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.
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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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Create a large network of state and/or cooperatively owned cannabis farms to mass-produce hemp for industrial purposes, and every strain of quality marijuana known to man. You think the weed’s too strong these days? That’s ok, the state will devote its resources to developing 10% THC strains that taste like a gourmet meal. You want to be sent to the moon? Why yes, there will be 99.9% pure concentrate oils widely available.
Just as the USSR had an alcohol ration, there will be a mids ration available for all. Any unclaimed rations will be distributed to the gulags to forcibly pacify political prisoners. While high and marginally more open-minded, they will be made to play video games where every character is a black lesbian and all the messaging is based on post-colonial theory. Only after their daily shift constructing and tending the farms is finished, of course.
Any questions?
Also linen! Massive state linen and wool production so no one ever has to wear cotton, the shittiest fiber, again!
Community cafeterias. 1 caf per x (tbd) population.
- informed by national-level dietary guidelines
- very receptive to local neighborhood dietary preferences and encouraged to develop specialties
- worker controlled
- kitchen teams could swap/guest in other neighborhoods to mix things up
- you can go to cafs in other neighborhoods but there would probably be some system to anticipate demand to avoid over/under prepping (like you have a home caf but you can make reservation at another one?)
You can eat there or get take out.
Benefits:
- less food waste
- don’t have to waste time shopping, chopping, cooking and cleaning when you don’t want to
- will not have insane “chef” centered kitchen cultures, unless everyone working there votes in favour of this for some reason
Duodecimal system baby, fuck this non divisible by 3 system.
We counting on our phalanges now.
just use your right hand to count to 5 and your left hand denotes batches of 6. You can count up to thirty like this
i would make every US state square shaped, including hawaii but excepting the then independent republics of florida and alaska
Buy out the ozempic patent and deliver it to every obese person
I mean better than charging out the ass for it but if you’re supreme ruler couldn’t you just fix the food supply to not be so terrible for you? when you stop taking that stuff you gain the weight back, and it has not insignificant side effects
Yikes that sounds like communism
I need more info
Semaglutide has an off-label use as a weight-loss aid. It is effective. However, if you’re in the US, it’ll cost you like $1000/month because your insurance won’t cover it for that reason.
I don’t think anywhere has approved it purely for weight loss either, it’s just getting some off-label prescriptions, and there was a mini-crisis where 95% of the ozempic prescriptions in North America were being written by a single doctor in Nova Scotia, and then distributed by mail pharmacies across Canada to US buyers.
Thanks
I wager that many obese people are insecure about their bodies. Giving them a drug to lose weight would potentially bring them happiness, lead to better socialization, less physical disability and comorbid diseases, alleviating the healthcare industry burden. Skinnier people touch grass more, run marathons, etc
I would build a giant space station that’s basically entirely solar panels with some kind of magnetic dust shield that would be permanently in sunlight, then it would beam electricity down to earth or something.
China is working on this: https://spacenews.com/china-aims-for-space-based-solar-power-test-in-leo-in-2028-geo-in-2030/
Oh my god, I remember reading this last year! I, robot is wild that’s for sure.
After I’ve done the full maglev rail network, the tallest structure on Earth. And then a slide coming off the top floor.
I’d wage trade, diplomatic and military offensives to push the sae/imperial/feet, pounds etc. on other countries.
They could even do something different as long as it’s not metric.
E: compulsory trade, music and art education.
Not for the workforce, just because it’s nice to make and enjoy stuff.
A circular underground tunnel for bikes. Cyclists have little umbrellas that they open up when they enter the tube and everyone rides clockwise. There are mudflaps at the entrance and exits.
Reading other comments, don’t put me in charge.
ghibli socialsim…
ban gaming
I guess it depends on the scale of regime I’d have. Once all the normal stuff happens and people have housing, good jobs, transit, food, healthcare, literacy, half the earth rewilded, and everything else, I’d go buckwild.
We’re gonna set up Mars for terraforming. Put a big fuckoff magnet at L1, and put a particle accelerator on Phobos to create a torus of plasma along its orbit, do 'em both, we need a backup because this shit has to last a billion years. Smack it with some ammonia-rich asteroids, shotgun the surface with extremophile lichens and bacteria, build some ecopoiesis domes. Just let it go wild. Not a colonization attempt, just create a trickle of progress and let it slowly improve over time and go wild til we’re actually ready to do something with it.
We’re going to learn everything we can and we’ll save all of our knowledge. We will learn everything we can, uncover old mysteries, and explore. The only limiting factor for sciences should be people-hours. And we’re going to make backups. Off-site ones too, maybe even off-world. We should never forget anything ever again.
We’re going to preserve languages and learn a universal second language. Teach everyone Esperanto or something, but make sure that people’s native languages are preserved and retained. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may be bullshit, but I think there’s a lot of cultural value in preserving languages. It’d be great for everyone to be able to communicate together, but it’s important that we’re not losing things along the way to that goal.
Venus would be more viable
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Yeah, could freeze the atmosphere and then ship that to Mars. That’s also another solid option instead of using the Vesta Moon proposal I also replied with. It’s not about difficulty, it’s about fun! Just dropping a big dipole magnet in front of Mars and maybe another big dipole magnet (and i guess a solar shield depending on viability of construction) in front of Venus and another is really all I wanna do right now til we can figure stuff out.
I’m not entirely sure of that, Venus just has so much atmosphere. Most of the “easy” methods would turn it into 4x10^19 kg of graphite, or roughly the mass of Saturn’s moon Mimas. Now that’s a lot of pencils!
Direct atmospheric removal would need to carry it sufficiently far away from Venusian orbit as to not result in recapture, perhaps exporting some of it to Mars is a decent use?
I think a couple maybe-possible options could be used together.
Drop 4 Vesta into Venusian orbit as a satellite, mining it for primarily Magnesium and Iron, as well as any Calcium present. React with the atmosphere to form carbonate rocks and to leave Iron behind as a catalyst for the Bosch reaction we’re about to use to convert the remaining atmosphere. Move Miranda from orbit around Uranus, impacting it into Venus at an angle to add some (not a ton) of velocity to its rotation, and to eject material from both the surface and atmosphere. Most material can be incorporated into Vesta, or atmosphere could be sent to Mars if you want. The primary motivator for impacting Miranda is the large amount of water ice (and hydrogen) which will introduce substantial quantities of water and will strip additional atmosphere through the Bosch reaction mentioned earlier.
Write into law that there is only one type of Christianity allowed. Every five years the knights of columbus and the freemasons select their top guys for a gladiator fight. If the Knights win then catholicism is the official religion for 5 years, if the masons win it’s protestantism.
If it’s Catholicism, do the pope and Orthadox Pope duel?
If it’s protestantism, just IRL fortnite between all like 20,000 protestantism sects
The Russian Orthodox Church would just start a religious order staffed by Russian MMA fighters and it would win every year
I’d put serious resources in to atmospheric carbon scrubbers. But not for any useful or sane purpose. Instead I’d use the carbon to build a 500km tall optically perfect diamond prism in the north atlantic that almost turns England in to a glowing puddle every day, but just misses them. To keep them in line.
