Posted on 02/18/2015 6:36:05 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
If you were to build a city from scratch, using current technology, what would it cost to live there? I think it would be nearly free if you did it right.
This is a big deal because people aren’t saving enough for retirement, and many folks are underemployed. If the economy can’t generate enough money for everyone to pay for a quality lifestyle today, perhaps we can approach it from the other direction and lower the cost of living.
Consider energy costs. We already know how to build homes that use zero net energy. So that budget line goes to zero if you build a city from scratch. Every roof will be intelligently oriented to the sun, and every energy trick will be used in the construction of the homes. (I will talk about the capital outlay for solar panels and whatnot later.)
I can imagine a city built around communal farming in which all the food is essentially free. Imagine every home with a greenhouse. All you grow is one crop in your home, all year, and the Internet provides an easy sharing system as well as a way to divide up the crops in a logical way. I share my cucumbers and in return get whatever I need from the other neighbors’ crops via an organized ongoing sharing arrangement. My guess is that using the waste water (treated) and excess heat from the home you could grow food economically in greenhouses. If you grow more than you eat, the excess is sold in neighboring towns, and that provides enough money for you to buy condiments, sauces, and stuff you can’t grow at home.
Medical costs will never go to zero, but recent advances in medical testing technology (which I have seen up close in start-up pitches) will drive the costs of routine medical services down by 80% over time. That’s my guess, based on the several pitches I have seen.
Now add Big Data to the mix and the ability to catch problems early (when they are inexpensive to treat) is suddenly tremendous.
Now add IBM’s Watson technology (artificial intelligence) to the medical system and you will be able to describe your symptoms to your phone and get better-than-human-doctor diagnoses right away. (Way better. Won’t even be close.) So doctor visits will become largely unnecessary except for emergency room visits, major surgeries, and end-of-life stuff.
Speaking of end-of-life, assume doctor-assisted-suicide is legal by the time this city is built. I plan to make sure that happens in California on the next vote. Other states will follow. In this imagined future you can remove much of the unnecessary costs of the cruel final days of life that are the bulk of medical expenses.
Now assume the city of the future has exercise facilities nearby for everyone, and the city is designed to promote healthy living. Everyone would be walking, swimming, biking, and working out. That should reduce healthcare costs.
Now imagine that because everyone is growing healthy food in their own greenhouses, the diet of this new city is spectacular. You’d have to make sure every home had a smoothie-maker for protein shakes. And let’s say you can buy meat from the outside if you want it, so no one is deprived. But the meat-free options will improve from the sawdust and tofu tastes you imagine now to something much more enjoyable over time. Healthy eaters who associate with other healthy eaters share tricks for making healthy food taste amazing.
Now assume the homes are organized such that they share a common center “grassy” area that is actually artificial turf so you don’t need water and mowing. Every home opens up to the common center, which has security cameras, WiFi, shady areas, dog bathroom areas, and more. This central lawn creates a natural “family” of folks drawn to the common area each evening for fun and recreation. This arrangement exists in some communities and folks rave about the lifestyle, as dogs and kids roam freely from home to home encircling the common open area.
That sort of home configuration takes care of your childcare needs, your pet care needs, and lots of other things that a large “family” handles easily. The neighborhood would be Internet-connected so it would be easy to find someone to watch your kid or dog if needed, for free. My neighborhood is already connected by an email group, so if someone sees a suspicious activity, for example, the entire neighborhood is alerted in minutes.
I assume that someday online education will be far superior to the go-to-school model. Online education improves every year while the classroom experience has started to plateau. Someday every home will have what I call an immersion room, which is a small room with video walls so you can immerse yourself in history, or other studies, and also visit other places without leaving home. (Great for senior citizens especially.) So the cost of education will drop to zero as physical schools become less necessary.
When anyone can learn any skill at home, and any job opening is easy to find online, the unemployment rate should be low. And given the low cost of daily living, folks can afford to take a year off to retool and learn new skills.
The repair and maintenance costs of homes can drop to nearly zero if you design homes from the start to accomplish that goal. You start by using common windows, doors, fixtures, and mechanical systems from a fixed set of choices. That means you always have the right replacement part nearby. Everyone has the same AC units, same Internet routers, and so on. If something breaks, a service guy swaps it out in an hour. Or do it yourself. If you start from scratch to make your homes maintenance-free, you can get close. You would have homes that never need paint, with floors and roofs that last hundreds of years, and so on.
Today it costs a lot to build a home, but most of that cost is in the inefficiency of the process. In the future, homes will be designed to the last detail using CAD, and factory-cut materials of the right size will appear on the job site as a snap-together kit with instructions printed on each part. I could write a book on this topic, but the bottom line is that home construction is about 80% higher than it needs to be even with current technology.
The new city would be built on cheap land, by design, so land costs would be minimal. Construction costs for a better-than-today condo-sized home would probably be below $75,000 apiece. Amortized over 15 years the payments are tiny. And after the 15th year there is no mortgage at all. (The mortgage expense includes the solar panels, greenhouses, etc.)
Transportation would be cheap in this new city. Individually-owned automobiles would be banned. Public transportation would be on-demand and summoned by app (like Uber).
And the self-driving cars would be cheap to build. Once human drivers are out of the picture you can remove all of the safety features because accidents won’t happen. And you only summon a self-driving car that is the size you need. There is no reason to drag an empty back seat and empty trunk everywhere you go. And if you imagine underground roads, the cars don’t need to be weather-proof. And your sound system is your phone, so the car just needs speakers and BlueTooth. Considering all of that, self-driving cars might someday cost $5,000 apiece, and that expense would be shared across several users on average. And imagine the cars are electric, and the city produces its own electricity. Your transportation budget for the entire family might be $200 per month within the city limits.
The cost of garbage service could drop to nearly zero if homes are designed with that goal in mind. Your food garbage would go back to the greenhouse as mulch. You wouldn’t have much processed food in this city, so no cans and bottles to discard. And let’s say you ban the postal service from this new city because all they do is deliver garbage anyway. (All bills will be online.) And let’s say if you do accumulate a bag of garbage you can just summon a garbage vehicle to meet you at the curb using the same app you use for other vehicles. By the time you walk to the curb, the vehicle pulls up, and you toss the bag in.
I think a properly-designed city could eliminate 80% of daily living expenses while providing a quality of life far beyond what we experience today. And I think this future will have to happen because the only other alternative is an aggressive transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor by force of law. I don’t see that happening.
If they want to pay to build me a Home, I want Mike Holmes to build it. LOL
“I thought hippies have been trying to do this in their communes since the 60’s. Seems they always end up either leaving broke or starting some sort of business dependent on capitalism.”
An acquaintance started a commune in the 60’s. He came from money and financed it. He had many followers on the commune until he stopped funding it.
“Yes, people are already lining up to watch for someone’s kid for free.”
Those people are called “grandparents” by most normal people. It’s usually easier to reach them by phone.
Check out his blog at: Scott Adams Blog ,P.But be sure to drill back to his older entries. It is pieces of statist crap like him that destroy freedom, when given power. The most laughable thing is he calls himself more libertarian than anything else, which would give libertarians a worse name than if they admit they worship Ron Paul.
He actually worshiped Bill Clinton, and said something to the effect that he would blindly follow any policy put forth by him because he was sure it would lead to a good result.
Scott Adams is human refuse who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. In other words, a typical liberal, statist, marxist.
“I’d like to know what they intend to do with all the takers in society.
I hope they aren’t expecting them to work in the communal farms.”
Has Mr. Adams considered the example of Detroit? Many of the ingredients for his utopia are in place in that city. There is plenty of vacant land to be farmed due to all of the buildings taken down , a significant idle and jobless able bodied population requiring food, benevolent charities prepared to fund projects helping the downtrodden, and community organizers to unite people behind a cause.
All the community organizers need is a little cash to build zero energy homes and give the unemployed people the tools to farm on vacant lots.
It is likely Mr. Adams is a multimillionaire member of the 1%. Since Mr. Adams knows so much about human nature and communalism, perhaps he would be willing to donate some of his money to show us all the way to his urban paradise in Detroit. He and his progressive friends can give community organizers a few million dollars to fund a demonstration project. Enlist Habitat for Humanity to build a few solar zero energy houses for the urban farmers. Once they’ve proven utopia works they can no doubt find other liberal philanthropists to extend the program to other cities.
Plenty of land, idle workforce, excess money in the hands of wealthy liberals needing to be deployed. How could this possibly not work?
Oh, I forget. Wealthy liberals don’t spend their own money to realize their socialist dreams. They spend their money to buy politicians who will steal the money from other citizens to execute the utopian vision.
Never mind.
The effective rebuilding in Detroit is being done by business in an exact opposite example. However the rich guys in Detroit these days aren’t building for socialism. They’re building for money.
“The effective rebuilding in Detroit is being done by business in an exact opposite example. However the rich guys in Detroit these days aren’t building for socialism. They’re building for money.”
I know private industry is working to rebuild Detroit and realize a profit. My post was meant to point out the hypocrisy of progressive who talk constantly about their visions for a perfect world but won’t spent a cent of their own money, or produce one drop of the their own sweat, to realize the vision. Not to mention their lack of knowledge as to human nature. Urban farms would exist on vacant lots if the local poor population had pride and a work ethic.
Exactly.
Utopia doesn’t work because our individual visions of utopia are all different and conflicting.
He needs to stick with comic strips - or move to some place that already practices his Utopian wet dreams in the realms of reality...
Good analysis!
If he wants 3-D printed houses, you’ll spend a lot maintaining them. We have to get the Roman version of concrete in mass production before buildings are as cheap as this guy imagines; otherwise, foundations and roads corrode over a few decades instead of lasting centuries. And printing houses with PVC or other plastics are not weather-resistant long term.
He assumes these cities are built on cheap land, which often means very flat and stable and safe. Challenge is, there are already cities in a lot of these places. Look at Tokyo and other parts of Japan - all the flat areas anywhere near the city are built on. To build his dream cities anywhere other than the middle of nowhere, he’d have to raze an existing city to build his paradise. The costs then become enormous. Build anywhere else like the middle of Arizona or Siberia, land is cheap, but HVAC demands alone are enormous.
Schooling at home assumes computer terminals everywhere; someone has to build those, and they don’t 3D print magically. Costs may come down, but not go away. Learning math, science and logic is more than memorizing facts on a screen, so teachers are still needed for many subjects - and some students can’t learn via online modules without guidance and supervision.
He assumes we’d all have a greenhouse in the house to feed ourselves. What about the retired lady with limited mobility who can’t do more than watch them grow? Or the person who hates to work with plants? No, comrade, out to the fields with you.
Forget solar power as the decentralized power source. I think the “poo power” buses in the UK, the waste processing plant that Bill Gates develops that dehydrates the water out of poop for recycling and then burning the dry waste to power nearby homes - that’s the future. After all, everyone eats and everyone poops. Add in food waste, pet waste and industrial livestock farm waste, and this could be a major power source and reduce the infrastructure needed for water treatment and waste handling. Add in a few solar panels to that arrangement plus natural gas plants for spike demands and nuclear to sustain the base load it already handles, and now you have a power grid that can meet demand.
Does early diagnosis let you prevent full blow diabetes? Sometimes, but not type 1. Does exercise and a healthy diet prevent a lot of problems like dementia and heart disease? Mostly. Will doing your daily tai chi cure cancer caused by genetic factors, Alzheimers or complications from a fall? Nope. Does assuming a healthy lifestyle eliminates everyone? Only if you kill those who it doesn’t treat. Oh, wait, he has that in his plan. So everything looks great and healthy as long as you ignore the murder of the kid paralyzed by falling out of a tree, the lady with dementia who was put to sleep like a pet, the kid with cerebral palsy not allowed to live.
Is he a leftist? Or ignorant?
Certainly on the left. His self-sufficiency dream is dependent on a tight knit community and everyone THE SAME. No one has room for anything different, like his talking about everyone having the same apartment, same router, etc.
I can’t remember where I heard the analysis, but it was that communes tended to attract the educated elitist or the low level worker who either has little desire to work or barely the ability to work (addictions, mental illness, etc).
They lack the farmers, carpenters and skilled craftspeople that they actually need to run.
My friend’s commune attracted stoners and people who didn’t want to do anything.
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