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Soylent Pudding posted:DC in general is heavily suffering from the pivot to work from home and a general migration of office space to the exurbs where rents are way cheaper. The mayor caught a lot of flack for calling on Biden to end federal wfh but her full remarks were that all the empty office space is devastating local businessesnand the gov should either come back full time or sell off the excess capacity to someone who will actually use it. cry more american cities. you spent decades making yourselves an unlivable hellscape whose sole purpose is to funnel commuters into a center that serves $20 salad lunches to fuel a bunch of graft departments that don't actually provide the services that would make people want to, yknow, live there, not simply profit off people who are forced to work there because that's where the office is i am all too happy to watch SF (which i figure is similar to DC in many ways) crater as the "commuters provide sales tax revenue but require no services" money faucet stops. hopefully it'll force american urbana to finally reshape itself
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Mar 2, 2023 22:22
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:36 |
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Soylent Pudding posted:If you're gonna pull this "they deserve it" schtick, picking DC, a predominantly African American city allowed limited self determination at the mercy of Congress is a major yoikes. that is in part my point: cities with a lot of inbound commuters love neglecting to make the residential parts good because they don't have to. make the central office district clean enough and you can ignore the dilapidated residential parts
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Mar 3, 2023 05:45
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Wrong Theory posted:I just fail to see how legalizing drugs would make for a friendlier nicer cartel. It just ends up rewarding them for waiting us out. The only thing I could see it is potentially a better outcome than the current system. But that's not even a guarantee. I don't even care about the legalizing drugs part I just don't like the idea of giving the keys to the cartels. What timescale would this even be looking at? For them to forego violence and human trafficking, etc... legalizing recreational drug use would not directly reward the cartels. legal recreational pharmaceuticals would likely be subject to the same policies as non-recreational pharmaceuticals, which are stringent as gently caress. you don't go from running an operation where you make functional drugs (something marketed as an opioid does opioid poo poo) to running a pharmaceutical lab that complies with USP or similar standards overnight. aside from just maintaining high quality standards in production, you also have to do a ton of paperwork for compliance reasons. recreational drugs would likely be subject to additional restrictions as well, at least initially, since it's unlikely governments would allow open season on recreational drug marketing or whatever. you'd likely have to have systems (if not necessarily truly effective systems, but certainly bureaucratic compliance systems) to avoid supplying recreational drugs to people with substance use disorders, and would probably be required to divert some percentage of profits to harm reduction legalization is not a guaranteed removal of the black market, however. legal cannabis in california has clearly demonstrated that there are plenty of operations who find the regulations too much of a burden and continue to sell out of compliance, hoping that they can fly under the radar. that'd likely apply to other legalized drugs as well, though you'd maybe see a shift to in-country production. weed is notable for being probably easier to produce within a state's borders out of sight compared to running a large-scale clandestine lab, but there's definitely precedent for small-scale clandestine labs--they're just currently less common because most of what they'd produce you can just buy in bulk from more professional chinese outfits that have bought off local officials or remain enough under the radar by not producing things that are actually scheduled realistically, the legal recreational market probably mostly gets fulfilled by pharma labs in india and china that are already running pharma reg quality industrial production to produce non-recreational stuff. cartels will move into other criminal or criminal-ish enterprises, like US organized crime did after alcohol prohibition ended. if you're set up to profit off crimes, you do crimes
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Mar 10, 2023 02:38
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Cugel the Clever posted:Having the option to work from home as needed is a must, but permanently eliminating one of the few remaining venues of regular socialization outside people's friend groups sounds like a great way to increase isolation and decrease empathy, both with the gloomy consequences you'd expect. Aside from workplaces with toxic cultures where in-person interaction isn't any better, most of the complaints people have about the office actually stem from other fundamental problems in the way we structure our society. losing that was good for me and forced me to start doing irl social stuff that wasn't work. the decline of third place social venues in american urban society shifting into some sorta weird 2.5th place work social environment wasn't great, it was just there and maybe somewhat a necessity with long commutes. sure, you get some useful inter-departmental interaction through spontaneous social stuff, but 80% of it was hanging out with people i wouldn't otherwise hang out with. im happier having joined a community sports league for the actual social poo poo, and while work hasn't quite figured out how to fill the gap for the work-related benefits, idgaf. i will deal with some loss of work cohesion because it just doesn't matter that much unless you are really and truly invested in your company, and i have accepted that i am not one of those people. capitalism is a gently caress that i deal with out of necessity, and im better making friends outside the thing that im realistically going to leave after a decade. work social probably made more sense when being a lifer was something you could reasonably do if you wanted, but that's long gone for much of the american professional class the options for socialization outside work have withered but we're better trying to build them again rather than saying "eh pandemic was an aberration and work social life is the ideal, we must return to it"
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Mar 19, 2023 20:17
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i wonder if biden would have gone for reelection if not for unexpectedly getting thrust into (effectively) wartime president mode. i mean, yeah, there were indications he was gonna do so anyway before, but circumstances appear to have clinched the deal half of me says he's trying to backroom groom harris as an effective foreign policy leader to take over when he inevitably gets too old to do the job. "win an election, continue on a bit, resign, deliver a big legacy bomb as the old white guy who turned the presidency over to a black woman" feels like a very biden move it's maybe preferable to some gop alternative, but goddamn do i despise american politics' slide into a patronage system because that's far more advantageous for either side of the entrenched powers than trying for systematic electoral reform
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Mar 21, 2023 06:08
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:36 |
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Soylent Pudding posted:I always buy 44 real trees per holiday season. Artificial trees don't burn as well in the menorah. sure they do dont breathe the smoke
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Mar 29, 2023 21:24
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