The downtown area of every major American city is an urban hellscape dominated by soulless office buildings, six lane roads, cars, parking lots and overpriced sandwich shops catering to the weekday lunch crowd. No shit no one wants to spends time over there unless forced to.
Remote work is gutting downtowns
181–190 of 262 posts
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#182The entire raison d'etre of cities in the first place is...jobs. When you no longer need a local job, it makes no sense to spend the extra money to get a smaller place near the city.
Some people like the amenities and will prefer the city. And that's fine. But most people I've known in life tend to be on the other end of the spectrum.
What's annoying to me is that this big reshuffling of people ends up putting a lot of people in areas that don't have the infra to handle it yet, and also messes up house prices and such in said areas. But that's a whole other topic.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#183Office districts suck.
It is draining to share a space with sycophants fake-smiling and fake-laughing, and superficial people ("dress for the job you want" and similar bullshit). And the few loud people without empathy that distract others while they try to focus.
Just let people be represented by what matters: their work. Do you do good work? let that be what matters.
Let people work from a quiet place instead of cargo-culting the open office layout hoax. Finally, working from home, we can actually do work instead of waiting for loud people to shut up. And yes: many times, the reason I went for a coffee walk was to wait for some loud person to shut up and I know I am not the only one.
If you want to meet face-to-face to read my face expressions to know if I am lying to you or I am hiding something, or you need to see me sitting in a desk, then instead of doing that, then just don't fucking hire in the first place because you don't trust me. If you have trust issues, instead of opening an office, go see a therapist.
Even though I care about other people's well-being, I don't care about your appearance. And thanks to remote work now nobody gets distracted by your appearance, and that is amazing.
Now that we are all interacting electronically, I cannot wait for the next generation of collaborative tools that auto-flags toxic behavior. Or a solution that does sentiment analysis on what people say in real time, such as "You sound sad as fuck, can you please cheer up a little bit?". Or "insults are not OK, please go see HR after this meeting".
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Living in the city is great for young people who have no kids - lots of entertainment options a short walk away. It's noisier/busier/dirtier (EVs will help A LOT with noise and pollution). Living further out is much nicer when you have kids - more space, more freedom for the kids to move around, more trees for them to climb and places to explore.
And nowhere for them to go by themselves? Living in the suburbs as a tween/teenager is death.
Teens live online now. Your youth experience is not the same as that of the youth today. It's generational snobbery to impose a previous generation's preferences on modern youth.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess a lot of people got triggered by the first words and never finished reading after the downvote. Such an amazing movie...
HN readers don't like low value joke / sarcastic comments.
I'm clearly biased as the GP, but I think quoting General Ripper is roughly the appropriate response to someone making a throwaway comment about testosterone rates.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#186[deleted]
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
And nowhere for them to go by themselves? Living in the suburbs as a tween/teenager is death.
Teens live online now. Your youth experience is not the same as that of the youth today. It's generational snobbery to impose a previous generation's preferences on modern youth.
This isn't a response: "living online" is a cultural metaphor for increased use of technology, not a preference w/r/t suburban vs. other living situations.
Last time I checked, teenagers still eat food and socialize in the physical world. It's not a huge reach to understand how suburbs stifle and constrain that (nor has that changed particularly in the last 20 years).
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The thing I don't miss is that I got sick every single Winter. All it takes is one inconsiderate person to not cover their mouth and everyone is getting ill. And it happened all the time. Give it a few years without exposure, and you will have very hard time if you have to get exposed again. I did 2 years for remote work with a single day with long exposure each week, after a few years with low exposure. I then had…
I think this is based on a misinterpretation of the hygiene hypothesis... exposure to germs helps when you're a child yourself but not after becoming an adult (AFAIA). This is supported by https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/05/all-social-...
That's one of those sciencey articles that is only technically correct within a specific context, otherwise why are elderly people advised to get the flu vaccine every year?
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#189Always blame the workers, never blame a system that is based in the following pillars: the exploitation of said workers, unlimited growth, the plundering of developing nations and the vast ammount of profits being kept by the capitalist class.
Re: Remote work is gutting downtowns
#190A bit off topic; I of course understand that I'm an odd situation and not representative of the broader trend at play here... But moving into remote work inspired my partner and I to move into Manhattan from the sprawling car driven nightmare that was Phoenix. Tiny little studio, but we've never been particularly materialistic, a murphy bed massively opens up the space, and no office to go into means once the day is…
You don't mention children, but that's an important data point. Your small apartment is suddenly smaller, and if you want to be in a good public school district, your rent options are now a lot more expensive. Or you can go private, and suddenly discover brand new ways to have no money.
A lot of singles and DINKs like this sort of arrangement, but a community that has few or no children is dying, if not already dead.
Mobility is less of an option once you have children embedded into the community. Moving across the country is exciting and fun, until it means uprooting your kids. That's how a city, town, neighborhood maintains stability. Transients are not a long-term solution.
Cities chased out families with ever-increasing costs. This worked okay as long as business needed to be conducted in cities. That's no longer the case, turning our urban centers into glorified roadside RV parks.