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.
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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Train racing. No I will not elaborate.
with multi-track drifting of course
I’m listening
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
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!
Giant solar shield in orbit so that i dont have to see the sun
Every multiplayer pvp game will be mandated to have an unskipabble 10 minute gay kiss/sex scene on startup.
White people and even former capitalists are given the opportunity to be full, equal members of society
Very occasionally, you find a capitalist who’ll say something along the lines of “You’re prejudiced against rich people! This is discrimination!”
And, like, sure, OK. But guess what? You can always just give up the capital and then the ‘discrimination’ ends.
Indeed. Being discriminated against for an unnecessary privilege you voluntarily hog all to yourself is fine.
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your proposals are all quite nice but none of them would knowingly ecocide half a continent & cost/generate more power than has ever been used by humanity for the simple goal of refilling the LA River
oh yeah, its NAWAPA TIME
I think this is my favorite
at least crop out the ifunny watermark if you’re going to repost from those shitters.
Why would I put effort in to posting a Screencap of a years-old Twitter post?
Don’t you leave us hanging like that. Copy the relevant paragraph from wikipedia so I don’t have to google
“The environmental damage that would be caused by that damned thing can’t even be described. It would cause as much harm as all of the dam-building we have done in a hundred years.”
“the hydrologic anti-Christ”
“the most outlandish water development scheme to emerge in the past 50 years”
The power demands for pumping this amount of water over such obstacles would be more nuclear and hydroelectric power than yet exists in north america, the excavations so titanic that civil engineering grade nuclear explosives were proposed.
I’m in. I don’t even understand why we would do it or what the ultimate implications would be. I just want something to believe in, and this is worthy.
Oh man this also involves Project Plowshare?
Sure, but think of how many more desert golf courses we could have!
conquering gravity, water, and distance, destroying the yukon and northwestern territories for these treasures most sublime: cheap water for californian cash crops & golfcourses
i’m listening
I’d want to breed sapience into cows and have them join us in society.
I think the cows might have beef with humans, sans India
Nah once I bring forth the glorious utopia of vegankind they will forgive us.
Rocko’sHeffer’s Modern Basilisk, the sentient cows will kill everyone who wasn’t a vegan since birth, and then farm the vegans as their food supply.
Duodecimal system baby, fuck this non divisible by 3 system.
We counting on our phalanges now.
just use your right hand to count to 5 and your left hand denotes batches of 6. You can count up to thirty like this
Bringing streetcars and trams back to as many roads as logistically possible
Massive radio telescopes built into the far side of the Moon.
i like it, then mine would be solar gravitational lens telescope
can we get Arecibo back too pls
The chinese already built an even bigger one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope
Lithium in the water supply makes a dent in the suicide numbers, but it’s been a long time since I was crazy enough to put real thought into it.
Just put battery in your water supply
your BRAIN EELS need to be RECHARGED
Putting lithium salts into the water supply maybe isn’t actually the worst idea in the world. It definitely would need more study in terms of how this might impact people taking medications which interact poorly with lithium.
I think the real answer is that people need better access to mental healthcare.
Yeah that would solve quite a bit.
Weird, I used to take lithium on prescription and I’m like 80% water.
humans aren’t 80% water in the same way a nearly full glass of water is.
Okay but that lithium pill isn’t going to set a nearly full glass of tapwater on fire either
it’s probably not pure lithium. And also it only burns in proportion to the amount of lithium you put in but lithium and water causes a fire
plus anti-depressants have side effects and medication can interact with other medicine people take so probably just make anti-depressants freely available but you need to get them from a pharmacist is the best way
Lithium in pharmacology specifically refers to lithium salts, usually lithium carbonate or lithium citrate. It’s not elemental lithium but it is still just called lithium, regardless of which salt is prescribed. Clarification is usually done by specifying a brand example for generics.
we told you about throwing car batteries in the ocean
we fuckin told you dawg
Arcologies. Entire cities built into single, massive complexes.
give them big spider legs too
Create an artificial language with no exceptions to its rules, then teach it in every school in the world, so that the whole humanity spoke one language.
Also ban smoking
I used to be for this, but then I started finding out about all that is lost when a language is, and now it makes me sad to think of losing any more than we already have. But also, pragmatically, it’d be awesome to not have language barriers. Need sci-fi style universal translators.
Need sci-fi style universal translators.
We’re honestly pretty fucking close right now