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Bill Gates Just Bought 25,000 Acres in the Arizona Desert (kgw.com)
What's the world's second-richest man up to now? A Phoenix news station reports:
One of Bill Gates' investment firms has spent $80 million to kickstart the development of a brand-new community in Arizona's far West Valley. The large plot of land is about 45 minutes west of downtown Phoenix off I-10 near Tonopah. The proposed community, made up of close to 25,000 acres of land, is called Belmont. According to Belmont Partners, a real estate investment group based in Arizona, the goal is to turn the land into its own "smart city."
"Belmont will create a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs," Belmont Partners said in a news release.
A former columnist for the Phoenix newspaper writes that "Unless Gates plans to turn the land into a preserve, he might want to know a few things that the locals didn't tell him..." First, Arizona doesn't have enough water to continue these kind of developments, no matter what the mouthpieces of the Real Estate Industrial Complex say... Second, climate change poses a clear and present danger to Arizona now. Summers are significantly hotter and lasting longer than a few decades ago. Massive wildfires are common, another new phenomenon. Whether Phoenix will even be inhabitable by mid-century is an open question. Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines. All of which make it questionable whether all the dreamed developments ever get built, much less last long.
"To be fair, wealthy people who were clever in one area -- especially tech -- often think they know a lot about everything," the columnist concludes. "If this is the case here, he might want to study up."
"Belmont will create a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs," Belmont Partners said in a news release.
A former columnist for the Phoenix newspaper writes that "Unless Gates plans to turn the land into a preserve, he might want to know a few things that the locals didn't tell him..." First, Arizona doesn't have enough water to continue these kind of developments, no matter what the mouthpieces of the Real Estate Industrial Complex say... Second, climate change poses a clear and present danger to Arizona now. Summers are significantly hotter and lasting longer than a few decades ago. Massive wildfires are common, another new phenomenon. Whether Phoenix will even be inhabitable by mid-century is an open question. Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines. All of which make it questionable whether all the dreamed developments ever get built, much less last long.
"To be fair, wealthy people who were clever in one area -- especially tech -- often think they know a lot about everything," the columnist concludes. "If this is the case here, he might want to study up."
According to Belmont Partners, a real estate investment group based in Arizona, the goal is to turn the land into its own "smart city."
I'm really interested in how they plan to deal with the water issue, it seems like a show-stopper. Maybe they can build something to recover water from the dry arid air - because otherwise they're going to have to pipe it in, and the Colorado River is already over used... They must have considered this issue when they bought the dry desert land...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The naysayment regarding water is dumb.
It is also dumb for another reason: 90% of the water in Phoenix goes to water lawns. So just build the new city without grass, and use xeriscaping instead. Problem solved.
"To be fair, wealthy people who were clever in one area -- especially tech -- often think they know a lot about everything,"
Unlike say columnists?
C'mon, I'm sure Bill didn't just smoke a blunt and decide to go build a new city in the desert. You can bet there's a ton of experts involved who have already thought about whatever it is Mr Columnist or Mr Forum poster thinks and then some. Because that's the thing with smart people, they think about all the things you think about, plus some more.
Why did we need this ignorant opinion in the summary? It only serves to dumb down the real story which could be something really interesting.
If that's part of the plan then we'll hear about it, the federal government frowns on unlicensed reactors under their jurisdiction.
That was before Trump handed the keys to the Department of Energy to a guy who wanted to shut the whole department down, if he could only remember its name.
I say let Gates give it a shot. He can hardly make things worse than they'll be soon enough anyway, given the current bunch of drooling stooges in charge.
I just checked, Arizona is landlocked. If desalination was the plan, surely it would make sense to move the project closer to the ocean?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Look, Bill Gates can get a lot of things wrong, that much anyone can tell.
But quite frankly the smugness of the columnist is quite hillarious, on how stupid someone can be.
As if he's more equipped to know how Bill's investment will pan out from a very superficial reading, like in comparison to a guy who made his top 3 world fortune position out of a garage upstart and is currently driving one of the most effective and important foundations in the world. Smugness tied to ignorance, good way to show the entire world how much of an idiot you are.
With the sort or money and power Gates has, he can turn any desolate land into paradise. He could build a tropical paradise out of Antarctica. It's the sort of backing that made places like Las Vegas and Disney.
Climate change, massive wildfires, hotter summer? Does this guy even know who he's talking about? There's a whole range of ways to make the region profitable.
And even if he doesn't, people have to understand that the stuff Bill Gates invest on these days are not always running around profit.
You can hate his Microsoft years and whatnot all you want, and you can throw arguments about tax deductions and whatnot against his foundation all you want, the fact is that there's probably no one else in the world right now investing more on charitable causes. We're talking billions of dollars often on causes that will have no financial return.
People often don't realize how much he and his foundation did because most of the stuff it's currently investing on are ways to address basic health, hygiene and sanitation problems in the poorest countries, so we don't directly see results as much, but for certain regions in the world his contributions probably advanced things several decades in years time.
He's not the kinda guy who is gonna be worried about infrastructure problems in an arid region. He's the guy who has the best chances of finding out a way of solving such problems there, and then selling or sharing the knowledge to do the same to other parts of the world.
If Los Angeles could produce its own water by desalination, inland areas would be able to retain the water we are now sending them. But until that happens each state on the Colorado River gets a specific annual allocation of the water in it. The Phoenix metro area has a local supply of mountain drainage, but Arizona law requires that any new development prove out a 100-year supply of water before it can be built. Water is the limiting factor for any development in this state.
Energy will not be a problem. The area gets over 300 days of hard clean sunlight a year, and is next to a large nuclear plant. But Gates is going to have to change the name. There is already a Bellemont on I-40 in the mountains, a large new residential development near Flagstaff.
Everyone's got an argument where 'plenty of solar power' solves each of the myriad problems of living in a sun-baked desert. The far easier solution is not to live in a sun baked desert.
Location is still the most important consideration in sustainable development, because the annual energy cost of living is proportional to how far the temperature is from 70 oF. Everything after that is just mitigating the cost of the environment you've chosen. We could live in a comfortable area, or we could install a big power plant to make it comfortable. We could live somewhere with reliable access to clean water, or we could install a big power plant to harvest, purify, or import water. We could live somewhere with easy transportation, or we could install a big power plant to knock down mountains and catapult goods from 1000 miles away.
Just because your big power plant is solar, doesn't prevent it being wasteful.
Learning to live in new environs is what resourceful life does when it refuses to die and depopulate at the edge of the Petri dish.
If we cannot figure out how to live (and eventually thrive) in the earthly atmosphere of the Arizona desert with its excessive heat and limited water, off-planet settlements are the dreams that come from pipes.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The DOE was created in 1977 - we did pretty well without it up until that time. Interesting to note, too, that the only nuclear power plant emergency we've had - Three Mile Island - happened after the creation of the DOE. Perhaps creating a big, overreaching, overarching Federal Department allows local/regional control to relax because "the Feds got it covered"...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Everyone's got an argument where 'plenty of solar power' solves each of the myriad problems of living in a sun-baked desert. The far easier solution is not to live in a sun baked desert.
Humans really like temperatures around 70 F/21 C. Solar power in the desert doesn't work very well unless there is water to evaporate. There you tend to need the "swamp cooler" type AC.
I'm a big fan of solar power. But to provide cooling in the desert, it's best use is being under the panels in the shade they throw.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.