Comment by ohgodplsno | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohgodplsno | Hacker News Reader

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1/ Billionaires are the last people I would ever trust to properly run a city, let alone build it.

2/ Cities built by a small group of "elites" inevitably fail or become the worst hellscapes you could imagine

3/ These people are dogshit to have as bosses. Now imagine them as unelected mayors having the ability to control your livelihood

4/ The land they bought is fucking stupid, unaccessible, has no water, no train stations, will be generic car centric hellscape n°1275

5/ None of them have any knowledge in city building (the time they spend on Cities Skylines while they pretend they're working doesn't count), and they will be working with sycophants saying yes to every one of their whims, even if it goes contrary to everything we learned.

6/ The land doesn't have water, sewage systems, power lines, internet, etc. Guess who they're going to go cry to and lobby? The state. Guess who's going to pay for their playground? You.

7/ We've already tried company towns. They were hell on earth.

VCs, and billionaires in general are the most uninnovative people I could ever think of. They have nothing but their "vision", willfully ignoring important things. Even picking up a hobo in the middle of Skid Row would lead to better results, because the hobo knows which parts of architecture are hostile, lead to horribly hot summers, etc.

But please let's let them try. It's their money, however they extracted it, and you never know. Trying new things is one of the singular positives in this country of ours. We don't know how to maintain things, we don't really know how to refactor and fix the laws we have, either because of entrenched interests, inherent racism, or a lack of willpower. But we can still create new things, prototype and try out new ideas. So let's keep doing that, and let the rest of the world take our best experiments and make their little socialist utopias while we continue to live in this extremely heterogeneous, unfair, and idealistic but somehow pragmatic place.

>It's their money, however they extracted it

Except, it's really not. Taking aside the fact that being a billionaire is fundamentally immoral and that it necessarily caused the misery of hundreds if not thousands, it's not _just_ their money. It's your money when it's going to come to plugging in the electrical grid, because you know they're going to ask for assistance. After all, it's built, and the state wouldn't want the bad publicity of being the ones that refuse to kickstart a brand new future city, right ? It's going to be your money for sewage systems, for pipes, for road maintenance. It's your society they're damaging by abusing the justice system to bully and sue farmers out of the land. It's going to be your environment when they have to pump water and dry out your rivers, your lakes, leaving fewer for everyone else. It's going to be your environment when chronically irresponsible VCs dump chemicals because they know the EPA will need ten years to come at them. It's going to be your national security when the Travis Air Force base receives complaints and pressures to close down because they're being too noisy next to the city. It's going to be your environment when they have to water a whole city in the middle of an almost desert.

>We don't know how to maintain things, we don't really know how to refactor and fix the laws we have, either because of entrenched interests, inherent racism, or a lack of willpower.

So the solution, instead of trying out small scale experiments that will help you build a proper city of the future is to just build a whole city in one go and hope it works out ? The people that are blocking you from maintaining things _are_ the ones building this. Andreeseen is in those investors, the same piece of shit that blocked construction of thousands of houses because it would "devalue his investment". He's not doing this to improve _your_ life.

> let the rest of the world take our best experiments and make their little socialist utopias

The rest of the world is not socialist, and you know it.

>somehow pragmatic place.

There is nothing pragmatic about the US. There's a very small subset of extremely powerful and wealthy ramming their decisions through everything, destroying lives in the process and counting on the state to be too slow to react, or slow enough that when they do, they're already entrenched anyways.

Yes my term socialist was a bit sarcastic, they are all capitalist mixed economies. But I don't think these kinds of experiments are an issue, it is rarely a zero sum. Externalities like water supply, chemicals, and road maintenance need to be carefully managed for sure. I don't blame capitalists for corrupt or captured regulators. I do think that it needs to be better understood that a capitalist never gave away money, only their widows and children ever did. What we seem to lack now is the backbone to truly regulate. Break up their trusts and monopolies, tax their profits, and create more and better infrastructure for the common good.

> 2/ Cities built by a small group of "elites" inevitably fail or become the worst hellscapes you could imagine

Irvine doesn't seem like a hellscape to me.

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