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.
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Train racing. No I will not elaborate.
I’m listening
with multi-track drifting of course
Create a large network of state and/or cooperatively owned cannabis farms to mass-produce hemp for industrial purposes, and every strain of quality marijuana known to man. You think the weed’s too strong these days? That’s ok, the state will devote its resources to developing 10% THC strains that taste like a gourmet meal. You want to be sent to the moon? Why yes, there will be 99.9% pure concentrate oils widely available.
Just as the USSR had an alcohol ration, there will be a mids ration available for all. Any unclaimed rations will be distributed to the gulags to forcibly pacify political prisoners. While high and marginally more open-minded, they will be made to play video games where every character is a black lesbian and all the messaging is based on post-colonial theory. Only after their daily shift constructing and tending the farms is finished, of course.
Any questions?
Also linen! Massive state linen and wool production so no one ever has to wear cotton, the shittiest fiber, again!
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.
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Community cafeterias. 1 caf per x (tbd) population.
- informed by national-level dietary guidelines
- very receptive to local neighborhood dietary preferences and encouraged to develop specialties
- worker controlled
- kitchen teams could swap/guest in other neighborhoods to mix things up
- you can go to cafs in other neighborhoods but there would probably be some system to anticipate demand to avoid over/under prepping (like you have a home caf but you can make reservation at another one?)
You can eat there or get take out.
Benefits:
- less food waste
- don’t have to waste time shopping, chopping, cooking and cleaning when you don’t want to
- will not have insane “chef” centered kitchen cultures, unless everyone working there votes in favour of this for some reason
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.
Just put battery in your water supply
your BRAIN EELS need to be RECHARGED
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.
Yeah that would solve quite a bit.
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
I guess I would go huge in on wetlands revitalization in order to have more cute frogs to look at. I would also hire a team of experts to come up with justifications as to why our society required me having a real life Gundam.
I’m too media obsessed for me to fantasize about things that aren’t using the position to mandate certain pieces of media be made. Which is kinda dumb so dont put me in power.
Sponge Cities!
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.
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.
I feel like there would be a crimewave of public wanking
Hell yeah unironically. Nudity is literally just not wearing clothes and is not worth being embarrassed about.
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.
The GDR already beat you to it
what’s that quote on women’s satisfaction with sex in the GDR?
The extent to which North Americans, among others, are absolutely incapable of being normal about nudity is disheartening in the extreme.
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!
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.
prime example is that 82ft fish tank that exploded in Germany
Garbage tubes too!
Imo not only the tubes sound like garbage, all his ideas do
Almost as though I was having a bit of silly fun, but hey ho.
I didn’t mean to honestly critique your ideas I just couldn’t let this setup go to waste
Fair enough. I wasn’t offended, its cool.
Dahir Insaat presents…
With a bit of Gerry Anderson to boot.
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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
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
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.
Oh man this also involves Project Plowshare?
I think this is my favorite
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?
i’m listening
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.
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?
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.
the orbital solar condenser + ground based collection disk from simcity 3000. like normal solar power but spicier
I’m definately in the Orbital Solar Power camp of madcap dictator projects
There is no problem that cannot be simultaneously solved and made cooler by the unmatched power of the sun.
Besides telecom and pure exploration, this is the only reason to actually go to space at all.
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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.
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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.
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
Now that is a crank prject i can get behind.
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.
