of conspiring to inflate the price of their land by hundreds of millions of dollars will "drastically expand" the reach of federal antitrust law if it is not dismissed, attorneys for the property holders told a U.S. judge.
> In a filing in Sacramento federal court, lawyers for the landowners in northern California on Friday urged U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley to reject "speculative" and "vague" allegations from agricultural land buyer Flannery Associates.
> Flannery, seeking more than $510 million in damages for alleged price-fixing, in May sued various family land trusts and estates over the sale of properties in the Jepson Prairie and Montezuma Hills area of Solano County between San Francisco and Sacramento.
What's the difference between price discovery and price fixing in this case?
If you hear on the grapevine that a bunch of billionaires are keenly interested in buying a certain thing that you own, and willing to pay over current market prices, well...
It's not like ALL of this land was simultaneously listed on a public market before the rich guys came up with their plan, right?
That's the rich for you. I'll pay you over market price to get the thing I want, then hire lawyers to sue you to recover what I paid or ensure it mostly goes to the local lawyers you'll have to hire to defend yourself.
If moneybags comes, keep in mind: you don't have to sell.
Moneybags, keep in mind: the price I'm willing to sell at is not price fixing. I just may not want to sell to you.
Wanting a sell at a certain price doesn’t mean you want to sell at a lower price. The desire to sell is often directly correlated to the price. If someone offered me double for our families house, I’d sell. If they offer me slightly over market value I’d just hang up the phone. For most people there is a price, it’s probably not what an average buyer sees as a reasonable price if it’s not on the market.
This problem is fundamentally a coordination problem, where land is conditionally valuable based on whether multiple lots can be purchased in tandem, and thus the value is based on getting everyone to sell at the same time. If the billionaires had known in advance that lots of existing landowners would pull this, they would have gone and bought land elsewhere, and the existing landowners would get nothing.
What's more, the billionaires are clearly offering a clearly profitable deal for everyone, specifically so that nobody has an excuse to refuse and cause the coordination problems mentioned. And because they bought at well above market price, they're stuck with dead weight if they don't go through with the affair.
In other words: the existing landowners are 1) demanding money well above the inherent value of the land, and 2) this mechanism/behavior of the existing landowners isn't useful to society/the economy as it makes it harder to do things that require lots of land. This is a textbook example of where government intervention is useful, if done competently and not corruptly.
So you are saying, when someone has enough money, others MUST sell to them, because maybe it is beneficial for the economy?
"What's more, the billionaires are clearly offering a clearly profitable deal for everyone, specifically so that nobody has an excuse to refuse "
When I like my land and I don't want to sell, than this is simply my right, no matter how much you think I have no excuse.
Building important infrastructure or mining critical ressources are rare exceptions for forced landsell, but not because someone wants to build a city for the rich on my land.
So sure, it is a tricky problem to buy from many owners, but getting the government to help you with your private project to force a contract on other people is kind of the definition of corruption.
> When I like my land and I don't want to sell, than this is simply my right, no matter how much you think I have no excuse.
I guess in this case they do want to sell it, they just know that the ‘billionaires’ having already bought a bunch of land in the area don’t really have a choice and will have to pay significantly more than the market value was previously.
It’s not exactly a case of some mega corporation trying to rip off some poor farmer and “steal” his land…
> build a city for the rich on my land.
Not that I’m saying that the government should get involved but the only reason you own that land is because want to make as much money from it as possible.
But it is hard to proof, if someone just wants to make more money (which is legitimate), or if they genuinly want to keep the land. And government Intervention in those cases seem just recipe for corruption.
- which makes a killing gouging you on cables with proprietary charging ports and dongles because their laptops/phones didn't have ports, and thus were forced to buy at a ridiculous price
- and is now mad she was forced to pay a ridiculous price for something
I’d say their price gouging for RAM/Storage is even more egregious since lightning was way better than micro-USB back in the day. But yeah (then again you seem to be blaming Apple both for adopting USB-C and not adopting it at the same time?)
If I own a sizeable stake in a public company, and I see that a billionaire is doing a hostile takeover, am I wrong to demand a higher price?
This is a risk of doing a massive land purchase like this. The seller is absolutely in the right to hold out as long as they want, and to maximize their profit.
> the existing landowners are 1) demanding money well above the inherent value of the land, and
The inherent value of the land is what market is willing to pay for it in the moment. If you accept that land is to be traded freely, then the seller can set the price as they choose or refuse to sell. What you suggest is that the government sets the price and force sale for the grater good. Even if we collectively decided that this is how it should be, this instance is a really bad example, because they haven’t shared what they want to do there. Why do you automatically think that their plan will be for the public benefit? Eminent domain had a narrow scope, at least originally, for public use. In 2005 things changed [1]. Actually Kelo vs New London is a very good example. The paned out redevelopment never happened, Pfizer closed down the facility in New London. City never recovered its loses.
> The purchases burst into public view this spring when lawyers for Flannery filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, accusing landowners of colluding to inflate prices.
Wouldn't this entirely destroy any price discovery in market? So you could not sell for example stock for higher price if it goes up? If you hear that other people are selling it?
3 reasons well known in Real Estate: Location, Location, Location. California is the only state you can build a brand new city that is only 60 miles from SF.
Solano County is way the f&ck out. And land comes with carrying costs, i.e. property taxes. No one who wants a big, quick return on investment (looking at you, VC's) is going to buy it.
Plenty of people who work in the city of Berkeley, as well as for the city of Berkeley and UC Berkeley live in Solano County. I have a family friend who works for the city of Berkeley and lives in Fairfield for example.
It's part of the Capital Corridor so it's commutable to both the Bay Area and Sacramento, the schools are decent, and the houses are nice and new.
Not really; sure, its a bit closer to Davis, but its close enough to both that which it gets fed by will be determined more by the kinds of jobs in demand compared to the program strengths of the schools, with distance as a trivial factor.
So is Morgan Hill if you live in Marin and Marin if you live in Morgan Hill.
Solano County is heavily connected economically and transit wise with Contra Costa County, San Francisco County, Marin County, and Alameda County.
Most police officers, city workers, low wage service workers, construction workers, etc live in the various cities and suburbs in Solano County and commute into the East Bay, other parts of the North Bay, and San Francisco.
I suspect it will be 100% private, including the streets, etc, like a mall. So they can kick people out for homelessness, trespassing and such. DW did an interesting doc on gated communities -- huge amount of Marseille is gated off.
URL w/ timestamp: https://youtu.be/0KMlDzaths8?t=1759
Yes please! From your comment (maybe not intentionally?) this sounds like a bad thing. But for inhabitants being able to have stricter rules is a blessing.
Ideally that would work like with the countries: different cities have dramatically different sets of rules and compete for citizens. Private ownership allows for much more flexibility here.
Leas fortunate in what? We don’t even know housing prices there yet. It could be dirt cheap since they bought the land very cheaply, instead of having a stack of landlords from multiple generations taking their cut in price increase as in a usual city. Such cities have a chance of actually being affordable - at least initially. And the more we have them, the more competition will that create and more affordable they will be. How is it different from buying a permanent license to a software product - but the one you can also sell and buy a new one!
The US is a huge country, it has plenty of space for experiments. It is not as if those people are taking over an ancient city of million people and bending it to their whim. Quite to the contrary, taking part in this project is entirely voluntary.
A neat thing about private property is you can be your own plutocrat and run it precisely how you desire. You can make a big paved area and open it up to car drifters, homeless, and lemonade stands. You can get it done exactly right.
In fact, you can democratize it and let everybody who shows up have a vote about what they can do on your property.
There is an equally strong case for the person on the other side for the behavior they are trying to exclude to do the same. Just stop sucking please, they say.
Not saying they are right, just saying pleas in that manner are already falling on ears deafened to them.
It's got pros and cons. Most people vacation in walkable areas with vibrant street life like buskers, musicians and so forth. You can't just take your saxophone and setup shop in the mall or do any sort of political/community-oriented activity. That's what you lose. The upside, of course, is no heroin needles, tent cities, etc.
Why do you think you cannot have the good without the bad? What stops this new city council from allocating designated musician pods on the streets, having artist in resident programs, etc? The group from the list don’t look stupid to me and these are some of the most obvious things.
PS: HN is such a strange community. In one thread people complain about US cities and SF in particular crumbling due to government mismanagement. In another they think that a new city built by some of our own members will devolve into a dystopia and give it no praise. This is an amazing idea and they already have land! I wish them only the best and if they need any help, my email is in my bio :)
>In another they think that a new city built by some of our own members will devolve into a dystopia and give it no praise.
Because, as members of this community, we're typically up to speed with the history, thought processes, beliefs, actions, etc. of the people involved in these purchases, and it sounds like, based on that understanding, many people in here don't trust the goals, vision, and/or intentions of the people behind this. Just because one might think that "SF in particular [is] crumbling due to government mismanagement" doesn't mean they should blindly go, "Oh yay, an alternative!".
Edit: I'd love to entertain ideas around how we can get cities to function differently but, I'm sorry, I don't want to hear what Marc Andreesen has to say on the subject.
Because you have fewer rights on private property than in public places. That's the fundamental reason. You can have the good without the bad -- a walkable city with some law enforcement and a DA that prosecutes. I suspect a new development won't be dense/mixed-use enough for interesting street life.
city council from allocating designated musician pods on the streets
'Sorry we don't like your new song, you have been designated a trespasser and fined $10,000, this decision is not subject to appeal or further inquiry.'
A city run by SV elites will be just as well run as tech companies terms of service are famous for fair dealing and customer cooperation, ie not at all.
> Why do you think you cannot have the good without the bad?
In theory I think you are right, but I can't recall the last time I saw a busker in a private space like a mall or airport. Maybe the incentive to encourage this is just never strong enough for the owners?
If you are renting property to businesses for commercial purposes, why would you give, rent, or tolerate the occupation of that space by someone who is paying less per square foot in rent, unless they are consistently doing something that increases the rent you can get from your other customers?
I can't recall the last time I saw a busker in a private space like a mall or airport.
While not buskers per se, a lot of private spaces hire musicians to play in their spaces to provide entertainment or background music. Many airports I've been to have someone on a piano playing in a corner
I've also seen places like trainstations where they have a licensing system. IE you audition, apply for a license and then get given a spot and a time slot when you can busk.
What you want in a vacation destination is very different from what you want where you live. Also, I’ve never vacationed anywhere with street musicians. Where are you talking about?
It'll probably be a cookie community similar to the ones springing up around Lathrop and Tracy. Now that long distance public transit has become better in Northern California over the past 10-15 years thanks to Govs Brown and Newsom, that border area between the Bay Area and SJV will see a lot of construction as both the interior Bay Area and Sacramento have become much more expensive.
A walkable outdoor mall right across a busy street from an indoor mall. It's kind of big for a mall but only by a little bit. I find large closed communities much more worrying.
There are various ways government and private ownership can provide accountability. I lived in a town where the property lines met on all sides, including through what appeared to be the roads. Each lot was encumbered with an easement which granted every other lot owner the privilege to travel over the easements so everyone can get to their houses. Taxes were mostly used by the town to maintain those roads (actually easements) and for police and building inspections. Importantly the town did not own the roads. The police enforced typical driving rules, but anyone who dug deep could find out none of it was really enforceable because it was private property. No parking on roads was enforced by a tow off the private property.
If local government acted up against the wishes of residents, it would be a simple matter to repeal taxes and do the road maintainenace ourselves. The town had a calm neighborly feel and people were respectful of each other. It worked great, and local government always knew the people had the power.
I thought the term was Smart City. Why can't we stick with terms? Why must people get rid of them at the slightest bad publicity or refuse to use them to say it will be completely different this time? I think this article should explain the project in terms of other Smart City projects.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadJust like the Gnostics, Marxists, communists, Obama, Trump ...
What else can you do with the Eschaton?
Exactly this.
Any person who wants to live a self-determined life, and have a self-determined govt must be (individually or collectively) better armed and better prepared than everyone form the wannabe local lunch bully, regional warlord, or national authoritarian. IF not, they will take your lunch and your government every time.
The GP's plan is great, but (s)he will need to start with a significant well-managed armed force. Otherwise, the local drug lord, warlord, mafia don, or authoritarian will ignore you until you create value, then decide they want it for themselves. If you cannot defend it, it will be theirs until they destroy it.
I think you're restating what I said. Narco traffickers are able to subvert the rule of law via corruption. Their ability to perform corruption is a function of their profitability, which in turn is a function of the demand (and their ability to supply it), in rich countries. The demand is unmet domestically because of our prohibitions and draconian federal enforcement.
So the rule of law breaks down there due to strong rule of law here. We are essentially exporting the market making there, and that sort of market making, while risky, is profitable in the extreme.
As for the commodity sanctions while most maybe are well intentioned, they only serve to again allow those willing to take the risk of market making to rack up obscene profits. This is regardless of what circumstances lead to them, they empower actors who aren't particularly altruistic and certainly aren't democratic, to subvert the rule of law.
I’m not. Let me restate what I said, with emphasis:
If there isn’t a strong rule of law, any economic activity is going to come under the control of protection rackets and other armed factions.
Any. Economic. Activity. Not just drug trafficking. I’m very familiar with the argument that drug prohibition creates organized crime, but it’s not a fully general explanation for global instability or the resource curse.
> As for the commodity sanctions while most maybe are well intentioned, they only serve to again allow those willing to take the risk of market making to rack up obscene profits.
You still aren’t explaining how Western sanctions on conflict diamonds are capable of traveling back through time and creating the problem of conflict diamonds in the first place.
But, the part about narco states still stands...I don't see a way to fix the rule of law problem by just "having strong rule of law". Those countries already have laws e.g. against corruption. Especially in South and Central America, narco-organizations and drug related violence predominates the causes of instability.
El Salvador did it.
At some point, which Mexico already reached a long time ago, cartels metastasize beyond narcotics and can sustain themselves on protection rackets. It’s very tempting to treat drug prohibition as some sort of monocausal explanation for organized crime, but even if that were true at some point, that doesn’t mean legalization would solve the problem. And I think the existence of conflict diamonds and the like already demonstrate that drug prohibition isn’t even necessary for this kind of problem to emerge in the first place.
You may think those punishments are unreasonably harsh, but then again you’re probably not a drug trafficker. And it’s not like the American punishments (decades in dangerous prisons) are much better.
Example:
New US government memos obtained by Just the News through a FOIA lawsuit reveal that the Obama Administration was still actively communicating with former Ukrainian Prosecutor Victor Shokin after Biden's December 2015 threat to withhold $1 billion in US aid unless then-President Petro Poroshenko fired him.
Senior State Department officials sent a conflicting message to Shokin before he was fired, inviting his staff to Washington for a January 2016 strategy session and sent him a personal note saying they were “impressed” with his office's work.
U.S. officials faced pressure from Burisma emissaries in the United States to make the corruption allegations go away and feared the energy firm had made two bribery payments in Ukraine as part of an effort to get cases settled.
A top U.S. official in Kyiv blamed Hunter Biden for undercutting U.S. anticorruption policy in Ukraine through his dealings with Burisma.
"10% for the big guy"
But the UK High Court nixed it, because Rwanda is "not a safe country".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwanda_asylum_plan
A functioning country for a few white people; hell for everyone else.
It wasn't functional before the end of apartheid. 'Functional for a small minority' != 'functional country'.
None of those are in South America or Africa. Maybe it would be good to first understand the problem, including the geography, before proposing ideas.
On a happier note, El Salvador seems to have sorted itself out in recent years.
> build stable countries
If you know how to do that, please tell the world. Stable countries need a half-century or more to create, and that's with existing institutions and culture, and still the outcome is very uncertain.
dont forget that singapore was under colonial rule before that. noone can deny the success of singapore, the city state with all the regional challenges. it took them about two decades.
i would give 5-10 years for our nation states to become functionally successful if they split and became city states.
its time for a change.
Source: I live here.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBART
some other "tech elite" of his time actually already did this[0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36816387
So the residential zoning starts out as 8000 square foot lots but each lot is enabled in the future for high density 3 story residential in 30 years. Commercial zoning is enabled for high density residential towers in 30 years as well.
Additionally, while it's still farmland, demarcate the right of way for future train lines, bike paths mass transit and freeways/underpasses.
I think what chafes NIMBY home owners is that the developers are able to change the residential single family zoning to high density residential post facto - and pocket the spoils. Basically changing the rules of the game via lobbying city council members. Meanwhile the rule following NIMBY home owner's zoning remains unchanged and they just have to deal with more traffic and less sunlight.
And then make all home/property buyers sign documents attesting that this is the city charter and cannot be changed.
The general idea is instead of assuming this new city will always be a sleepy suburban residential until eternity - assume from the get go that it will have the same "where are we going to stick all the 5 story towers" hot potato problem that San Jose/Santa Clara are having right now.
By laying out the future high density area zones on a 30 year zoning map, buyers can know a priori that if they buy the single family house on this street, their grandkids can potentially either expect to stubbornly live there in the shadows of a 5 story condo complex with low income components or cash out for tens of millions to a RE developer.
I think why this hasn't happened before is because it always seems silly when you just look at 500 acres of farmland to throw down BART access right of ways.
But in reality given California's historical growth patterns, its probably realistic if looking at a 25-50 year time horizons.
The only way I see if the residents cannot own the property and the land. Something like max 15 years rent.
Why should it be friendly to cars at all, when neither Paris nor NYC are known to be car friendly?
Both are super car friendly. They’re just anti private car ownership.
"Almost every New Yorker and anyone who has ever visited will encourage you not to drive in New York City." - https://www.tripsavvy.com/tips-for-driving-in-new-york-city-...
"Driving in NYC requires some serious skills and patience to conquer. Between the impatient and angry drivers, impossible street parking, inability to turn right on red, and the nightmare of getting stuck in the middle of an intersection, it’s definitely not the place you want to leisurely cruise between destinations. But if you should build the bravery to dive into the sea of yellow taxis in the Big Apple, you’ll want to be prepared with these safety survival tips." - https://shebuystravel.com/driving-in-nyc/
"We gave New York [State] a “Good” rating for Traffic and Road Quality, despite the New York metropolitan area being one of the most traffic-congested regions in America." _ https://www.hagerty.com/media/archived/how-classic-car-frien...
Compare it to Salt Lake City - that's a super car-friendly city.
One of my main ideas is to construct buildings as public or semi-public facilities. Another idea is to have multiple levels of infrastructure such as roadways.
I imagine something like a series of egg-shaped buildings connected by multiple levels of roads for autonomous (mostly single passenger) cars. Inside are several floors of large platforms with modular buildings stacked on them. The superstructure would not need to always provide a perfect climate inside but would aim for making things more tolerable and giving the heating or cooling of the interior modules a headstart.
The buildings could have lush internal landscaping or even some type of agriculture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN9DW4rrEjY
Yes, that's the vibe I'm getting too.
Buying 50,000 acres of land and covering it with manhattan-style skyscrapers full of condos and apartments solves that problem quite nicely.
Its even self-funding, because no matter how high a salary you pay them, they'll pay over half of it back to you. While you are making a huge profit from the sale. Its a brilliant plan, even for high-tech investors.
This example always jumps to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California
if you really like circles, kangaroos, bush fires, public servants, politicians, and occassional access to ski fields.
But yeah, it's a decent example of a planned city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes
"List of purpose-built national capitals" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_purpose-built_national...
Wikipedia notes: "Travis Air Force Base handles more cargo and passenger traffic through its airport than any other military air terminal in the United States." So don't expect any "quiet / remote / idyllic" vibes. And a couple quick searches reveal some major soil & groundwater contamination issues at the AFB.
Well...it'll likely be interesting. The article says ~zilch about the ideals of the "SV elites" involved. And notes that they'll probably face a very long, tough slog - through skeptical locals, NIMBYs, regulations, and red tape - before they can actually build much anything.
"'Mystery company' buys land worth $800M near Travis AFB, raising concerns" - 114 points - 35 days ago - 170 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36816387
There were all sorts of rumours, and concerns due its proximity to an important military base. I can't imagine the government and military not knowing that this prominent group were behind it.
or back to the past...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I15_KUsOzs (Merle Travis - Sixteen Tons (original version) from 1947)
> Flannery has purchased land from farmers for several times more than the market value and become the biggest landowners in Solano county.
> The firm has been sued by farmers who sold their land to the group over what the land owners describe as an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy”.
If a group is buying land at multiples of the market value, you'd think the "price-fixing conspiracy" narrative would come from would-be buyers who were priced out, not from sellers.
> A mystery company that has been buying up farmland around Travis Air Force Base in California in recent years is now suing the farmers it bought the land from, accusing them of conspiring to inflate the value of their properties.
> Lots of questions and speculation are floating around about the buyer, Flannery Associates, which has invested close to $1 billion to buy more than 50,000 acres farmland in the Jepson Prairie and Montezuma Hills area of Solano County. According to numerous reports, the company is filing suit for at least $510 million against the farmers.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/some-california-lan...
> A lawsuit accusing a group of California landowners of conspiring to inflate the price of their land by hundreds of millions of dollars will "drastically expand" the reach of federal antitrust law if it is not dismissed, attorneys for the property holders told a U.S. judge.
> In a filing in Sacramento federal court, lawyers for the landowners in northern California on Friday urged U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley to reject "speculative" and "vague" allegations from agricultural land buyer Flannery Associates.
> Flannery, seeking more than $510 million in damages for alleged price-fixing, in May sued various family land trusts and estates over the sale of properties in the Jepson Prairie and Montezuma Hills area of Solano County between San Francisco and Sacramento.
If you hear on the grapevine that a bunch of billionaires are keenly interested in buying a certain thing that you own, and willing to pay over current market prices, well...
It's not like ALL of this land was simultaneously listed on a public market before the rich guys came up with their plan, right?
If moneybags comes, keep in mind: you don't have to sell.
Moneybags, keep in mind: the price I'm willing to sell at is not price fixing. I just may not want to sell to you.
It’s one group of very rich people (possibly) trying to screw over other rich people, though.
> I just may not want to sell to you.
You almost definitely do though. You just want more money because you know that the buyer doesn’t really have a choice.
That said, wow, this seems like a blatantly horrible hardball tactic or probably a result of sour grapes for someone who was a fool with their money.
I hope this gets dismissed with extreme prejudice and flannery has to pay legal fees.
Maybe the unnamed investor was Softbank’s Masayoshi Son and after repeatedly being shafted by Neumann he said “No more!” and urged the lawsuit.
What's more, the billionaires are clearly offering a clearly profitable deal for everyone, specifically so that nobody has an excuse to refuse and cause the coordination problems mentioned. And because they bought at well above market price, they're stuck with dead weight if they don't go through with the affair.
In other words: the existing landowners are 1) demanding money well above the inherent value of the land, and 2) this mechanism/behavior of the existing landowners isn't useful to society/the economy as it makes it harder to do things that require lots of land. This is a textbook example of where government intervention is useful, if done competently and not corruptly.
"What's more, the billionaires are clearly offering a clearly profitable deal for everyone, specifically so that nobody has an excuse to refuse "
When I like my land and I don't want to sell, than this is simply my right, no matter how much you think I have no excuse.
Building important infrastructure or mining critical ressources are rare exceptions for forced landsell, but not because someone wants to build a city for the rich on my land.
So sure, it is a tricky problem to buy from many owners, but getting the government to help you with your private project to force a contract on other people is kind of the definition of corruption.
I guess in this case they do want to sell it, they just know that the ‘billionaires’ having already bought a bunch of land in the area don’t really have a choice and will have to pay significantly more than the market value was previously.
It’s not exactly a case of some mega corporation trying to rip off some poor farmer and “steal” his land…
> build a city for the rich on my land.
Not that I’m saying that the government should get involved but the only reason you own that land is because want to make as much money from it as possible.
- a major investor in this project
- who got her money from Apple
- which makes a killing gouging you on cables with proprietary charging ports and dongles because their laptops/phones didn't have ports, and thus were forced to buy at a ridiculous price
- and is now mad she was forced to pay a ridiculous price for something
This is a risk of doing a massive land purchase like this. The seller is absolutely in the right to hold out as long as they want, and to maximize their profit.
If they won't sell, build around them.
However this is one of the many reasons why there are housing shortages in many areas.
Yes, wealth inequality and land development practices are reasons why housing is in such short supply.
Saying something like "sell to us or we'll force you to via eminent domain", buying the land, and THEN complaining about the price tag is ... brutal.
The inherent value of the land is what market is willing to pay for it in the moment. If you accept that land is to be traded freely, then the seller can set the price as they choose or refuse to sell. What you suggest is that the government sets the price and force sale for the grater good. Even if we collectively decided that this is how it should be, this instance is a really bad example, because they haven’t shared what they want to do there. Why do you automatically think that their plan will be for the public benefit? Eminent domain had a narrow scope, at least originally, for public use. In 2005 things changed [1]. Actually Kelo vs New London is a very good example. The paned out redevelopment never happened, Pfizer closed down the facility in New London. City never recovered its loses.
[1] https://ij.org/case/kelo/
I am confused by this statement, they are farmers. Farms are beneficial to the economy and society.
This is from the article linked.
Solano County is way the f&ck out. And land comes with carrying costs, i.e. property taxes. No one who wants a big, quick return on investment (looking at you, VC's) is going to buy it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area
It's part of the Capital Corridor so it's commutable to both the Bay Area and Sacramento, the schools are decent, and the houses are nice and new.
Solano County is heavily connected economically and transit wise with Contra Costa County, San Francisco County, Marin County, and Alameda County.
Most police officers, city workers, low wage service workers, construction workers, etc live in the various cities and suburbs in Solano County and commute into the East Bay, other parts of the North Bay, and San Francisco.
Ideally that would work like with the countries: different cities have dramatically different sets of rules and compete for citizens. Private ownership allows for much more flexibility here.
In fact, you can democratize it and let everybody who shows up have a vote about what they can do on your property.
Not saying they are right, just saying pleas in that manner are already falling on ears deafened to them.
PS: HN is such a strange community. In one thread people complain about US cities and SF in particular crumbling due to government mismanagement. In another they think that a new city built by some of our own members will devolve into a dystopia and give it no praise. This is an amazing idea and they already have land! I wish them only the best and if they need any help, my email is in my bio :)
Because, as members of this community, we're typically up to speed with the history, thought processes, beliefs, actions, etc. of the people involved in these purchases, and it sounds like, based on that understanding, many people in here don't trust the goals, vision, and/or intentions of the people behind this. Just because one might think that "SF in particular [is] crumbling due to government mismanagement" doesn't mean they should blindly go, "Oh yay, an alternative!".
Edit: I'd love to entertain ideas around how we can get cities to function differently but, I'm sorry, I don't want to hear what Marc Andreesen has to say on the subject.
'Sorry we don't like your new song, you have been designated a trespasser and fined $10,000, this decision is not subject to appeal or further inquiry.'
A city run by SV elites will be just as well run as tech companies terms of service are famous for fair dealing and customer cooperation, ie not at all.
In theory I think you are right, but I can't recall the last time I saw a busker in a private space like a mall or airport. Maybe the incentive to encourage this is just never strong enough for the owners?
While not buskers per se, a lot of private spaces hire musicians to play in their spaces to provide entertainment or background music. Many airports I've been to have someone on a piano playing in a corner
I've also seen places like trainstations where they have a licensing system. IE you audition, apply for a license and then get given a spot and a time slot when you can busk.
If local government acted up against the wishes of residents, it would be a simple matter to repeal taxes and do the road maintainenace ourselves. The town had a calm neighborly feel and people were respectful of each other. It worked great, and local government always knew the people had the power.
https://oregonbusiness.com/rei-announces-closure-of-portland...
Jokes aside, I live near Seattle and homelessness is a problem, and tents everywhere is not a solution.
But it will probably end up being far more like the city in Demolition Man. Bland, no surprises, no swearing, etc.
Sounds like it’s already a utopia.
Maybe put space for some offices from the big companies as well