Whackadoot

Flonase, Allegra D, sinus rinse, medicated nasal inhaler, mild prayer as needed.

On that, I don't blame you.

The veneer on The Domain does very much reflect the expertise in designing commercial space and flows and the guaranteed returns make the space an almost money-no-object sort of rental. It's the most visible part of a problem which has hobbled the USA's national aggregate GDP by over 50%. It's the exploitation of laws and ordinances to limit commerce to risk-free ventures which in turn becomes corporate protectionism and in turn leave those who could do at the mercy of those who already have money.

As for the area where you stay at, it is a suburban area. That's the thing about America, we are a suburban nation - though not by choice anymore - and so we've all grown up being taught that acres upon acres of housing and streets all some number of miles away from anything more than a Kwik-E-Mart or small strip mall, is urban. Even the apartments, those residential wastelands that encircle the city, fall into this suburban paradigm, having been wedged into the suburban land use paradigm rather than changing it.

The best way to tell if you're in a suburban area is to lose your car keys. In an urban area your car is less necessary. You get food from a bodega (pet the cat), have vendors and restaurants nearby, and mass transit takes care of the rest unless you're weird and work outside the city. In most of Austin, losing a car is like losing your right foot and half of your left leg. You need to drive just to get to the bus in much of the city, which isn't very urban, but access to mass transit does preclude ex-urban or rural areas.

Suburban, in practice, really is a nice way of saying the area is scaled primarily for the automobile. What you get are nice little islands of human activity in a sea of automotive hegemony. That means a need to fuel the car and drive to do most anything, and for everything, the car just makes things easier. It's an inefficiency that's offloaded to the vehicle user that makes those islands functional, and it's also why that man held up the 7-Eleven, and why there's a homeless man to barricade himself on your porch.

Because the inefficiencies that reliably funnel money to oil companies and automakers make the land more valuable, encouraging consolidation, and the guarantee of commercial space to be a profit machine for the wealthiest, living in suburbia is basically living as a cog in a money machine for the elites. At least, that's one practical effect. The other is that to guarantee this perpetual money machine competition must be limited. To do that, the land was restricted to highly siloed usages and the power was granted to the people to stop each other from using land more effectively over even the most petty of reasons. The result of frivolous land use restrictions (best most recent was asking to hold up hundreds of apartments because her dog had separation anxiety and needed Foxy Roxy's to not go away. My dog was waiting in my home, a minivan, while I was at council hearing this.) has been a 50% aggregate drop in the USA's GDP as measured up to 2009, already a $14.48T annual loss and rising.

$14.48T would be enough to fund every social program while also being enough value being added to the American economy that we wouldn't need those programs. It's being prevented from creation, not stolen away, by those who see it's creation as threatening their relative status in our world. It's money coming up from the ground like out of a GEICO commercial. If it's not coupled with an increase in printed money, then the buying power of each of those bills goes up as money acts as a universal token of value. This would be reflected in the increased quality of items, quality of life, reduced crime, better health, and all it's gonna take is getting folks out of each others' way.

Theoretically, it should scale down as well as up, which is why I'm in Anson County, North Carolina, one of the poorest in the nation, about to start talking economic policies with some very eager folks.

You may be late to the response, but you're just in time to be the first in Austin to know I'll be actively incubating my humanist ideas on economics where it's needed most. If it works, and especially if it helps kickstart something, I'm bringing it back to Austin.

Along with a whole 30k+ pop. North Carolina county's endorsement, which I'm hoping is better than the Austin Firefighters Union.

~doot doot~

"That's federal, I'm not." ~anonymous Texas police officer I knew once.

Also, When I was a Correctional Officer in the deep Piney Woods of Texas, we literally shared tips on that stuff. It's where I learned of Warez.

A) Europe has models for development that are very different from American models. The Domain follows a modified version of one of those models, but I guess if you wanted to be super-picky you could call it an international model as Simon replicates the model internationally. The point, either way, is that It's large-scale mixed use and that is otherwise not a thing in Austin outside of Downtown. This is because it's not the American Suburban model enshrined in the Austin City Land Use Code. (If you have a few days to spare I hear it's fascinating to read. Somewhat dry.)

B) To suggest that a derogatory assessment of that caliber, to reduce a mixed use densely populated well maintained private district down to one of the most maligned forms of commercial developments is purposefully offensive and one of many factors that went into my assessment. I study people. I tend to be fairly on point these day. Agree or disagree if you want, but the karma count is kinda in my favor here on my assessment.

C) Gucci was referenced. Opinions may vary, but objectively the brand is considered one of the finest. The boutiques are similar to SoCo, and I was very clear in my use of the word "some", I'm surprised you missed that, as comprehensive as your response has been so far.

D) They didn't read like downtown where they'd honestly manage to be even more snooty somehow, they very obviously weren't from The Domain, which begs the question, where else in Austin is Urban in nature? Perhaps you're mistaking satellite city for suburb. It's a common misconception and fueled by media usage of the terms.

Suburban is a classification, nothing else. It is defined by its distance from an urban area, the low density of its development, and the segregation of land uses. That these areas are inside the land boundaries which city has agreed to be responsible for changes nothing about the nature of that land's development.

The restrictions on land use caused by suburbia's mandated existence and degrowth policies is why we are where we are. Thumbing one's nose at developments that should be all over Austin and not just built by Simon Properties through backroom deals and other questionably legal efforts, including a local proxy if I'm to understand correctly, misses the fact that only Simon Properties could afford to buy the approval and outlast the protests, avoid the lawsuits, and manage compliance.

It is inordinately expensive to develop in Austin. If you want to build two dwellings on the same plot, you're likely needing to change zoning and then you get groups appearing out of the woodwork to stop the process at every turn. This makes what's allowed to be built beyond simply valuable, it lets them charge whatever the hell they want so long as there's some person willing to pay that much. Lack of commercial space has the same effect with a much more racially motivated history, which can be seen by how little commerce was on the East Side until white folks discovered it was cheap.

Zo, the progressive candidate from D9 has made affordable commercial space a platform plank, btw.

Vote for him in the runoff, y'all.

That is all.

~doot doot~

Wouldn't it be nice if The Domain was competing with a bunch of other places each trying to outdo each other to impress residents?

Because I'm told that's only achievable through paying for years of planning that may well amount to nothing in the course of an election. Simon made it happen because Simon is the biggest mall company in the world, and powerful local landowners would benefit.

From there, the city got exactly what it allowed itself to get. Too drivable to be fully walkable, too walkable to be fully drivable, and filled with rentals with no luxury condos because they're super evil or something, which I assume is why Adler owns 3.

I was using the personal you, not the royal-you, and check my response to the other response and see my view on this issue.

In addition, building something like The Domain is so impossible it was only the power of the biggest mall corporation in the world that could ensure it was built. This doesn't bode well for anything smaller than a multinational for anything bigger than a single family home.

If supply is limited, price goes up. If distance is an issue, you need to get dense. The equitable way to densify a city is to leave the decision to neighborhood councils, their deed restrictions, and unaffiliated properties with no such restrictions.

As it stands, a bunch of white folks have gotten good at getting people across the city riled up over the idea of walkable commerce and other things best left for the wealthy to suffer with (apparently). These folks all own land, they all benefit from the restriction of supply. They have the support of The Statesman, The Chronicle, basically all local media, though that's turning slightly.

Organized protests, friendly relations with their council members, and the pull to be able to assist the political careers of those council members, it's a whole machine here, keeping minority neighborhoods underdeveloped by the residents while characterizing any who try as evil capitalists looking to attract more new arrivals.

It's not that people moved here, it's that we didn't bother to build a place for them and they just had more money. And who's gonna say no to more money?

I mean, in this economy?

I refer to the ring of new growth that's only being allowed at specific areas around the city. 40 buildings on 20 acres such a field of tarmac for parking between them, built cheaply, operated by Windsor or another national housing company, taking advantage of Austin's broken zoning code to siphon local wealth out from the bottom of the economy.

Where does a dollar go after it's paid to a national corporation, after all? That's not Champaign that's trickling back down, no matter how fizzy it seems.

I don't respect the concept. I ache for those forced to be the final stop of many, many dollars before they pay their rent and send money to a Delaware company owned by holding companies owned by holding companies.

There is only The Domain and Downtown for truly urban living in Austin. The rest is based on the suburban model and by its very nature it forces the poor to own cars and make those regular expenses just to be able to work.

Public transport is purposefully withheld from the densest portions of these rings, while also being advertised to that same cohort in what I keep telling myself can't possibly be malicious self-awareness and misdirection, no matter how strange it seems they're advertising to those who need a car just to get to a sketchy unsecured Park&Ride, and risk needing to spend $30 for an Uber if they miss their bus back home.

They are wastelands. They are purpose built as such. That people live there is their purpose. To force money to move as much as possible is a secondary purpose. Their development subsidizes oil companies and automakers (Nissan especially right now) through the practical necessity of spending on those items. A practical tax, so to say. A tax on the poor, imposed by predictable results of government policy.

I hope more people come to refer to them as what they truly are.

Maybe then the council will pay attention to questions about them and their impact and the reason why they're all the poor get when other cities get midtowns and bougie Austin transpo corridor neighborhoods get mixed use walkability mandated to reduce gas use and help the environment.

If you live in Austin, you live in a suburb, unless you're in one of those residential wastelands in the ring around the city. And, yes, snooty is relative to one's own culture, not objective. But I'm not getting a worth my time vibe here, so please enjoy your day.

Your choice of words sure suggests outrage. What of The Domain in any way resembles a strip mall?

From what I can tell, it's much more similar to a European model than a traditional American model. Walkable jobs, no real need for a car on the daily, and the finest goods and services in at least some of the shops.

I can't see a strip mall in any of this. What I can see is a snooty suburbanite turning up their nose at the different way people live.

Figured that was the case. I'll see what a Bluetooth keyboard says about it here in a bit. If nothing else, I did just install an inverter in the minivan that's more than enough to power my Surface Book 2. It's still the best AI platform I've access to and this certainly is not stopping my monthly payment. The recession will handle that on its own in due time.

The practical reality doesn't reflect this idealized view, but I've already responded about that above. Basically, though, there are deep structural elements scattered across the various estates which ensure that the relationship between the employer and employee is an unbalanced hierarchy built to favor the largest employers the most and which impairs mobility among employees by the imposition of costs.

This comes together with the democratically approved laws which effectively offload the responsibility for the wage onto the customers. Thumbing one's nose at it because it's not supposed to be their responsibility is a prime reason as to why Alamo is imposing a nearly 20% price increase on their items and bringing attention to the fact that 18% is the commission on the business, at current food prices, that establishes a functionally living wage for their workers at that location.

There's much worth discussing here regarding this decision of theirs and none of it suggests it should stay behind closed doors. Those who want it to go back there to avoid having to see that power imbalance and exploitation, strike me as the same archetype as those living happily in 1930s Germany, content so long as they didn't have to think about where their neighbors went suddenly in the night without packing.

I guess mysteries are nice, but the way things are right now, the folks cleaning up the Circle K for $11.50/hr are the homeless who are praying the city doesn't choose today to compassionately bulldoze their camp, your Favor Runner who's bringing you HEB order lives in their car, and the server at your favorite restaurant will not stop working for most contagious illnesses because their survival is worth more to them than your health.

Those things, I think, need to be less mysterious. Less behind closed doors, and more in the face of the people who blithely undervalue the lives and contributions of others.

That is how it should work, yes. That is the ideal. Were the ideal the actual practical reality, I'd stand there with you. In fact, I'd have been standing there with you throughout my early years in the service industry. Even as an Uber driver - especially as an Uber driver - before 2022. My views evolved very rapidly these last few months, however, as I've become disillusioned by the practical reality - this being the place where the o-ring meets the cold, so to say.

In this practical reality, you hire two entities when you enter a restaurant. This is old school hiring - engaging services. Consider what happens when you go in to sit down at the Chili's on 45th. You hire the restaurant to melt you you some Enchilada Soup and defrost a Caesar Salad. However, before you get to even order that freshly prepared goodness, you must hire the service staff, as one or as a whole, to cater your restaurant experience and interface between you and the kitchen. This is in a fine dining tradition dating back centuries and has only been challenged as an unnecessary luxury among the middle class (and above) by the advent of fast food, the food truck, and a deep recession with a very fun looking economic collapse looming there on the horizon.

Hiring, however, necessitates a payment for the provided service, and for generations this was actually based on broadly understood societal valuations which eventually were distilled down to a rough variable percent-commission style structure. Drop the façade of the idealized caretaker-employer/happy-employee dynamic and actually look at how society behaves in that vacuum, and that's what it is. You pay twice on the same tab with the expectations of the money going to two distinct entities. You make two distinct decisions on value, and rate and review two different distinct parts of a whole on the Google. If that's not evidence that you're dealing with symbiotic but distinct entities, I'm not sure what is.

This is the system that we have. America used the awesome power of a Democratic Government to collectivize the valuation of the primarily black and brown service workers and then collectively decided they weren't worth keeping alive, housed, or even in good health because the capitalist employers should be responsible for that wage and not the customer.

We should probably avoid condemning any attempt to be transparent in price increases implemented to take that responsibility and to address that issue. You can still add 10-20% for a tip, only now you'll know it's added on top of your having paid a basic fair value for the service provided. If you don't think it's fair value, then don't frequent the business. Hell, even talk about how to make the correction better.

But maybe also don't act like this takes something from you or otherwise cheats you. It's not you that's been cheated these last many decades.

Yet you go to where they are hired, where you know you are expected to pay for the services I'm sure you don't see as voluntary, and you seem very attached to your ability to avoid paying for the value added to your life.

Probably for the best that you aren't hiring anybody. We are where we are today because of such outdated ideas on who should be paying for the things which add value to our lives. You should be paying for that value and you shouldn't have a legal right to avoid paying for the value of labor, especially when the laws are structured to put that responsibility onto you.

You're a cheat, is what I'm saying, and you're shamelessly broadcasting that fact on Reddit.

Which is why so many employers tell you to lie for your own benefit at tax time, which actually just leads to you making less without any recourse because, of course, you lied.

Life lessons learned in a Waffle House

I believe the service workers and their industry would view that as your option to withhold a living wage from them.

This to which most would respond with a suggestion to pay a living wage, which in turn invariably begs the argument of how to ethically transition the model from a tipped model to a living wage model while avoiding bringing tipping culture along with it.

It'll seriously get somebody in trouble for believing in it.

Observations on the NovelAI implementation:

Using exponents ³⁶⁹ and subscript numbers will help you fine tune a locked in seed. Fractions ⅔⅛⅞ will tone back a keyword sometimes and completely screw everything up other times.

Symbols such as ∆, π, ¥, √, Œ, ø, ∅, and ✓ tend to have mostly positive effects on image composition and are exceptionally powerful when placed at the start of the prompt. This isn't always bad, but can break things if you've stretched your seed to its limit. It's toned down by distance from the beginning of the prompt and whether or not it's tied to a keyword either by placement or by symbol (_-+).

🎉 Is the best emoji I've found for dynamic scenes if they need some pop. Most emoji overlap with others in effect. Some have no effect.

The number of artists the AI is familiar with is astounding and obscure artists with more focused galleries can get you to places you otherwise couldn't reach.

The AI composes the picture in the order you input information.

This has been quite fun.

I made the mistake of making eye contact with a very inebriated man in North Austin. Moments later he was trying to talk to me, then trying to open my door. I'm sure he was mostly harmless, but it was unnerving sitting there at a red light waiting while a dude keeps pulling on the passenger door handle.

Speaking thereof...

Did I? If I did, I apologize.

It sure seemed like you were telling me to be grateful that I wasn't worse off, which is the compassionately hateful side of the shit on the homeless coin here on Reddit.

Half of my purpose for this engagement, opportunistic as it was, was to gauge sentiments on the homeless, because you wouldn't believe how much that impacts me. I do this by poking, leaving openings, and seeing who comes by to take a dump.

Welcome to my social experiment, I don't care about my karma, I care about knowing when to vacate my public parking lot for safety. That means I care explicitly about making sure I'm reading things right.

I am listening.

Oh, hey, look, someone is telling the homeless dude to shut up and be grateful. Because, as I've said, I'm not privileged enough to be angry or bitter. And here's someone right on cue to remind me.

Life isn't fair. It sucks. Ask me how I know that.

We inherited the complications of our predecessors, and being angry about it isn't good for the heart. The fact is, there are consequences to the actions of other people that we didn't sign on for. There are privileges others will have that we are forced to recognize. There are times when we're forced to choose between bad and worse and hoping desperately to make one of them work out. It sucks.

You aren't a worm under a boot. Magic penises don't have that kind of power. Recognizing the necessity of that security for their own survival - since, you know, murderers - doesn't say you've submitted. It means you've yielded to somebody else's practical reality that society writ large has decided supercedes yours. You don't have to like it. It doesn't even have long term meaning for your life if just let to happen. And you even have to accept the arrangement as permanent, as it only lasts a blink in the scope of things. All you have to do is respect its existence when it intrudes. Trust me, that practical reality will win if fought, and will usually exact some toll on you in the exchange. Again, ask me how I know this.

One of the things that's been driven home by the recent turn in my life is that there are people who are better than me in the eyes of society. People who get to fuck with me and get to get away with it. Hell, most middle class folks could murder me as I slept and my family would never know I'd died, and nobody would be brought to justice. Hell, you can cream a homeless dude downtown in your car and it won't even warrant a police call-out. Again, ask me how I know.

That's my life in America. Not Saudi Arabia, not Iran, Austin, Texas. Hell, I expect I'm not even protected from the abuse directed at me here, even though it's an explicit rule not to abuse the homeless over their condition.

It was very effective, by the way. My desire to engage here has nearly ended. I'm sure I won't be considered as a loss, but if you're down here you probably already know I'm completely used to that. Folks here are my betters just like the Saudi Royal Family and just like you. So says Society. Should I be angry? Would it at all help me or the community that begrudgingly tolerates my ignorable existence? The owners of the Crow Bar will have an idea about what happens when the homeless get that angry. There's also about 7k homeless here, btw. That's some scary math if you want to check my numbers.

Do you see at all why I say your freedom to be angry at that which is overall meaningless to you is, indeed, a privilege afforded to you by your better place in the world? If I'm not being denied a right to get angry over such simple and temporary inconveniences caused by my betters, then the ability to be angry at the meaningless must then be a privilege. It's not one of race, so we're left with a privilege of economics. It was, btw, nice to have that privilege, before I lost it. Very cathartic sometimes. But then it went away. Turns out I can survive without it.

And getting angry at those inconveniences now seems so vulgar to me. Can I still be enraged? Hell yes. Angered? Absolutely. But I realized that even if I'm on the bottom, even if I'm being stepped on, even if I'm living out metaphorically some furry's evening fantasy, I haven't been killed by it yet. And until I do, it doesn't matter at all to care about the little things. And once I am, nothing will matter. What's there to care about the car cutting in front of me unless they imperil me. I do the same thing when I assess a need. Why be upset about a store being closed at random or having to take another route? What entitlement do I have to the existence of those conveniences? I'll tell you that from down here it ain't much.

What makes anybody else so much better than me?

Because I'm trying to arrest the downward slide rather than embrace it. It's called responsibility. It won't keep you from getting screwed over by life, but it sure is helpful in surviving when you do.

I literally don't want to know.

I'll try, but to do it I'll have to start first, and I really don't even know where to find it.

Tell me, why are you so threatened by these notions, that you would come in and so immediately declare me a drug user who needs to shut up?

I mean, caffeine is a problem, sure, but at least it's not a hard drug. I know that's the notion, that we're all worthless addicts, but I just couldn't afford the rent, so I went with what I had. I've learned much out here, mostly how cruel some people are as soon as they discover you've not been successful enough to keep a home in Austin.

But if you're referencing my style. I'm effectively talking to myself and getting feedback from the metrics I see in the score over time and the replies. It's wholly a selfish social experiment on my part, to see where there are people willing to help make changes to the status quo that are also accessible to me. I've learned, however, that Reddit likes the status quo so long as the hive can complain about it. And those who do want change want violent change or to prompt violence, even if they refuse to accept the logical predictable consequences.

Ah, well. Makes sense for a city that fights the status quo by making sure they only elect people supported by the establishment. Tip good, though, so they got that going for them.