Oxymandias wrote:@anasawad
That isn't particularly relevant to my point unless you are assuming that vertical farms and planned cities would be built by the market which is practically impossible.
Why would it be impossible ? I don't see how a corporation wouldn't view it favorably to magnify their production and reducing the per unit production cost in the same time.
Isn't that what GMOs all about ? corporations spending 10s of billions of dollars just to improve production volume and efficiency ?
Planned cities can only be built if the political system in place allows it to. Vertical farms can only be built if the political system in place allows it to. You need political change before you can apply it. The order required to achieve political change is irrelevant because you need political change before you can get planned cities or vertical farms.
First, lets explain what planned cities look are like, for this example, lets take Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is a city with lots and lots of empty areas around it that are viable for construction, yet the state artificially limit the access of investors to those area in order to boost the realstate market by increasing investment in some areas while cutting it short in others.
The government of Hong Kong plans ahead the development, construction, and expansion of the city, and then both private investors and the state itself act in accordance.
That is how cities are planned. Planned cities doesn't mean that the state is building a city from scratch.
For the need for political change, again, its not needed, the introduction of a new policy to go forward with such projects is needed if the state is the one doing them, or if private corporations are going with them, then a state permit is needed. The political system doesn't have to change entirely to go with large projects.
Planned cities on the other hand need more state supervision and planning, but does not necessarily need the state itself to pursue the construction of a new expansion.
Planned cities if built from scratch like some ghost cities in China do indeed tend to fail since the market didn't lead the decision, but in the same time for China and those ghost cities it doesn't matter, since those cities are being built to boost up the GDP by funneling money into the market through construction companies and whether the cities succeeded or not is a side effect not the main goal.
Also in China, the state is currently planning to establish mega cities by connecting its main coastal cities both with other cities and the surrounding country side of those cities. The state is not building everything itself, rather it plans and supervises the expansion and give incentives for private investors to do the construction and new corporations to set up shop in those areas in order for the plans to go as intended.
Thats how planning a city is done, rarely by building them from scratch.
Also, Political change is social change. Politics represents the opinions and status of the general population. It's why the fact that Trump became president in the first place is so disturbing, because it represents the opinions of the American population and how American society is changing. Politics can be seen as an abstraction of society so if society changes, so does politics. While there is a delay in the change of political systems compared to change in society, the politics of that society change at the same time as the society itself. Also, change doesn't follow in a specific order, it is much more chaotic than that.
Actually no its not.
If we are taking the US as an example, the US population in overwhelming population rejects Trump, the reason he became president is because the establishment is incredibly corrupt, and the choice in the last election was either the establishment (Hillary Clinton) or a dumb as hell lunatic (Donald Trump). So most people threw a wild card and picked Trump. If Bernie Sanders wasn't cheated out of the election, then he'd have won easily.
And while political change does follow social change, its not just a "little late", its way too late.
And even in republics (note I said republics not democracies, big difference and most of the world countries are republics) where there are "democratic" elections, money plays a much bigger role than social changes, but it may seem from afar that social change leads to political change because social changes change market demand patterns and behaviors which changes the economy and the economic changes make political changes happen. This is a feature of capitalism, and even in non-capitalist countries, since they're part of the world, and the world order is capitalist, then the same applies to them.
It's not about wanting those products nor is it about their readiness. People want to build space elevators or research in alternative energy. The issue is that this isn't social or ideological change. Ideological or social change is a change in a person's values. While these people want space elevators or alternative energy, these things aren't values or tied to their values. We need to cultivate a new value in people, the value of progress of never ending growth and limitless potential.
The same as above.
Many people like the idea of space elevators for example, but when the pay time comes, people in general wont pay for it, an example of this is NASA which everyone in the US likes and wants to go to Mars and all, but when the funding part comes in, 50 billion dollars is already considered too much for tax payers to pay and they prefer it goes somewhere else.
So wanting a space elevator is one thing, and paying for it is another. If the people want and are welling to pay for it, then it'll happen. If not, then no.
People in general on the other hand do want cheaper products, do want better living standards, do want cheaper and better food, etc, and they're welling to pay for it.
So if we were to say, we need to put this amount of money to establish this project, but in effect the price of food for example will drop by this percentage, people are going to say yes do spend that tax money there.
And in a capitalist economy, a corporation that does find a way to massively boost production will have much more competitive advantage and burn out competition which will give it even bigger advantage and leverage. Which is why, as stated before, corporations in the agriculture sector already spend 10s of billions of dollars on research in GMOs.
If we have that, then we will get more solutions than just planned cities or vertical farms.
Vertical farms and GMOs and others are some of the solutions thought of to solve the problem.
Infact, the idea of vertical farms came up due to the government trying to find a solution to the problem of inflation in Iran and how to provide better accessibility to basic products in the country. (it was in 2014 during the sanctions, and now the sanctions are back on, its even more likely to see those coming back, since we're already stuffing mountains with nuclear reactors and military basis and weapons factories, why not farms.
)
1. Planned cities aren't there to increase efficiency and I don't think I have ever heard efficiency used as a justification for building planned cities by any of it's advocates before.
No, whats usually said in the full explanation for planning an expansion for a city is increasing the economic output by expanding the city and moving people from the country side to that city and as such improving their productivity and decreasing the costs of providing services and transportation to far away areas. Which is a long way of saying efficiency since thats literally the definition of market efficiency.
The main benefit of planned cities is how they are supposed to improve the quality of life of it's inhabitants.
Not really, thats the end goal not the direct one; The direct goal is to improve the economic output and productivity which in return would improve living standards.
However, most cities or planned cities fail to take into consideration human psychology so while they provide all the amenities they can, the citizens of the city hate living there because it feels to artificial. Planned cities don't take into consideration what citizens actually want. You may say that this is due to bad planning, but the reason citizens dislike it is because of the fact that the city is planned in the first place.
Dude, almost all cities in the world are planned, the state plans it, introduce the policy and incetivize investors, then supervise the development. Thats how cities are built, pretty much all of them. The development and construction of what the people want is based on market demands.
When a state is planning an expansion for a city lets say, they don't say we want a night club here, and the bar over there, etc. Those are called residential, business, industrial or financial hubs or areas and they are built inside or near an already existing city.
What the state does plan is how the infrastructure, building distribution (i.e how the buildings are organized next to each other), roads, railways if included, subways, utility centers, etc. They say this area is residential, the invested construction company then decides what type of residential complexes to build there based on the market demand. If they said this area should be where the businesses and corporations are, the investors whether private or state owned corporations decide independently where to set their offices, what type of offices or facilities they want to put there or in general what to invest in in that area.
Thats how cities are planned, and all of them are planned.
2. Improving efficiency and distribution of resources won't solve class conflict because class will always try to get more resources than the other regardless of the systems in place. What you need is to sit all the classes and interest groups down and have a dialogue with them. This is call corporatism and it's the organization of a society based on the large interest groups that dominate it such as businessmen, workers, unions, artisans, guilds, entrepreneurs, engineers, etc. who would then work together and construct policies based on their common interests. This is the epitome of class collaboration since everyone has equal say and is represented in the political system..
And you're giving them all more resources, simply the share of each class of the overall income changes.
This is the purpose of income taxes, to redistribute newly created wealth to other classes, and all countries do it. Again, this is why European major countries have better living standards, they improve production and efficiency then introduce a legal system to fairly distribute the newly created wealth and countries with small or no income tax don't.
Though some countries fail in that due to corruption. Namely the US, Since they have legal bribery there (lobbying) and you can already see the results.
1.
There are ways to temporarily satiate the urge for an uprising or revolution. It's like throwing a bone to a dog, you don't give him exactly what he wants but you give him enough of a taste that it stops him from thinking about biting you for a while. And here's the kicker, it always works every time. You get people's expectations so low that they would be fine with anything even remotely better than what they have now and they won't demand for more, they'll just try to hold on to what little they have. There is no political incentive to progress or do things that no one else has ever done. That has to do with how the government is structured.
Unless you have bigger plans than just staying exactly where you are without progress.
If you haven't noticed in the case of Iran, the goal is building an empire, and you need more productivity and progress to do that, and to have that you need to improve living standards.
You have the social incentive wrong. Society does not have a goal, it is merely the organization of human begins of themselves. Society has as much of a goal as any individual person does and like most people, it's complicated and often doesn't know what it wants.
Since we're talking about production and the market, then the consumers' goal is always cheaper and better products. Irregardless of what individual differences there are, cheaper and better products are always wanted.
If we were talking about other topics, then sure social incentive isn't that easy to come by with, but in regards of the market and the economy, generally speaking, it is.
2.
Then why hasn't anyone done any of this? Vertical farms and planned cities have existed for centuries. Why hasn't the market or the government or society acted? For example, 1920s America was a lot like Iran. It was a period of major social upheaval and economic growth yet when Technocracy Inc. proposed the idea of a post-scarcity society and how everyone in the US could have a high standard of living, governments and businessmen tried to stop the idea from spreading. It was even banned by the Canadian government for some time. All the conditions were there so why isn't America a Technocracy? That's because it's more complicated than mere incentives. The state wants to avoid uprising and revolution but it doesn't want to replace itself for something more efficient, it wants to maintain itself even if it's inefficient or outdated. The economy wants to improve production and stability, but it doesn't want a centralized economy that would improve production and stability ten fold because then it wouldn't have any wealth. And society is at the mercy of these two factors.
The US is part technocracy and part oligarchy.
Those are what are known to regular people as "the establishment" and "the deep state".
The deep state refers to the experts and technocrats in general who work and run the government and are not elected officials.
And the establishment is the oligarchy in which those technocrats work for.
See, to have a technocracy, you need the state to be in control first, as such, you need socialistic style state.
If you have a capitalistic state, then you'll get a class of oligarchs deciding the direction and a class of technocrats working for them running the government and going forward in that direction.
1. Right here you literally just admitted that the state needs to change in order for planned cities to become a reality because there is no financial incentive to build them.
Huh ?
How did you get from that line that the state needs to change ?
States introduce new policies and laws and licenses and put in place legal frameworks for specific projects or things all the time without changing the overall political order.
By "political groundwork" I am referring to the policies needed for such projects like establishing a special zones or giving tax incentives or easier licensing or etc in order to go through the project in hand. Just as is done with every other large project.
2. That isn't enough and it also won't attract citizens to the planned cities. All the planned cities we have seen so far that have been built from scratch are all abandoned and have no people living in them. You need to attract people to the cities, not investors otherwise it would just end up at most a playground for the super rich and at worst, an empty waste of money.
Already addressed above.
The amount of planning necessary to take into consideration the emergence and complexity of human social organization would be so little that you couldn't even call it a planned city by that point.
??
Not sure what do you mean by this.
1. Most of Madrid is not planned at all.
2. The portions that are planned look beautiful due to the architecture, not the actual plans.
3. The portions that are planned are also the most painful to walk around in since it's like walking in a highway, it takes forever to get from point A to point B.
1- All of Madrid is planned, this is why its so organized.
2- How some areas looks is irrelevant since thats up to who built them. Only the parks are in most part state owned and not even all of them.
3- True, but you're not to meant to walk around unless your intent is go walking around.
And also the reason why it feels so empty is because it is, the city is dying out as many people are leaving due to the economic conditions, so...
I can't think of any outside of Paris (which was reconstructed in 1850, not after WW2) and some town in New Zealand. Outside of that, I can't think of any at the moment. Paris, after it's reconstruction, is still significantly less planned than many modern planned cities.
All modern cities are planned.
The ones that aren't planned are usually the ones who are not organized and its incredibly hard to go around in them or even implement standard laws in them.
None of the cities you mentioned are emergent.
All of those cities are emergent.
They were all desolate areas with Bedouins living in them until the oil boom came along and turned them into major cities.
You can look up pics of them before and after the oil boom if you'd like to see how they were.
1. A business or capitalist built city would certainly not be planned.
2. Citizens wouldn't be able to live there for free
3. If it is built by investors then investors would need to receive a a portion of the tax revenue.
1- It will still be planned even if private investors built it. Since the government is required to give the licenses and permits to build something, the government decides where to build and the purpose of each area.
2- No one said anything about people living there for free, ofcouse you have to pay to rent or buy an apartment in a new residential area.
3- No they don't, investors do the tax paying, not the tax receiving since thats how investment works.
They do get tax incentives like lower taxes, but they still pay taxes since they'll be making profit.
If it's just that then I'm fine with it. As long as it's done on a local level, I agree with the idea.
Its not like the government will take a piece of desert and build from scratch a single city with the size of a small country and tell everyone to move into it.
This is how mega cities are built by default.
Detroit didn't die because of the war. It died because it could not catch up with the times.
Yes, and by the times it means the end of the war.
A city built for the war will loose activity and economic output once the war is over.
Detroit is just that. Prospered with the military industrial complex during world war 2 and slightly afterwords during the cold war, then died once its done.
1. Backup systems also fail and are prone to. These backup systems also need to be constantly maintained which raises expenses. My proposal will serve as a backup system in it of itself without the drawback of cost.
2. These multiple systems are too reliant on one another. If one fails, the others are affected.
.
1- You already have to establish backup systems in a production network, the only difference is with centralization you get less maintenance cost for those systems since you wont be to spread out.
2- Each factory has its own internal systems by default, by the general systems we're usually referring to things like electricity, water, loading platforms, etc.
If those failed, whether in a network or in a compound, you'll have much bigger problems on your hand than the factories shutting down.
3. If they are distributed instead of centralized, this means that, in the case of a military attack if an airplane dropped a bomb on a factory it would destroy the entire network or "city" since these factories are organized into a self-sufficient network. It's going to take alot more bombs and alot more money to take out the entire network.
Here both have advantages and disadvantages.
And generally it would depend on what type of enemy you're expecting and what type of army a nation has to choose between decentralization and spreading out, or centralization and fortification.
Iran has better chances in centralization since its dealing with much larger enemies and as such fortification gives it an advantage.
The Us has better chances spreading out since its geography disadvantage invaders due to logistics and decentralization makes it even harder to cover all production facilities in the attack.
I'm glad you're getting more active in your posting.
- By FiveofSwords
- By Godstud
- By Rugoz