RandCLR

You don't explain why. The Enfield jobs are mostly call center jobs, they already have a nice place worked out, the offices are. Why can't LEGO afford to be there? You also go on to say cities have been gutted because of telework... so why does it matter if the office is in a city or not.

 

You clearly never been to Boston if you think they have a decent transportation network. Rochester NY has a better bus system then Boston has a transportation system.

The gist boils down to employee preferences. Broad generalization alert: pretty much anyone younger than me (I'm 46, late Gen X) wants to be in vibrant urban places, wants to walk, wants to bike, is transit-savvy. The last place they want to be is suburbs and small towns - certainly not until they start families and need to find good schools for children.

When applied to call center work, call centers burn through employees like crazy, almost as quickly as Amazon warehouses do. You need a larger population of potential employees to be able to stay near full staffing complement. There's also a smaller factor at play that commercial buildings age rapidly. It's cheaper to buy a new building with modern wiring than to improve an older building that likely requires a full gut and replace of the entire wiring and telecom systems.

I saw the comments after the above post on fires in Boston's transit system. Half the transit systems in America are the same way; here around D.C., Metro has fires almost literally weekly somewhere in the system and they're pouring millions on millions into system upgrades. We're a Third World nation when it comes to infrastructure. But even with this in mind, there isn't a single large business that thinks it can thrive keeping operations and headquarters outside rail-served mixed-use locations. By the way, this is why ideas to relocate Federal agencies out to the heartland are just boondoggles and would waste billions in taxpayer money - every time someone tries to force a relocation, more than 3/4 of the current employees resign rather than relocate. Some would say this is the intent, but I'll just leave it at that.

Telework not only guts the cities, it guts the suburban offices that remain. Let's say the call center in Enfield decided not to relocate - it would be much cheaper for them in the long run to simply shift the call center operation to telework and close up the physical buildings. There's nothing one can do from a cube at a call center they can't do from a PC/VOIP at their home.

Everyone related to development is figuring out how to reverse the decline of office occupancy and loss of daytime population. The main solution boils down to trying to find innovative ways to add even more housing. That's not really viable outside the cities and transit locations because again, the youths simply don't want to live there. 

Also some local professor, who isn't Richard Wolf so he's probably wrong, take on the LEGO move.

I'm a professional urban/community planner and the gist of the argument he makes about relocation back to cities and competition for talent is 100% correct. Offices no longer want to be in suburban locations and cannot afford to be there - they  want to be in city cores and areas accessed by heavy and light rail transit lines - preferably no further than 1/4 mile from the stations. I work in a massive county just outside D.C. and this is one of our biggest challenges - our office vacancy is increasing and it's becoming much harder to attract new tenants because the businesses would rather be in dense urban places. They don't care about the costs of living.

It's much harder here than in Boston because we have the added impact of huge numbers of Federal employees and the Feds are sticking with significant telework, so the whole region is suffering because we can't occupy physical space. D.C. spent 20 years recovering to become a vibrant city and it's been gutted by telework - the daytime population in center city is devastated and the ripples are closing restaurants and services catering to daytime employees.

Man, you're in for a treat playing Sapienza for the first time. I'd argue the H1+H2 maps are better overall than those in H3, and I really loved H3. H2 maps in particular are just so consistently good across the board, especially the DLC.

I second this for Sapienza. I think it's possibly the best map of all time. It's definitely in the conversation.

I still need to put my thoughts up about how good Greedfall is. Not sure if everybody here has tried that yet. I did check it out on Game Pass and need to give it more time. 

 

Game Pass is up for me soon and I probably won't re-up, so....I'll probably have to buy it eventually, if I don't get back on Game Pass.

You liked it? I put a number of hours in and left it thinking it was just a sort of off-brand Risen.

Just received my cancellation as well. I received caseless Splatoon 2 and Yoshi's Crafted World and was only charged $2.79 total, so I snagged both of my free ones. 

Thanks GS. 

Now to see if I can score some swapped cases tomorrow. 

Saw the Batmobile in store today. It’s nice but I’d have nowhere to display it. Really tempted to just buy the smaller Batmobile off of eBay, but at that point I may as well just get the Pursuit of Joker one for even less

I'm currently leading an eBay auction for the smaller one and am watching several others if I get outbid. Made the mistake of picking a built one up in store today to explore the build and it's just spectacular. I may end up with it before my sanity catches up to me and closes the wallet.

Everything received; thanks again on a great lowball!

Great and fun lowball, thanks!

PG county has the highest concentration of rich yuppies in Maryland, so yeah, I'd say that's about right.

Wrong county  . Rockville's in Montgomery. There aren't a lot of yuppies in PG, and Howard has passed Montgomery on the wealthiest counties list.

Still right about on target though with Rockville in general.

Great lowball, and it's pretty funny watching the snipe bids keep rolling in.

Definitely see some good things here.