Ending remote work is going to revitalize downtown DC, which was dying since covid. The local businesses will like this. I don't think Trump is doing it for that reason, butI'm here for all the unintended consequences, good and bad.
I don't stalk your posts. I read threads and respond. How are Rocky Juarez and Juan Diaz's gym random? They're two former World champions and professional gyms. You can Google them if you don't believe me. If you haven't lived in Houston for years and your childhood friends have moved how will you know a place? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. You'll have to Google a gym. You can simply Google mine. Why should I have to go where you choose? This is ridiculous and it seems like you're just trolling me. I'm going to stop derailing the thread. If you're really serious then dm me.
Yeah seems innocuous but this is not remotely what is going to happen- they're also (illegally ) canceling thousands of office leases, selling buildings & firing tons of staff. The RTO thing is just a subterfuge to get rid of an O. They are transferring people hundreds of miles away & then doing RTO, for example. The other activity is to fire all blacks, Hispanics & women (and DC is largely a black working class City) while claiming it's DEI - it's actually just segregation. There's a big article about that part in the post today. Downtown DC and every area that has a federal building is going to be absolutely devastated. Same with university towns - Baltimore is on big trouble with Johns Hopkins It could create the urban hellscapes that MAGA always pretends DC & New York are. We are shaping up for a very nasty recession for so many reasons, but this is a major one.
What a bad take from someone who's intelligent @Kim . Hundreds of thousands of jobs are being eliminated in DC for literally no reason and some think DC is going be thriving. If you speak to anyone in DC the entire town is freaking out. People are staying home and saving every penny as they dont know what's coming next. DC is about to see a massive recession. 80% of jobs in DC are connected to the government in some fashion
Getting people out of the house more will do wonders. Isolation is bad, regardless of partisanship. I wonder how much in-person communication has been reduced since Covid.
Prentiss County Mississippi - desperately poor, voted for Trump 80% (also, 80% white) - no more food for them (and Medicaid)
Great news! Whoever voted for Trump deserves to suffer. This is what they wanted. Washington post did a great article interviewing people who have been laid off but have been MAGA Nothing better than MAGA realizing they've been conned
it’s hilarious how easily these dumb MAGAts get played republicans will tell them that their children don’t deserve free school lunch, and they’ll happily accept…meanwhile, these politicians’ kids are never in any danger of going hungry at school republicans will tell them that education is a scam and woke/liberal ideology or whatever nonsense they come up with…meanwhile, they all went to prestigious colleges and are making sure their kids do the same while the MAGAts remain dumb with no degree and no money Trump will enact tariffs and make the prices of so many things increase, and these dumb MAGAs will applaud while barely living paycheck to paycheck…Trump is a billionaire, he doesn’t give a fck about grocery prices…him and the rest of the family are eating well every night How many MAGAts does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Zero. Republicans will just tell them the problem is fixed as they sit there and clap in the dark. MAGAts are like bots or NPCs…no free will or mind of their own, just accept whatever dear leader tells them
I'm not intelligent and I give bad takes all the time. I think I'm right about this, but I could be wrong. I've lived a big part of my life in that area. I have friends and family in that area. A lot of jobs are being cut around the world, including DC, but we'll see how that goes, from a legal process issue to what the end result will be. I do know this, DC has been bleeding since COVID: people moved out of the city, offices closed, restaurants closed, people worked remotely. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/04/central-business-district-dc-pandemic/ https://www.washingtonian.com/2023/05/31/can-downtown-dc-be-reinvigorated/ https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/01/downtown-dc-transformation-plan-00144253 https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/09/27/washington-dc-pandemic-recovery/ But since the return to work: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/...o-return-to-in-person-work-this-week/3840466/ https://www.nbcnews.com/business/bu...-federal-employees-telework-policy-rcna188629 Now, the issues will be that there's not enough parking, there's not enough office space, and everyone has been productive working from home. Look, a lot of what is going in can be argued as bad policy. Hell, a lot of it is illegally violating negotiated cba's, and even violating laws passed by Congress. Maybe the courts will sort it out. Maybe we'll become a kingdom. Don't let your rabid hatred towards Trump, a lot of which is justified, blind yourself to potential positive side effects. I'm pretty sure I know more people in DC than you, so when you so "talk to people in DC," you're just repeating stuff in the news. Again, I could be wrong. But Trump/Musk is unintentionally going to infuse life into downtown DC, bring more restaurants and business back, increase construction, increase Metro usage, and those things aren't bad if you care about downtown DC.
I know quite a few people who work at the Justice department. I filed a whistleblower lawsuit against UHS which to this day is the largest medicare fraud case in Houston History. I stayed in DC for close to a year helping bring the case together. Nothing I repeat is what I hear from the news. We have close to 200-300k direct layoffs in the city with the Musk purge nd that doesn't even include the contractors and the service industry that caters to these individuals. HUD/Energy/USAID/CFPB/state department are all seeing tens of thousands of employees leave. The hiring freeze across government that Trump put into place also means less investment and CAPEX in the metro. Nobody is going to invest a penny as long as the government stops hiring. DC Is about to be destroyed
Good, then text your friends. Did they work downtown pre-Trump? Everyone I know who still works for the government is talking about dreading the return to work orders. Those 300k layoffs could be terrible. I'm not saying it's good. What I'm saying is that DC is in zombie mode and has been for 3 years. Have you been to downtown DC in the past 3 years. It's not like when you were there before. Read the links. Main point is that something good may come from this, even if it's mostly bad.
But whos disagreeing with what you're saying? I never said DC downtown is lively or where it was pre covid. There is no doubt that remote work hasnt hit the city hard? I dont know whos disagreeing with what you're saying. My entire argument was Trump ending the remote work and forcing people back into office still wont offset the hundreds of thousand so layoffs thats occurring right now. Its really rough now all over DC. Restaurants and bars around the capital are dead. Happy hours which DC is famous for is dead and everyone is worried. The sentiment right now in DC is really really bad. People are terrified
You were disagreeing, or so I thought, lol. This is a very dynamic situation, so no one knows for until years in the future. It's just my guess that there some positives from this, even if it is net negative. Everything that you say is dead has been dead for years. I ask you again, have you been to downtown DC the last 3 years? Have your friends/contacts that you talk to been there? It's been dying since covid because everyone gets to work from home. So yes, many people are losing or quitting. The entire federal government workforce in DC is not quitting. My guess is there will actually be a boost for downtown. The only evidence so far is the article I posted about Navy Yard getting 17k people returning to work last week. There's like 350k fed employees in the DMV, and about half of them work from home most of the time. There have been union negotiated cba's agreed to that have allowed that condition. Trump/Musk are simply ignoring it. I'm sure there will be lawsuits. But, until that is resolved, you'll have 100k to 200k employees returning to work in DC, which boosts transportation spending, food spending, and if it has staying power, will fill up more offices downtown. Will what boost be impacted the other way by layoffs? Sure. I don't think DC area layoffs will outrun the boost, but who knows? We don't know yet. Too many factors. That was my original dumb post that you disagreed with in total. We'll know more as time passes.
You got played. You voted for Kamala. I didn't vote. But Trump's supporters won and you're crying on the internet
The goal here is 10 years from now this is such a shameful mark for a human to admit they live in fear the rest of their lives. The goal is for people like you to eventually to be afraid to admit this. At least that is my goal.
Voting for the Mayor Who Promised to Blow Up the City Doesn’t Mean I Approve of the Mayor Blowing Up the City It’s so easy to label people these days. From the way folks have been talking, you’d think everyone falls into two buckets: those who voted against the mayor who promised to blow up the city and those who voted for the mayor who promised to blow up the city. And now that the mayor, whom I voted for, is blowing up the city, as he promised, I’m one of many people who are being unfairly blamed for something I didn’t want. Okay? I didn’t want the mayor to blow up the city like he mentioned many times; I just wanted him to fix the old bowling alley like he promised in passing once. Anyone saying I’m partially responsible for the explosions is just a sign that they have no argument. Before you rush to cancel me, try to remember the mayor made lots of promises, and I didn’t expect him to keep them all. Yes, he promised to turn our playgrounds to glass and take a blowtorch to the schools; yes, he said that he was going to use napalm on every grocery store, but, as I said, he also promised he was going to fix the old bowling alley. Oh, how I loved that bowling alley as a kid. It’s been closed for twenty years, so when the mayor mentioned he’d fix it if we elected him, I had to give it a chance. To be fair, he was also the mayor a few years ago, made the same promise, and failed to fix the bowling alley then. But he did live up to his promise to reintroduce smallpox into local daycares, so at least you know he can get things done, unlike the other guy who did neither of those. I’ve seen all the attacks online. You use the mayor’s own clear statements of purpose against me just because I consciously chose this. “The mayor said he was going to blow up the city.” Yeah, metaphorically. “The mayor brought up his desire to see the residents of the city cleansed by flame in every speech.” Sure, if you take it out of context, maybe. “The mayor’s election slogan was, ‘Blow It All Up and Watch Them Suffer,’” which is scary only for people stupid enough to take him seriously. The fact that he had to go so far as to pour gasoline all over the Burger King before throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window shows what his opponents have pushed him to do. It’s really his critics that have kept him from fixing the bowling alley. Let me reiterate: I do not approve of the mayor locking the doors of the mall and igniting a bus full of C4 in the food court. I may have worn a shirt that said, VOTE FOR THE MAYOR WHO WILL BLOW UP THE MALL FOOD COURT, but that was just my fun way of saying I only cared about the bowling alley. It makes me sad that you think I wanted people to get hurt by this. Especially when it’s something that directly affected me for the first time in my life, when my nephew was accidentally trapped in that mall when it exploded. Give me a little grace here. Plus, my nephew voted for the other candidate, so it’s kind of his fault that he ended up there to begin with. Is it so bad that I wanted the bowling alley back? Maybe that’s what you’re really mad about. You wanted the mayor to fail. The negativity around the smell of roasting pig is just a facile attempt to distract from his potential future successes. I bet the mayor is about to fix up the bowling alley, and I’ll walk in, and I’ll be twelve again, and all the adults will be so tall, and it will be my party, and everyone—even the kids who don’t like me—will have to sing happy birthday. The previous mayor said that rebuilding the bowling alley wouldn’t make it 1996 again, which, to me, is unacceptable. It’s disgusting and, frankly, counterproductive to point out that I voted for this. To imply that I had personal free will and agency when I walked into a voting booth and picked Mayor Bomberman is insulting. Here I am, admitting that I did not actually want the mayor’s biggest promise to happen, and you’re criticizing me for directly being part of the reason it’s happening. You should be praising me for being able to admit that—well, not that I was wrong, heaven forbid—but perhaps my faith in the mayor who was arrested thirty-four times for arson was misplaced. At the end of the day, you can imply that I “wanted this” as much as you like. You don’t know what’s inside my heart. The mayor said he’d fix the bowling alley. Just because he hasn’t fixed the bowling alley and announced that he’ll never fix the bowling alley, doesn’t mean I’m dumb or a fool. And while he may have also promised he’d re-segregate the city, crash the city’s economy, and turn the city’s only remaining functional hospital into a big Jersey Mike’s, I can guarantee that I only wanted the Jersey Mike’s. So, no, I’m not “happy now” that our zoo has been turned into an open-air animal mausoleum. But of the options I had, only one mayor promised to completely change the city. And you know what? At least he is doing something. It may kill a lot of people. It may leave others without homes or jobs. But I respect a man of action, regardless of what that action is and whether or not it’s going to make things better or worse. Now, I’ll just sit back and wait for the bowling alley to get fixed. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles...an-i-approve-of-the-mayor-blowing-up-the-city
