The 1970s were a half a century ago.
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At 645 feet, the Millennium Tower isn’t really that tall for a modern skyscraper. If I recall correctly, the problem there is that building is on top of sandy/silty soil and so making a stable foundation is much trickier and more expensive than building on bedrock.
The Citicorp Center story is scary but also cool in a way. Its angled roof makes it one of the more distinctive buildings on the skyline.
All those pencil towers south of Central Park look absolutely horrid. Shame on NYC approving them.
I think they add some variety to the skyline, although I don’t like that their main purpose is money laundering for billionaires.
Its easy to criticize those hideous empty condo buildings, but at least they have a clear purpose. That’s more then can be said for the endless office towers. Nobody has ever benn able to explain to me what goes on in those places or why they are needed. All I know now is that 2 years ago everybody stopped going to them and things - seem kinda better? Also stocks are up? Can we start tearing these things down yet?
this was a good explainer for non-engineers like me
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I like the pencil buildings as purely aesthetic skyline features. My objection is that they create crappy urban environments. The scale is dehumanizing and isolationist. Midtown as a whole is an exhausting, uncomfortable and unpleasant place to spend time.
Can buy anonymously via LLC then sell later and boom money laundered.
I think partly that’s just the nature of Central Business Districts. Like is the CBD going to be the best part of any American city? Probably not. But at least all the tourists, theater goers and office workers keep Midtown a lot livelier than a typical CBD.
This is a great YouTube channel in general.
Yes, a different situation, but it undermines my previously held and extremely naive view that ultra-modern engineering is pretty much infallible. Again, dumb view. That plus stuff like the Boeing situation showing regulators are just not up to the task has made me much less trusting.
Why would you want to turn your nose up at all that dough? Not much of an option if you want to maintain your position as the world’s financial capital. Most of the criminality takes place overseas anyway afaict, don’t see how this is any of our business.
i’ve seen some talks on the tech stack for anti-money laundering efforts. the thing that stood out to me was that fraud investigations are usually post-fact. sometimes it takes a lot of data collection to figure it out, sometimes the data just lags quarters or years. sometimes the laundered amounts are in the noise. sometimes new types of reporting have to get legislated and implemented, which could uncover prior fraud. but in theory, it’s relatively easy for someone to run a set of offshore accounts from within one program or laptop, and on the other side, it takes a lot of computing power and data to put it all together .
Not that it will completely stop the money laundering but I thought NY passed a law last year (a couple years ago?) that required all property owners/members of the LLC be specifically named.
Even then, someone has to give all that data to the anti money laundering regulator. They don’t have direct feeds into the entire financial system so they can pull down data any time they want. The mechanism for AML reporting is very flimsy, basically understaffed regulators have laws that require companies connected to the financial system to report “suspicious transactions” to them, and then they’ll take a look at it. Companies naturally do the bare minimum required to identify suspicious transactions, because robust monitoring costs money and yields no profit.
THAT"S SOCIALISM!
oh wait, what were we talking about? i just automatically respond with socialism if i see a whole paragraph from you
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cant believe this only got a few clicks. this is indeed nuts - I am consistently surprised at how juvenile gifted programmers/hackers are. Nerf guns in an office? I’d be the salty guy in the corner telling everyone to stop breaking my concentration, i dunno why people like that frat boy shit.
given how hard our country (IMO) is falling behind in the cyber war, it does not exactly inspire much confidence in me to read accounts like this.
Thank God, I went to my last festival when I was 33 and then COVID hit, sparing countless youth vibes.
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On my bus ride home, a man and a woman sitting next to me were talking about how the woman’s mother being treated for some type of ear fungus/impacted earwax situation. The conversation must have lasted for at least five minutes and went into a great deal of detail. There are some things you just shouldn’t discuss in polite society.