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Comment by jelliclesfarm | Hacker News Reader

I am torn between shaking my fists at the ‘oligarchs’ and going ‘well done, boys!’.

I would do the same if I had a billion dollars or two to spare. The future is city states and networked small towns of 10k mixed population ..use the same seed idea as the Dunbar Number. Fwiw, I have already designed such cities for my own amusement with high density housing in 10% of the total land and the remaining as forests and food producing acres..underground tunnels for intra city transport and above ground, self driving cars and efficient public transport(maglev)…

it will be a three tiered city with skyscrapers, underground city and ground infrastructure. Etc etc.

What’s the point of being a billionaire if you can’t even build your own city?

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>>Whats the point of being a billionare if you cant even build your own city?

Are you even hearing yourself? Cities existed before billionares did. Society existed before pricks with god complexes started thinking that order and society organized the other way around.

Get off from Rand. Learn some actual history.

It’s not God complex. Society doesn’t come into existence by itself in hunter-gathering time. It starts off with someone self-identifying as the chief/shaman and who is socially approved.

Starting a small settlement / community is not a small feat. It requires lots of organizing top-level-down. And then fast forwards million of years later we have religions and government and we start paying taxes without asking lots of questions while also taking everything for granted.

Religions and governments were considered a progressive thing 2000 years ago. But then gradually in the past 100 years we started to see disentanglement between these two. And now we are here.

And now we are starting enter the aeon of AI. Now it is good time to fix many real-world problems.

> Society doesn’t come into existence by itself in hunter-gathering time.

Ummmmm… like how do you think cities got started?

There's no single answer. Most of them did indeed get started organically, but some got started by dukes who were in the city starting business:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zähringen

Some got started by Roman Emperors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augsburg

Some got started by a country wanting a new capital:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasília

And some grew organically, but were at some point or other subject to a massive master plan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...

https://thegreatestgrid.mcny.org

Sure all that is true but this guy was asserting that cities didn’t just come about organically, when… well a lot of them did lol.

So you think cities and villages just magically got built because people would come together and interact like some kind of brownian motion?

I already laid down my arguments from an anthropological perspective. There was something very special about the past 2000~4000 years (since the beginning of stone age 3 million year ago, and anatomically modern humans 300,000 years ago) and that is why at the year 2024AD, things have progressed into the current state. (Or why have we not progressed faster as a civilization/species?)

It's about cost and the sustaining of people's attention and work. Even for communities that started so to speak "organically", they would have dependency on some form of leadership at some points, if not throughout, or it would not be self-sustainable and grow to scale up e.g. into a village/city.

There are a lot of assertions in your post. Again, take an anthro class or at least read about the origin of cities.

Hell, we don’t even know if all the early ones were inhabitated year round. Nor do we know if many of the early cities required “leadership” in any real way.

Also, there may be more ways to measure “progress” than you’re aware of. Depending on the metric you choose… we may not be doing as well as you’d think.

Is this Steven Pinker’s nephews HN account?

you are totally missing the point. whatever. At this point none-technical discussion on HN has become almost like reddit.

What are you talking about?

This actually is a technical discussion.

You’re asserting things about the formation of cities that aren’t just unknown or mysterious, you’re asserting things that are patently untrue, then upset when someone calls you out for it lol. How Reddit is that?

You’re saying, “cities require strong leadership, planning, cost, and sustaining people’s attention, and work.” (To roughly paraphrase). I’m saying, “that’s not necessarily true, we don’t know enough about this to assert this. You should read some more about it or take an anthropology class.”

This is a highly technical subject, it’s just not one about computers or math or physics. Like, for some early cities we are unsure if they were even inhabited year round, for some cities it appears that there was absolutely no leadership. Maybe megalopolises requires strong central authority but I’m not so sure.

Even if you spend $8b and start your own version of Fordlandia you still may not succeed at building utopia because how do you maintain things how “you want them” when people like me exist who will try to flaunt your rules? Violence?

At this point it sounds like I'm talking to gpt3.5 with the system prompt as "angry troll on the internet". Won't be surprised if I am.

If you are not a chatbot, here is my advice after reading this incoherent thing you wrote: go work on something to make the change you want to see in your life.

It saddens me that discussions on HN are now turning into dumpster fire like this.

You aren’t entitled to have people agree with you on the internet - especially when you don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re just making wild claims about society.

I disagree with you, but sure “I’m a chat bot.” This conversation saddens you? Lol, ok. That clearly elevates the discourse.

I don’t care if someone on the internet agrees with me. It saddens me to see more and more trolls on HN.

I’m not a troll - I just think you’re wrong. Everyone who disagrees with you is not a troll. Get over yourself.

So ..basically..repeat what has been done before and has failed?

I live in California. We need private citizens with god complex who can do better than a govt with a god complex.

The domed city trope is coming to life.

Usually a metaphor for physical separation of classes. The rabble have to deal with the environmental consequences of the elite's abuse of the planet, the elite shut themselves in.

Of course that's not what's happening here, it is the shining elite leading us to a better model of civilization! Right?

Yeah, the article reads like a “late stage capitalism” vs nasty nimby localism.

On one hand I don’t like the idea that a lot of land end up in hands of a small group of people, but on the other hand the accusation that they are tearing apart the community is a little weird, given than they have not started building anything yet. And most of land around Travis AFB is prairie, so used for grazing.

On top of that the lawsuit they filed against farmers is weird. Did they try to intimidate them into selling or got screwed by an alleged price fixing?

I fully agree, although it's a great way to quickly lose your billionaire status. Only the greatest of billionaires could afford to build an underground railway system for a city and still have money left to build some apartment buildings for people to live in them.

Only a couple of them on the entire earth could pull it off probably. One of them has already done 3 similarly grandiose things and is now dabbling with social media. One of them is in his party on a yacht fase. One of them is starting to get a bit geriatric but also has always cared more about the people on the planet than the planet itself. And one of them seems to be on an internal journey discovering his masculinity.

There's a couple more for sure, but I guess they're not in the media enough for me to know what their excuses are.

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