Since I was born and raised in Santa Cruz I found this article interesting and posted it to a Santa Cruz local site. The old timers in Santa Cruz like my parents don't like the influence that UCSC brought to the town, but I love it:

MBS’s $500 Billion Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder

Neom, the Saudi crown prince’s urban megaproject, is supposed to have a ski resort, swim lanes for commuters, and “smart” everything. It’s going great—for the consultants.

"One day last September, a curious email arrived in Chris Hables Gray’s inbox. An author and self-described anarchist, feminist, and revolutionary, Gray fits right into Santa Cruz, Calif., where he lives. He’s written extensively about genetic engineering and the inevitable rise of cyborgs, attending protests in between for causes such as Black Lives Matter. While Gray had taken some consulting gigs over the years, he’d never received an offer like this one. The first shock was the money: significantly more than he’d earned from all but one of his books. The second was the task: researching the aesthetics of seminal works of science fiction such as Blade Runner. The biggest surprise, however, was the ultimate client: Mohammed bin Salman, the 36-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia."

https://archive.ph/65uZx (Bloomberg)