About a year ago, political commentator Jeremy Driver coined the term
“cheems mindset”; the tendency for the public and
politicians of Western countries to be lazy and unimaginative when it comes to grand ideas.
This can vary from mundane policies such as “why bother building a tram
system when we have cars” all the way to “Why spend money going to
Mars when there isn’t anything there”. Because it’s cool, Janet.
I reckon if the Channel Tunnel, or the Delta Works, or the Hoover Dam were proposed today,
it would be rejected as too difficult and a waste of money.
Take for example HS2, a proposed high speed railway line in the UK that goes from London
to Leeds. The plan was drawn up in 2009 and after over 13 years of debate, discussion, committee
meetings, planning councils, costing analysis, public scrutiny, local hearings, environmental
impact assessments… the 500 kilometres of railway line is set to be completed by...2045!
Around the same time, China, which does not seem to suffer from the “Cheems Mindset” began
their own high speed rail network and as of 2021, they have 40,000 kilometres of high speed rail.
If you weigh the pros and cons and the pros come out on top
then just like. Do it. Why is this so hard? So today, I’m going to name my top picks
for really crazy projects that countries across the world should build, or at the very least,
find out how feasible it would be to make these projects reality.
And I’m not talking space elevators or Dyson spheres or terraforming Mars.
This isn’t Kurzgesagt. These are projects that we could
easily make right now with our current technology if we had the willpower to do so.
When humans first arrived in Australia, it was a green, rainforest continent with diverse
megafauna. However, the native Aboriginal Australians employed a hunting tactic called “fire stick farming”,
where trees were selectively burned to control animal populations and the local environment.
As a result, Australia is now a desert continent and the human populations are confined to only
a handful of cities along the coast, where temperatures are tolerable for at least some
of the year. The vast majority of the Australian outback however is uninhabitable desert and the
high thirties is the average temperature in the region during the summer months.
Some people living out there have to sleep underground during the day and
only come out at night like a village of Vampire Paul Hogans.
Now this could EASILY be fixed if you just dug a canal from one part of Australia to the other
and let the middle part flood with water. All of this is now coastline and it will rain a lot more.
And then you get a whole new green continent the side of the USA and you could fit loads of
people in there. Easily half a billion people. They have the technology, Australia is already
a big mining country. I came up with this idea in the shower
and before I finished washing my hair I had thought up like 7 benefits right off the bat.
It cools down Australia by creating rain, so fewer forest fires and no more melting car tires
You gain access to land the size of the continental USA to do whatever you want with
The GDP boost from building a giant canal would be a lot
It’s practice terraforming for Mars
It’s dope Even if it doesn’t
work you can use it as a shipping passage, don’t have to go around Australia any more.
It lowers the global sea level a bit, maybe. Last time Australia flooded it lowered the global sea
level by 7 millimetres so imagine what creating a new sea the size of the Mediterranean could do.
Australia COULD BE the next global super power but you know why they’re not doing it?
“Oh no you can’t do that mate think of all the bloody animals” like. I don’t know if
you’re aware, but every year the outback burns down and three billion animals burn to death.
You know what doesn’t burn down often? Places where it rains.
Also, this would undo the mass extinction of animals that happened when the original
forests were burned down all those years ago. The net number of animals is going to increase
and you’re going to lose like, what, four species of snake and some kangaroos? Get real.
Back of the envelope calculations by the Internet Historian estimates it would cost
$14 billion dollars and that’s nothing
in terms of government expenditure. I don’t see the drawbacks just dig a canal.
Hong Kong was a British territory until It was handed back to China in 1997.
China pinky promised to be nice and be respectful to the rights of the Hong
Kongers but its clear in recent years that they’ve been anything but that.
This has kicked off a wave of protests and forced many residents to flee the islands.
In response to this, in 2020 the UK government announced that every Hong Konger who held a
British Passport prior to 1997 could come and live in the United Kingdom and obtain
British citizenship after five years of residency. The move was widely praised
as a humanitarian lifeline; others however expressed reservations about the policy;
“ooh think of the effect on the house prices”
90,000 Hong Kongers and counting have applied to the scheme so far, and it appears like London,
Liverpool, and other major UK cities are the top destinations for them to move to;
this, of course, exacerbates the sky-high housing prices that we’ve seen in the UK in recent years.
Hong Kongers can afford it; they’re used to it. But the average British person maybe less so.
There is also the problem of the UK’s infrastructure. Hong Kong is a real life cyberpunk
neon megacity with unbelievable density and fast subways and fireworks! While the UK is uh…yeah.
The solution was proposed by economist Sam Bowman in May 2020; set aside a small uninhabited section
of land on the UK coast and apply all the rules that made Hong Kong so rich in the first place.
Low taxes, low regulation, property rights, and the English legal system.
Pretty quickly developers will flock to take advantage of these relaxed rules, building
ports and relocating businesses, magnificent skyscrapers, and affordable housing. Politically
it will be similar to the other Crown Dependencies like the Isle of Man; owned and protected by
the UK, but with its own local government. Hong Kongers will have a place to live that feels
just like home, while escaping persecution at the hands of the PRC. Young Brits and people looking
for a fresh start will have a brand new city of opportunity right on their doorstep – plenty of
cheap housing to live in and businesses to gain high-paying employment. And the economic boost
of building an entire new city for a million people from scratch will be incalculable.
If it doesn’t work, who cares? You’ve lost nothing except ten minutes of paperwork.
But if this works, we have everything to gain.
In a similar vein let’s talk about a series of Tweets that twitter user “Derek” wrote last year;
Let’s talk about why China builds these cities from scratch. Since 1978, China has built over
500 of these pre-made cities, even if nobody lives in them. Famously the Kangbashi district
was built to hold over a million citizens; today, the population numbers less than 200,000,
with an all time low of 30,000. But they still have a purpose. Because as China
grows into an advanced economy, the urban population is only going to get bigger.
These ghost cities entice rural folk to move out of the countryside and into higher-paying,
better work in the cities – where all the nation’s wealth is being created right now. More people in
urban areas, more wealth generated for the nation. All that is needed to kickstart these dormant
cities is just one or two factories paying more than being a farmer, and the rest of
civilisation will quickly follow. And the result is that nearly one in eight people alive today
lives in a Chinese city. One of the biggest success stories from this programme is Shenzhen,
which in 1993 had just over a million and a half people but today, Shenzhen is...well. Shenzhen.
Can such a tactic be employed by the United States? Yeah. [pause]
Half of the US GDP is generated by the top 25 largest US cities, and that figure rises to 80%
if you include the next 250 largest urban areas. Rural folks like to claim they hold all the power
as they are the food generators of America, but farming is less than 1% of all the wealth
generated by the US so just like. Zip it. The more big cities you have,
the more money you make as a nation. And seeing as there are 4 million square kilometres of the USA
where not a single person lives, you can quite clearly fit many more cities and
millions more people into that space and still have plenty of natural beauty left to admire.
But the benefits wouldn’t just be in the economy. Many Liberals and Progressives in the United
States complain that the Electoral College and the Senate are biased towards a small minority in
rural states. But y’know if Democrats built like 4 medium sized neon cities in these boring middle
states they’d probably never lose an election every again. They wouldn’t even need to spend
tax money to make the Federal Government build the cities. They could just set aside some
federally-owned land in Wyoming and create some special incentives for businesses and
construction companies to build stuff there like in the Hong Kong 2 idea. If places like California
and New York refuse to fix their housing crisis then it’s only fair for the disaffected rentier
class to just up and leave and take their talents to HyperDriveCity where they can live,
as Derek put it, in a $200 a month apartment that is also on the 93rd floor of a mall.
The original Twin Towers were some of the most iconic buildings in the
world and in addition to all the death and destruction that their demolition caused,
it was also a crime against architecture.
I mean, they were so cool, what the hell? And although they rebuilt one of them,
it’s not the same without the other. You can even just reuse the old design,
I won’t care. I know they’re working on it but come on, people. What’s the hold up?
From 1976 to 2003, Air France and British Airways operated a supersonic passenger jet
service that could transport people from New York to London at half the time of a standard flight;
at it’s fastest, the jet could make Mach 2 and was travelling faster than the speed the Earth spins.
But after a slump in worldwide plane ticket sales, and a Concorde blowing up on the runway,
the fleet of supersonic jets were retired as too expensive and too riddled with problems.
Now here’s the bit that really annoys me. After the program was cancelled, Richard Branson,
who owns Virgin Atlantic Airways, offered to buy the entire fleet and all the documentation for £1,
and they said No. Even when he upped the price to $5 million per plane they said No. And since 2003,
the technology that allows people to travel at 13 hundred miles an hour has been sitting in a
warehouse and nobody else has been able to build on or improve the technology. Of all
the technological improvements in my lifetime, air transport is the only one that’s gone backwards.
Just make the plans public. What are you doing with it? You’ve made exactly
zero profit from the program since you shut it down. Make it public and let the whole
aviation industry work on fixing the issues that plagued the first run of the programme.
And if the problems are unsolvable and we can’t revive Concorde then we’ve lost nothing.
Some Las Vegas construction company wants to build a giant middle finger in London and it would be
the tallest building in Europe. It’s also called the European Trade Centre which is very ironic.
For that reason alone I think we should build it.
These are just some of buildings and engineering feats that have been proposed over the past
couple of decades and there are many more I wanted to include that didn’t make the cut.
But it goes to show that if we can easily make all these crazy buildings and
flood an entire continent, there really isn’t any excuse not to do the little things that we so
desperately need; good public transport, adequate housing, or basically any public
works project without going over budget and over schedule. Because if we don’t overcome
the cheems mindset, we might as well just nuke ourselves now and get it over with.