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Location Selected For $1 Billion Ghost Town
Hugh Pickens writes "Although a fully operation city with no people sounds like the setup for a dystopian sci-fi novel, the Boston Globe reports that the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation will develop a $1 billion scientific ghost town near Hobbs, New Mexico to help researchers test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets on existing infrastructure without interfering in everyday life. Bob Brumley, senior managing director of Pegasus Holdings, says the town will be modeled after the real city of Rock Hill, South Carolina, complete with highways, houses and commercial buildings, old and new. Unlike traditional cities, City Labs will start with its underground 'backbone' infrastructure that will allow the lab to monitor activity throughout the 17-mile site. Since nobody lives in the Center's buildings, computerized systems will mimic human behavior such as turning thermostats up and down, switching lights off and on, or flushing toilets. The Center's test facilities and supporting infrastructure may require as much as 20 square miles of open, unimproved land where the controlled environment will permit evaluation of the positive and negative impacts of smart grid applications and integration of renewable energies for residential, commercial and industrial sectors of the economy. 'It's an amusement park for the scientists,' adds Brumley."
this one should be interesting
Seriously, Facebook costs the same as 100 fully-automated and instrumented cities.
Economy is doing fine, indeed...
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Wouldn't it be easier to just add sensors to Rock Hill, SC? Or better yet, play Sim City.
I don't think I could justify dropping $1 billion on something like this given our current deficit.
You misunderstand I guess, they're just going to build an automated toilet hooked up to a money printing press and see how much money they can flush down the toilet per minute.
Seriously though, there has to be a more cost-effective method to do an experiment like this.
I know it's not as controlled, but letting actual people live in this town would have a few benefits.
1. Some people would get a place to live.
2. If you want simulation data for humans, why not just use humans?
Seriously, let people live there for free or nearly free and the deal is they have to let scientists into their homes whenever for testing and upgrades. They also give up privacy for all of their anonimized actions and give up certain privacy for identifiable information, like photos. Bonus round, let them run the businesses too. Seriously, in the days of the WPA there were all sorts of co op planned communities that went up all at once, like Greenbelt, MD. Many of them are still thriving.
Much of Detroit consists of vacant buildings these days, with at least some sort of roads still in place.
In a way, the government is already "employing" (i.e., wasting welfare dollars on) most of the people still living there. Turning lights on or off and flushing toilets for research purposes would at least indirectly allow them to provide something of value to society, rather than merely being the drain they currently represent.
Why don't they just lease downtown Detroit?
"What reason is there not to have actual people living in it?"
Duh, so they can nuke it in case of a robot uprising.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why not just lease one of China's ghost cities? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/Ghost-towns-China-Satellite-images-cities-lying-completely-deserted.html
"What reason is there not to have actual people living in it?"
Duh, so they can nuke it in case of a robot uprising.
Or more likely so nobody is around to see what they are really doing there. They've built cities in the past for secret research. The Manhattan Project comes to mind.
...to all the traditional slash-dotters I know?!? Do you people not do your research? If you paid attention to who it was and did a little, few minute research, you would find out that this is a global private company. They can do whatever the frak they want with their money. Before you start to go off on the "gov't," do some research to find out.
"If confusion is the first step to knowledge, I must be a genius." ~Larry Leissner
This looks like some kind of scam or hoax. There's a web site for the project, but it's all clip art. "Pegasus Global Holdings" is suspicious. The "Pegasus Global Holdings" behind this project is here. But there's also Pegasus-Global Holdings, with a dash. The one with a dash seems to be real. The one without the dash, the one behind this project, not so much.
Their "head office" is supposedly at 1875 "I" Street, NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20006. Many other companies have the same address, including a small law firm and a PR firm. It seems to be a mail drop of some kind. Their address in Reston, VA is a small furnished space currently for lease. Their "London office" is a is a "virtual office" package: "Executive Offices Group can provide a Virtual Office business address at any of our 34 highly sought after locations. "
"Pegasus Global Holdings" isn't listed in the SEC's EDGAR system, so they're not publicly held or doing anything big financially. They previously announced a "commercial spaceport" project; nothing came of that.
Our current deficit is a result of excessive military spending, insufficient taxes, and rampant tax expenditures and corporate welfare.
But hey, good idea, just because you owe money doesn't mean you cut all your expenses and starve your way to prosperity. Sometimes that doesn't pay off, like the guy who didn't replace his roof because he owed money.
Then it blew off, and since he didn't pay for insurance, he ended up losing his house.
A 2 bedroom house should cost about $50-$100k ANYWHERE, and I'm being generous. If real effort were made, the house:car price ratio would routinely be 2:1 instead of 10:1.
It will never happen because there are too many incentives built into the system which require housing to be expensive.
1. The biggest and cruelest joke: Politicians who express a desire for affordable housing. Nonsense. The tax base comes from a percentage of the assessed value of the house. Affordable housing would just give them a huge fiscal headache. Much of the cost of new construction also funds an inefficient permitting and inspection beurocracy, which they would have to cut if all housing were built in factories to national standards and shipped in components (yes, you could still customize, and it would only be marginally more expensive).
2. Leverage. Almost anybody who owns a house is overweighted real estate in their portfolio. Worse yet, they are leveraged. The nice thing about leverage is that if the asset rises it magnifies your wins. The downside is that it magnifies your losses and we just saw what that does. The individual owners require rising prices. Hence, people are very upset when property values decline. Note, ownership turns the consumer calculus on its head. If your landlord offered you a rent decrease you'd be extatic. That doesn't happen; but renters can shop rents with nothing more than the inconvenience of the move; while owners have much higher transaction costs.
3. The banks. If people could save enough to buy a house for cash, or if they could make large down payments then the banks would collect a lot less interest. The banks have the ear of Congress. This brings us back to point 1--efforts to encourage "affordable housing" by subsidizing... loans. The great deceit is for the banks to convince us that afforodable CREDIT is the same thing as affordable HOUSING. This isn't hair splitting. The unlieshing of credit under low rates doesn't just pump housing, it pumps inflation in general. It's partly why you can't buy a gallon of gasoline with a silver quarter anymore.
It takes a special person to decide the real problem with design is too much user input. By all means, enjoy your city-of-things. But for the love, please don't bring any of it back to the real world until you run it by some humans.