Karmic justice requires this project to be crushed by the sand that these arrogant dictators tried to impose their steel dick over.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/03/un-rights-expe...
It's a small number of people, who are opposing known tyrants, foolishly. The ruling class can kill and enslave, at will. The indentured servitude imposed on thousands of immigrants who built and maintain it, is much more concerning imo.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...
It's a barbaric country. US support has created another blemish on US history. Was it worth it to ensure safe seas to enable global commercialism, which kept most of the world stable for decades? I do not, but I'll never be in charge either way.
I also see a link to https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/04/i... to the left of that text on that page
Perhaps it's just me, but I don't see scaling down a project as karmic retribution for murder.
The Saudis announced six megaprojects in 2005. King Abdullah Economic City was the only one that went anywhere. I believe it was supposed to have 2 million people and reached about 7 thousand.
They've kicked people out of the area, killed at least one person, trashed the area with initial construction efforts (I've driven past) and now the inevitable seems to be coming to pass already.
They still have time but they need to do something to diversify from oil in the way Dubai has eventually. Building a new Dubai, with a different legal framework (only rumoured for Neom AFAIK), doesn't seem like the worst idea to me, but starting with an overly ambitious design probably isn't the way to get traction. The Middle East do love a pissing contest though so starting small isn't what they're into.
Saudi diversification from oil is a fantasy. The culture is medieval from the POV of the rest of the world, and the hostile climate is only getting worse.
In 2018 "only" 43% of UAE's exports were zero-value-add extracted oil & gas. 11-12% was "Gold, Diamonds, Precious Metals"(?). The rest is pretty evenly split between very different industries - value-added chemicals, electronics, cars, metals, industrial machines, and textiles.
Overall, UAE pulls in a higher % of their foreign currency from non-oil-and-gas economic activity than Saudi does, but still leans heavily on it for 40-60% of their exports. Saudi exports ~20% more oil & gas than UAE on a nominal total USD basis. However, UAE's total exports are 30-40% higher than Saudi's on a total USD basis. So UAE sells less oil, more other stuff.
If I had to pick, I'd definitely rather be in Dubai's position than Saudi's. I've also lived in both places, and I'd definitely say that Dubai appeared to have a more diverse economy and drew from a deeper talent pool (mostly immigrant-based, though).
I'm not sure if Saudi Arabia can reproduce the success. The entirety of Arabian peninsula is pretty much immune to cultural development, but Dubai got a pass because they were the first ones in that area to try building a normal healthy economy, meanwhile whatever Saudis do, they have to compete with Dubai which is already highly developed.
My point being, why would people invest in Saudi Arabia if they can invest in Dubai.
Saudi is at the mercy of it's leader and little else. The culture isn't generally medieval but the Al Saud certainly can be.
Just curious, it wouldn’t surprise me but wasn’t sure.
like it's big, elaborate build outs, nothing delivered, and some sort of under the table deal nuclear with Trump's brother in law that got him a Billion. the Iranians have, or can rapidly enrich, and Israel is popping off again (and may have ~100 nukes), so Saudi has means, motive, opportunity.
infrastructure required to build silos, and infrastructure required to build the City Of The Future are going to look more or less the same for 3-4 years -- lots of big holes, running trenches, piping and power, etc. -- and after a few years they can call it a failure and quietly sweep it under the rug with the rationalization that it's been a failure and they're ashamed of it.
And even that could still very much be worthwhile, as in generate business for the company, sell off the company to external investors based on those numbers and later phase out the artificially generated demand.
I'm sure a lot of underlings are making a fortune out of the budget, but I don't believe that was the initial motivation for the project. Consider yourself in the shoes of bin Salman. Why would you need to funnel money away, when you are the absolute monarch and the whole country is yours? It makes about as much difference as taking coins out of your left pocket and shoving it back to the right pocket.
There are much more effective ways to achieve population control than building line cities and moving people into them.
But only with a line can you be aligned with your ruler's dreams.
Curved tracks do mean limits on top speed, as the centrifugal force needs to be kept below what would be uncomfortable for passengers. It also can cause some issues for building stations, as curved stations require a wider gap between the train and the platform. But neither is a blocking issue, all train tracks in the world do have curve, and curved stations aren't unusual in public transport systems.
The grandparent probably means disk, not ring-shaped when mentioning circles anyway. Pick any 2 point at random into a 33km² circle, the average distance will be 4km, and worst case scenario 6km. Do the same thing in a 33km², 200m-wide "line", the average distance will be 85km, with a worst case of 170km. A circular city doesn't need nearly as much raw speed for it's public transport to be more efficient than transport in a nonsensical linear city could ever be, even if you throw in ridiculously fast trains and sprinkle magical AI thinking.
It's not a coincidence that all major cities are roughly circular even though they are built around roughly linear features (navigable rivers and/or coast line). It's just what naturally works.
In a regular city that grows outwards, you'd expect there to be circumferential routes as well as cross-city routes connecting various points, making the travel time more bearable.
And you can still build mostly straight-line trams in a circle anyway.
To get the same area, you'd have to have slightly more center-line circumference on a ring city as linear distance on a line, but even so your transit distances are going to be shorter on the ring.
You'd spend a lot of time on that one train line though - and I imagine in the central bits it would get really really busy as people are trying to get to the other end. And what happens if that train line breaks?
Making a city circular takes advantage of geometry - even at the cost of having to build more than one train line. It also opens up the possibility of other forms of travel - buses, bikes, cars.
It doesn't surprise me that this is starting to fall apart. When it was announced it seemed completely unhinged.
Probably because it looks cool in CGI renderings and nobody else has one, for reasons that are probably becoming apparent to all involved.
For example - if there is a natural element like a river, lake, canyon, etc. that you want to maximize city exposure to. A linear city roughly following the Grand Canyon would be infinitely more interesting than a circular one situated at one end of it.
By using a line they can just shut off one part of the line from the rest with one or two cuts.
a) So you have people living uniformly distributed on a line of length 1. When you pick 2 at random, what's the average distance from one to the other?
b) How about if they live on a circle of circumference 1 (and you can only travel along the circumference)?
c) How about if they live on a disk of circumference 1 (and you can travel straight across the disk)?
That part actually doesn't seem implausible, it's right on the Red Sea, which is quite hot on the surface, but cools down as you you go deeper into it[2].
So (and this is just my speculation) they could have a large undersea pipeline to a depth of say 1km, and use the heat the building itself to pull up and distribute that cold water through cooling ducts throughout the structure.
They were also planning to desalinate seawater, so such a system would perform the double duty of pulling that seawater into the building.
1. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-i-admire-saudi-arabi...
Do a Mars colony next.
I guess they're would be diesel generators for that in reality. We need an engineer to calculate the flow needed because given how far away the far end is from the water that could end up behind one huge generator, not to mention the size of the pipes.
It's worth mentioning that they don't seem to be burying any massive water pipes so this isn't likely to be done in reality.
A proper fault-tolerant design will buy enough time for most residents to walk to a neighboring section that still has power.
- Adam Something: NEOM Is The Parody Of The Future [1]
- Thunderf00t: NEOM, The Line: BUSTED!! [2]
At the time of publishing thousands and thousands were already on the road for years in the Netherlands.
This guy checks what his audience already thinks on a subject and then makes up arguments to go along with it.
Take it with a kilo of salt.
However, battery electric buses are seriously more expensive and a bigger carbon sink than a trolley bus network. But governments don't like to build infrastructure in the west and some people don't like the look of overhead wires. This isn't economically or environmentally efficient but those preferences can cause those issues to be ignored. Until the high cost of battery replacements kick in after the initial honeymoon period...
There's a fractal insanity to the whole project. As you focus in on any one aspect, more silliness appears. The design process is driven by the Crown Prince pointing at 3D renders and saying he likes the one that looks the most cyberpunk.
Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Bahrain, Qatar, they all remind me of that quote from King of the Hill—they are monuments to man's arrogance. Desert cities hitting 50+ °C air temperature at midday which means air conditioning everywhere; vapid luxury in the form of expensive garish cars, shopping malls, and weird buildings and monuments, all while local chiefs who oppose stupid and unrealistic white elephant vanity projects are executed in the back alley.
This is one reason why I would like more nuclear power: it'll take some of the money away from the Gulf.
Let's not gloss over the absolutely appalling respect many of these societies have for human dignity. Public executions and flogging, discrimination and imprisonment based solely on gender, absolutely zero regard for freedom of conscience when it comes to matters of religion.
There's only so much you can get away with by saying it's my society's accepted practice, what's wrong is wrong. And there's plenty wrong with other countries and societies too, including my own, but it doesn't excuse human rights indifference.
You, as an individual, may do your best to contribute to the betterment of the world, but when talking about society vs. society, you’re glossing over far too many of our ills while ignoring the positives of the others.
Freedom of religion, individualism, capitalism, they aren’t “good” or “right” they’re just… different. The western individualism (seen most prominently in the U.S.) is not the majority culture, to many, even those who are just as “free” as any American, western cultural ideals are a step backward.
The way you perceive Islam is not the way it’s perceived by Muslims in Muslim majority countries, it is not an oppression put upon them by religious zealots, it’s a community that they participate in with a deep sense of pride and duty. For every Muslim in a Muslim-majority country who wants to break from their religion, there’s an unsuccessful American struggling to survive, desperate to break free from the lonely American pursuit of individual success.
You can hate public executions, flogging, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and you should, I do, but don’t compare societies. We are not better, just different.
It is after all much easier to change hearts and minds in a democracy.
Edit: contrast ME with Mexico who is running out of oil. Yet, they are able to build because they happen to have some of the hardest working labor in the world (though not notably skilled). I rather bet on Mexico revival over ME 100/100.
They is so much money poured down on them that they don't understand the concept of work, to them it is just a hobby.
Quite correct. I had people reaching out to me saying they want me to contract for Arabic millionaires -- websites, backends, a lot of stuff together -- but every time they demanded time tracking, they wanted to know my physical address, wanted my photo, and one of them even wanted me to install camera so he can track me in real time with some misguided AI-based software.
Each time I giggled to myself and responded something along the lines of:
"While the offer sounds tempting financially, and while I would love to have some tech independence, your offer falls short on the privacy front, and it also contains clauses that can nullify the independence to choose tech tomorrow. I'll have to decline and if you are open to feedback: insisting on face tracking is not how you hire the really good programmers, to which I don't pretend to belong but have known a good number of them".
So yes their mindset is apparently always 10 masters + 20_000_000 slaves and as hard as they are trying, they will not export this culture to anywhere else except maybe India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China and a few others. The West will not change for them no matter how rich they are.
The Qatari have also obviously paid off various FIFA officials but hey, that's just football.
Couldn't that element be self-sufficient on solar?
https://eepower.com/industry-articles/is-desert-based-solar-...
Night happens even in the desert. Plus what others said about wind. Here's video about a recent sandstorm: https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/dust-storm-sweeps-across...
In 2021, inmates in federal prisons earned between $0.23 to $1.15 per hour.
Are you suggesting they should have just remained on camels while sand blows around them?
> I'll be frank: I have a deep mistrust of any culture present in the Arabian peninsula since about 632 CE.
Also, AFAIK they are very aware that oil money isn't going to keep pouring forever and they indeed are trying to diversify. Their elites all study in UK, France, Switzerland and the USA and the questionable stuff they do is actually about the local culture they are trying to transform.
Their prince who is celebrated for pushing social and cultural reforms is the same guy who ordered the killing of a journalist in their Istanbul embassy. So, it is what it is.
BTW, IMHO they should look into what Jewish did in Israel with the Kibbutz. I'm a great fan of the idea and the Jewish culture that made it possible and it appears to work. Maybe instead of building giant skyscrapers and shopping malls, take a note from the Israeli or even work with them instead of pouring tour money into "Las Vegas". Skip the illegal settlements and genocide of the locals of course, but the Israeli have already proven methods of building high quality high prosperity communities on barely habitable lands. So, the Arabs should take a note. Maybe they don't have other option than trying to transform the environment using their fortune but they have options on how to do it exactly.
You always have another option than to treat people like cattle though.
> the questionable stuff they do is actually about the local culture they are trying to transform.
Is it though? Or their Western education has helped put things in perspective, they understood how good they have it and they want to double down on it and make very sure they'll never lose it?
> Their prince who is celebrated for pushing social and cultural reforms is the same guy who ordered the killing of a journalist in their Istanbul embassy. So, it is what it is.
We can also choose not to engage in business with them but money talks, apparently.
But to the people in power, only symbols and power are important.
Do they need anything more? And you mentioned airplanes, but you failed to mention logistics more generally and container shipping, with Jebel Ali port being the third largest (behind LA and Rotterdam) in a list that would exclude East Asia and Singapore. [1] There's also tourism because, yes, people are actually paying money in order to visit places like Dubai, and that's because they like what they see there.
And then there's finance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...?
Can you give any keywords what to look for to read more about this?
It's just big lanes devoid of cars between the towers devoid of people. And then a small road connecting to the Industrial Area.
It's also governed differently from the others in being an oligarchy. That requirement for consensus-building and internal variation creates robustness; it gave Dubai the room to experiment, for example, with religious moderation.
It's not a view I hold too seriously. But I remember visiting the Emirates and Saudi Arabia--shortly after the Phillipines and India--and thinking to myself that the British were, in their time, far better at nation building than we've (EDIT: America) been in the post-War era.
They are monuments to the brilliance of human engineering, allowing millions of humans to live comfortably in the scorching desert heat.
Do you also call Amsterdam with its dikes and below sea level, “a monument to man’s arrogance?
Wasn’t the moon landing a monument to man’s arrogance?
I think calling something “a monument to man’s arrogance” reveals more about the biases of the person saying it than about the actual thing.
> Do you also call Amsterdam
> with its dikes and below sea
> level, “a monument to man’s
> arrogance?
1. https://www.floodmap.net/elevation/CountryElevationMap/?ct=N...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
Any kind of thermal plant will not save us. Renewable energy can do it.
The points raised are a mixture of facts, fiction, jealousy and dislike.
You want them to boil in desert heat with some environmental appeal, while many countries pump the air full of pollution from factories or massive ICE cars
I haven’t heard of back alley executions over there
I don’t feel hate towards someone spending their money on 2 cars or a holiday house or whatever luxury shoes, or paint their house whatever color. Why does it annoy you so much.
Why hate on people with different taste, very strange
I get it’s ok to hate on gulf countries without backlash more than hating on say Denmark
FWIW I’m not from there and don’t live there
This seems more likely to me as an explanation than hating on people with different taste. Otherwise everyone would hate Japan for example.
[1] https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/#the-scale [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i... [3] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022
I'll be frank: I have a deep mistrust of any culture present in the Arabian peninsula since about 632 CE.
Same reason Egypt is building a decadent new capital: it lets the ruler pay off his supporters.
Not sure who this “we” is who ever started, which is a requirement for stopping.
A lot of people in western countries indirectly pay for this
Think of the alternatives, top 5 oil producing countries: US(13bb/day), Russia (13bb/day), Saudi (9bb/day), Canada (5bb/day), Iraq(4bb/day).
We all know what's currently happening in Russia. The US and Canada have good production, but they're a long way from Europe. So how exactly do you expect Eastern Europe to heat their homes during winter?
Let's be clear, they can't even really afford to boycott Russia at the moment - Russian oil is pumping out to India and getting re-badged. So the idea they'd pick a fight with Saudi Arabia seems ambitious to say the least.
I guess over human rights transgressions. But the collective West is very selective on whose transgressions they are willing to overlook and whose not.
And, indeed, at this point, in no position to play hardball with the Saudis.
I wonder where do you have this number from?
According to this source, Russia never reached 11bb/day, current production is ~10bb: https://ycharts.com/indicators/russia_crude_oil_production
You can thank all the engineers and business people working on batteries, electric vehicles, and other petroleum alternatives.
If you go to Google Earth (the app), it lets you see historical imagery from the site and for the past three or so years you can see continuous progress on digging out The Line; that alone is quite impressive on its own! But then again, digging it is only like 1% of it, and the easiest part. It's an impossible project.
Neom reminds me of Łódź, a city in Poland that is built around a single 5km long street. It’s quite cool and the simple geometry is aesthetically appealing in a way I’ve yet to find elsewhere.
Some years ago I occasionally read a German architecture forum [0] that may be compared to HN (mainly professionals). For example, I remember the thread about the reconstruction of parts of the historic city center of Frankfurt [1] being really interesting, with a lot of excellent pictures and insider knowledge. The discussion was mostly centered on the aesthetic quality of the quarter and the use of historic construction methods (and how this use of traditional craftsmanship highly motivated the workers), while bigger media outlets often completely ignored this and focused on a strange political discussion that went along the lines of "reconstruction of something destroyed in WW2 = revisionism = supporting neofashists".
[0] https://www.deutsches-architekturforum.de/
[1] https://www.deutsches-architekturforum.de/thread/10345-dom-r...
There are none and as such there is nothing to discuss.
The reason why this exists is obviously that these projects are started by absolute rulers who want to build themselves vanity monuments the same way their ancient predecessors did.
If you're only building a mega project so you're forced to develop the infrastructure around it, why don't you choose a sensible megaproject instead? Answer: because that's not why they're doing it, you just made that up.
Who said, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.
Is there a way to make money by betting against them?
There are those grandiose mega projects purely for the rich, purely for vanity and showing off wealth and meant attract outside attention... like "The Line" for example...
...but there also are more sensible projects, that are actually meant to help the local populace, improve conditions, and fight poverty... like "The Al Baydha Project" just for one example.
It's totally possible to do something ambitious and impressive, and with historic significance without becoming completely detached from reality.
> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Shocked, I tell you.
It's a time tested strategy. The main problem is SA is doing it in the most useless and bloody way possible.
There might be line cities. But none of them is a concept like this, or are they in a desert and are 170km long and 500m high? So you absolutely miss my points.
We're now. We know more. We have more experience (like "line cities are problematic" but where exactly?)
It's not about traditional city vs line city. And here too, your dislike is stronger then your thinking of opportunities. You don't like dictator there? Ok. I wrote it down.
Not necessarily you have to travel longer, it's ineffective and all the points you say. We (and they too) still don't know how, and where. Having a circular automated highspeed transport in the ground, it's possible. "What work where" will also be regulated, the plumber won't live in the end of the line city and also won't be the only one.
Just think of "silo" (series). I don't see the impossibilities here, like many of you do. I see opportunities.
That is not the word I or most of HN would have used…
It’s a sad state of the world that this delusional lunatic is dictator of a $1T GDP country instead of everyone else that understands this is a stupid idea.
I'm interested in the technology, in the achievements that are possible, the problem solving and solutions found to do something of this scope.
It's not about lunatics or the ** arabs dictators or killers ** say what you want.
For example, the need for the special sand for the concrete. Their sand, which they have plenty of, is completely not suitable for this. It's too fine. So, how this will be solved?
The world could learn a lot of it - just imagine, you can use the Sahara sands instead of the special sands that need to be somehow and somewhere resourced atm. That would reduce the house building costs a lot and enable affordable housing everywhere. I'm talking about the proper way of housing, like in the story of the three pigs and the wolf.
So can you explain why you dislike technology and advancement in city buildings, experiments and new learnings? I don't quite get it.
We might have our faults but our people are working towards progress, it takes time but we don't go bashing Western people and how they are the worst examples of humanity, even knowing their history and countless examples of genocides conducted by them and then denying it. Shame on you people and those who think they are the best examples. Next time when you're offered a job in a Middle East country, don't accept it simple as that instead of coming here, bashing and then saying money talks. Greed is all you guys know.