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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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
Train racing. No I will not elaborate.
with multi-track drifting of course
I’m listening
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.
Run some ultrahigh voltage DC power lines with it and have a hemisphere wide electric grid
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!
Virtual drug test dummies. I would commission huge banks of supercomputers to simulate the human body for rapid drug tests and general research, and dump money on quantum computing. Idk if this counts as a crank project but it would definitely be immense.
The former already exists, but our knowledge of biology and medicine is still very, very poor.
You’d need to massively increase the investment in and workforce for basic science first
Yeah it’s gotta be a package deal. But I also think sufficiently powerful simulations can help fill gaps in our knowledge.
Current efforts are pretty rudimentary, afaik.
Bringing streetcars and trams back to as many roads as logistically possible
My crank project would be a vast public domain and publicly owned version of the Library of Congress, for literature, movies, shows, games, and pretty much any and all media in danger of being lost to time, copyright bullshit, tax write-off skullduggery, or the like. A big part of that project would be attempts to retrieve and restore media that is already considered lost.
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…
The destruction of all white settlements in desert areas and summar execution of sundown towners
i would build everything that would give my granddaughter a better life
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
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.
Offworlding all industry?
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.
We’ve been deorbiting humans for half a century, it’s presumably easier for toasters.
The real challenge is speeding things up to escape the gravity, not nearly as easy compared to slowing them down. 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.
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.
The Culture.
get this every street by law must have a sign saying its street name
also in the same vein as getting rid of the French influences from English I would make the way people in Norfolk speak the official correct way of pronouncing English that or the west country accent so we all sound like pirates
get this every street by law must have a sign saying its street name
I don’t know if it’s a legal requirement, but the percentage of streets with name signs (sometimes even explanations of the name, such as “G. Gool, 18XX-19XX, painter”) is very high. It’s actually handy for memorizing city layouts. Also number signs on buildings in Poland sometimes have street names on them. It’s not as ubiquitous as in Italy, but it’s Handy.
Buy out the ozempic patent and deliver it to every obese person
I need more info
I wager that many obese people are insecure about their bodies. Giving them a drug to lose weight would potentially bring them happiness, lead to better socialization, less physical disability and comorbid diseases, alleviating the healthcare industry burden. Skinnier people touch grass more, run marathons, etc
Semaglutide has an off-label use as a weight-loss aid. It is effective. However, if you’re in the US, it’ll cost you like $1000/month because your insurance won’t cover it for that reason.
I don’t think anywhere has approved it purely for weight loss either, it’s just getting some off-label prescriptions, and there was a mini-crisis where 95% of the ozempic prescriptions in North America were being written by a single doctor in Nova Scotia, and then distributed by mail pharmacies across Canada to US buyers.
Thanks
I mean better than charging out the ass for it but if you’re supreme ruler couldn’t you just fix the food supply to not be so terrible for you? when you stop taking that stuff you gain the weight back, and it has not insignificant side effects
Yikes that sounds like communism
Night trains from everywhere to everywhere would be neat. Including neat sleeping cabins so that the population of the world can migrate by climate phases and joy.
But since I played openttd make it river canals and ships that are trolley boats.
They’re a relic of the cold war even here in Europe. Only ÖBB runs night passenger trains covering mostly Germany, Austria (since ÖBB = Austrian Federal Railways) and Northern Italy.
In many cases, due to cuts, ran-like-a-business principles, understaffing and underinvestment, here in Germany it can be hard to get anywhere by train after 9 PM. Bus Night lines are more common, but that’s a big city thing.
A fellow Openttd player! Post a screenshot!
Here’s one of mine:
