Location Selected For $1 Billion Ghost Town 172
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."
or a haven for hobos... (Score:3, Interesting)
this one should be interesting
Reminder: Facebook costs the same as 100 cities. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, Facebook costs the same as 100 fully-automated and instrumented cities.
Economy is doing fine, indeed...
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Seriously, Facebook costs the same as 100 fully-automated and instrumented cities.
While that's interesting, what are we supposed to get from that? Could be an indication that the "city" above is overpriced.
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Could be an indication that the "city" above is overpriced.
My eyes are rolling at 7200rpm.
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The valuation isn't for the technology. The valuation is for the number of regular users.
Google+ is better technology, but by itself is worth a tiny fraction of what Facebook is.
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Exactly!
And look what happened to Myspace (that was the last Facebook).
This valuation is for something less stable than the price of tulips.
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Exactly! And look what happened to Myspace (that was the last Facebook). This valuation is for something less stable than the price of tulips.
I think your logic is a bit strange, MySpace might be to Facebook what Altavista or Yahoo was to Google. Yes, the leadership changed rapidly for a while but then a victor emerged and continues to dominate the industry. Or MMORPGs and WoW for example. Yes, I know the dangers of anecdotal data but I see more and more people gravitating towards Facebook rather than away, they don't email they use Facebook messages. They don't use MSN, they use Facebook chat. They don't share photo albums on Flickr, they share
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but then a victor emerged and continues to dominate the industry.
What victor? What industry? In something like social networks, the victor is whatever the current fad is, and companies constantly drop out of favor. Google (as a search engine) has an advantage of technology and infrastructure, and it's still far from being a permanent monopoly on search. Facebook has nothing but "momentum", and eventually will piss off the users so they will move on to something else.
There is a separate question, how come something as amorphous as marketing information gathering from rand
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Or MMORPGs and WoW for example.
WoW has been losing subscribers steadily for a while now. [computeran...ogames.com]
I get the point you're making, but nothing lasts forever. If you really sit back and think about the internet as it was for us a decade ago it's mindblowing how far we've come. I mean, Myspace is a joke now, but 10 years ago they didn't even exist. How long has it been since Myspace has been relevant? 4 years? 5? From nothing to the juggernaut they became in the mid-00's to nothing again. Facebook is going to suffer the same fate, and I'm bet
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I'm really curious as to how many unique, regular users (regular meaning people that log in at least every couple days) they actually have. Obviously nobody on the outside would ever know, but I wouldn't be surprised if 1/3 of their 'users' are inactive accounts that haven't been touched in ages...
Oh I'm thinking less than that, but the only two groups I'm hearing from are those on Facebook and those not on Facebook or anything else. That still doesn't sound like a bad position for them to be in...
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If Google+ actually was _GOOD_ people would use it.
No, because the utility of a social networking site is whether your friends/family/colleagues are on it. Us few people that tried it didn't last long, because few other people were there. It's a chicken and egg situation.
The technology only has to be good enough. And that's what Facebook is. Lots of things about it irritate people, but the size of personal networks there are enough to outweigh that.
The UI for Google+ is undoubtably better Facebook. But unless Facebook really screw up, they'll never reach th
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The problem with google+ is it actually spews out more redundant crap than Facebook does. Facebook at least manages to hit the inner circle of my friends on a regular basis. Google+ on the other hand puts in posts from people I have no idea who is, informing me of crap I have no use for.
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what does it tell us about economy when a service that can be replicated in about a year by any competent team of developers
And a few hundred million users switching over. Facebook wasn't valued at its current levels when it didn't have the customers.
They should have just used Detroit. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Yeah weren't they bulldozing suburbs or something recently?
Re:They should have just used Detroit. (Score:5, Funny)
But then they would have to adapt to the local crime rate, and will probably end up with some kind of cyborg cops instead of automated power grids and traffic lights.
Re:They should have just used Detroit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Much of Detroit consists of vacant buildings these days, with at least some sort of roads still in place.
It would probably also be much better for testing new technology. Self-flushing toilets may work fine in city with all new plumbing. But will they work with old rusty pipes? Does a self-timing traffic system work with old wiring? New Mexico has little rain, low humidity, and a mild climate. Detroit would be much more challenging. If you can make something work in Detroit, it will work anywhere.
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If you can make something work in Detroit, it will work anywhere.
there are some car buyers who would disagree. if you can make something work in siberia, it'll work in siberia.
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No, but it costs that to BUY one. What investors supposedly do at IPO.
Wouldn't it be easier.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be easier.... (Score:5, Informative)
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I hope I'm the only slashdotter who's actually lived there. It was thoroughly a shithole.
I was driving around with a friend, and we stopped to visit some good ol' boy. Said GOB had underwear and a tshirt but no pants. The reason for his error in overdressing became clear as he lifted his shirt to reveal the nastiest scar that I hope to see. It looked like a drunk had stitched him together with twine. GOB had traded a kidney for crack. "You know the urban legend about people waking up in a bathtub full of ic
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Wouldn't it be easier to just simulate the entire city on a supercomputer? And when it's not calculating wattage of incandescent vs led lightbulbs, it could do something, oh, I don't know, useful, like curing cancer?
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They're planning on buying empty land and selling a whole fucking city. Selling a computer simulation won't generate as much profit.
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Simulations won't work because we don't know enough about the line to fully simulate the system.
Testing on existing homes won't work because existing utilities don't have the right to force a homeowner to endure low power quality while some engineer runs a test.
I would rather see the money being used to pay off homeowners to deal with testing that may destroy their homes. However, most people would rather it be done on another person's home.
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so then pay off homeowners to have testing done on their neighbors.
duh.
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;)
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Simulations only work work when you have sufficient input data for the model to accurately reflect reality. This is, for any non trivial simulation, A Very Hard Problem - especially when the simulation is multi-dimensional.
.999 accurate, and your sewage system (which uses electricity for the pumps, etc...) is only .999 accu
For example, any errors in your model multiply across the interfaces. If your electrical model is only
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Well, you seem to miss the point - this isn't a real live city.
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In a real live city you'd get in big trouble if you tried to repeat a disaster with a few changes, just to see if the results agree with what the computer simulation predicts.
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The point you claimed I missed is exactly the point I made... Are you drunk, stoned, or just fucking stupid?
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My point was the town can help improve simulations.
And you then said I miss the point and it isn't a real live city (which was kinda obvious already and didn't even need saying).
So what have I missed so far?
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Yep, the only way this makes sense if they want to test dangerous or potentially dangerous technologies without humans getting in the way. If it was really just wireless networks and automated appliances, they could just hand out/install the new bleeding edge technology out for free in a volunteer test city.
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Haven't you heard, cell phones and Wi-Fi are dangerous technologies. Allergies, cancer, other mystery ailments....
And broadband internet access, that's an extremely dangerous technology, just ask the MPAA, RIAA, or DHS.
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I don't think they could raise a billion dollars for that. To grab the interest of investors/suckers, you need to come up with something grandiose like building a whole city with no people in it.
But don't worry. If you build it, they will come. I think that's part of their rationale.
So ... people are losing their houses ... (Score:1, Insightful)
People are losing their houses due to the housing bubble and they are going to build an entire town where no one is allowed to live and have computers simulate human activity?
I ... I don't even know how to express my feelings for just how wrong this is on so many levels.
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"People are losing their houses due to the housing bubble and they are going to build an entire town where no one is allowed to live and have computers simulate human activity?"
Sounds like a guarded walled community for rich people existing today.
Only nowadays the robots turning thermostats up and down and cleaning the toilets are called Conchita and Manuel.
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Nobody is losing there home due to corporatism.
They are losing their homes because they overpaid in a bubble. A bubble created by government. Most are better off walking away and leaving the banks to eat the loss.
You want to pay-off peoples homes to collect data? Moron. You'd have 300 million takers.
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Banks and governments can certainly create or fail to stop illegal actions but the majority of people in financial trouble and losing their houses were those making 35K a year and deciding they could afford to buy a +250K house. Financiers and bankers can only make loans based upon demand, If no one is grabbing up huge mortgages they will have to survive by making smaller loans which can help avoid the inevitable bubble effect when people finally realize they may have borrowed too much money. Without idiot
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In non-recourse states people can just walk away from their homes and owe nothing.
In recourse states they have to file personal bankruptcy after walking away from their homes.
Your deal offers no options they don't already have.
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People are losing houses they could never have afforded and shouldn't have been approved for anyway due to the housing bubble
FTFY
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Those people learned a valuable lesson. They are big boys and girls, hopefully they will think for themselves for the rest of their lives.
The rest of the world however is being spoon fed a narrative that only feeds this problem. It's NOT the banks fault someone bought a house they can't afford. It's NOT the governments fault. It's NOT the sellers fault. It's their fault.
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But is it the bank's fault is they commit fraud when they swear to sworn statements that aren't true as part of their robo-signing process?
Fraud was endemic across the financial system, blaming the individual homeowners when banks engaged in a concerted process and raked in billions off the rest of us doing it...is spoon-feeding a narrative.
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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
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Houses generally ARE only worth about $100k.
Its the land that costs so much money.
Also, I don't know what its like in the US, but in New Zealand and in the UK you can buy leasehold properties (as opposed to freehold properties that you are aware of.)
In those cases, you buy the "house" and ONLY the "house". ie, what is built upon the land. And you pay rent (which is reviewed every 7 years or so) for the land.
The crux of this, is, it allows you to buy a nicer house in a much nicer area than you could ever pos
Best sims are real people (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Probably the answer is "some bloody insurance company doesn't allow it". Nevertheless, this place is begging to be occupied against the will of the owner. They should set an end date for the experiments and then sell the real estate for people who would commit to actually live there.
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Would you want to live in a structure that the contractor who built it knew that it was not intended for human habitation? To keep costs reasonable, the contractors building the town would likely stipulate that the buildings never be occupied.
Can't test social theories with real people (Score:1)
If they used real people then the scientists couldn't test out their pet theories about how much energy could be saved if people changed their behaviors. You can program robots to behave differently, you can't make 50% of a real population live on night schedules to balance the grid load.
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Might be a valid thought, though if you can't even make 50% of a real population change their schedule for the sake of an experiment, what does that imply for the practicality of results? If in theory changing human behavior would help, but in practice you can't make that happen, that's less than useful....
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Marketing manipulation in promoting the city and denying people access in order to generate desirability so that instead of paying people to inhabit the test site people will pay to inhabit the test site.
Getting the right sort of people to inhabit the test environment is not as easy as it sounds and getting them to do it with least cost to the developers is obviously a high goal.
It is not about abandoning privacy in that city it is about giving doctorates in psychology and developers the opportunity to
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They probably want to be able to run simulations that are actually dangerous. Or be able to assume crowd behaviors.
They might want to simulate a terrorist attack or a plague. They might want to use various traffic mitigation strategies with the same traffic jam over and over and over.
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Seriously. For a minute I was thinking this would be a modern incarnation of the original vision for the Epcot. Instead, it's just an automated city. I'd love to see an actual "city of tomorrow" being built and populated as an example to other cities of how things could be.
Save money and do something useful (Score:5, Funny)
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Or since the government already owns Times Beach and a bunch of other sites purchased with the super fund, why not use one of them, or even an abandoned/closed military base.
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testing toilets? (Score:2)
or are they testing something else where the presence of witnesses would interfere/hamper the test?
self-flushing toilets need a fake city to test? (Score:3)
Some one is living is the past if self-flushing toilets are so new they need to be tested like that.
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They're testing new infrastructure ideas, not new toilet ideas. And to properly test the infrastructure, they seem to think they need to have actual toilets running. Seems like a simulation could handle that well enough, but meh.
Moving From The Dead To Ghosts (Score:1)
I wonder how many letters the MPIAA will be sending there.
New Mexico vs. The Monorail (Score:1)
What irony! (Score:1)
At a time when millions of homes are foreclosed funding is available for this project, as it seems.
Talk about an imbalance in distribution of wealth in a system.
To get this fixed would probably worth spending some energy.
China has ready-made cities to use. (Score:3, Informative)
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Forget China.
This explains what those pesky North Koreans have been doing... those aren't really propaganda cities you know......
Occupy Wallstreet (Score:1)
Ummm, just one little detail (Score:1)
The point of all of this is to test all of these things on existing infrastructure. But, if you have to go out and build the infrastructure, then it really isn't existing infrastructure is it?
self-flushing toilets? (Score:1)
Good place to test robotic cars (Score:1)
You could test various algorithms for traffic control, "platooning" and high(er) speed avoidance.
Have you seen the computer simulation for robotic cars that are under computerized traffic control (I don't know if it's centralized or swarm intelligence). Pretty amazing, frightening yet undoubtedly efficient. It would be really something to see in real life, the intermeshing of high speed vehicles, inches from each other, on separate trajectories! (I remember watching a video of Italian motorcycle cops per
What happened.... (Score:5, Informative)
Ghost Town ? (Score:2)
It's not a ghost town if it has never been occupied. This would be a sham city, like the sham Paris [bigthink.com] of World War I.
This looks like a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
This looks like some kind of scam or hoax. There's a web site [cite-city.com] for the project, but it's all clip art. "Pegasus Global Holdings" is suspicious. The "Pegasus Global Holdings" behind this project is here. [pegasusglo...ldings.com] But there's also Pegasus-Global Holdings [pegasus-global.com], 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. [furnished-spaces.com] Their "London office" is a is a "virtual office" package [executiveoffices.co.uk]: "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.
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editors should add your post to TFS, but that would take all the fun out of it.
Re:This looks like a scam (Score:5, Interesting)
The more I look at this, the worse it gets. The company isn't in Dun and Bradstreet. They have no significant completed projects. Another (real) company owns the trademark "Pegasus-Global". Resume checks on the published bios of the principals aren't looking good. There's no indication of where the financing will come from, or how the project makes money. Twenty minutes with a web browser will confirm everything above.
I've been sending notes to the AP and other press outlets. Either I'm totally wrong or the whole project collapses tomorrow.
Real estate promotion (Score:2)
More info: Robert Brumley [businessweek.com], the CEO, is a lawyer and ex-Marine, and held various political-lawyer type jobs in the Reagan Administration. He was CEO of TerreStar, a satellite company, from 2005 to 2008. (TerreStar went bust in 2010, but that may not have been his fault.) His company, Pegasus Global LLC, has one (1) employee, him, according to Dun and Bradstreet.
This skeptical Santa Fe, New Mexico newspaper article from last October [sfreporter.com] is probably the best one on the subject.
Urban planning: So much easier without the humans (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Who's paying for this? (Score:2)
Is it voluntary? Or did they taxpayer funded?
If it's government funded, one billion means they are spending the entire lifetime disposable income (i.e. everything but basic food and housing) of three thousand people, just to set it up. What benefits can this research have that will pay off more than that?
Hmmm. (Score:2)
...aha (Score:2)
Aaaah yes. They spend 1 BILLION dollars to enable tests like "intelligent traffic systems" or "self-flushing toilets".
Certainly. Of course.
And it has absolute NOTHING to do with training combat of, say, military people in a city, defending the state against the citizens. Nothing about rising water or sinking fuel amounts or anything like that.
Nothing new hare, move along.
Outrageous. (Score:2)
with the immense problems the USA has with poverty and homelessness (problems the GOP in particular wishes to ignore), spending a billion dollars on a city no one will live in is a good idea? I think not. This project has waste, boondoggle and white elephant all over it. This makes the GSA scandal look like efficiency in comparison. I think we all, as a Democrat, have every right to make sure that government money is actually being spent properly such as to help the poor. And thats what Democrats are really
Umbrella (Score:2)
Stupid! (Score:2)
Instead of investing this into a city like Detroit to bring it back to full swing and full economic promise, where there are already plenty of skyscrapers and etc,etc....
I see this move as a waste of tax payer dollars that could be used to help the people not the government contractors trying to stuff their pockets full of government money!
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Who's paying for this? I mean, it's really cool... but at the same time I don't think I could justify dropping $1 billion on something like this given our current deficit.
Yes, and there are people going with out food every day. Seems that $1B could be put to better use.
Re:Federal project? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Government?
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The cost of the project goes to paying someone to install the toilet and manage the experiment. The money doesn't go down the toilet, it goes in their pockets. Then they spend it in the community, on food, housing, computer games, etc. That puts money in other people's pockets, who in turn spend it on other things, and so on. Even if the initial activity was in some sense useless, which this experiment isn't, the money goes on to pay for things that are useful. And all along the way, the government gets a s
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Now, consider that the effective interest rate after inflation on US government debt is currently negative, meaning investors are paying the government to hold on to their money for a while.
Except that for the last couple of years the biggest purchaser of US government debt has been the Federal Reserve, which buys the government debt with money that didn't exist until they used it to buy the T-bills.
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So go break some windows to drum up the economic activity of your home town.
I think this could lead to valuable research, but to say that dumping a billion dollars into a do-nothing project is useful in and of itself is a fallacy.
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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.
Re:So why no people? (Score:4, Funny)
"What reason is there not to have actual people living in it?"
Duh, so they can nuke it in case of a robot uprising.
Re:So why no people? (Score:4, Informative)
"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.
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So they can do what they want with power/water, and not be sued by anyone for "mental distress". Because you know, that if they let people live there, and continue to play with the city, someone will become "hurt" or get pissed off and sue for something.
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What I gathered is that they are actually testing possible smart electrical grid designs, and how such devices fit into the picture. When viewed from that perspective one can at least see the reasoning behind the project. Whether it's necessary or a good idea can be debated, but it's not quite as brain dead as 'build a city to test a washing machine'.
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This has got to be the citizens tax money being wasted to build a ghost city. No way private money would develop such a thing.
Wrong [pegasusglo...ldings.com]
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... where are THEY getting their money from?
S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
think about it for a second. makes perfect sense. a robo city. I hear they're bringing back roger moore for this one.
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You can bet someone will. A city with no one around and lots of places to live. No city cops, no one to make you leave even if they could find you. Every wanted criminal, meth- labbie, runaway kid for states around is gonna make a bee line there, at their convenience.First sensors will drop like flies when they figure out how you find them. They'll just arm themselves and drive off the rent-a-cops.They'll screw up the automated equipment and just make themselves at home and squat. I picture biker gangs burn
Students (Score:2)
Aren't students those people you get when real people are too expensive, or unwilling to cooperate?