Working from home could wipe $800 billion from office values globally

spaceghoti@lemmy.one to politics @lemmy.world – 534 points –
Working from home could wipe $800 billion from office values globally | CNN Business
cnn.com

McKinsey said cities could adapt to the declining demand for office space by “taking a hybrid approach themselves,” developing multi-use office and retail space and constructing buildings that can be easily adapted to serve different purposes.

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I (don't really) like to imagine how if someone were to invent a star trek-esqe teleportation device that beams people from place to place, how the auto manufacturers, road infrastructure organizations, and a probably countless other industries would be up in arms about their "losses" without realizing how stupid and short sighted that stance would be.

It's like we're unable to outgrow anything as a society without toddler-tantrum-like backlash from those who have benefitted from us being beholden to the current status quo.

You should look at the history of public transit in Detroit, and trains more broadly in the US. Its the same thing.

I feel @glitches_brew is sooo close to getting orange pilled. While it's not teleportation, we have the technology for high speed rail. Even my weekly commute of ~110km on conventional rail is about the same time as driving and I can get work done/watch videos/sleep instead of focusing on driving!

Most of the people I see commuting by car, at least in America, are also not focused on driving.

I saw someone eating a bowl of cereal in the driver seat a few days ago. It's terrifying out there.

I’ll take that over the guy watching porn in stop and go traffic on a busy, high speed, narrow road outside Boston…

The Great American Streetcar Scandal comes to mind.

I used to live in a tiny rural town of about 3,000 people, and even it used to have a trolley line. They tore it up when they built the highway, and now the only public transit available is one bus twice a day, and only for people who are disabled.

One of the old trolleys is still sitting next to the fire station, mocking everyone who drives by.

The internet largely killed high speed commercial flight.

It should’ve kill the cubical a long time ago. But middle management culture is so entrenched it took a deadly highly contagious virus to kill it.

Teleporting is just one small conceptual step beyond (and unlikely large technical leap) what we already have.

Given that the star trek teleporter most likely atomizes and simply copies the individual. Id have to agree with the auto manufacturers on that.

I don’t think that is settled science amongst the fanbase.

It may not be "settled science" in the series' canon but it's the only logical conclusion one can come to when applied to the real world. That's how all our current information transfer works. It's dissected and a copy is sent bit by bit.

The argument against it is that if you believe in philosophical materialism, and the transporter reconstructs the person exactly as they are on the other end, then they are exactly the same person as before. They may be "dead" in the medical sense in between, but people do get resuscitated from being technically dead, and we don't consider them to be separate people afterwords. Without invoking some kind of soul that's separate from the body, it's difficult to argue that they are anything but the same person.

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