I'm getting an ad on Youtube for living in a luxury prison in one of the world's top repressive states, enticing! 
Oh yes, you can live in total luxury! All you need to do is convert to sunni islam, strictly follow the sharia, hand over all of your data for realtime monitoring and sacrifice all of your family for generations to come 
@noiob knowing them they probably will tbh, hell even Egypt can pull it off these days somehow
@xerz the islands, probably, the weird-ass line city straight through the desert? I doubt that'll ever work out
@noiob the first time it was made centuries ago it eventually became a large neighborhood on an European top 5 largest capital, I know because I've been there… it wasn't nearly 170km but neither was it made by an obscenely rich and committed regime 
it's a pointlessly dumb idea, but they can still get the land, infrastructures and logistics working — if anything I find its biggest issues will be socioeconomic and not developmental
it's a pointlessly dumb idea, but they can still get the land, infrastructures and logistics working — if anything I find its biggest issues will be socioeconomic and not developmental
@xerz I mean the logistics can't really work at that scale, travel times within the city would be awful, they're handwaving it now but there is no technology that'll save them
@noiob that's *kinda* where I'm going with the socioeconomic part — they can do the spine thingie because they "just" need 510km/h rail, but I doubt the commercial capacity would be particularly big, and thus it would have to be more like multiple cities that happen to be aligned instead of just one… which is what their concept of "city modules" suggests they'll do.
@xerz would you like to live near 510 km/h rail? also it would need to stop at regular intervals to be useful so it'd never reach that speed
