A bigger problem is the location, office building are not located in residential areas and as such lack a lot of facilities, e.g. no supermarkets and other shops in walking/cycling distance, no MD/pharmacy and other healthcare facilities, no schools or playgrounds, etc. etc.
I agree that it’s not great but it’s better than nothing. Plus some of those services could eventually appear or be setup even in the same building itself.
I would have agreed up until about a week ago. There was a news story a few days ago about how there are people in LA renting various vehicles parked on public streets for people to live in. Then another story about how there are actually thousands of such “rentals” in LA. I think highrise slums might be a notch or two down from the current dystopia.
I guess that explains why they’re going to such great lengths to convince us that talking about Game of Thrones around a water cooler is such a tremendous benefit to humankind…
At our office they are really pushing the “socializing” aspect by having a “gaming lunch” once a month. And by gaming lunch I mean they put out a few board games in the kitchenette that no one touches because we get 30 minutes to eat before having to work at a soulless corporation. But hey at least middle management is happy now they can walk around making sure you are working instead of being at home.
All workers are required to enjoy 30 minutes of mandatory social engagement at a designated “Fun Area”. Enjoyment activities can include: hearty laughter, corporate value appreciation, appropriate camaraderie. If the enjoyment you wish to experience is outside of these allowed forms, please speak to your department’s Enjoyment Adjustment Officer.
In the first half I thought that sounds at least kind of cool to have a lan party, but its one of those gaming table in office that only for decorations and no one touch….
If only Amazon wasn’t forcing me to go back into the office soon…
Even my manager hates the idea. Out team is split on different coasts, so we’re gonna have to be in class anyway, so why am I forced to go into the office? I went in before I was going to be forced because it was fun, but now I’m staying out until I’m forced. It’s bullshit.
Amazon and Bezos himself has pretty close ties to Wall Street. You being herded in is the returned backscratch for very favourable stock market “accidents” that led Amazon to an insane valuation and competitors on the short side of the investments.
Yeah but it would add localised - and extremely high efficiency in terms of water, yield, etc. - food supply that’s more resilient to climate shifts, needs no pesticodes, etc., and for those of us on islands like the UK where we import lots of food it would be good.
Might also help those countries we import from build up more food supply resiliency because thry have more excess. Or massively reduce land use for food ^.^. And a lot of the places food gets imported from or otherwise farmed are also at large risk for climate change, so perhaps using vertical farms or other climate controlled farming techniques would be a good idea for them too nya
Furthermore it makes the supply chain more auditable, so you can reduce the reliance on questionably or very unethically sourced stuff. A controlled environment might also allow for even more automation.
I’m a pretty big fan of vertical farming for lots of reasons though to the point of writing an article on it, so I’m a little biased ;p. The main obstacles are land/building price and energy (and also some techniques for growing staples, though I think that is not a fundamemtal limitation, and I think the other two are solvable)
Edit: also I think it’s desirable to return agricultural land to less managed environments like forests. Moving more human infrastructure into cities would enable more of this sort of “rewilding” (though I think that’s a bit of a misnomer as environments everywhere have all been fundamentally altered by people, and a lot of people’s idea of “nature” is the very sanitised version that avoids the constant slaughter and death, like cityparks and stuff which are actually very human managed - good for mental health, but not really ““nature”” in the same way)
They absolutely can. If Canadian cities can do it with less people and money then certainly some of these massive multi-billion dollar real estate companies can do it too.
Cities, you just said keyword there cities, you can do it in cities because people want to live in cities. They don’t want to live on the outskirts. Most of these offices are not in the city centre because the city centre is a really expensive place to have an office, only massive corporations are based there.
The vast majority of office space is in low rent districts on the periphery of cities. Because no one lives there there’s no shops, no leisure centres, no schools, no parks or other green spaces. You can’t just convert every building into a housing unit without considering the surrounding environment.
It would be infinitely cheaper to just build homes where you actually want them, than to try and convert a building that was never designed for the task.
I know it’s not trendy or hip or exciting to say that, but when you look at the economics it just doesn’t make sense outside of some very limited circumstances.
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