Microsoft to build $500M 'smart city' in Northern Virginia - Sensationalist Headlines

Microsoft, 22 Capital Partners to develop $500M ‘smart city’ in .. Minh Le is a self-described technologist, a former managing director with Accenture who has branched out into predictive data analytics, big data management and software development through a variety of acquired companies. Next stop, real estate. Le and his company, 22 Capital Partners, are proposing to build Gramercy District, a 2.5 million-square-foot, $500 million development on 16 acres fronting the north side of the Dulles Greenway, adjacent to the planned Ashburn Metro station on the Silver Line. Le has landed a Fortune 50 partner in Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) as a co-investor that will bring its expertise, its people and its capital to bear. ... Microsoft will help build the blueprint for an “intelligent living platform,” Le said. It will be aligned with, if not directly a part of, Microsoft's CityNext program and its focus on neighborhood management, smart buildings, operations management and sustainabile land use. While details of its role are scarce, John Hardigree, Microsoft’s strategic partner and channels lead, confirmed the company’s role. Its scope and investment will be disclosed later, he said.

They should make an Arcology. It's about time we had arcologies. We're in that kind of future now. Give us a giant god damn pyramid in the middle of Seattle.

So this is what Gooseman is up to now?

I mean its cool and all but will there be any affordable housing? or should I wait for the linux city?

There is already no affordable housing in Ashburn, so no

the US already has shadowrun tier politicians so we might as well go all the way.

No so it will be just like the rest of northern Virginia.

I gave you a diamond to help pay for the toll road

The difference between Shadowrun and the real world is that in the real world, the corporations realized they didn't need their own militaries if they just bought out the government's. Oh, and also elves and shit.

are they gonna bring back microsoft points?

Their football team's mascot will be the Ashburn clippies https://artsy-media-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/mPisDeUp-bFdqp5jSaafeg%2FClippy+thumb.jpg

Oh great more silicon valley """utopia"""" bullshit

Who said it was a utopia?

"intelligent living platform" Mortal Engines but it's mechs driven by Cortana

That's literally what Silicon Valley goers think they're building. Several scholars and researchers have noted that many in SV have a very utopianistic view of their work without realizing just how easily abused it could be. Case and point: Facebook.

Played out, but someone has to. "I'm Bill Gates, and I'm here to ask you a question; is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow?"

Watch as teh whole thing falls apart with the first software update.

Microsoft announces big huge $500M smart city All microsoft products will be integrated with this smart city Microsoft puts a ton of effort into advertising this new city and encouraging people to switch from old cities to the new city Tech fans migrate to new city Initial migration numbers slightly less than analysts predictions Microsoft abandons it entirely Builds a new $500M smart city next to the old $500M smart city, calls it "Smart city 10" all the people who were ready to integrate with this brand new awesome city are no longer supported Smart City 1 become chernobyl-like wasteland

This demonization of silicon valley is literally old man yelling at cloud, in more ways than one.

Imagine if Apple made cities like they did products. You couldn't get your current city maintained or upgraded, so you had to move cities.

Okay so are we just going to ignore that YouTube has repeatedly helped spread extremism in every vain from Religious Extremism to Far-Right/Nazism? And has even done so through algorithms that help jump start it? How about the fact that channels with millions of viewers are able to get away with abusing strangers, friends and even direct children for years before instead of YouTube catching them, it was another group of YouTubers? How about the vein assholes who are now selling directly to children below the age of 4 merchandise at a time where they don't even comprehend their being lied too? How about the fact its the fucking Children's YouTube App? Lets talk about that one in particular because does anyone remember the really extreme creepy shit coming out of it and how its still coming out with really creepy inappropriate shit? I don't need to talk about Facebook because John Oliver did a fantastic piece about how Facebook's lack of care or capability to hire people who understand a local region and instead just use some engineers blanket solution actually doesn't help and made things exasperatingly worse. There's also the mountain of troll bots that have been praying on everyone and how while the young people are leaving, the older people are joining in droves still and they're the ones more likely to fall for bot accounts. Lets talk about how Facebook has been engineered to encourage, participate in and spread echo chambers at an amplified level of stupidity and how its designed to be a skinner box which is an unhealthy but highly lucrative UI philosophy. Should I continue? Twitters just straight shit that was never designed to have long form conversations but now that its become some default platform for long form conversations its...kinda terrible? And it easily helps spread quips, short form attacks and incentives again echo chambers, violent stupidity and extremism because its design is a skinner box. And I'm gonna go for the two grand-daddies. Microsoft was a monopolistic piece of shit that single-handily almost took complete control of the PC market and we still feel the aftershocks of the stupid decisions made back then. For instance the fact that we're still stuck on Windows for a majority of PC users which makes hacking, controlling and abusing computers far far easier than it should be. Apple is a piece of shit that removes features, oversells its products because the outside looks nice and shiny but once you actually take a look at its construction it turns out the components are shit, the solder is shit. They're just glue together pieces of shit golden turds not worth the cost of admission to use that sweet luscious environment. Need I go on? Silicon Valley is a fucking dumpster fire that has had good ideas on paper, but like everything else they put out, was never fucking tested by end-users for a long enough time for them to fully understand just how badly that shit could be abused. The main reason? Because they don't care. As you'll rightly point out, they're corporations their only motivation is profit(inside the US because of one major supreme court case that has actually been reversed several times), in that quest for profit who do you think they care for more? Its their profit margins, and that means ad revenue and that means if that youtuber who abuses his kid is making us cash especially in a sinking ship like youtube, well we'll keep him until controversy spills out~! What do you mean our engineers don't know how X Country they most likely can't find a map works culturally~? I'm sure we can just create some specialized algorithm from our Amero-centric point of view! Oh? China is using every single part of our system in the worst way possible to lock down, monitor and punish citizens who don't tow the party's line? Ah well, we'll just create our own experience for them to match up! We've got to have money after all. And now you can see where this fucking falls apart. Silicon is purely driven by money, its systems are designed in the same phone app games target whales but at a global scale and everyone can abuse it.

Steve Ballmer should become the dictator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3XdOl5YtLg

You're literally inventing a group to be prejudiced against. Your entire "gotcha" post is not only extremely over-reationary and smacks strongly of outrage politics, but the entire thing is ridiculously reductive of a massive industry and readily displays that you don't really know what you're talking about. Even if it was valid, it still wouldn't actually prove your point, because the "group" you're saying is shit is the entire tech industry, which isn't cohesive at all. 1. How was YouTube supposed to catch these channels without community members doing it? Millions of hours of footage are posted every day. Additionally, it's not YouTube job to censor content. If there was an audience for extremist content, the their alogrithm that automatically finds trends will find that trend. It's not easy for a human, let alone a bot, to recognize dogwhistles. Algorithms are not gods. Things fall through the cracks. 2. Moderatorbots are litrally the only option; you can't hire exponential workers. This also applied to the YouTube comment. It's essentially impossible to track Russian bots, but Facebook is actually trying to do so very hard and they have been for a while, Facebook has always attempted to get rid of false accounts. Additionally, don't blame Facebook for people choosing to isolate themselves into echo chambers. That's a choice people make, not something Facebook did. 3. Microsoft jump-started the PC market as we know it today, we owe them a lot. Like, a lot a lot, in terms of what a computer really is in our lives, and it's place in homes, and workplaces. Same goes for Apple. Them being successful doesn't make them bad, we aren't still feeling the "aftershocks" of anything other than the blowback from takeoff. Don't get mad at Microsoft just because they made a good product and people choose to use it, that's stupid. 4. Apple products actually are objectively well constructed, you're full of shit. I don't know how to respond to this point any other way than "you are wrong". They aren't worth that luxury sticker price, but what is? 5. I don't even know how to respond to this last paragraph, because you're saying that "they" "don't care", but you haven't specified what it is that "they" "don't care" about or provided any evidence. Yeah, they're corporations. Corporations make money, that's not evil. It's market optimization. Also, they weren't choosing to keep horrible videos to squeeze that sweet sweet cash out; they literally didn't catch them because systems are not flawless. It honestly just sounds like you're pissed off that people are trying to do new and exciting things and that it doesn't always work out the first time. Yeah, some developments with tech are scary, but you're attributing a fucking gigantic amount if malice to what is human error. Then, you're slapping this caricature of a "silicon valley type" on top of it, someone you think you know better than and can feel smugly superior to because they're this character that you've built to the point that you couldn't possibly see it any other way.

*Cries in Californian*

1 and 2 Combined can be easily combated through better designed UI interfaces but the core issue is that the main way UI design is made now for social media is designed to keep you in. And this can and has had terrible impacts. As stated in all of my research put here, Social Media can be used for good but it is overwhelmingly not only missing transparency but also is used not to enhance our communications experiences but to keep us scrolling for ad revenue. This is dangerous, because Skinner Boxes are notoriously addictive, they are used heavily in the Casino and Gambling industries though I'm not making a direct parallel because Gamblin/Casinos do it a far worse level. Additionally, Facebook hasn't been trying as they were warned as pointed out in the LWT episode about facebook, 4 years in advance of the start of the Rohyingan Genocide and also allowed the launch of an app that wasn't even translated and their TOS is still mis-translated. They were and are not prepared and as you correctly pointed out, yes, finding hate speech is difficult. But that's something that anyone whose taken in intro American History or Constitutional Law course would easily know. The fact that the CEO of Facebook during his hearing with the Senate was spouting 'No Shit Sherlock' moments speaks to their niavity which has been heavily abused and is still abused to this day as was shown in a separate filing in the EU against Google and its Biasing. These companies are given massive communication monopolies over us and are clearly not looking out for our best interest at all. If you wouldn't trust a federal government, beholden to its people, with these powers. Why would you trust a closed off, publicly traded corporation whose only purpose is to generate money. They can say they're trying, but Youtube's repeated failures as extremists of all stripes have been on the sight for 4 to 5 years is amazing. As for Microsoft, they helped popularize the PC market. They also helped monopolize, cannibalize and destroy any chance of competitors coming toward them including those of Linux which were often ahead of the curve of Windows post 95 such as the fact that Linux had 64 bit operating systems a full 4 years before Windows did and before you say Windows does things better. 98, Vista and 8. The current update debacle with 10 which is in a long line of update debacles. Remember the Red Ring of Death? How about the fact you have to defrag your fucking windows, that is a windows only 'feature'. They won because they took control of the market and forced out their competitors, often times launching products to try and make headway and instead of giving end of life care, straight up abandoning projects after getting a bunch of smaller developers on board and leaving them to go bankrupt in the wind. Microsoft has several anti-trust lawsuits that its still paying out to this day. They are not worthy of any praise what-so-ever. And as for Mac? Hahahahah. They have a history of their products being labeled as constructed one way and then being not constructed like that at all. Like when the originally announced their unibody Macbooks? They weren't unibody, they had glue being used to keep the unibody together and the heat fans were pointed straight at the glue.Additionally, Apple is notorious for their anti-consumer repair policies and sheer hatred for small business owned repair stores. I'm not talking about scary, I'm telling you that social media is a business and that business fucks us, the consumer, on a daily basis. These aren't 'gotcha' posts. These are the facts that we have discussed in several threads that have been posted here. Oh and one last thing. Remember that whole extermism? Well it turns out that even educated people can fall for them and the main reason is because when they get caught in echo chamber it tends to amplify and extend out voices that would drown criticism otherwise. Skinner Boxes are perfect for this kind of circular encouragement because when you like something on youtube or facebook, even by accident, you will then get flooded with material of the same nature. These 'user based' search results are just designed to keep you reading and engaged, not to challenge.

i agree, we need more pyramids that rival the bass pro shops pyramid in Tennessee https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/2246/bf0d32c9-2448-4248-b5e1-a4f5be1d52e5/image.png

I feel like 500 million dollars is a pretty small amount for a city, esp. a "smart" city that I'd assume would be full of hip new stuff like ecological conservatism, good public infrastructure, and etc.

Hey I remember this from a video game https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/216259/3c8c3e21-a796-41a7-9bc0-a266a599e69a/image.png

this is one of the most american images i've ever seen in my life, holy shit