> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Shocked, I tell you.
It's a time tested strategy. The main problem is SA is doing it in the most useless and bloody way possible.
We might have our faults but our people are working towards progress, it takes time but we don't go bashing Western people and how they are the worst examples of humanity, even knowing their history and countless examples of genocides conducted by them and then denying it. Shame on you people and those who think they are the best examples. Next time when you're offered a job in a Middle East country, don't accept it simple as that instead of coming here, bashing and then saying money talks. Greed is all you guys know.
There might be line cities. But none of them is a concept like this, or are they in a desert and are 170km long and 500m high? So you absolutely miss my points.
We're now. We know more. We have more experience (like "line cities are problematic" but where exactly?)
It's not about traditional city vs line city. And here too, your dislike is stronger then your thinking of opportunities. You don't like dictator there? Ok. I wrote it down.
Not necessarily you have to travel longer, it's ineffective and all the points you say. We (and they too) still don't know how, and where. Having a circular automated highspeed transport in the ground, it's possible. "What work where" will also be regulated, the plumber won't live in the end of the line city and also won't be the only one.
Just think of "silo" (series). I don't see the impossibilities here, like many of you do. I see opportunities.
That is not the word I or most of HN would have used…
It’s a sad state of the world that this delusional lunatic is dictator of a $1T GDP country instead of everyone else that understands this is a stupid idea.
I'm interested in the technology, in the achievements that are possible, the problem solving and solutions found to do something of this scope.
It's not about lunatics or the ** arabs dictators or killers ** say what you want.
For example, the need for the special sand for the concrete. Their sand, which they have plenty of, is completely not suitable for this. It's too fine. So, how this will be solved?
The world could learn a lot of it - just imagine, you can use the Sahara sands instead of the special sands that need to be somehow and somewhere resourced atm. That would reduce the house building costs a lot and enable affordable housing everywhere. I'm talking about the proper way of housing, like in the story of the three pigs and the wolf.
So can you explain why you dislike technology and advancement in city buildings, experiments and new learnings? I don't quite get it.
All this project is just about creating a lot of limitations and thinking about ways to reduce those limitations with a huge cost while not having a clear defined benefit. You get the same stuff as in this project by just living close to a subway with the advantage that you still get more stuff because of density while the city remains much more flexible to dynamic demand (buildings can be easily adapted for businesses or for living, you get more area to create parks, etc). Inelastic cities are very vulnerable to the demand change (when demographics are changing(aging or ppl having more kids, the demand for specific infra changes too) or when some businesses that do employ a lot of ppl are closing and unemployment rises quickly because the gap can't be filled that fast) And I've just barely touched the surface - the maintenance cost and knowledge and custom parts needed for this project are not sustainable in any way
Nitpick, but MBS isn't the sovereign. His father is.
Given MBS isn't acting as regent, he's actually--in the most technical way--a tyrant: "the tyrant was Very Obviously but not formally in charge, because he ruled extra-constitutonally, rather than abolishing the constitution. This is what seperates tyranny, a form of extra-constitutional one man rule, from monarchy, a form of traditional and thus constitutional one-man rule" [1].
[1] https://acoup.blog/2023/03/17/collections-how-to-polis-part-...
His power is not (as far as anyone not privy to the private preferences of King Salman can say) extraconstitutional, since it flows directly from royal decree giving him the position and authority he holds, and Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy where any delegation of authority the King makes is, ipso facto, constitutional.
Monarchy is telling you "who" has the power, and tyranny is telling you "how" the power is used.
Not even mentioning the existence of constitutional monarchy. It's the political system of many countries, including Norway and Sweden.
So, in order to really convey useful information, one would have to use different words, such as "democracy" (which can be "liberal", or the extreme opposite "illiberal"), "dictatorship", etc.
Its not the monarch's design, its the prime minister’s (the PM is also the heir; which is also a break from earlier tradition, as previously the monarch was also PM.)
Though at the time of the design, MBS wasn't PM, the King was still PM, and MBS was Crown Prince (as he remains) and First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense.
Do you have a source for the decree? (EDIT: Nvm, Salman delegated various affairs to MBS [1], as well as made him PM [2]. Salman remains the head of state.)
I'd still argue that MBS is not formally in charge. The President can delegate their authority to a rando, that doesn't make it lower-case constitutional, e.g. Edith Wilson [3]. (Granted, that was done without formal decree.)
Going back to the Greek analog, tyrants would usually gain some instrument from the formal leader technically legitimising their actions. But the formal leader wasn't the one deciding. The tyrant was.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1DA23M/
[2] https://amwaj.media/media-monitor/saudi-power-transition-con...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Wilson#Increased_role_af...
Burji (highest building) was also doomed by kings and horses. Learned a lot. Next will be even higher.
Budget talking is not my point. This somehow will be overcome. If not, it's not my problem. There are ways for getting money. You know it, I know it.
Maintenance and transportation can't be judged right now, as we didn't see it in function. You and I don't know anything about the plans.
You're speculating it will be shitty, I speculate it's possible. If you use modules. Do we have experience with modular buildings? (Yes we have..) Can we use this made experiences? (Yes..)
So you see problems before they're actually emerged. That's foresee of the future. All the debunks will be wrong if the line proves the opposite. I see the same problems as you do, but I don't think their unovercomeable..
As usual, either the sand gets bought from poorer countries or outright stolen and sold on the black market. You can't use desert sand for building.
if you never try, you won't find it out.
It's a way of creative problem solving. If they build it. In the "middle of", suddenly, something is not enough, then you do have to find a solution.
MBS isn't acting as a regent, though. Salman remains the formal head of state.
Dragonwriter made a compelling point, however, in Salman having formally delegated a lot of powers to MBS. So maybe MBS isn't a tyrant, though it's difficult to argue either Salman or MBS are absolute monarchs at this time in practice. (Their "crown" retains absolute power. But that's slightly, and very meaningfully, different.)
Karmic justice requires this project to be crushed by the sand that these arrogant dictators tried to impose their steel dick over.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/03/un-rights-expe...
It's a small number of people, who are opposing known tyrants, foolishly. The ruling class can kill and enslave, at will. The indentured servitude imposed on thousands of immigrants who built and maintain it, is much more concerning imo.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...
It's a barbaric country. US support has created another blemish on US history. Was it worth it to ensure safe seas to enable global commercialism, which kept most of the world stable for decades? I do not, but I'll never be in charge either way.
I also see a link to https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/04/i... to the left of that text on that page
Perhaps it's just me, but I don't see scaling down a project as karmic retribution for murder.
The Saudis announced six megaprojects in 2005. King Abdullah Economic City was the only one that went anywhere. I believe it was supposed to have 2 million people and reached about 7 thousand.
They've kicked people out of the area, killed at least one person, trashed the area with initial construction efforts (I've driven past) and now the inevitable seems to be coming to pass already.
They still have time but they need to do something to diversify from oil in the way Dubai has eventually. Building a new Dubai, with a different legal framework (only rumoured for Neom AFAIK), doesn't seem like the worst idea to me, but starting with an overly ambitious design probably isn't the way to get traction. The Middle East do love a pissing contest though so starting small isn't what they're into.
Saudi diversification from oil is a fantasy. The culture is medieval from the POV of the rest of the world, and the hostile climate is only getting worse.
In 2018 "only" 43% of UAE's exports were zero-value-add extracted oil & gas. 11-12% was "Gold, Diamonds, Precious Metals"(?). The rest is pretty evenly split between very different industries - value-added chemicals, electronics, cars, metals, industrial machines, and textiles.
Overall, UAE pulls in a higher % of their foreign currency from non-oil-and-gas economic activity than Saudi does, but still leans heavily on it for 40-60% of their exports. Saudi exports ~20% more oil & gas than UAE on a nominal total USD basis. However, UAE's total exports are 30-40% higher than Saudi's on a total USD basis. So UAE sells less oil, more other stuff.
If I had to pick, I'd definitely rather be in Dubai's position than Saudi's. I've also lived in both places, and I'd definitely say that Dubai appeared to have a more diverse economy and drew from a deeper talent pool (mostly immigrant-based, though).
I'm not sure if Saudi Arabia can reproduce the success. The entirety of Arabian peninsula is pretty much immune to cultural development, but Dubai got a pass because they were the first ones in that area to try building a normal healthy economy, meanwhile whatever Saudis do, they have to compete with Dubai which is already highly developed.
My point being, why would people invest in Saudi Arabia if they can invest in Dubai.
Saudi is at the mercy of it's leader and little else. The culture isn't generally medieval but the Al Saud certainly can be.
Just curious, it wouldn’t surprise me but wasn’t sure.
like it's big, elaborate build outs, nothing delivered, and some sort of under the table deal nuclear with Trump's brother in law that got him a Billion. the Iranians have, or can rapidly enrich, and Israel is popping off again (and may have ~100 nukes), so Saudi has means, motive, opportunity.
infrastructure required to build silos, and infrastructure required to build the City Of The Future are going to look more or less the same for 3-4 years -- lots of big holes, running trenches, piping and power, etc. -- and after a few years they can call it a failure and quietly sweep it under the rug with the rationalization that it's been a failure and they're ashamed of it.
And even that could still very much be worthwhile, as in generate business for the company, sell off the company to external investors based on those numbers and later phase out the artificially generated demand.
I'm sure a lot of underlings are making a fortune out of the budget, but I don't believe that was the initial motivation for the project. Consider yourself in the shoes of bin Salman. Why would you need to funnel money away, when you are the absolute monarch and the whole country is yours? It makes about as much difference as taking coins out of your left pocket and shoving it back to the right pocket.
- Adam Something: NEOM Is The Parody Of The Future [1]
- Thunderf00t: NEOM, The Line: BUSTED!! [2]
At the time of publishing thousands and thousands were already on the road for years in the Netherlands.
This guy checks what his audience already thinks on a subject and then makes up arguments to go along with it.
Take it with a kilo of salt.
However, battery electric buses are seriously more expensive and a bigger carbon sink than a trolley bus network. But governments don't like to build infrastructure in the west and some people don't like the look of overhead wires. This isn't economically or environmentally efficient but those preferences can cause those issues to be ignored. Until the high cost of battery replacements kick in after the initial honeymoon period...
There's a fractal insanity to the whole project. As you focus in on any one aspect, more silliness appears. The design process is driven by the Crown Prince pointing at 3D renders and saying he likes the one that looks the most cyberpunk.
Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Bahrain, Qatar, they all remind me of that quote from King of the Hill—they are monuments to man's arrogance. Desert cities hitting 50+ °C air temperature at midday which means air conditioning everywhere; vapid luxury in the form of expensive garish cars, shopping malls, and weird buildings and monuments, all while local chiefs who oppose stupid and unrealistic white elephant vanity projects are executed in the back alley.
This is one reason why I would like more nuclear power: it'll take some of the money away from the Gulf.
Same reason Egypt is building a decadent new capital: it lets the ruler pay off his supporters.
Not sure who this “we” is who ever started, which is a requirement for stopping.
A lot of people in western countries indirectly pay for this
Think of the alternatives, top 5 oil producing countries: US(13bb/day), Russia (13bb/day), Saudi (9bb/day), Canada (5bb/day), Iraq(4bb/day).
We all know what's currently happening in Russia. The US and Canada have good production, but they're a long way from Europe. So how exactly do you expect Eastern Europe to heat their homes during winter?
Let's be clear, they can't even really afford to boycott Russia at the moment - Russian oil is pumping out to India and getting re-badged. So the idea they'd pick a fight with Saudi Arabia seems ambitious to say the least.
I guess over human rights transgressions. But the collective West is very selective on whose transgressions they are willing to overlook and whose not.
And, indeed, at this point, in no position to play hardball with the Saudis.
I wonder where do you have this number from?
According to this source, Russia never reached 11bb/day, current production is ~10bb: https://ycharts.com/indicators/russia_crude_oil_production
You can thank all the engineers and business people working on batteries, electric vehicles, and other petroleum alternatives.
If you go to Google Earth (the app), it lets you see historical imagery from the site and for the past three or so years you can see continuous progress on digging out The Line; that alone is quite impressive on its own! But then again, digging it is only like 1% of it, and the easiest part. It's an impossible project.
Neom reminds me of Łódź, a city in Poland that is built around a single 5km long street. It’s quite cool and the simple geometry is aesthetically appealing in a way I’ve yet to find elsewhere.
The reason why this exists is obviously that these projects are started by absolute rulers who want to build themselves vanity monuments the same way their ancient predecessors did.
If you're only building a mega project so you're forced to develop the infrastructure around it, why don't you choose a sensible megaproject instead? Answer: because that's not why they're doing it, you just made that up.
Who said, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.
Is there a way to make money by betting against them?
There are those grandiose mega projects purely for the rich, purely for vanity and showing off wealth and meant attract outside attention... like "The Line" for example...
...but there also are more sensible projects, that are actually meant to help the local populace, improve conditions, and fight poverty... like "The Al Baydha Project" just for one example.
It's totally possible to do something ambitious and impressive, and with historic significance without becoming completely detached from reality.
There are much more effective ways to achieve population control than building line cities and moving people into them.
But only with a line can you be aligned with your ruler's dreams.
Curved tracks do mean limits on top speed, as the centrifugal force needs to be kept below what would be uncomfortable for passengers. It also can cause some issues for building stations, as curved stations require a wider gap between the train and the platform. But neither is a blocking issue, all train tracks in the world do have curve, and curved stations aren't unusual in public transport systems.
The grandparent probably means disk, not ring-shaped when mentioning circles anyway. Pick any 2 point at random into a 33km² circle, the average distance will be 4km, and worst case scenario 6km. Do the same thing in a 33km², 200m-wide "line", the average distance will be 85km, with a worst case of 170km. A circular city doesn't need nearly as much raw speed for it's public transport to be more efficient than transport in a nonsensical linear city could ever be, even if you throw in ridiculously fast trains and sprinkle magical AI thinking.
It's not a coincidence that all major cities are roughly circular even though they are built around roughly linear features (navigable rivers and/or coast line). It's just what naturally works.
In a regular city that grows outwards, you'd expect there to be circumferential routes as well as cross-city routes connecting various points, making the travel time more bearable.
And you can still build mostly straight-line trams in a circle anyway.
To get the same area, you'd have to have slightly more center-line circumference on a ring city as linear distance on a line, but even so your transit distances are going to be shorter on the ring.
You'd spend a lot of time on that one train line though - and I imagine in the central bits it would get really really busy as people are trying to get to the other end. And what happens if that train line breaks?
Making a city circular takes advantage of geometry - even at the cost of having to build more than one train line. It also opens up the possibility of other forms of travel - buses, bikes, cars.
It doesn't surprise me that this is starting to fall apart. When it was announced it seemed completely unhinged.
Probably because it looks cool in CGI renderings and nobody else has one, for reasons that are probably becoming apparent to all involved.
For example - if there is a natural element like a river, lake, canyon, etc. that you want to maximize city exposure to. A linear city roughly following the Grand Canyon would be infinitely more interesting than a circular one situated at one end of it.
By using a line they can just shut off one part of the line from the rest with one or two cuts.
a) So you have people living uniformly distributed on a line of length 1. When you pick 2 at random, what's the average distance from one to the other?
b) How about if they live on a circle of circumference 1 (and you can only travel along the circumference)?
c) How about if they live on a disk of circumference 1 (and you can travel straight across the disk)?
That part actually doesn't seem implausible, it's right on the Red Sea, which is quite hot on the surface, but cools down as you you go deeper into it[2].
So (and this is just my speculation) they could have a large undersea pipeline to a depth of say 1km, and use the heat the building itself to pull up and distribute that cold water through cooling ducts throughout the structure.
They were also planning to desalinate seawater, so such a system would perform the double duty of pulling that seawater into the building.
1. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-i-admire-saudi-arabi...
Do a Mars colony next.
I guess they're would be diesel generators for that in reality. We need an engineer to calculate the flow needed because given how far away the far end is from the water that could end up behind one huge generator, not to mention the size of the pipes.
It's worth mentioning that they don't seem to be burying any massive water pipes so this isn't likely to be done in reality.
A proper fault-tolerant design will buy enough time for most residents to walk to a neighboring section that still has power.
Let's not gloss over the absolutely appalling respect many of these societies have for human dignity. Public executions and flogging, discrimination and imprisonment based solely on gender, absolutely zero regard for freedom of conscience when it comes to matters of religion.
There's only so much you can get away with by saying it's my society's accepted practice, what's wrong is wrong. And there's plenty wrong with other countries and societies too, including my own, but it doesn't excuse human rights indifference.
You, as an individual, may do your best to contribute to the betterment of the world, but when talking about society vs. society, you’re glossing over far too many of our ills while ignoring the positives of the others.
Freedom of religion, individualism, capitalism, they aren’t “good” or “right” they’re just… different. The western individualism (seen most prominently in the U.S.) is not the majority culture, to many, even those who are just as “free” as any American, western cultural ideals are a step backward.
The way you perceive Islam is not the way it’s perceived by Muslims in Muslim majority countries, it is not an oppression put upon them by religious zealots, it’s a community that they participate in with a deep sense of pride and duty. For every Muslim in a Muslim-majority country who wants to break from their religion, there’s an unsuccessful American struggling to survive, desperate to break free from the lonely American pursuit of individual success.
You can hate public executions, flogging, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and you should, I do, but don’t compare societies. We are not better, just different.
It is after all much easier to change hearts and minds in a democracy.
Edit: contrast ME with Mexico who is running out of oil. Yet, they are able to build because they happen to have some of the hardest working labor in the world (though not notably skilled). I rather bet on Mexico revival over ME 100/100.
They is so much money poured down on them that they don't understand the concept of work, to them it is just a hobby.
Quite correct. I had people reaching out to me saying they want me to contract for Arabic millionaires -- websites, backends, a lot of stuff together -- but every time they demanded time tracking, they wanted to know my physical address, wanted my photo, and one of them even wanted me to install camera so he can track me in real time with some misguided AI-based software.
Each time I giggled to myself and responded something along the lines of:
"While the offer sounds tempting financially, and while I would love to have some tech independence, your offer falls short on the privacy front, and it also contains clauses that can nullify the independence to choose tech tomorrow. I'll have to decline and if you are open to feedback: insisting on face tracking is not how you hire the really good programmers, to which I don't pretend to belong but have known a good number of them".
So yes their mindset is apparently always 10 masters + 20_000_000 slaves and as hard as they are trying, they will not export this culture to anywhere else except maybe India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China and a few others. The West will not change for them no matter how rich they are.
The Qatari have also obviously paid off various FIFA officials but hey, that's just football.
Couldn't that element be self-sufficient on solar?
https://eepower.com/industry-articles/is-desert-based-solar-...
Night happens even in the desert. Plus what others said about wind. Here's video about a recent sandstorm: https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/dust-storm-sweeps-across...
In 2021, inmates in federal prisons earned between $0.23 to $1.15 per hour.
Are you suggesting they should have just remained on camels while sand blows around them?
> I'll be frank: I have a deep mistrust of any culture present in the Arabian peninsula since about 632 CE.
Also, AFAIK they are very aware that oil money isn't going to keep pouring forever and they indeed are trying to diversify. Their elites all study in UK, France, Switzerland and the USA and the questionable stuff they do is actually about the local culture they are trying to transform.
Their prince who is celebrated for pushing social and cultural reforms is the same guy who ordered the killing of a journalist in their Istanbul embassy. So, it is what it is.
BTW, IMHO they should look into what Jewish did in Israel with the Kibbutz. I'm a great fan of the idea and the Jewish culture that made it possible and it appears to work. Maybe instead of building giant skyscrapers and shopping malls, take a note from the Israeli or even work with them instead of pouring tour money into "Las Vegas". Skip the illegal settlements and genocide of the locals of course, but the Israeli have already proven methods of building high quality high prosperity communities on barely habitable lands. So, the Arabs should take a note. Maybe they don't have other option than trying to transform the environment using their fortune but they have options on how to do it exactly.
You always have another option than to treat people like cattle though.
> the questionable stuff they do is actually about the local culture they are trying to transform.
Is it though? Or their Western education has helped put things in perspective, they understood how good they have it and they want to double down on it and make very sure they'll never lose it?
> Their prince who is celebrated for pushing social and cultural reforms is the same guy who ordered the killing of a journalist in their Istanbul embassy. So, it is what it is.
We can also choose not to engage in business with them but money talks, apparently.
But to the people in power, only symbols and power are important.
Do they need anything more? And you mentioned airplanes, but you failed to mention logistics more generally and container shipping, with Jebel Ali port being the third largest (behind LA and Rotterdam) in a list that would exclude East Asia and Singapore. [1] There's also tourism because, yes, people are actually paying money in order to visit places like Dubai, and that's because they like what they see there.
And then there's finance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...?
Can you give any keywords what to look for to read more about this?
It's just big lanes devoid of cars between the towers devoid of people. And then a small road connecting to the Industrial Area.
It's also governed differently from the others in being an oligarchy. That requirement for consensus-building and internal variation creates robustness; it gave Dubai the room to experiment, for example, with religious moderation.
It's not a view I hold too seriously. But I remember visiting the Emirates and Saudi Arabia--shortly after the Phillipines and India--and thinking to myself that the British were, in their time, far better at nation building than we've (EDIT: America) been in the post-War era.
They are monuments to the brilliance of human engineering, allowing millions of humans to live comfortably in the scorching desert heat.
Do you also call Amsterdam with its dikes and below sea level, “a monument to man’s arrogance?
Wasn’t the moon landing a monument to man’s arrogance?
I think calling something “a monument to man’s arrogance” reveals more about the biases of the person saying it than about the actual thing.
> Do you also call Amsterdam
> with its dikes and below sea
> level, “a monument to man’s
> arrogance?
1. https://www.floodmap.net/elevation/CountryElevationMap/?ct=N...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
Any kind of thermal plant will not save us. Renewable energy can do it.
The points raised are a mixture of facts, fiction, jealousy and dislike.
You want them to boil in desert heat with some environmental appeal, while many countries pump the air full of pollution from factories or massive ICE cars
I haven’t heard of back alley executions over there
I don’t feel hate towards someone spending their money on 2 cars or a holiday house or whatever luxury shoes, or paint their house whatever color. Why does it annoy you so much.
Why hate on people with different taste, very strange
I get it’s ok to hate on gulf countries without backlash more than hating on say Denmark
FWIW I’m not from there and don’t live there
This seems more likely to me as an explanation than hating on people with different taste. Otherwise everyone would hate Japan for example.
[1] https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/#the-scale [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i... [3] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022
I'll be frank: I have a deep mistrust of any culture present in the Arabian peninsula since about 632 CE.
Some years ago I occasionally read a German architecture forum [0] that may be compared to HN (mainly professionals). For example, I remember the thread about the reconstruction of parts of the historic city center of Frankfurt [1] being really interesting, with a lot of excellent pictures and insider knowledge. The discussion was mostly centered on the aesthetic quality of the quarter and the use of historic construction methods (and how this use of traditional craftsmanship highly motivated the workers), while bigger media outlets often completely ignored this and focused on a strange political discussion that went along the lines of "reconstruction of something destroyed in WW2 = revisionism = supporting neofashists".
[0] https://www.deutsches-architekturforum.de/
[1] https://www.deutsches-architekturforum.de/thread/10345-dom-r...
There are none and as such there is nothing to discuss.
This comment is 100% ridiculous speculation.
That's not to say they don't have a nuclear weapons program - they probably do - but needing a mega-project to cover it up is just silly.
Furthermore, we live in a globalized world. In 2024, almost every country is dependent on international investors bringing in liquidity. Graft is fine, so long as execution happens.
This means you have multiple different firms joining in these kinds of infra investments. Some are international investors (eg. Citigroup, HSBC, Jardins), some are regional investors (eg. SNB, SAB), some are family offices, and some are the government itself.
The international investors are used to maintain international credibility, the regional investors are used as fixers by the international investors, the family offices are those regionally prominent members who can make or break procurement, and the government investment funds that act as the lubricant to manage all these different factions.
Basically, these investments are used to not only show off regional power, but also pay off regionally prominent factions via Family Offices or minority ownership.
This happens from Saudi Arabia (eg. Neom) to Japan [0] to South Korea [1] to Poland [2]. This is very common in newly developed countries as well as developing countries (eg. CCDI's crackdown on land corruption in China, the Odenbrecht scandal in Brazil, the various Adani linked scandals in India).
> as in generate business for the company, sell off the company to external investors
There's no reason to. Once a connected company executes successfully on large regional projects, they can become international players. This is what happened to Reliance in the 2000s, Adani in the 2010s, Odenbrecht in Brazil in the 1990s-2000s, Polimeks in Turkiye in the 2000s, Wanda Group in China in the 2000s, etc.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-19/japan-s-k...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-indic...
[2] - https://www.oecd.org/corruption/poland-s-fight-against-forei...
We even have a city that built a trolley bus network. But it never caught on simply because it has too many drawbacks. It's worse than a BEV bus and worse than a tram but does come with the upfront investment bill.
BEV buses that replace diesel ones are working great.
So, basically a regular city.
> One end of the building will
> be over 100km from the sea,
Talk about a disincentive to show up to work before sunrise and leave after dark.
> Also wouldn't this be like
> the elevator problem in tall
> buildings?
> The first few kilometers of the
> line will need to have pipes
> sized for the cooling water of
> the 165km behind it eating up
> interior volume.
Secondly, by having it run in a loop you'd drastically reduce the energy to pump it. It'll take no more energy to pump water up 10m or 1km, as long as your outlet pipe is also at the same depth.
> passing it through a heat
> exchanger [...] be more energy
> efficient than a AC?
I was just pointing out that once you're willing to invest the sort of money Saudi Arabia has in upfront costs, there's no reason the end result (no matter how ridiculously expensive) can't be sustainable and passively cooled.
Meanwhile if you design a disc city, you can keep expanding outwards, but that's going to be increasingly far from the center. It's going to be very difficult to build a new airport into a middle of the city (if such needs arises), meanwhile it's much easier to do that for the middle segment of a linear city.
This is applying the terrible thinking that gives us micro service hell to city planning.
With no top speed, accelerate for 85km at 1m/s then decelerate for the next 85km/s at 1m/s and that's about 13 minutes with a top speed of about 900mph. 1m/s is the top acceleration you can have for a typical passenger train for comfort purposes.
Total area of a 170km*200m city is 34 square km, or a city about 6.5km across.
London's Elizabeth line (crossrail) covers a distance of 6.75km from Paddington to Liverpool Street in 11 minutes, with 3 intermediate stops.
The circumference of a 6.5km diameter city would be 20km. 20 cross-city lines with decent headway and interchange would give a worst case journey of
- 250m to nearest station - 3 minutes walk
- 2 minute wait for train
- 5 minutes to central station
- 200m/3 minutes to appropiate platform
- 2 minute wait for train
- 5 minutes to destination station
- 200m/3 minutes to destination
25 minutes. From anywhere to anywhere.
Nah, it must be racism.
To reiterate, having an issue with a government for a specific reason is informed. Hating an ethic group is racism.
Ps I’m not from there or live there
I find it very interesting that when nuclear power is brought up, there are a lot of people who talk up how solar + wind & batteries are a perfect solution. Yet when it comes to the Middle East and conditions there, none of the back and forth about how it is not the best solution occurs.
My issue is that when the term is used as a pejorative, it more often used with regards to projects in developing countries.
The part where it talks about 6500 migrant worker deaths over the decade of World Cup facility construction has a serious error. It fails to look at the death rate.
Qatar has around 2 million migrant workers, and the 6500 deaths are all deaths of migrants in the country rather than just work related deaths. 6500 deaths over 10 years in a population of 2 million is a death rate of 32.5/100k/year.
A death rate of 32.5/100k/year should raise questions, especially if we assume that migrant workers in Qatar skew younger, but the question should be why is it so low?
For comparison the death rate for 15-24 year old males in the US is 100/100k/year, and for 25-34 year old males it is 177/100k/year.
It's possible that Qatar's poor treatment of migrant workers does result in an unusually high job-related death rate but something else Qatar does results in an unusually low death rate when not at work with the net result being the overall death rate is low.
In the US the top causes of death of young males are poisoning (which includes drug overdoses), suicide, automobile accidents, and homicide.
Qatar is very anti-drug, with harsh penalties and almost no tolerance, giving them a drug death rate around 4% of the US drug death rate.
They are also much more intolerant of drunk driving, which is a major contributor to automobile deaths in the US. In Qatar if there is any detectable alcohol in your blood after an accident you are considered to have been drunk driving. That threshold is so low that you would be considered drunk if you were in an accident in the morning and had one drink the night before. Also I'd expect that most migrant workers use some other form of transport most of the time.
Their homicide rate is also very low.
Are those enough to offset a high work-related death rate. I don't know. I should know because all of the articles I've seen talking about migrant worker deaths in Qatar should have looked into this.
https://africanarguments.org/2024/03/go-gulf-is-ethiopia-sac...
Bluntly, I hope nobody comes to their aid when oil ends and their economies inevitably collapse - they can go back to bashing each other on the heads with rocks in the desert, and stop destroying the whole damned planet for a quick buck.
Unfortunately, this is the outcome when you turn tribal hunter-gatherers into billionaires overnight. The scum always rises to the top in a society built on dominance and violence.
I think your argumentation rests on this, but you should explain why it's daft and how it makes people's lives miserable. I would personally enjoy having 20 minute access to any place in the city I live (which is far from having 9 million people) and still have a vast open space nearby.
In all seriousness, in those baking desert landscapes, it would even make a considerable amount of sense for cooling costs.
The sand bit feels like a filter problem.
The workers in SA aren’t criminals being jailed for some crime.
The US believes the constitution ends at its borders and people; This is what the law is in SA.
I can't say I like it either, but I think jailing human beings and enslaving them to the benefit of others is simply not Good.
If you can agree then maybe we can work together to fix it in the US in a lifetime or two, but there's frankly little we can do about SA if we can't show the world what being Good looks like in America.
A general statement that is universal across time and geography. Nothing special about the gulf
And now imagine doing this in a world where there was no federal tax, the GDP was pennies (relative to today), and state of the art technology was us being on the verge of discovering that handwashing before surgery was a good idea. Really! [1] And the big goal here was to be able to put up 'electric lanterns.' It sounds so pie in the sky as to be unbelievable. And indeed it probably would never, in a million years, happen today. But it did happen in the past, and for that we owe our predecessors quite the debt!
The point I make with this is that we have just an unimaginably vast level of economic power today, but it's mostly being squandered. We should be trying out grand ideas, endlessly. If we can make them work - awesome, we've radically improved the world and humanity - our descendants will thank us. If they fail, we can call it a jobs program -- certainly a much better one than trying to make stuff to go kill people half way around the globe.
But that's not what we did. Folks at the start of the process might have imagined that eventual situation, but they built up small networks, then a skeleton network with human connections (telegraph), then human driven routing. You can't just point at those mega infrastructure items we already have and say oh we have that so we can just apply that to another because that glosses over the whole and very long process of getting from mini projects to mega ones.
The Line was designed to be literally modular, being made up of 135 modules of less than a km in length each. That such a "vision" is considered exceptional, to the point of even not being realistic, is something that to me feels like a complete deterioration of the vision and ambition in society.
[1] https://reasonstobecheerful.world/heat-pumps-norway-efficien...
I see the argument that air conditioning is somehow “wrong” or “unsophisticated” on HN all the time (usually from Europeans) and it’s one of the weirdest things. I see no explanation for it other than racism.
To claim you are somehow more virtuous than Arab people because you use artificial heating instead of artificial cooling is downright hilarious given this context.
At home, it recycles stale, dry air. In urban settings, air-conditioners pump hotter air into the (already) sizzling outside. There are better implementations like district cooling with cold water, but this will require ripping out every single split-aircon unit from every single flat and replacing the ducting, the cooling units, and even the controls.
Okay.
Governments try to explain everybody they should use less heating, and I personally find comfortable (and reasonable) smaller differences between outside and inside.
Now, when I was in a country with what I think is excessive air conditioning (not middle east, but no use to name it) it annoyed me the huge difference, 38 Celsius outside and 21 Celsius inside.
I will complain about large differential no matter the country. Of course it might limit the activities I can make in some parts of the world (skiing in the desert anybody?), but that's what I find reasonable.
I do not see that. In this thread it is making the point that the cities are extremely expensive to run and not sustainable. I see the same point made about desert cities in the US.
European cities may need heating, but they also tend to have far better supplies of water, better government, and a far more diversified economy. White elephant projects are at least challenged and discussed and are rarely (if ever) on this scale. Even something like Britain's much maligned HS2 is far smaller in absolute cost (maybe by an order of magnitude depending on whose estimates of each you believe), and even more so relative to the population size of the economy.
There is a formal succession process, but it's been regularly sidestepped for various reasons. So you basically have a real-life Game of Thrones where your family aren't your loyal and trusted confidants, but the exact people you're paranoid of. And for very good reasons. For instance one Saudi king was assassinated by his nephew (who was later publicly decapitated), then his brother took the throne, and so on endlessly.
Who do you think MBS was purging in '17? Other royals. Rich royals. Competition for the throne.
(not to say that this project isn't a total farce, but at least the issue of pumping water without electricity was solved hundreds of years ago)
Or just have Olympic-sized swimming pools in the basement that you've actively pumped water into. If the pumps are out they'll have a lot of thermal inertia.
1. https://www.archdaily.com/975502/geothermal-energy-using-the...
Furthermore, if the building is decently isolated (HR++ sun-blocking glass exists), it should be able to handle some air conditioning downtime.
I live in Dubai but grew up in the United States. Despite what people may believe, there is freedom of religion here, women aren’t oppressed, and the government genuinely cares about having a good city to live in.
I don't want to open a flame war, but I visited the city during the Expo and its a highway with a stripe of skyscrapers on each side and slums beyond. It's impossible to walk anywhere. (To be fair, the public transport is pretty good, as long as you live next to the highway.)
When I read "a good city to live in" I imagine something like Vienna.
That is fair. I guess my comparison is San Diego (where I grew up) and Mexico, where I lived all of my adult life until moving to Dubai in 2022.
The city is building a new metro line and improving on walkability as new neighborhoods of high population density pop up. It will still be very focused on shopping malls with AC because of the heat during the summers. Official records of real estate transactions have a data point for "closest shopping mall" for a reason.
Even Vienna has slum-like areas, every major city does. Not sure how that's a knock against Dubai. I'm not even sure what slums you saw in Dubai, Having lived there for a few years there's definitely low income housing in certain parts but I'd struggle to call them slums.
Does this only apply to rich westerners though?
So most of this is not true according to you:
https://www.state.gov/reports/2016-report-on-international-r...
> women aren’t oppressed
and this is all false too?
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/03/04/uae-greater-progress-nee...
I guess I don’t really understand the criticism, most of which seems to be “you should just build something that isn’t the thing you want to build.” There is plenty of aesthetic merit to the linear city idea on its own.
To use an example of a place that already exists: the city Łódź in Poland is situated along a single linear 4-5km street. Other neighborhoods branch off from it, but essentially the main road is the city’s layout. I really like it and think it’s a lot more interesting than it would be as a circle, even if the transit is theoretically not as optimal. There is something very aesthetically appealing about it.
Are we just making things up? Just by a single glance at a map of Łódź you can see that this is not true. The city is clearly blob shaped.
> I guess I don’t really understand the criticism, most of which seems to be “you should just build something that isn’t the thing you want to build.”
The criticism is that there are reasons why cities are built the way they are built. "Looks good on a 3d render" is not a great reason to do something, and the reasons the proponents list don't hold up to scrutiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piotrkowska_Street
And yes, as I wrote, it is the main axis of the city, even if other neighborhoods branch off of it. This is a basic obvious fact about the city:
From the very beginning this street was the central axis, around which the city grew bigger, and its development spontaneously gave the present shape to its centre. At first the city was mainly the highway, but later it changed into the city's showcase, the leisure and shopping centre, where the life of growing industrial agglomeration could be observed.
Then it's Goodhart law in action. A fast transit system is desirable because it's a proxy for low-friction travel. This has the speed and the friction.
Piotrkowska?
In summary, there maybe reasons for an informed person to have an issue with a specific government, there is no reasonable reason to hate on countries because the are adjacent to a government you dislike and lastly the individuals in a country are free to live in reasonable temperatures with their own taste in buildings
I'll call the gulf states Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. Which of these would you say has a good record on human rights, personal liberty, and equality?
An issue can be found in any government, how does that move the conversation forward ?
Not sure if "geographic discrimination" is in any way better than "racism" but using terms correctly is required for good communication.
So if that individuals distrust towards the Arabian peninsula begins in the exact year Islam began to spread, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that OP is an Islamaphobe (and it would include a number of North African countries as well)
TLDR: OP is using geography as a dog whistle.
It so happens that the large majority of these governments are in Muslim-majority countries, where Islam is the 'state religion' (I have a problem with 'state religions' too). Therefore, a reasonable conclusion: it is that particular religion that demands these of its adherents (and worse, non-adherents), and therefore, I mistrust it.
> a number of North African countries as well
For the record, I have little problem with Tunisia.
> Let's not gloss over the fact that we in the west do the same.
I'm curious where in the "west" you're from. At least in my part of the "western world", we absolutely don't do any of this.
Totally: Norway and Saudi Arabia are exactly the same in terms of humanism, it's just a matter of optics, right?
This in no way mitigates anybody else's issues, but that's an issue that I, personally, wish we could solve (and when we're done with that, maybe we can tackle the calorie laundering that goes on in that industry).
I think the problem is that in a globalised economy, a local issue quickly becomes an everybody issue. Am I less responsible, as a consumer, because the injury happens a long way away?
Of course, we are responsible most directly for our own interactions with other people. Less so with other people's bad behavior.
You go down the other road, there's an indirect connection to every person on earth. Refuse to deal with everybody and anybody because of that, you're paralyzed.
I get it, that was a rhetorical question. Mine is not a rhetorical answer. It's hard enough, dealing decently with the people I come into contact with. Struggling to make every problem into my problem, there's very little gain in that.
Before anybody says I'm callous and unfeeling, well, you'd have to know what I do in my own community. But few bother to weight that, at all, when they're playing the blamethrowing game.
What the sentence you are quoting claims is that this is the street the city grow out of. Which is a different statement than saying that the one you said. The "the city Łódź in Poland is situated along a single linear 4-5km street" describe the appearance and layout of the city today, the quote you are quoting describe the history of the city and in which order it was built out.
You can’t tell what it is on a map because you wouldn’t expect a pedestrianized street to be 100m wide. But I assure you, it is the busiest street and has the most foot traffic and commercial activity.
This argument is such a waste of time. I’ve been there, you’ve spent five minutes looking at Google maps. I brought it up as an example of a city designed around a straight line. Which it is.
Go waste someone else’s time.
who does "we" refer to? The Dutch? France?
Sorry, clarified as America. Not aware of any Dutch nation building after WWII. (I'd argue the British also did better than the French.)
The British strategy was far more pragmatic, they kept the local powers in place and played each of them against each other to maintain control over the colonies.
Of course, I'm generalizing but there's a clear difference of ideology that I do think explain the differences between the French and British when it came to managing their colonial empire.
UAE is doing so well for (mainly) 2 reasons:
1) The Shakhbut coup in Abu Dhabi
2) Abu Dhabi and Dubai buried the hatchet to form UAE(there was a lot of bad blood between the 2 states, but because Rashid bin Saeed and Zayed bin Sultan were way above average as far as authoritarians go they managed to avoid stupid conflicts and focused on cashing in on the oil).
Fair enough. And as you describe, it's more a diarchy of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Nevertheless, structurally different from the absolute monarchies around them.
Furthermore, Saudi has started requiring companies that are operating in Saudi to operate a Saudi office, and won't give tenders to those who are managing the relationship remotely from Dubai now, so companies have started moving staff to Riyadh.
> Nevertheless, structurally different from the absolute monarchies around them
MbS is trying to remake KSA into an Abu Dhabi 2.0, as MbZ was his mentor
[0] - https://www.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/12/14/dubai.10.billion.bai...
I'm not sure if this is satire or not... Religious moderation should be the default, not something to 'experiment' with.
Another HN post today motivated me to look up the history of British blasphemy law and it turns out it was not medieval. Criminal blasphemy laws appeared right at the end of the Middle Ages (at least in England and Wales) so are mostly modern. Before that the punishment for blasphemy was excommunication.
> I'll be frank: I have a deep mistrust of any culture present in the Arabian peninsula since about 632 CE.
Enough said. This isn’t an informed opinion
It baffles me that anyone, let alone a bunch of people, would look at this and say “ah, yes, this seems like a good place to live”.
To each their own, I guess.
And so is Hong Kong and a few other places. The question is, is that worth the cost? A cost that's mostly hidden from public view and scrutiny?
"They enslave their children's children, who make compromise with sin"
I think about that quote a lot. It sets an unachievable standard. But I don't think it's wrong.
You want to seize on a cause, go ahead. That would entail work, doing research, sending letters, something! That I could get behind; in fact, as I suggest, many of us are doing something every day. And maybe get a little weary of the warriors who respect gestures over substance.
Why does cultural relativism excuse horrors of actual modern people with access to and awareness of all modern thinking, modern technology, and modern examples of societies who achieved moral progress, but we’re perfectly comfortable saying slave owners of the past are responsible for their crimes despite being raised by slave owners in a society of slave owners embedded in a world of slave owners with a history absolutely chalk full of slave owners?
For example I think that there were relatively moral people who lived in e.g. the US and Saudi Arabia ~300 years ago and accepted slavery unquestioningly. It would have been better if they had questioned and rejected it, but I don't think they are evil for not doing so. In the modern US I think that only someone tremendously immoral would accept and participate in enslaving others.
This belief makes me a moral relativist (at least by some reasonable definitions). All the same I think I'm much closer aligned with your feelings on the morality of modern Middle Eastern society than GP.
All that to say, being a moral relativist allows you to have weird dissonant views, but it doesn't require it.
---
For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, "of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods."
If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.
- Aristotle ~350BC
---
He also made regular indirect mention of abolitionists and abolitionist causes, which have obviously existed for millennia. It's not just some coincidence that the Industrial Revolution happens and within about a century most of every country (that had benefited from said industrialization) had outlawed slavery. It's not that we became more moral, but rather it became comfortable enough to dispose with slavery. So we did, and then attributed that to "modern thinking."
But we haven't achieved moral progress.
G7/G20 countries have essentially merely physically outsourced slavery out of sight to second world factories and third world hell holes.
Through the magic of fiat money and currency exchange rates, we have deluded ourselves for half a century that we are in fact not colonizers and oppressors anymore.
Just one example are the Coltane mining wars in Congo: 1998-2008 5.2 million killed or dead from hunger (and it'd probably be higher if people hadn't more or less stopped counting after 2006). You probably didn't even know it happened,and yet millions today work at slaves to continue producing minerals for our digital comfort.
Slavery was bad. Slavery is bad. Slavery is not excused. However, frothing at the mouth with rage when speaking about the actions of another society because they don’t share the same moral values as you without thinking a step further is hollow, it is empty, it is meaningless.
Why is “modern thinking” (whatever that means) good? Why is maximum individual freedom at the expense of the whole good? I am like you, I believe in that, but if you interact with people from different cultures, you will discover that is not a belief held by everyone. For many people, individual freedom at the expense of the whole is not good and they have observed that from these “modern” societies. Look at how deeply unhappy the U.S is, the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions of people. Is limiting access to healthcare an example of “modern thinking”?
Modern thinking: things like pluralism and liberalism. These are actual ideas that emerged in the late 1800s and which are responsible for immense human thriving, immense liberation from suffering all over the world. Upstream of all political and social reform is an intellectual reform, i.e. new "thinking." I am not referring to "maximum individual freedom," and in fact this idea is fundamentally in tension with pluralism and liberalism. Maximum individual freedom at the expense of the whole is a bad idea because it yields bad outcomes, just like various forms of theocracy are bad ideas because they yield bad outcomes.
The ideas that yield expanded suffrage, expanded legal protections, expanded access to prosperity are good ideas because they produce good outcomes. Yes sure, the US/the west broadly isn't perfect, etc, but note that we can discuss all the ways in which it's broken so we can get to work fixing it. That's a good outcome and it's a critical part of the path to more good outcomes on more important dimensions.
You're not arguing that other forms get to better outcomes or whatever, you're just arguing that there's no such thing as good or bad outcomes and therefore no such thing as good or bad ideas.
Try going to Qatar or Iran and asking someone for their opinion on their heads of state. I think you'll find their reaction far more chilling than the fact that our health insurance system is broken.
A large number of immigrants opt to bring their culture with them and retain it in their host country though.
Not quite - but you do need to be a moral universalist.
Because you whenever it was intentional or not make yourself sound very racist by effectively saying "x person from y society actually like the barbarism said society has".
Comparisons of others in this case societies is crucial to make your own society better, failing to do makes us just reinforce bad ideas and what were then once local issues or small scale become systematic.
When it then is the case that your society is "better" then another society, then you can propose change or at least show why it's better in the "marketplace of ideas", the mistake of the past was that we saw our societies as inherently superior and as such bruteforcing said our way of life was seen as morally good and not tyranny.
Not giving people fundamental rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of worship is just wrong.
You are literally comparing societies.
I really don't understand what your point is.
Many citizens of Singapore are very happy as citizens of Singapore, many of them look at the west as barbaric: the crime ridden cities of the U.S, the poverty, the abject failure of western governments to protect their citizens despite very high tax rates… if killing a few criminals is the price to pay to live in a comparable utopia, so be it? What’s barbaric about a caning? The U.S. sentences people to death!
I am from the west (despite your assertion, I live in a Muslim country) and believe in very western ideals, I believe in freedom for the individual, it’s deeply ingrained in me, however, my non-academic experience has shown me that this is not a universal truth. Many cultures do not care for the individual, they care for the family, a group of people bound by blood to be one part of the whole. Many cultures believe that sacrificing oneself for the family is noble and right and that to be an individual is to be barbaric.
Once you accept that individual freedom is a western ideal, and not fundamental to the human condition, it becomes much easier to understand that other cultures are fundamentally different.
Since again then the logic of "savages will be savages because they crave it" applies.
>The American culture of kicking your children out of home the day they turn 18 is more barbaric to some than the death penalty
For proclaiming to being cultured you make an example that isn't even a cultural norm in the USA but at best a trend within American household entirely predicated on whenever or not the economic situation is suitable for such norms to even exist.
Not only that but if you actually talk with said Americans during that time I would take a gander and say that the majority of them didn't feel bothered not because "their way of life" but because it isn't inherently barbaric if it's done with good intention (independence and spreading your wings).
>Many citizens of Singapore are very happy as citizens of Singapore, many of them look at the west as barbaric: the crime ridden cities of the U.S, the poverty, the abject failure of western governments to protect their citizens despite very high tax rates… if killing a few criminals is the price to pay to live in a comparable utopia, so be it? What’s barbaric about a caning? The U.S. sentences people to death!
This is so overly reductive, first of all there are plenty of people in Singapore that do not share this idea that you are presenting that Singapore is a "comparable utopia" nor can you or they be taken serious by conflating barbarism with "crime" and "government failing to protect their citizens" (whatever this means).
And I love the whataboutism at the end.
>I am from the west (despite your assertion, I live in a Muslim country) and believe in very western ideals, I believe in freedom for the individual, it’s deeply ingrained in me, however, my non-academic experience has shown me that this is not a universal truth. Many cultures do not care for the individual, they care for the family, a group of people bound by blood to be one part of the whole. Many cultures believe that sacrificing oneself for the family is noble and right and that to be an individual is to be barbaric.
And you show this enlightenment by making such crude and clumsy argumentation spoken to the point that anyone can mistake you for making some very racist statements?
And these society that "focus on family instead of the individual" has severe issues within their societies when it comes to economic, cultural, social and political concerns that is undermining what they hold dear.
But if you want to essentially cope by proclaiming "these areas aren't important, just their quaint way of life is!" then you're only adding fuel to the fire for the people's suffering.
Even then if I were to take your argument at face value, the issue with your argument is that liberalism which is the cornerstone of individualism is not inherently against focusing on the family, instead they are concern with ensure that the individual can be free to pursue their aspirations and be free from unequal treatment in the face of society, the law and the nation... In other words you can be as "sacrificing yourself for the family" as you want.
Individual freedom comes out of the necessity of it existing not from idealistic daydreaming, thousands had to sacrifice their lives to give their future (family) the individual freedoms the people can all enjoy equally.
This line of thought can be traced all the way through to the modern day, and obviously well up to abolition.
There's really not much evidence at all that slaveholders saw their activities the way you describe ("necessary evil"). There's no evidence that we first had a necessity for slavery and then obviated it through automation. In fact, automation in the Americas increased demand on the labor of enslaved people.
If there was any external triggering event of abolition, it'd have been Darwin's On The Origin of Species and contemporaneous breakthroughs in science that destroyed the philosophical foundations that slavery was built upon (natural god-given supremacy, as Aristotle believed).
The abolitionist movement was an intellectual and moral one, through and through. You can just read the writings of abolitionists to hear what convinced them into their positions.
But it never remained abolished because of a simple logical problem you run into. The reality of the world - past, present, and future - is that stronger powers dominate weaker powers -- the same reality upon which Aristotle based his cognitive dissonance. And so so long as slavery provided a significant material benefit, powers that embraced slavery would dominate those that did not. And that dominance would inevitably lead to the institution (or reinstitution) of slavery in the weaker powers. The British Empire and its spread of slavery around the globe is but one of many examples.
So you saw this regular flip flopping. One ideologically minded leader would end slavery, only for it to come back later. What changed with the industrial revolution is that the latest end of slavery no longer had any particularly negative consequences, instead we saw the exact opposite. Countries that abolished slavery, which was primarily a rural/plantation based phenomena, actually started to grow exceptionally rapidly on the back of the emerging systems of industrial wage labor, while rural and plantation style production became less and less economically relevant. Slavery had become obsolete.
---
There's some interesting parallels with slavery and modern day conscriptions. A country locks up its borders, prevents people from leaving, starts forcibly conscripting them into the military, gives them a gun, and sends them off to die. This is utterly barbaric, and most people would agree with such. Yet it remains a thing, and will remain a thing for the foreseeable future, for the exact same reason that slavery was perpetuated.
Countries that turn to conscription will be more powerful than those that don't. When this reality becomes no longer true (perhaps due to war becoming more mechanical in nature) we'll certainly finally abolish this barbaric behavior, and then claim it's due to some 'greater moral understanding', as if people alive today can't see with their own two eyes what an unnatural and abhorrent behavior this is. Of course we can! But trying to permanently stop something that's a significant means to power is like trying to stop a train by walking in front of it.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
I will argue that by many standards, what we view as barbaric has better outcomes. Have you met a Singaporean? I disagree with their criminal justice system (as I do the U.S. but I rank Singapore’s as “worse”) and yet it has better outcomes for the majority of its citizens by most measures. Are they the measures you and I care about? Probably not, because to you and I, hanging someone for using heroin is not a fair price to be paid for a lower crime rate and higher GDP, but that’s a moral judgement, not some objective “modern” absolute. If you don’t value human life above all else (which many cultures don’t) then killing a few drug addicts a year to make life for millions of others better, that’s inconsequential — and excellent “modern” thinking about doing the most good!
If you can’t imagine why the bad of anti-lgbt sentiment is far outweighed by the good of community-spirit from an anti-lgbt religion then you’re not considering “outcomes”.
I am saying that there are countless dimensions that matter, and there are better and worse locations along those dimensions.
On the dimension of drug addiction rates, Singapore is doing better than the US. On the dimension of personal liberties, Singapore is doing worse than the US.
This observation is not a counter argument to my position, it’s a disproof of yours.
Saying we cannot make value judgments about these things implies we cannot justifiably take action that would nudge us into a different location along any of these different dimensions. How could you possibly decide to change things if there’s no such thing as a better, more preferable possible future state?
Here’s a gut check: are you comfortable with your moral system landing you solidly in the “let’s allow slavery” camp in the 1800s? After all, the disagreement between slave holders and abolitionists was one of culture and opinions, and as we know now there’s no such thing as a better or worse position to hold on such matters. Does that moral system seem like a good one to you?
I hope I wouldn't need to say it, but for the record: I oppose slavery. I oppose gender based discrimination. I oppose sexuality based discrimination. I oppose racism. I oppose the death penalty. I oppose drug criminalisation. I oppose the American prison system. I oppose the smug western superiority complex about our behaviour being "modern" or the "best" or "ahead" of the rest of the world. I oppose referring to Saudi Arabia as "not modern" (or backwards or whatever term is in right now) which I believe is patronising and a view reserved for those without the willingness to be introspective.
For the oppressed gay man in Saudi Arabia, there's a gay man homeless on the streets of the United States, dying from neglect, after being kicked out of their home as a teenager by their Christian fundamentalist parents, thrown to the mercy of a society that couldn't care less about them. Let's put them on a spectrum, how many points is "dying homeless on the streets of America because of being gay" compared to "can't be openly gay in Saudi Arabia"? How many points for "robbed on the streets of San Francisco for the 8th time" when compared to "can leave valuables out in public without concern because there's so little crime in Singapore"?
If your vision for a better world starts with disparaging Saudi Arabia, I fear you are deeply uninspired and will not have the impact on the world that you could have if you instead focused on yourself and your culture. I also hope someday you appreciate the irony of you having worked for Palantir of all companies while talking about moral superiority of the west. I wonder where Peter Thiel would land on our Spectrum Of Moral Superiority. Actually, I don't want to know, let me live another day without reading a defence of that ghoul.
I said that you'd land on the conclusion of allowing it, presumably despite your own personal preferences. Many people who opposed abolition also personally opposed slavery, but used arguments identical to yours to oppose action against slavery. The lack of action would've, obviously, allowed slavery to persist indefinitely.
Can you explain how (or if) your moral system would prevent you from landing on that conclusion? It's a simple question that doesn't depend on theatrics to ask nor answer.
My question to you is, do you believe the United Arab Emirates is more righteous than the United States? According to many measures of "goodness" like the Human Development Index (and the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index) the United Arab Emirates is a more "good" place than the United States and therefore, in your view of comparable righteousness, the United Arab Emirates is a more righteous place? Yet, the United Arab Emirates is, to many westerners (including myself and I am sure you) a place of many moral ills (including one of the most heinous: slavery). Do you believe that on your multi-dimensional most-good morality spectrum the United Arab Emirates out ranks the United States?
I'll answer that for you: no, you don't. And deep beneath this facade of objective morality, you know that morality is so deeply ingrained in your cultural upbringing that you cannot sincerely state that the United Arab Emirates is more righteous than the United States, and that regardless of what any measure, whether it's one dimension or many dimensional, whether it's black and white or a spectrum, regardless of what that measure says, nothing is above your sense of what is right and what is wrong.
Not clear what point you’re arguing against by saying “HDI says UAE is good yet you don’t agree with it!” Why on earth would I defer full moral judgment to HDI?
I never claimed my moral system is objective, so I’m also not sure what facade you’re referring to.
Not something that directly concerns me, but I'm personally more worried about restrictions on freedom of speech, but regardless not somewhere I'd be willing to live (I currently do live in Switzerland).
These laws are also pretty much never enforced in UAE, as far as I understand.
https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/united-arab-emirate...
They are never enforced, until you become a target, then you're arrested and charged with a list violations.
I mean, we do this too, to some degree. But this is naive.
This one is better: a woman in UAE went to the doctor(gynecologist) and ended up in jail because doctor found out she is pregnant but not married.
In many American states a raped woman has to carry her rapist off spring to term
In America black people are significantly over represented in jails, poverty, illiteracy, single parent families.
I’m sure the 5 largest western democracies have similar issues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_rape has some more examples.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Alexandre_Robert
A number of particularly nasty elements to the response—including that the authorities knew that one of the rapists carried HIV, and had previously segregated him in custody to prevent him spreading the virus to other prisoners, but they fabricated medical tests to the contrary and lied to the boy’s family.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fact-coalition-report-us-money-...
Which is also excellent not just for stealing, but also for murder. Half a year ago a German-born Pole killed a family in a car crash and run away to UAE.[0] They tried to extradit him but without success.
[0] https://bnnbreaking.com/breaking-news/accidents/suspected-fa...
If you look into it you'll find that it's a nice marketplace for israeli oligarchs running operations in DR Congo, e.g. for diamonds which Israel exports unexpected amounts of, and you'll also find that the Rapid Support Forces/Janjaweed in Sudan are buddies of the UAE. Unlike Switzerland the UAE is quite aggressive militarily, e.g. occupying part of Yemen.
Funny you mention Switzerland because they have some of the highest skilled labor in the world.
The Gulf countries have more than enough expertise to manage and run their wealth for the foreseeable future. To say they’ll be poor again without oil is simply ignorant of the facts and probably related to the point I made above.
I wanted to reply "But Sheikh Mohammed himself said so!" but then trying to back up my claim I realized it's false. [0] It's amazing how many false things we take for granted just because they align with our world-view (and make a good story).
[O] https://factcheck.afp.com/sheikh-mohammed-did-not-say-great-...
There are all kinds of promises when times are good, that change as soon as the economic winds change. This project is more evidence of that.
Yes, this is how you compare populations.
This project was a side project and always has been. Its success or lack thereof has very little to do with the overall financial position of the country.
But I wouldn’t somehow think it’s accurate or acceptable to claim Greeks are all lazy and rude.
You may assert it but morality is not defined by or measured in outcomes, morality is a cultural product. If your moral system is not objective, if your moral system is a culturally-influenced personal belief in what is right and wrong, it is totally incoherent to say that Saudi Arabia has not made moral progress or that they have not used "modern thinking" because by their moral standards they have, and by their moral standards you (and I) are the immoral.
If you'd like to compare the United States to Saudi Arabia on human rights, press freedom, education, crime, freedom of religion, gender discrimination, do that. They have outcomes that we can measure, and don't worry, they're influenced by morality, so you can still pass judgement.
Formally documented de jure discrimination is hardly the only available approach. For example, the term "grandfather clause" stems from Southern states applying severe voter restrictions (poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.) but exempting anyone whose ancestors had the right to vote on a particular pre-Civil War date.
Functionally? Permitted poor/uneducated whites but not blacks to vote without ever mentioning a race in the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinn_v._United_States
"No person shall be registered as an elector of this state or be allowed to vote in any election held herein, unless he be able to read and write any section of the Constitution of the state of Oklahoma; but no person who was, on January 1, 1866, or any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under any form of government, or who at that time resided in some foreign nation, and no lineal descendant of such person, shall be denied the right to register and vote because of his inability to so read and write sections of such Constitution."
It's not possible to run a functioning country (which SA undeniably is) without a large number of people who are at least somewhat competent, at least somewhat hardworking, and at least somewhat loyal to the country. You may be able to rely on cheap migrant workers for the hard physical labor, but not for the planning and administration that makes the whole thing work.
The oil money printer can hide a lot of problems. A small percentage of somewhat competent people aren't guaranteed to be able to provide for a huge number of useless freeloaders if the gravy train stops. Look at Venezuela for a somewhat similar situation.
Main export of Israel: https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/diamonds/repo...
Local presentation of mining sites: https://en.israelidiamond.co.il/wikidiamond/diamond-mining-m...
Some historical background and interesting sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_industry_in_Israel
As mentioned, reading up on Dan Gertler is a good idea too.
Sudan complaining recently about foreign involvement: https://sudantribune.com/article283888/
If you look into Omar al-Bashir's 'career' you'll likely find it enlightening about the degree of Gulf involvement in Sudan. The Gulf states are really, really good at PR, they can afford the biggest, most efficient firms to run it for them, but there are a lot of books about the colonial history in the region and how trade and economics have evolved over the last century.
The strategically importantly located island of Socotra has a really interesting history, lots of pirates and stuff. Since 2018 UAE is occupying it and lately Yemen news sources have claimed that Israel is in on it, and the US DoD has been asked whether they're there too. Starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Emirates_takeover_...