Detroit becoming a ghost town?

The asylum looks scary! Can't imagine what was going through your mind.

I'd like to try it but I aren't in the best shape to run or climb really.

 

There was an eminem song and the video shows the decline in detroit.. pretty insane. My friend say there'd be some ideal places to have paintball arenas though

 

Haha. We did go in the middle of the night, looked round the mortuary, shock therapy room and the tunnels underneath and so on, our lantern went out at one point which gave us the willies for a second :lol:

The funniest bit was a small cell room with a chair in the middle, I sat down and pretended to be possessed, bit disrespectful but worth it when my mate looked in and saw me - the expression on his face was priceless!
We didn't go in the children's asylum building as it was very close to the road, that would have been even spookier if there were kids toys around!

My mate has pictures, I'll have to get him to send them over.

 

x

 

I live 2 hours from Detroit. It's not as bad as the pictures let on. But it is in shambles as most houses have been abandoned and are falling to pieces or become crack/meth lab houses. They just announced a few days ago that the city is pushing to give ,for free, some of the nicer abandoned homes to police officers to try and get officer presence back in the city. Most officers quit and left, there's parts that haven't seen police presence in a long time so crime is really bad in those parts right now.

 

Parts of Bradford are like this. Instead of repairing the houses they just leave them standing and destroy land to build more crap houses.

 

It was 90 minutes and was called 8-Mile.

 

lol..These two sentences are biting each other quite hefty.

 

These pictures are great yet depressing at the same time. They're interesting works of art but only at the cost of all of these grand buildings deteriorating.

Now that I think of it, though, Detroit reminds me of Reading, PA. It too was a heavily industrial, yet beautiful town. It made a lot of it's money off of the famous Reading Railroad and the clothing outlet industry.

The railroad went out of business in the mid-70s due to lack of demand and ridership, and as a result a lot of industry left with it. The workers slowly left for the suburbs, ghettos sprout up in their place, and today the city has a solidly Democrat government (similar to other places like Detroit and Philadelphia) that serves themselves while various Mexican and Puerto Rican gangs from New York actually run the city.

Still, for such a small city, it has some very beautiful and interesting architecture and buildings. Since the city still has nothing to pull people in, there are several abandoned apartments, buildings, factories, and train stations. If I'm in the city with a camera anytime soon, expect some pictures.

 

Fuccck....

I am in the lower third of the bottom 90%. Shit, If my sister and I (we take care of our mum and live in the family residence left by our father) pooled our salaries together, PLUS my mum's widow pension, we'd still be in the bottom 90%.

I don't know whether to laugh my arse off, or just start screaming random profanities until they lose their meanings. OH:

 

Man. I've always had this stereo-typical (Canadian) view of Detroit like it was this mega city and super successful. I guess it still is, but not nearly as much as it used to be.

 

The thing about the american auto industry is that it was a bubble.

Indeed, you cant pay a dude who barely went to highschool more than the average engineer makes, because there are at least 100 guys able to put a car together for every engineer that can design that car, and I'm being generous here.

It was a bubble because a lot of people invested in auto companies before, during and after WWII, which meant those companies had all the money in the world and could pay big salaries to anyone, even regular workers. Is similar to whats happening in tech right now.

Then the guys that were reduced to dust, germans and the japanese, came back, and did a better job for very little money. This was already obvious in the 60s but back then people would just point at a tiny beetle or datsun and laugh, as if it was impossible that a car with better mileage, overall quality and at a fraction of the cost could beat such monstrosities as the convair.

And since we're talking about tech, is funny that people wont shut the fuck up about twitter, even though it makes zero money and has a completely fabricated valuation. On the other hand big chinese tech companies like tengent are making a lot of money, and becoming as big as google.

So american tech could pretty much go the same way as cars...

On the income graph, yeah it sucks, you can pretty much say a society is in decline when it becomes a plutocracy and the middle class becomes a distant memory. What's even funnier is that when you look at the media it portrays most americans as living between the richer 10% and 1%.

Because really, who can afford a Mcmansion, three brand new cars and 2 kids in college in this POS economy?

Not a teacher making between 30 and 50K...

 

The US auto industry wasn't a bubble, It's downfall was caused by sub par design, lack of innovation, massive bureaucracy, and union greed.

 

What is a unions job? Be greedy. What is the corporations job? Be greedy. What do they do together? Find a way to be greedy together! </vast over simplification>

I think Wisconsin is showing you where that particular line of thought goes.

 

I've been to parts of Iraq that were nicer than Detroit. A big reasons you see so many abandon buildings is because the city’s population has shrunk by 50 percent, from about 1.8 million people to fewer than 900,000. Alot of the abandon residential areas are being reclaimed by nature now. So much so that John Hantz announced plans to use his own fortune to create the world's largest for profit urban farm in Detroit. But that plans been on hold for awhile now, so we'll see. I doubt farming will ever bring back the people. Detroits never going to be what it was again.

 

A unions job isn't to be greedy. It is to provide fair rights for its members. The problem is once those rights are met it then needs to continually justify itself. That is when the greed begins and is also the inherent flaw most unions suffer from.

 

But the corporation would do the same. Having both been unionised and non-unionised at different jobs, I can tell you that both have serious trouble, but as a worker, you are more protected if you do have a union.

That being said, Union bosses who steal should get the same bullet in the head that Slave-driving union busters and golden-parachute CEOs.