Bioshock4 is supposed to be an Antarctica city gone wrong… too bad they didn’t go for a shining city on a hill on Mars, where we ship all the pyschopaths and weirdo techbrahs. That place would soar a bit that crater so badly they see it over in Andromeda. Any shlub who indentures themselves to get to Mars will soon find out that they are just meat on the hoof for all those techbrahs (who are so very very hungry you see).
I see this ending (wiggles 8ball) badly. Very badly. Hopefully without the cannibalism.
Ford’s hubris drips off every page. From the way he ignored all sincere advice from locals who knew how to live on that land and were trying to help him, to the ways in which he believed the mid century suburb was the highest form of living that could somehow be transplanted anywhere.
It’s terrific read and the mindset maps perfectly to modern tech bros.
This is so exciting! Will there be public education? Fire and emergency services? Libraries? Social Workers? Battered Women’s Shelters? Roads? Sidewalks? Parking Enforcement? Courts? Jails? Public Transportation? Animal Control? Police? Community Centers? Parks? Trash collectino? Recycling? I sure do hope all those jobs can be filled by people who can afford to live in this Utopia!
Ideals such as making use of antitrust laws, when it suits them. They haven’t even started building anything yet but they’ve already sued landowners for being mean by refusing to sell at the prices that the Flannery Group wants to pay. Won’t someone think of the poor billionaire libertarians??
Also, most of the land is zoned for agricultural use, and I’m reading elsewhere that this group is laying the groundwork for a ballot measure in 2024 asking Solano County voters to approve the zoning changes required to allow them to build their utopian city. Hopefully the county residents tell them to get bent.
Haha, so the capitalists don’t like it when prices change based on new information. Too bad, so sad.
Their mistake wasn’t figuring out a way to get an existing gov’t entity to just eminent-domain the whole enchilada for them. They aren’t just re-inventing the wheel of how a city works, they’re ignoring a century of lessons on how to be proper capitalists.
I know HPL is kind of cancelled these days, rightly so since he was a racist turd. But At the Mountains of Madness is one of my favorite stories for the slow burn or build up of dread. Then I watched the movie The Thing and was doubly creeped out.
Ah well, I’m off to bathe in the waters of my favorite AI (shoggoth) image generator for a bit. Did you feel that? Felt like a tentacle or something… shrugs.
I highly recommend this book to everyone. It’s an amazing story of a slow motion train wreck. Even more amazingly, the wreck actually started long before the libertarian bozos ever showed up, but they very much accelerated the disaster.
The model of some post-colonial states where you don’t need to spend any money on defense because it’s next door to, hosts, or is the labor pool of a gigantic British/French/US airbase
I’m curious whether this community will be built on the “nominally libertarian but there’s a suspicious amount of freely available public goods, there are just no poor people allowed anywhere near it” model or if it’s truly going to be the libertarian ideal free-for-all.
I wonder if this “utopia” will have company stores as far as the eye can see. Would they use crypto instead of the old school company “totally-not-money” voucher?
