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Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

I assume another close contender is the Nay Pyi Taw airport in Myanmar.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BXvqis0htxH/?taken-at=277450644

https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/277450644/naypyi...

The city was built as a showcase capital for Myanmar's military government, and has crazy sights like a 20 lane highway (with almost no cars):

https://www.go-myanmar.com/sites/go-myanmar.com/files/upload...

More pictures:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-304350...

The craziest part of the city to me was the amusement park. It was open, but only half complete. Ride operators would follow us around to turn on the rides we wanted to ride. One of the rides didn't have the female side of the seat belt buckle, so I just had to tie the straps together.

Very sad how much money was spent on this city, especially considering how poor the country is.

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It's interesting to contrast that with the story of Ordos Kangbashi, Inner Mongolia:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/06/30/ordos-ch...

I'd first heard of that a couple years ago and shook my head at all the wasteful misallocation of capital. Ordos recently appeared in the news again, but instead of an empty ghost town - it's apparently a thriving metropolis, center of the worldwide Bitcoin mining industry.

Capitalism is remarkably effective at redirecting misallocated capital into productive uses. The original builders go bankrupt, and it sucks for them, but usually an enterprising firm picks up the assets at fire-sale prices and does something interesting with them.

> Capitalism is remarkably effective at redirecting misallocated capital into productive uses. The original builders go bankrupt, and it sucks for them, but usually an enterprising firm picks up the assets at fire-sale prices and does something interesting with them.

It works great in theory and even in practice to a degree, but there are endless chronically impoverished neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations where it didn't work out that way. The wealthy locales tend to stay wealthy, and the poor ones poor.

This sounds a little like broken window fallacy - the fact remains that the original capital was apparently misallocated - despite what any future enterprise may do with the effective subsidy of vast amounts of free stuff, that money that was wasted will always remain lost, and thus the economy is worse off than if the capital had been employed efficiently from the start. Saying that capitalism is good at recycling free stuff is kind of a so what.

Like the article points out your head shaking is because of the original reporting?

I also wonder if your point about assets is not necessarily always true and that you're only thinking examples that became interesting. By definition the bar is pretty low for such assets regardless of who scraps up the remains.

> crazy sights like a 20 lane highway (with almost no cars)

When Top Gear went they stopped to have a game of football in the middle of the road https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwTnP8ioiU

Mirabel airport [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montr%C3%A9al%E2%80%93Mirabel_...] probably was a contender. The passenger terminals were eventually torn down recently, but cargo flights continue to use it.

EDIT: "By surface area, it was the largest airport in the world that had ever been envisioned, with a planned area of 39,660 hectares (396.6 km2; 98,000 acres)"

Gaza International.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat_International_Ai...

That was a completely sensible thing to build (and I even flew in once!), it was just destroyed by Israeli bombing.

I remember the Top Gear episode in Myanmar where Jeremy and gang played soccer on the highway. It was that empty, and that huge.

As an Indian, China's influence scares me a bit. They've got us surrounded

> the female side of the seat belt buckle

The what? Are rides segregated or is there some kind of female buckle I have not heard of?

When two halves of a seatbelt love each other very much, the male end inserts himself into the female end's receptacle

The phrase refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_faste...

Thanks. I've heard of pipes being referred to that way, but not buckles.

most buckles have a male and female part. It's a common term to describe parts of things that fit into each other. Used in plumbing, electrical and many other industries.

Just don't make a joke about it at a developer conference.

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