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.
Train racing. No I will not elaborate.
with multi-track drifting of course
I’m listening
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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Bringing streetcars and trams back to as many roads as logistically possible
Thinking of actual crank projects. Mine is probably nuclear powered ships. Decarbonize the oceans!
Okay but hear me out - what about 21st century tea clippers built with bleeding edge material science and utilizing advanced weather tracking to maximize speed and minimize crossage time, all without using “powered”, ie electric battery or ice, propulsion during normal operations?
Plattenbau construction megaproject. Socialism, gray, big blocks and no suburb freedom? Yes, we’ll build more.
I would bring big efforts to resurrect the Irish language by having all sporting events, news broadcasts etc in Irish, having Irish be taught in school before English, having social events where people are expected to speak Irish etc. However this would merely be a Trojan horse for my real goal: slyly take out gendered pronouns from Irish and have everyone’s pronouns be gender neutral by default, and only otherwise if specified.
It should be obvious that I’m Irish but we can apply this to any Anglophone country. England speaks Irish now, fuck you
Global grid of computers for collective use. Like a public cloud. The primary purpose of this would be for economic planning (and voting on priorities for the plan) but also for any other purpose (research, providing services, data storage and distribution, etc).
Massive radio telescopes built into the far side of the Moon.
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
i like it, then mine would be solar gravitational lens telescope
someone else brought this idea up a couple weeks ago but its been stuck in my brain ever since:
- seize all gold stores from the wealthy/governments of the world
- bring the best and brightest computer system engineers and scientists together and develop a new standard of solar-powered computing that emphasizes durability, accessibility, and low power consumption above everything else.
- melt down all the gold from 1 and use that stockpile to construct public computer services and interfacing devices that are handed out or otherwise available for everyone to use cheaply
- slowly spin-up new solar-powered datacenters, decommission/cannibalize existing datacenters and sell off those resources to recoup the costs of the project.
thats the view from 10 billion feet up. i think it would be pretty neat.
End natural predation.
Honestly bringing back the Cult of Reason sounds dope.
Aside from that though, Global Pan-Oceanic Hypertrain Network.
Just for the flex of it.
Window powered maglev trains because why not?
Alantropa? The TNO brains are leaking.
Antarctica colony. Big ass bronze statue staring out over the ocean north like the Colossus of Rhodes
Doc Savage vibes.
The destruction of all white settlements in desert areas and summar execution of sundown towners
Try to make local and sustainable industrial productivity with solar metal casting and distributed network of CNC machines.
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/07/smelting-solar-style/
https://hackaday.com/2023/06/25/automate-away-the-drudgery-of-cnc-manufacturing/
backyard furnacebackyard solar smelter -