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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
big train
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’ll put chemicals in the water to make the
frogseveryone gayand more dog infrastructure
and retirement homes for cows
superheroes are illegal now
fursonas are mandatory
free kalashnikovs for the unemployed
mao gets beatified
make werewolves real
drag the moon closer
The Culture.
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…
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.
oh and trains, I guess, space trains
Ban lawns. Like, completely. No more lawns. Having one is a punishable offense. I want children to report their parents on this matter. Merciless enforcement. EVERYONE with ground space MUST have a garden.
One of my not-crank i will actually do this if you fools let me wield power projects is evacuating the suburbs in to high density city cores, mining the burbs for useful materials, the bulldozing them for use as crop lands, light industry, and whatever else is acceptable to have near cities.
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.
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.
I’m definately in the Orbital Solar Power camp of madcap dictator projects
Arcologies. Entire cities built into single, massive complexes.
give them big spider legs too
