50 billion already spent
What was the grand idea anyway? A stupid bawdy city that vapid people will visit? They already have those, this always seemed like an utter waste of time.
They could’ve built a space elevator with the level of hubris this project had and it would’ve been more genuinely useful and just as much of a statement. They have an excellent location for it.
You can see it on google maps too, they’ve dug out 106km of foundations for it, some straight through actual mountains. What they’ve done is an environmental blight.
Picking up my coffee at Starbucks Neom Community-1, anyone want anything?
Yeah, but a space elevator is beyond our current capabilities of materials science. Neom has the benefit of being physically buildable even if the end result isn’t desirable.
The oversized rectangular prism, sure, if you can get the materials in the quantities necessary. I’d be very surprised if any structural engineers said the chandelier idea was feasible without being paid a lot of money to say exactly that.
Right? Plus if you build that thing nobody else is ever building one. The city that owns the space elevator will be one of the most important locations in the world eventually and putting it on the route through the most important trade corridor through the panama canal is a very good location even if it’s not on the equator.
The best equatorial location for it is Singapore or near Macapa, Brazil though probably.
MBS is such a fucking idiot.
dude played sims city once and thought that just one train going back and forth down an infinitely long city was peak
Ok, look, Workers and Resources is actually a pretty hard game ok
November 2024, 21,000 workers had been killed building Neom
I was trying to find the story of the old man they murdered because he didn’t want to leave his tribal homelands. I believe they built the airport where his family had lived for generations
wtf were they doing? using people’s foreheads as hammers? how do you possibly kill that many workers?
They use indentured slave labor so they probably don’t care about safety.
I’d guess lack of safety on job sites combined with overwork. Having people do 16+ hour days without hard hats or scaffolding is going to cause a lot of accidents.
“So I read the Chinese have a famous great wall that has lasted centuries, I want Neom to be exactly like that”
“Sir, the laborers that died building it were entombed inside the wall and it was constructed on and off for 2500 years”
“Excellent. We’ll do that”
Well you see, hierarchy in general and monarchy in particular are incredibly efficient.
Yeah, it’s such an absurdly high number I’m wondering if there isn’t a
or 
involved somewhere in the reporting.
Are you shitting me? That much more than even the death of migrant workers for the Qatar world cup
Yeah and the others sentenced to death for resisting eviction
This was always the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of in my life and I’m still surprised they made it as far as they did into the construction. Just goes to show that if you show a whole bunch of relatively ‘qualified’ engineers/architects/scientists a pile of infinite money they will go along with whatever you say as long as you pay them.
“When you flush the toilet, the stuff goes downhill, right?” the architect asked. “We’ve worked that out,” Qaddumi replied, according to the architect. “We’re going to have hundreds of shuttle cars running back and forth, picking up the sewage on retractable bridges.”
Damn, can’t wait till we invent pipes
??? Just make one poop train
That would be Communism
Dubai style sewage system
Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic moment.
:
When I was going up from town I met the turd train rolling down Every day hundred trains Every train hundred cars Every car hundred tons Every ton hundred tanks Every tank ten thousand Turds And every day smells even worse
I’m very disappointed. I hoped MBS would triple down and spend another $100 billion or whatever to claim they were building a space needle that would literally reach the moon.
the cruelty of the gulf states dictators is only rivaled by their gaudiness. (in case of saudis - a lack of foresight as well, uae and qatar are more competently evil)
(tfw oil at 60 and your cashflow gone to shits)
Neom says that the attention has now moved to “the complex engineering and detailed design work associated with the first phase” of The Line.
You don’t build a home before you design it. Tract home, palatial mansion, or hovel they all have a plan in place before it is built. This is squarely in wiping-your-ass-before-you-shit territory.
Fifty billion. Fucking dumbass.
There’s the Winchester House in San Jose that was design-as-you-go and ended up such a clusterfuck that it’s now a tourist attraction.
That was the result of money and mentail illness. I’d argue Neom is money and man’s hubris.
Line go down.
Did anyone expect otherwise? Even the Saudis?
I kinda expected to build like a visor center and a tramstop not connected to anything.
I sometimes wonder why the Gulf States just don’t build a giant flaming Mammon head to throw their excess wealth in, it’s probably a easier way to eat up all that dead capital than planning all these bullshit mega projects.
I mean, I kinda assume none if that money is like, actually real. All just spreadhseet stuff they hypothetically have but can’t really spend, but investing it and hiding losses still works out.
I am with it though. A world where we have cool bullshit megaprojects is a better world than we have.
Communism would’ve been able to do this
But would have been too smart to try.
Uhh, Magnitogorsk.
Last I checked, that’s a town and not a line of houses in the desert. Are you really trying to draw an equivalent between planning and building a new town vs whatever the fuck the Line is?
It was initially designed as a linear city. It wasn’t as dumb as the Line, but still a weird idea.
Genuinely
This is hilarious and predictable
