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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."
I grew up in Arizona, and let me tell you, a couple decades ago it was HOT. Like, 122 F in Tucson and Phoenix was not unheard of. Now, it's fairly likely to hit that every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti
Since the 1950s, people have thought that the cheap land could be tamed and "new ideas" would just blossom out of the goodness in people's hearts. Arcosanti is a great example, but not the only one. Last I saw the place, it had a gift shop where the hippy owners took money selling semi-erotic paintings and charcoal drawings, and invited the young folks to spend some quality time mixing concrete with desert sand... or pose for the artist. There's never going to be an Arcosanti the way it was originally envisioned, or even with a population over 10.
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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.
They bought the land to develop because a big freeway is supposed to go right through the middle. They'll extort the state for a ton of money, make a huge amount of profit and then exit before the community is fully done. So the long term viability of the site is irrelevant.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Bill must think of the desert as an empty sandbox for him to play in, but there is a vibrant community already there in the plants and animals that have evolved to survive in the climate and terrain . Use the google, there's a website about it: https://www.desertusa.com/. What knowledge will be lost about the Anasazi and Sinagua people? I've walked on pre-Columbian trails where people migrated from the hot Colorado desert to the cool Laguna and Palomar mountains as the seasons changed.
"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.
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.
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.
I found...
There's no shade.
There's no water (except at the golf courses)
All the plants have thorns
All the insects are venomous
All the animals are venomous
It's too hot to be outside for about 9 months of the year.
Everything about the place screams "humans do not belong here!", yet most of the population lives in the Valley of the Sun.
I guess that explains the voting record...
And people are saying the people already living there are in trouble. Not enough water, requires a lot of energy just to stay livable by our modern standards, and on top of that it's going to be far from work so that means even more energy to move people back and forth between home and work twice a day.
Sure, but of the 200K years mankind's footprint has been expanding on the planet, most of it has been spent exploiting the rich natural reserves of the planet.
The conservation of (and stretching of) resources has arguably only advanced in times of extreme shortage. The exponential growth (intended) of crop yields to keep feeding a booming population is but one example. People are resourceful, intelligent creatures for the most part, yet often complacent unless propelled by hardship.
It's not Arrakis, but living in desert cities has already prompted water conservation and recycling unheard of a few generations ago.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
All the critics here who are chorussing "oh, Gates is so stupid, he doesn't know that Arizona is uninhabitable" are silly: we already know it's possible because 1.6 million people already live there.
Cool story bro, except it isn't that the desert is uninhabitable, it's that there are limits and you are pressing them. While your real estate brochure version of living in the desert is cool, it seems to assume that there will always be plenty of water, plenty of air conditioning, and will be just like living in 70 degrees all year round - perfect comfort.
And it's sort of funny - why move to an area when all you want to do is alter the environment to something the environment isn't.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.