So like the ancient inhabitants of Yap are remembered for their currency based on giant stone wheels, future civilizations will look upon the fallen civilization of the united states and recall us as those weirdos who transacted in giant concrete cubes
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Who cares?? It’s not like anyone actually lives in these things.
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Don’t forget money-launderies for gangsters.
Are we sure You Know Who isn’t involved?
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Awwww, go flush your tears down your gold toilet. No one cares.
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A lot to be said against it also, at least for most buildings beyond 10 stories or so.
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Yep, that’s what I had in mind. Even the one that was lost at sea maintained its value, since everyone agrees it does. Basically capital in microcosm.
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Would have liked your post except for this. The reason for vertical development in capitalist property markets is the higher up ones can command higher sales prices. It’s grossly inefficient, disastrous for the environment, and usually barely livable in.
But it jacks up real estate prices.
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The schadenfreude is strong with this one (oh, I mean shoddy-freude, thanks @Kaleberg!)
But to everyone saying, “who cares,” well, I do. Even though this was a super stupid mostly tax haven of a building, it might not always be. Every time a bunch of capital is invested in a huge shoddy eyesore like this, there’s a big environmental cost, too. Concrete alone has a huge carbon footprint, and I’m sure there are a bunch of toxins and non-recyclable materials, as with most buildings of this nature.
So, shoddy construction hurts us all. If the rich folk go away, that building will either need to be repurposed and repairs will fall on the next owners, or it will get demolished and this was the moral equivalent of paving over something unnecessarily so developers could get their cut.
Tl:dr version: it’s in all our best interest that most structures be built to last.
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I wonder how many of these are trump properties
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Shoddy construction usually means a maintenance nightmare. And a big building like that is going to require a lot of maintenance. From the article, it sounds like the current maintenance is woefully insufficient. How long until all those floods and leaks and cracks result in a compromised structure? That thing is big. If something goes wrong, it will go very very very wrong.
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I hate to be such a pedant…but that’s a tardigrade playing a cello. Or at least he’s holding a violin like a cello.
Either way, it’s tiny and I love it.
Edit: spelling
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Ah thanks! I was misreading that setup. Too bad it is still just the single stairwell though, which I know there is push for multiple stairwells now. I think a lot has to to with the size of each floor, they are probably exempt from some rules since the floors aren’t big, but you’d think they’d still have to deal with more rules for being so high!
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(I, for one, enjoyed that bit of pedantry.)
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You caught me!
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Well there’s been a requirement for two stairwells (means of egress) in most US jurisdictions since approximately forever. Apparantly the NYC building code is based on the IBC (international building code) rather than NFPA’s Life Safety code. And the IBC regards scissors stairs as a single stairway because of the aforementioned likelihood that smoke in one will infiltrate into the other. So from a building code point of view, it IS a single stairway. I’m guessing that they got away with it because of a combination of the low occupancy levels and sprinklers. Still a firetrap IMHO. Especially since the entrances to the stairs are so close to each other.
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Real estate developers in NYC often use higher floor numbers as a marketing gimmick. They don’t count floors the way you or I might. They use all kinds of ruses, for example, a “floor equivalent” that lets them start number higher floors based on the elevation rather than the floor count.
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As did I, ever since that &*$%& picture started showing up every time I see it I think it’s obviously not a violin and it’s playing it wrong. It’s very trivial but dammit 
, something that always gets me is when it would have been no additional effort to do something right instead of wrong.
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The salient point we seem to be missing here is that these buildings are designed for zero occupants, maximum owners.
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I don’t care do you?
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good.
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