So Long, And Thanks For All The Tuna Roll

You may have seen the speech President Obama gave during his meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.  (Hey, spelled that right on the first try.)  It made the news because Obama thanked Japan for its many contributions to world culture, which he summed up as karate, karaoke, manga, anime, and emojis.

I hope this starts a precedent that countries will start formally acknowledging what others have given us.  I think that would help us to appreciate people from far away.  e.g. Hey Austria, thanks for Mozart and Red Bull.

But it also brings up something that people don't seem to notice: Japan has actually been pretty successful fighting back against the American cultural machine.  In fact, there are plenty of other things we can thank Japan for:

• Sushi
• Godzilla and other Kaiju
• Ramen
• Taking a few of our extra rock bands off our hands
• Cute robots
• Pocky
• Drifting
• The Walkman
• Saving video games after the Americans messed them up
• The Uncanny Valley
• The Power Rangers
• Yayoi Kusama
• Hello Kitty

Here In My Car, I Feel Safest Of All

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post excoriating GM for TV ads using stereotypes to sell trucks and ridicule small car drivers. Around the same time I wrote that, BMW was starting up their own campaign.

These ads show video of a BMW being driven at high speed around a track. Meanwhile, the incongruous audio is of someone praising a businessman. In one ad, it's part of a speech presenting an award, while another has a boss announcing a promotion. In both cases, they're pretty anonymous: there are few details about the unheard subject's achievements. The message is just one of success in business. I'd summarize the ads as BMW saying, "You know how everyone thinks our customers are self-centred materialist pricks? Well, we're totally okay with that."

This is pretty surprising. I know, we can't expect all products to appeal to us, but these aren't cases of brands that merely miss me; they're completely the opposite of what I want. So I want to know: if Chevy and BMW can be so completely different from me, who is similarly perfect for me?

As a child/teen following the world of cars, I got the idea that Saab was the brand for me. It had a nice mix of quirk, engineering, design, sportiness and efficiency. But alas, long before I could afford one, Saab had gone to that great parking lot in the sky.

So who else would I go with?

• Subaru? They briefly built a car for Saab in their final days, and seem to have inherited the quirky car crown from them. And the WRX STI has always appealed to me as the nerdy car vengeance machine.
• Mazda? I mentioned my appreciation of them - despite their ads - in the past.
• Volvo? Saab's stuffier Scandinavian brother is another possibility. Again, they have the anti-cool coolness I appreciate.
• Tesla?  Well sure, just give me a few decades to save up.

(And If you're thinking it was sexist that I characterized Volvo as male, I refer you to their logo.)

My point is that although car makers have their own personalities, there are still a lot of people who aren't covered.  If you're masculine, aggressive, materialist, - or, for that matter, dull - then you have lots of choices. But geeky hipster guys in touch with their feminine side are out of luck.

Old-Time Sports Day

Today, the three big professional sports in the U.S. are baseball, basketball, and football. But it wasn't always that way. For most of the first half of the twentieth century it was baseball, boxing, and horse racing.

Because the sweet science and the sport of kings have faded from previous highs, their place in modern culture is hard to understand. But we'll get a chance to examine it next Saturday, when the Kentucky Derby and the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will take place within hours of each other.

The Kentucky Derby is the one chance for horse racing to shine. Of course, all marginal sports get that one event where everyone pretends to pay attention and care. But with the Derby, we get the sports world going a step further and pretending they know something. Usually that something is just the fact that there hasn't been a triple crown winner in years. What's odd is the lack of grounding for the one big event: the mainstream sports media pays attention to NASCAR for the Daytona 500 then it drops into the background for the rest of the year. But there is at least a background awareness, with reports - or at least acknowledgement - of the rest of the sport.  Horse racing pretty much drops off the map outside of the big three events.  And if the same horse doesn't win the first two, the third only gets token mentions.

Boxing's place in current society is harder to understand. For the most part, the sport seems to be a spent force. It doesn't get much time on mainstream sports talk shows. Among the secondary, non-team sports, it has nowhere near the profile of golf, or even tennis.

Of course, there are sports that have a sort of cult following, in that they have lots of dedicated fans, but not enough mainstream appeal to get in on mass-appeal shows. I'm thinking of things like NASCAR, extreme sports, MMA, or curling in Canada. These sports get hours of programming on sports networks, but nary a mention on the news and discussion shows or your evening news.  But boxing coverage is often just shoehorned around other programming to fill in. I haven't really been looking for the "boxing nation," but I don't see much evidence of it.

And yet, when a big fight occurs, it turns into a massive event. Seats for this fight are going for prices similar to the Superbowl.  True, there are fewer of them, so supply and demand etc.  But that still shows a tremendous desire for boxing is out there.

And this is all for a fight that isn't really a marketer's dream. It's not for the heavyweight championship of the world, it's two "best pound-for pound" boxers (the sort of thing that usually appeals to purists) and of course, they're both past their prime. And then there's the boxers themselves: one of them won elected office then did very little except campaign against rights for gays and women, and yet he's far and away the good guy.

So I don't get it. There's obviously a lot of boxing enthusiasm out there, but I don't know where it goes between big fights. Perhaps one explanation is that boxing is the most hyped sport there is.  I found one article calling it one of the top three fights of all time.  So this is essentially the Derek Jeter of boxing matches.  And maybe that baseball reference brings this discussion full circle, explaining everything: sports that have a long and proud history have some extra aura of importance beyond what other sports can deliver.  Even after they decline, we can think of the current participants as being similar to the legends, even if they don't really measure up.

We Come From The Land Of The Ice And Snow

There's an election coming up in Britain.  Any election means there's going to be a variety of campaign handouts to promote the parties' platforms.  Here's one from the left-leaning Labour Party that's been getting a lot of attention:

When you see that, a number of questions may occur to you.  Can a liberal party win over the centre successfully with a few highlighted promises? Will they lose the support of their base?

But probably, you're wondering what kind of a stupid campaign gives out mugs?  Whatever happened to pamphlets?  You'd think that if you were going to use any beverage vessel to win over xenophobic Britons, you'd go with a teacup.

As an aside, here are some of the other images that came up when I searched for the mug picture.  I don't know how Bieber got on there, though Google might just group all the embarrassing mug shots together.

As political strategy, it (the promise, not the mug) doesn't make sense. At a time when the Conservatives are facing a big vote split with the even-further-to-the-right UK Independence Party, Labour just needs to get its base to turn out in big numbers.  Instead this has really alienated them.

But more to the point, it's incredibly bad timing.  While Labour is trying to harness the fear of foreigners, Europe's migration problem has taken a turn for the tragic.  Europe and its constituent countries have scaled back patrols of illegal migration in the Mediterranean this year, and at the same time the situation in Libya and other parts of Africa and the Middle East have gotten worse.  The result has been a huge increase in deaths during attempts to cross the sea.

Something that's really bothered me about the coverage of the migration crisis is the way the recent history of it has been explained.  The usual story is that Europe cut-back on patrols in the hopes that the lack of a safety net for desperate, dangerous journeys in the Mediterranean would discourage attempts.

To put it in terms the locals will understand: Bollocks.  This wasn't some clever strategy to discourage migrants, it was European leaders doing the only thing they ever seem to do: ignoring a problem and hoping it goes away. Usually that just makes a few investors nervous, but this time a thousand people died.  With their economy still poor and far-right anti-immigrant parties making gains, spending money on illegal immigrants isn't popular, so they did the easy thing, whatever the results.

Europe is going to have to face the fact that its bigotry is dangerous.  Usually we think of the problem as caused by a small number of Neo-Nazis. I have no idea how prevalent they are, so I can't comment on the seriousness of that problem.  But the fact is that the mainstream fear of foreigners is beyond what you should see in a civilized society.  Of course, this is an issue everywhere, but the amount of social-acceptance of it, the quickness to scapegoat, and the number of politicians cashing in on it, is a serious problem with real consequences.

Please Forward This Post To Demonstrate What Happens When People Forward Posts

It was many months ago - maybe a few years - that I saw a picture passed around on Facebook, of kids demonstrating how far things can spread online. They had a sign saying that as part of a school assignment they were asking everyone to keep forwarding the picture, to see just how many people it would reach.  That seemed like a cute idea.  By the time I saw it, it had already been shared and liked thousands of times.  The point was made, to the kids and the many who saw it.

Get that?  The point was made.  There's no need to keep repeating the same experiment.  I keep seeing more and more of them.  Frankly, I didn't think this really needed demonstrating in the first place.  To see the power of social media, you don't need to set up a photo with pleading children, you just need to watch what you are consuming online.  Just in the last 24 hours, that bad Robert Downey Jr. interview has gone viral.  So don't set up your own demonstration, just imagine he's holding a sign asking you to consider how stories spread on the Internet.

The irony is that the copycat viral media demonstrations are casting doubt on their own thesis.  If these pictures were so widely spread, people would realise just how redundant they've become.  You want to show kids how far viral stories go?  Then you must not have seen the last twelve people who did the same thing, which means they didn't really spread that far.  It's sort of like those ads you see on benches and bus shelters that say, "You Just Proved Advertising Works."  Yeah, and you just proved that you're having trouble selling ad space.

London Mauling

A few days ago the people of London, Ontario got rather upset over an article published on line.  Wait, "upset" doesn't seem like the right word.  What do you call that feeling when, after years of anonymity, someone says something mildly bad about you, and you're not sure if you are glad about the recognition, or angry at the insult?  There probably isn't a word for it, since it's only experienced by introverts and Canadians.

Anyway, the mildly bad thing was an article titled, "10 Problems Only People From London Ontario Will Understand" at the website WhatCulture (a Buzzfeed wannabe.) Of course, as a resident of nearby, similarly-sized Kitchener-Waterloo, I wanted headed straight for the list as soon as I heard about it.

The main thing that strikes me upon reading it is that it’s not exactly a hard-hitting list. You’d think a genuinely critical shot at London would include its notorious east-west class divide. (We in Kitchener-Waterloo at least have the decency to maintain our archaic two-city setup to make our class divides less obvious.) Most of the items in this list apply to all of Southern Ontario, if not all of Canada.  Really, cross-border shopping is inconvenient?  How about "your newspaper makes Fox News sound neutral"?

The only one that applies specifically to London is the shot at its unoriginal name. I totally agree, but I realize that naming your city after a more famous place is one of those things that makes sense to Canadians, but that I’ll never understand. It’s right up there with the monarchy, Don Cherry, and Hedley. You might think that the London name is just a matter of tradition, but here in Kitchener - where we dodged the same bullet by dumping the name “Berlin” during WWI - there’s still a significant part of the population that wants to go back to the Berlin name, despite London’s teachable example.

I was going to write a list of legitimate bad things about London, but I don't have enough venom. One of the entries was going to be that you couldn’t make a list of top ten tourist attractions without padding it out by including White Oaks Mall. But then I realized that to pad my list out to ten entries, I would have to add something about how hard it is to find your way around White Oaks Mall.

But I do have to take issue with the part about the embarrassment of former mayor Joe Fontana.  For one thing, it was hard for anyone in Canada outside of Toronto to be embarrassed of their mayor over that time period.  But my problem is that the article makes it sound like he was a good mayor who made one perplexing mistake. It even says "he was able to get some things done". Actually, if his term is known for anything other than scandal, it will be for U.S. Congress-style division and paralysis in city council.

Syntaxality!

I've seen an ad for the new Mortal Kombat game in which it says the game is "available digitally and in stores." We sometimes talk about digital downloads of movies, so it took second to remember that we're talking about a video game here. And that's when it hit me: available digitally and in stores. Does that mean that if I buy it in stores, I get an analog version?

Apparently they have decided that because the word "digitally" is applied to downloads, so the word will now be used to mean "downloaded with no physical copy." This, even though all copies of the game are, like all software today, digital.

It's sort of like how we in Canada refer to the electricity supply as "hydro" because we started with the term “hydroelectric” and generalized the wrong part of the word. Or it’s like “film” in reference to a feature-length movie. The word “film” originally meant the celluloid the movie was recorded on, but it is now used to refer to movies that go from studio to audience without using any film or tape.

In contrast, sound recorded on grooved vinyl was called a “record” because it was a recording. Yet somehow, we came to think of “record” as meaning the physical thing itself, so no one would call a collection of audio computer files as a “record,” even though it’s still a recording. I don’t know how society decides on these things. Why is this thing I’m writing called a “blog” and not a “glorified diary shoved in the public’s face”?

It Keeps Going And Going And...

This week was the fiftieth anniversary of Moore's Law. If you're not familiar with it, Gordon Moore is an engineer who was involved in the creation of the first microchips. Early on in the process, he noted that their progress in making newer and improved chips was going at a steady rate of improvement: the amount of circuitry they could fit on a chip doubled every 18 months. The concept has become notable for a couple of reasons:

• It's continued at a similar rate since then. That's odd, given that microchip design and manufacturing has changed so much. It's gone from a small number of researchers working on a little-known technology, to a huge business that the world depends on, pushed by a duopoly of multinational tech companies.
• People have been predicting it demise for a variety of reasons - both technical and economic - for years. And yet, like a microchip-powered Timex, it just keeps ticking. Even Moore himself predicted that it would eventually be no longer economically feasible to keep upgrading manufacturing equipment to keep making chips smaller and faster. That was almost twenty years ago.

But the weird thing about Moore's law is that for all the false predictions of doom, we know it has to end eventually. If we just keep making the circuitry on chips smaller and smaller, eventually, we'll get to the point where the wires are just a line of individual atoms, and we can shrink it no more. And thanks to the weirdness of quantum mechanics, it would stop behaving like any normal wire long before we can get it that small.

So claims of the end of more Moore's law are like the predictions of a bad psychic: if we make enough of them, we'll eventually be right.

And that's led to the strangeness of people celebrating the anniversary of Moore's Law with discussion of what happens when it ends.  It may not seem like a big change, but for many of us, constant and fast growth of computing power is all we've ever known.  Our devices have always been getting faster and more powerful.  But what if our kids just used the same apps we do now?  One article posited that we'll have heirloom computers handed down from one generation to another.  I don't see that happening; if new computers are no better than the old ones, we'll just start emphasizing their design and style.

But lack of computer improvement could be positive: without constant power increases to cover up bad programming and design, there'd be more pressure to get software right.  And we the users would probably start to refine the way we use computers into something more effective and intelligent, instead of just bouncing from one start-up service to another.  Gaming would surely improve too, since the developers couldn't just rely on greater realism to convince audiences to replace old games.

But seriously, computer engineers, keep the new chips coming.

Russian Modernism

This architect is terrible at Tetris.

Hillary Begins The Ascent

So, Hillary is running for president. That wasn't much of a surprise; the Leafs fired all their coaches the same day, and even that seemed slightly less inevitable.  What's weird is that because she's the presumptive winner of the Democratic nomination, there's a feeling that this whole side of the story is already over.  But that's not how it's supposed to work; this is an American election - it's supposed to be a constant story for two whole years.  Now we've got nothing to talk about for the next year-and-a-half.

By the way, some people have complained that referring to Hillary Clinton by her first name is sexist.  The argument is that we wouldn't do that for a man.  I'm not so sure: As a friend once pointed out, it's the pinnacle of success to be so famous that people just call you by your first name; it means you're right up there with Jesus.  True, most of the people with that combination of fame and unique-first-name to get the one-name treatment are women (hello, Oprah!) And famous men with unusual first names don't get it (I don't recall anyone discussing Obama as just "Barrack.")

But the fact is, there really doesn't seem to be any damage done by calling her by her first name. It's especially an odd complaint when you consider that the most sexist aspect of her name is the fact that she stopped using her maiden name (Rodham) when she decided to run for public office.

I know, people will be pointing out that she looked like a lock for the nomination in 2008, but then Obama came from out of nowhere to pass her by.  But there doesn't seem to be anyone like that here. Some people are pointing to Elizabeth Warren as a popular politician that people would rally around.  But the fact is that she has said she won't run.  And further, as much as I, too, like her, her cerebral and slightly nerdy charm won't win her much mainstream success.  She's someone who is well-suited to win over liberals, but few others.  Or, to put it another way, she isn't this election's Obama, she's this election's Howard Dean.

But what really makes me think that Hillary Clinton's victory in the primaries is inevitable is that American liberals have begun selling her to their fringe. She's a more centrist candidate with ties to business and a relatively conservative Democratic president, so she's just the sort of person who would cause the American left to find themselves a Nader to make a big statement, especially if they are going to get eighteen months to think about it.  Certainly, moderate or practical liberals sensed this backlash coming: I found lots of tweets on the weekend making the case that a Republican president would probably repeal Obamacare, invade Iran, and stack the Supreme Court, so this isn't a good time to back a third-party candidate.

Of course, that's going to be a difficult sell.  America's left-of-the-left never has taken responsibility for the consequences of the Nader vote, so I'm thinking it's going to take all the time until the election to win them over this time.  Considering the Republicans' difficulty winning the mainstream in recent presidential elections, the most important part of the election might just be Democrats convincing each other to vote.

GM Makes Hypocrisy, Not Cars

Recently, ads for Chevy Trucks have been built around focus groups comparing a picture of a guy and his truck, with a picture of an identical guy and a small car. (It's a Prius, though that's never mentioned.)



It's one of those screw-subtlety ads that I'm assuming appeal to some people, even if they make many others squirm.  I mean, you can poke fun with stereotypes of different drivers, but this one just lays on the insults unrepentantly.

You've got children running down the car driver. They seem a little unsure as they speak.  It's probably just because of the cameras, but I also suspect it's because they're essentially being asked to go against all the anti-bullying education they've been going through at school.  Then you have the women saying how much more attractive the guy with the truck is.  Think that through, ladies: You'd really chose the truck driver over the guy who clearly feels no need to compensate for anything?

I'm assuming that the marketing philosophy about commercials like this is that they are so tightly targeted.  That is, people like me will think that the folks in the ad are stupid, unpleasant people, but I'm not in their target market, so it doesn't matter.

Normally I'd just ignore an ad campaign like this, and write it off as a price of watching television content with a large male audience.  But then I see this other campaign that Chevrolet is running that also features real people giving their opinions in focus groups.



In this case, the point is that the participants always assume other brands are first to give innovative features, rather than Chevy.  It seems to be part of a GM tradition of confronting their brands' bad reputations head on, after "This Isn't Your Father's Oldsmobile" and "You Don't Know Buick."

But wait a minute: with one campaign, Chevy is asking us to believe in stereotypes of people, then in the other, they're asking us not to invoke stereotypes of car brands.  They don't mind making fun of a large part of their market, but then play the victim when they're the ones trying to lose a reputation.

Well GM, you can't have it both ways.  I'm not going to open my mind to you, if you're telling everyone to have a closed mind to me.  I'm going to remind everyone of your continuing ignition scandal.  I'll point out that you just slashed the length of your warranties, and Car and Driver thinks it's because you're having engine quality problems.  And oh look, you're having problems selling Volts.  Now why would people in the market for small efficient cars suddenly not want to buy from you?

No, Seriously Car 54, I Can't Find You

The Ford Crown Victoria was a large sedan of the type they don't really make anymore. It's fairly famous in these parts because it was built in St. Thomas. It probably would have been cancelled in the eighties, except for the fact that it was frequently used for police cars.

Police, at least in North America, tend to like their cars big. I never really understood why. Of course, comfort and room is important if you spend a big part of your day in a car, but in small cars the space is mostly taken out of the back seat, and anyone sitting there is not going to be comfortable anyway.

So for years, if you saw a Crown Victoria on the road, you knew it had to be one of two things: a police car, or an unmarked police car. Okay, there was a third possibility: it could be a senior citizen refusing to give in and get a smaller car; either way, you knew you were slowing down.

But now that's all changing. The Crown Victoria has been retired, and each of the Big Three car makers are selling police cars based on normal-sized cars that the average person might actually drive.

I hadn't realized how much I had come to depend on being able to spot police cars a mile away. A few days ago, I slowed down when I saw a Dodge Charger (now a common police car) parked at the side of the road.  But it turned out to be a used car for sale, and happened to be white. No, I didn't buy the car - who would want a car that makes everyone around you slow down?

Bogus Technology, Dude

A lot of people have been talking about this article in the New York Times by then-technology writer, Erik Sandberg-Diment. That's in spite of the fact it's from 1985. What's notable is that it is about laptops, or at least the overgrown calculators that passed for laptops in the eighties.  The article has been widely ridiculed for getting it about as wrong as possible.

As an aside, I wonder why people are only now seeing it. Presumably it's been sitting there on the NYT web site for years, just waiting for someone to find it. Maybe there's someone with a hobby of reading the Times thirty years later for fun.

The website Boing Boing made the point that the lesson of this article is less about obtuse journalism, and more about how companies try to push a technology before it's ready for the public. I think they've got a point. Consider what a "laptop" was in 1985: it wasn't just a portable desktop. These machines were underpowered even by the standards of the time. They made due with tiny, monochrome screens that only had room for a half-dozen lines.  In retrospect, the only reason those machines look useful is that we look at them knowing what they would evolve into.  Really, they were trying to produce future technology with what was available at the time: in other words, they were low-level steampunk.

It also reminds us that predictions have to be taken with a little context. One thing that stood out to me in the article was that he kept focusing on those laptops as failing due to their software. That's quite nonsensical today: we're used to laptops having the same software available as a desktop. But in those days, they were limited to custom-made, perhaps built-in, software, made to deal with the less-powerful processors and limited screens. If he could see what we consider a laptop today, he might change his tune. I'm guessing anyway; I couldn't find a comment from Sandberg-Diment himself.  As far as I can tell, he left technology journalism to go back to his first love, painting. 

Anyway, the point is, our world is well beyond the scope of a 1985 newspaper article.  Back in the twentieth century people thought of "the future" as starting in 2000, so we're not just living in his future, we're living beyond it. Who knows what people in the eighties would have imagined 2015 to look like. Oh, wait, we don't have to wonder, they made a whole movie about it.

I bring this up as someone who has made negative predictions about a few technologies myself. I've been bearish on self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and drones. So I feel I should emphasize that I'm not saying these things will never happen, just that they'll take longer than people - particularly the media - think they'll take. I have no doubt that they're all possible, and barring disaster they'll all happen eventually.

But another point on considering misguided predictions from the past, is that it's never clear when to finally pass judgement. A second part of the article that stood out to me was his ridiculing the idea of lugging a laptop home from work, when you could just carry a few floppy disks. And of course, today we could replace those floppies with a thumb drive that's more portable and durable. So that's a good question, why do we lug our laptops/tablets/phones around?

The simple answer is that in a world where computers do so many things, the data and applications specific to us are more than we can fit on a thumb drive. But I wonder how long the current situation will last. More and more devices are connected, and more of our data is on the cloud. All we need are some breakthroughs in security, encryption and identification, and we would have a world where people feel comfortable accessing their personal data from whatever devices are available, not necessarily their own personal devices. To put it another way, we expect artificial lighting to be available wherever we go, but that doesn't mean we carry flashlights everywhere we go. It could be that people in the future will look back at laptops as a strange aberration in the history of computers, and see this New York Times article as very prescient.

Freudian Sip

Hmmm.... If you were going to name wine after a famous psychologist, I'm not sure Carl Jung is the one you'd go with.  You'd think that Mr. id himself, Freud, would be the name that would sell alcohol.  Though really, Freud would make more sense for hard liquor or maybe beer.  Or perhaps Freud Lite Beer would sell; it's the id of beer, the superego of reduced alcohol, and the ego of less calories.  I leave you to make up your own parody of "Tastes Great, Less Filling."

I should point out that this is no-alcohol wine. So perhaps the name is appropriate.  It encourages you to wonder what mental processes led you to buy expensive grape juice.

Droning On

When Amazon first revealed their plans to use drones for deliveries, I pooh-poohed the concept as impractical. I figured there was no way it would make financial sense to use a delivery method that has so little capacity and such a short range, so the whole thing must be a publicity stunt.

Well, if it is a publicity stunt, they're really good at bluffing, since they are continuing to test their drones, now at a secret location in B.C.  I don't know, maybe it makes sense for them to have a delivery system that only works within densely-populated centres.

But there's another aspect of the story that I noticed: the fact that they're testing in Canada, because it takes weeks to get regulatory approval, while in the U.S. it would take months.  (Of course, I could hardly not notice that aspect of the story, since Canadian news outlets proudly made that the focus of their coverage.)  Is it just me, or does that happen a lot.

Obviously, Canada and its government agencies are hardly paragons of efficiency, but it does seem like the red tape is significantly thicker South of the border.  This goes against the usual perception of their more minimalist government, compared to our more activist state.  I wonder why that would be.  It could be that government agencies there feel the need to work harder to justify their existence.  Or maybe America's sheer size leads to bigger, less flexible institutions.  Hopefully someone will find a way to quantify government bureaucracy so we can find a way to be smug about it.  I'm getting tired of bragging about health care.

Fire In The As-Yet-Unnamed New Capital Of Egypt

A few weeks ago, the Egyptian government announced plans to build a new city to serve as it's capital. That's ambitious, but not unusual, since a number of countries have planned, purpose-built capitals. Brasilia, Brazil is perhaps the most famous, since it was only built in the 50's. But history buffs may know that both Washington, D.C. and Canberra, Australia were originally planned to be capitals. There's also New Delhi, India and Islamabad, Pakistan, though they were both extensions of existing cities. And the new country of South Sudan proposed using its new oil wealth to rebuild its capital, Juba, in the shape of a giraffe.

It's easy to see why a country (particularly a new or growing one) might want a new capital: you can avoid the rivalry between existing capitals and regions when choosing who gets to be capital. And since the capital is a sort of global face of the country, it's impressive if you have a nice shiny new one. Though it does reflect poorly on your country if you look at your existing cities, then decide you'd rather just start from scratch.

And that's the big downside of a planned capital: it costs a fortune. They're talking about $45 billion for the new Egyptian capital. And their economy isn't doing too well. No one wants to invest in a country that pauses every couple of years to change dictators. And the usually-lucrative tourism industry has been hurt because no one feels comfortable visiting the country where the religious party seems like the voice of reason. So people are taking a believe-it-when-we-see-it attitude.

But this issue does raise an interesting question: it’s hard enough to design a city from scratch, but if it’s going to be a national capital, how would that affect the design? You’d want it to be impressive and awe-inspiring, and you’d have to leave plenty of room for government offices and international embassies. You’d also want lots of nice, friendly places for photo-ops. But I don’t think the planners could put in all that work without yielding to the temptation to make sarcastic little touches, like having all the bureaucrats’ buildings be featureless grey cubes. It would also be nice if you could arrange it so that the poorest neighbourhood is between the nicest neighbourhood and the government offices, forcing the politicians to have an educational commute everyday.