okdiluted

okdiluted t1_itfhj5o wrote

why can't there be things that are just for the public good? why are things that are commonly accepted as essential for travelers turned into yet another rent-extraction scheme? why does everything have to turn a profit for someone? outlets existed there for ages and it took more work and more expense to remove them and install something that is just another excuse to charge people money for trying to exist in public. phones charging off of the previous available outlets were not gonna bankrupt penn station--this is just another way to both make public spaces more hostile and to extract a profit from a previously free courtesy service. it doesn't need to be like this! why would you advocate for things being like this! the world doesn't have to be crueler and worse all the time!

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okdiluted t1_itc7jmx wrote

it'd be amazing if money for adequate public housing was ever allocated—all of these costs are better at scale, and starting a government program to rehab abandoned homes to be turned into housing for refugees and public housing that would start to make a dent in the shortage of section 8 properties would be amazing for the community--steady, skilled labor jobs would be brought into the city, local materials suppliers would have to be used (government has pretty stringent rules mandating that sometimes!), and vacant housing would have to be restored up to code and be consistent with each other instead of like twenty different contractors and DIYers all doing things their own way and hoping nobody'll notice if they get weird with it. like, there's a way to do this, it'll just never get done because allocating a relatively small amount of money to communities (small in terms of our government's spending anyways) is "wasteful" or "the money isn't there" or it's "unprofitable" but like, the defense department or wherever needs an ever-expanding blank check, so.

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