• cosecantphi [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Do libs really believe that homelessness only exists because we just haven't found a way to fit enough homes for everyone on all the land available on Earth? That if only we'd build underground we'd finally have enough room for everyone? what the fuck

    • Plants [des/pair]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Yeah in my experience they actually believe that

    • Orannis62 [ze/hir]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yes, they do think that. Their answer to homelessness, when asked, is always "build more housing".

      They never have a coherent response when I point out that there are 30x more empty homes than homeless people- the most I get is "but most of those homes are in places people don't want to live" which is a convenient little quarter-truth that lets them shut everything out.

      • cosecantphi [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        "but most of those homes are in places people don't want to live"

        Lmao this sort of thinking is one of the great mysteries of the liberal mind.

        Do they really imagine in their heads homeless people turning down free homes like "yeah, you know what it sucks only getting a couple hours of sleep per night under an overpass because cops keep harassing me, but i really don't wanna live in that neighborhood. the local schools have lousy standardized test scores and there isn't an HOA to keep the lawns tidy, so thanks anyway but i'll pass on that!"

        • DragonNest_Aidit [they/them,use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          I still don't know what their reasoning is yet, but yes that is exactly what they think. They consider bad housing to be worse than no housing, so it's better to just let the homeless be homeless for a little longer until they get "proper" homes.

          And they love to rag on the left for our standard "pErFecT iS ThE eNeMy of gOoD!1"

          • SoyViking [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            The bad housing argument is just an excuse. They certainly don't seem to give a shit about poor people who are already living in bad housing (at least not until they need an excuse to gentrify it by force).

            What they really care about is "undeserving" people getting something they didn't "earn" the right to have in the proper way. They don't want the riffraff to live in their neighbourhoods as if they were as good as them. They don't want their boutique beard oil stores and trendy cafes to make way for places where the unwashed masses can live and work. They want to maintain their supremacy.

            • ToastGhost [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              as soon as you say put them up in hotels they lunge the opposite way and cry about the homeless being animals who will destroy any building they are in

          • ToastGhost [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            'perfect is the enemy of good' they say as they do absolutely nothing just as their silly catchphrase implicitly warns of

        • Wertheimer [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Wow. I thought they were claiming that, like, all the empty homes are in Nebraska or something. I didn’t know they kept this up when confronted with the city-by-city statistics.

        • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          no HOA would be a major selling point tbh. HOA's are everything americans complain about communism being

      • SickleRick [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Hit 'em with the San Francisco numbers. Empty homes in San Francisco : unhoused people in San Francisco is above the national average, because of shit like AirBnB's.

        • ajouter [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          San Francisco numbers for anyone wondering: 40k empty houses, 10k homeless (found here https://www.fillemptyhomes.com/)

    • FailureToLaunch [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Don't ask a liberal to have coherent or reality-based thoughts and beliefs - it's impossible

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Libs like this don't deal with landlords on a regular basis because they likely own their own home. Or they are landlords and want more homes to drive down values so they can snatch up more property and rent it out to proles for 50%+ of their wages

        • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Big landlords do, it allows them to accumulate more property. Rents are totally disconnected from property values now anyways because housing is a necessity. The lower the cost of the land/property itself, the greater the profit of the landlord.

  • LeninsWorldTour [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    bit idea: alt reality where the twin towers were underground and bin laden used giant drills to dig through the towers :joker-laden:

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      Elon Musk III appears and says "We will make natural light affordable for everyone!"

      Later on his lawyers have to clean things up. Everybody knows NQR natural light is already expensive. NQR meaning Not Quite Real of course.

      • D61 [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Elon Musk III appears and says “We will make natural light affordable for everyone!”

        Somehow it will still be shipped in tubes.

    • D61 [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      :theiss-explanation:

      "Do you photosynthesise? I said, DO YOU PHOTOSYNTHESISE MUTHER F*CKER?!?"

      "SUNLIGHT IS FOR THE PLANTS, GET YO' ASS BACK INTO THE PIT!"

  • fuckiforgotmypasswor [comrade/them,any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Serious question - does this guy know how expensive/labor intensive/wasteful it is to dig hundreds of feet into the earth just to build a shitty apartment complex underground

    kind of defeats the purpose of being a slumlord if your construction costs are in the ballpark of 300 million dollars

    • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Imagined a 1960s new York slum lord half-dressed and smoking a stogie while talking with NASA engineers about underground housing.

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Yo let me become one of the eyeless mole people of our future capitalist hellscape ekeing out a living by gnawing on moss in my -20th floor lavascraper apartment.

  • Shoegazer [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I recently learned that YIMBYs are just likes NIMBYs, that is, a bunch of liberals. But this time they want good housing for themselves and austerity housing for others.

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      YIMBYs are a liberal archetype. They are just embarrassed NIMBYs who want to seem like they have empathy when in fact they have none. Even actual magic wouldn't please them.

      Imagine Harry Potter was real and he was standing next to a YIMBY. He was about to wave his magic wand and create 50 affordable housing units down the street - the YIMBY would yell "Stop!"

      And then they'd sheepishly say "I know it's a good thing and costs nothing plus the buildings would be there instantly so there's no real life stuff like construction noise and trucks all over the place. But couldn't you just - you know - not make the housing here and move those people somewhere else? Vetting doesn't catch everything and I also have my property values to consider.."

  • dro_away [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Looks like a fucking death trap. Imagine the fires safety needed to make that remotely tenable. Flood resistance too, you're basically beholden to whoever's damming shit to do it right. Which is fine if you're in .nl, but anywhere else I don't think I'd feel comfortable down there in a hurricane...

    Just make it the Geofront or whatever from Neon Genesis.

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I imagine you'd just build each unit to be completely self contained, so if one unit catches fire it will burn but no fire can get out. We already do this for some large apartment building construction. Grenfell was supposed to be this but the problem was that the cladding spread the fire via the outside of the building, it would not have spread at all without the cladding outside.

      • SickleRick [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        :wtyp-gang: episode was good.

        "That concrete council housing is too ugly for the richest council in the UK. Let's cover it in solidified oil!"

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    This may not necessarily be a bad thing unless it's made into a bad thing by :porky-happy: . It may become necessary as the climate gets worse.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Wouldn't it be better to build into hills or even construct artificial hills over a surface structure designed to accommodate the weight, so you're not just creating a giant well that you'll struggle to keep dry?

      Actually, if one's purpose building housing to handle severe weather and high temperatures there's tons of cheaper extant designs that do the trick, like just properly insulating a reinforced structure and then incorporating features that naturally cool air like towers that catch the wind and direct it down over cisterns or through cellars to cool it off even in the middle of the day.

      • SickleRick [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I remember them being pretty decent, but I read them as a liberal. I think it may have been closer to Lysenkoism than classic eugenics, but it's been quite a while since I read them.

        • pink_mist [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I read it only a couple years ago. Wasn't it about

          spoiler

          liberal eco-terrorists doing an accelerationism?

      • UlyssesT [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I don't think most things will become necessary as climate gets worse. Some things will become outright impossible.

        Also, some things can be much worse than other things when :porky-happy: is applied, such as military technology. The equivalency is vague.

  • keepcarrot [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    While I have mild fantasies of living in a secret underground bunker hidden under the local park, digging underground is super expensive, requires a lot of maintenance and ventilation, and can be quite risky. Also haven't sussed out how I'd build the bunker with no one noticing.

    Good insulation though, I guess

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Good insulation though, I guess

      I suspect it will become more popular as climate change drives up the cost of air conditioning. But its generally not a solution for areas exposed to high risk of flooding.

  • Barabas [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    This would have to be a pretty much perfect seal towards the ground or it would be filled with mold within a matter of weeks. The ventilation would also be a nightmare.

    Building under ground is about the same as building under water if you want to make actually decent habitats. And it is absolutely a no go if there is any chance of earthquakes lest it turns into a tomb.

  • iwillavengeyoufather [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    take whatever millions youre going to spend on digging a giant pit and just bribe your city councilors if you are worried about height resitrictions

  • Nakoichi [they/them]M
    ·
    2 years ago

    We'll probably end up having to do shit like this as the climate heats up.

  • PZK [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's like "How can we make homeless people disappear?" "I know! Make them live underground!"