My megaproject ideas are mostly pretty standard. I'd build a high speed rail network across North America, and build and expand metro and regional rail systems in and around every city. I'd turn all cities and suburbs into fifteen-minute cities. I'd decommodify housing, and build ten million units of public/social/non-market housing, mostly three bedroom units. I'd link those last three policies together by building TODs around the new Metro and rail stops. And I'd build bicycle networks in every town and city and connect them to the TODs. I'd build bridges and walkways across skyscrapers. I'd put a bidet in every American toilet (uses less water than toilet paper apart from being more comfortable). Fiber internet in every home. A heat pump in every home. An induction stove in every kitchen. Phase out fossil fuels and power everything with Pumped Storage Hydropower and Geothermal. I'd make the US go Metric.
But my truly crazy, obsessive idea would be to bring back the French Revolutionary calendar. Or I'd purge all French influences from English.
We’re bringing back Roman bath houses and including spots to nap in public there in case you have like an hour and a half gap between things you have to do but it’s too far to go home. Really just more public space investment
I would go hard on pushing public nudity as fine. I don't want to be naked in public but human bodies are normal and nothing to he ashamed of.
Americans would fucking hate it but they'll get over it.
Hell yeah unironically. Nudity is literally just not wearing clothes and is not worth being embarrassed about.
The Home, WA anarchist commune fell apart because of conflict between "the nudes and the prudes." You're playing with fire, be careful.
That said, you can't signify rank or class with clothing if no one wears clothing. Uphold anarcho-naturalist thought.
The extent to which North Americans, among others, are absolutely incapable of being normal about nudity is disheartening in the extreme.
I don't consider normalizing nudity a crank position. Honestly I think it's going to end up being an essential part of feminism at some point, desexualizing and destigmatizing the body outside of sexual contexts. And it's 100% achievable. Nudity taboos are entirely cultural and vary widely over time and across cultures.
Lithium in the water supply makes a dent in the suicide numbers, but it's been a long time since I was crazy enough to put real thought into it.
Putting lithium salts into the water supply maybe isn't actually the worst idea in the world. It definitely would need more study in terms of how this might impact people taking medications which interact poorly with lithium.
I think the real answer is that people need better access to mental healthcare.
Weird, I used to take lithium on prescription and I'm like 80% water.
humans aren't 80% water in the same way a nearly full glass of water is.
Okay but that lithium pill isn't going to set a nearly full glass of tapwater on fire either
it's probably not pure lithium. And also it only burns in proportion to the amount of lithium you put in but lithium and water causes a fire
plus anti-depressants have side effects and medication can interact with other medicine people take so probably just make anti-depressants freely available but you need to get them from a pharmacist is the best way
Lithium in pharmacology specifically refers to lithium salts, usually lithium carbonate or lithium citrate. It's not elemental lithium but it is still just called lithium, regardless of which salt is prescribed. Clarification is usually done by specifying a brand example for generics.
we told you about throwing car batteries in the ocean
we fuckin told you dawg
High speed rail running the 'spine' of the americas - people should be able to go from Alaska to the far end of Chille and not need to transfer (although one imagines a number of stops along the way)
obviously, this would also be paired with a lot more freight rail, with the goal of eliminating as much intra-americas cargo voyages as possible. Really, that would be the true aim of the project, but the high-speed passenger line would be the forward face of it.
Tubes!
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All mail (letters and small items) to be delivered by a pneumatic tube systems. Civilian tubes are free. Business post cost increases considerably so only important things are sent. I don't want fifteen tubes landing a day with junk mail in them. Parcels to be delivered by traditional post people, but better compensated and with less punishing rounds thanks to lower amounts of corporate mail.
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New tunnels beneath water to be made of indestructable glass like an aquarium. Other policies will have reduced pollution and helped rewild the rivers and oceans for more to see. More underwater tube tunnels to be built to reduce reliance on planes and boats.
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Vertical mega-gardens/farms in transparent towers. Tops extend upward to save space and capture sunlight, bottoms extend downward for natural geothermal warming to reduce energy consumption. Different ambient temperatures based on geothermal depth would allow for growing plants and produce native to different climates. No more shipping flowers or fruit across the planet! More tall green towers! See argriculture happen in real time!
I didn't mean to honestly critique your ideas I just couldn't let this setup go to waste
Aquarium glass isn't indestructible, it's just really thick acrylic. Large aquarium panels may be as much as 60cm/24 inch thick. They're rated to a certain level of pressure they can safely hold, and if the water was to go too much higher (as it might in a flood if it was in a lake or river) they will break.
Also, even if your river or lake has no pollution, you're not going to see too much, sediment, algae, and other natural aspects of the aquatic environment will cloud you from seeing the fish who won't want to hang out near the scary tunnel if they can avoid it.
I'm aware really. It seems I wasn't treating the post with the seriousness that people here expected.
Valid. I do like the idea of futurama tubes though. Sounds fun!
I was tempted to suggest those too, but selfishly I get vertigo so my travelling through transparent tubes is limited to aquariums and nonsense future tunnels.
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This is conpletely serious but definitely a crank answer:
Create a network of Greenways on the scale of our railroads and interstates, carving out huge swaths of cities and connecting every state and national forest and park.
Then maintain the ecological integrity of these Greenways by making practical indigenous land management and foraging mandatory topics in schools.
I will also maintain a small army of engineers to run clean, running water through the greenways (for handwashing) as well as an army of pilots and EMTs to make sure the Greenway dwellers have access to modern medical infrastructure.
Again, I am completely serious.
Then maintain the ecological integrity of these Greenways by making practical indigenous land management and foraging mandatory topics in schools
seems like it would be more practical to just have civil service jobs to maintain them and teach how to maintain them to people that take the job
Part of the point of this project is to allow people to opt out of "having a job." The dichotomy between work and leisure is underexamined and imo leads a lot of people towards unhealthy self denial and compartmentalization.
Additionally, the division of labor where each person is not a human who sometimes does ecological restoration, but an ecologist is foundational to class division (at least in Marx). By attacking those divisions and allowing people to heard sheep in the morning and write criticism by night, without ever becoming a heardsman ot a critic, we can attack the very foundations of class society.
Finally, by training everyone to be in relationship with ecological systems, we create a system where everyone has a stake in preventing ecocide. It would be a thorough preventative against the kind of ecological crisis we're in now
I see that point but also people do need to learn how to do certain jobs. I can't just go be a brain surgeon one morning. Or a herdsman if one morning no one decides to be a herdsman guess what we just lost all the sheep they wandered off. Ecology is also a complicated thing that might require specialised training, some form of regulation to make sure people don't abuse natural resources corruptly etc. Also if there is ecocide then we all die there is already a stake it's just that capitalism doesn't work with those kinds of concerns
and also I'm not convinced that do it whenever you feel like it is a very good way of making sure necessary things get done. The thing about work is that it takes labour to ensure that food is grown and delivered, water is extracted etc and therefore society needs to allocate that work granted a lot of work now is unecessary but the necessary work will always need to be alloted ideally in ways that are fair and maybe automation could cut down on the amount needed
I think you're confusing a bunch of distinct concepts.
Like, a job has so much that goes into it: a wage, time boundaries, a management structure, etc.
There's also other parts of a job that can be done without those things: the actual (re)productive activity, the skills associated with it. Like, you can be a landscaper as a job, or you can keep a garden.
You don't clock in to gardening, you don't report your progress to a boss, you don't get paid for it.
There's also multiple avenues for learning things. Many people learn cooking and auto maintenance in their families. People go to language learning clubs. People pick up skills on the job. People go to school. There's nothing that says that skilling needs to be in service to a job.
"Jobs" and markets are the current ways of organizing (re)productive activity in our society, but that's historically contingent.
In Marx, neither Jobs nor markets appear in his descriptions of communism. Indigenous people have and still use ritual do do certain productive activities such as controlled burns or salmon harvests. Many anarchist projects run on a volunteer basis. On the darker side, serfdom and slavery have appeared as alternatives to jobs
Insisting on the persistence of Jobs is to insist on an incomplete break with capitalism.
Use elevated monorails for your mass transit solution so you can run transit over the greenways with minimal impact at the ground level!
I love it! Isn't regular rail more efficient though? Both can be elevated. Or are we talking monorail just for thr retro future vibes?
your proposals are all quite nice but none of them would knowingly ecocide half a continent & cost/generate more power than has ever been used by humanity for the simple goal of refilling the LA River
oh yeah, its NAWAPA TIME
Show
at least crop out the ifunny watermark if you're going to repost from those shitters.
Why would I put effort in to posting a Screencap of a years-old Twitter post?
Don't you leave us hanging like that. Copy the relevant paragraph from wikipedia so I don't have to google
"The environmental damage that would be caused by that damned thing can't even be described. It would cause as much harm as all of the dam-building we have done in a hundred years."
"the hydrologic anti-Christ"
"the most outlandish water development scheme to emerge in the past 50 years"
The power demands for pumping this amount of water over such obstacles would be more nuclear and hydroelectric power than yet exists in north america, the excavations so titanic that civil engineering grade nuclear explosives were proposed.
I’m in. I don’t even understand why we would do it or what the ultimate implications would be. I just want something to believe in, and this is worthy.
Sure, but think of how many more desert golf courses we could have!
conquering gravity, water, and distance, destroying the yukon and northwestern territories for these treasures most sublime: cheap water for californian cash crops & golfcourses
My crank project is a massive geoengineering project to restore Lake Megachad and then expand it beyond its previous greatest extent to create Lake Gigachad
the orbital solar condenser + ground based collection disk from simcity 3000. like normal solar power but spicier
There is no problem that cannot be simultaneously solved and made cooler by the unmatched power of the sun.
I'm definately in the Orbital Solar Power camp of madcap dictator projects
Besides telecom and pure exploration, this is the only reason to actually go to space at all.
I have serious doubts we'll ever come close to a space elevator.(or launch loop or rotovator or unobtainium of the week) Which tends to raise a lots of questions as to how exactly we'll ship ballistic toasters.
Power is easy. Masers and rectenna arrays have decently good conversion rates and are light, cheap, and dont require slowing down 11km/s loads of space kipple.
You'd need to launch an astonishing amount lot of equipment to offworld power production, which is why you'd develop a space industry in the first place.
Agreed, you'd need an astonishing amount of equipment to do anything up there. Which is why i can't imagine a logistics system on both sides of the gravity well for finished goods ever making sense. Heat shields & parachutes only get you so far when you start scaling up from a several people in a hollow capsule to bulk freight loads. Retrobraking adds a gas tax that scales with the rocket equation.
Any tech you have for making a self-contained, pollution-sequestering factory in orbit could probably be built on the ground a whole lot easier and cheaper. Which is why i dont think we'll end up having orbital factories without a scifi-ass megastructures or nuclear rocket engines & the headaches they bring.
But we'll probably keep slinging shit into orbit for a long time. Panels are cheap & getting lighter. Mirrors are cheaper & lighter still, and can multiply the effect of panels you have. And its all scaleable and implementable with current tech. Yeah, you're never going to off-world all power production with beamed solar this way, but it's a workable vanity project.
I'd make all detached single-family homes near an urban center illegal and start replacing them all with a combination of low-rise attached units for families, and apartment complexes for people without kids (notionally, I'm fine with some intermixing). Make sure that there are services and amenities within walking distance of all newly-densified housing, and run bus service and light rail everywhere. Then I'd ban private vehicles anywhere within view of a skyscraper. You will live in a pleasant, walkable community with greenspace and accessible services, or you will be sent to the reeducation camps.
Also, big bronze statue in a park. Big enough to provide ample shade to park goers in the summer.
Let's be real, your crank project would be designing the Silicon Valley gulag
Where's the crank part? We can just put a wall around it and make it one of those closed cities they stuffed politically compromised scientists into to work.
The Walled City of Silicon. Fake VCs dispensing fake money for fake web3/crypto/blockchain projects to keep these guys docile and happy. Actually we wouldn't have to change anything..
I'd start math education with formal logic, elementary number theory, and mathematical language in the first grade. That way everyone has a chance to actually understand the math they're expected to manipulate in high school.
I would bring big efforts to resurrect the Irish language by having all sporting events, news broadcasts etc in Irish, having Irish be taught in school before English, having social events where people are expected to speak Irish etc. However this would merely be a Trojan horse for my real goal: slyly take out gendered pronouns from Irish and have everyone's pronouns be gender neutral by default, and only otherwise if specified.
It should be obvious that I'm Irish but we can apply this to any Anglophone country. England speaks Irish now, fuck you
A truman show-esque reality TV program, where donald trump is planted as a regional manager of a small chain restaurant and monitored 24/7.
