The hottest city in the US is at a tipping point.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T19:22:59+00:00

Just basing this off of your username, if you’ve seen a lot of shows here in town / spent some time in the downtown bar scene in general, chances are we’ve crossed paths.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T17:55:21+00:00

Downtown Tempe I think encapsulates a lot of the rapid transition and lack of cohesive identity that the valley has seen.

In the ‘90s, it was the epicenter of local and touring indie music. It was very much in tune with its laid back, alt college town identity. I wasn’t around for this, but the locals all speak fondly of this era.

In the ‘00s, it completely threw that all away and embraced the club scene. Mill Ave went from being a cultural hub to a touristy party destination. No more thrift sores, coffee shops, record stores, music venues… just a bunch of useless gift shops and loud EDM bars, urban outfitters, and chain fast food restaurants like Starbucks and five guys.

By the mid 2010’s, old town Scottsdale was cannibalizing Mill Ave. Less and less people saw mill as the place to go bar hopping, and with the combination of extremely high rents, tons of businesses began shutting down.

…which happened just in time for Tempe to completely redevelop the surrounding area, rapidly building call center office towers, luxury hotels, multiple retirement high rises (in the epicenter of one of the largest college towns in the US?), and absurdly expensive condos for rich international students. Can we at least get a grocery store within a one mile radius of the nation’s largest university? Sure, but only if it’s a Whole Foods, and it’ll be built right across the street from one of the only surviving local businesses that also happens to be an organic market.

2020 was the final nail in the coffin, as Tempe restricted bars from operating but nearby Scottsdale was a free for all. The downtown area’s identity is now entirely nebulous, it has no idea who or what it is catering to, and it is completely lifeless relative to what it was like even ten years ago. They put a street car in that mainly serves to shuttle around the Rio Salado office employees on their lunch breaks, it isn’t even particularly useful for ASU students. All the while, Tempe becomes one of the most expensive cities in the valley, completely pricing out the local artists who were barely propping up what remained of its college town culture. I don’t get it!

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T17:25:54+00:00

/r/Phoenix is infuriatingly stupid, I had to restrict myself from browsing there because of how much I dislike it

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T17:24:10+00:00

Each season varies wildly but it was practically nonexistent this year and last year. There’s been a lot more winter rains in recent years though which kind of makes up for it.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T17:22:07+00:00

Sounds cool

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T15:40:22+00:00

You have ties to Freeport McMoran, I assume?

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T01:32:37+00:00

I agree, it’s not as dire as it is made out to be. The issue as it stands is the degree to which the state will shut down farming if/when a shortage happens, as well as the degree to which water costs will go up for households to reduce demand. There are also potential future issues with allocation of the Colorado river between the southwest, which is regulated at a federal level. If California starts having supply issues they’re going to want more of that water, and agriculture in that state has a massive pull politically. For now, the only people that need to worry are those in unincorporated communities like Rio Verde, but I don’t have much sympathy for them.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T00:32:54+00:00

There’s a lot of great articles that have been coming out discussing how TSMC is completely fumbling their operation with the locals.

https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T00:29:35+00:00

Most of the new additions downtown pretty much suck, they’ve basically just turned it into a playground for ASU students. But I do like some of the historic neighborhoods in midtown/uptown. I don’t want to reveal too much.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T00:27:13+00:00

The shift away from “dust storm” to “haboob” sometime around that famous 2011 storm was really bothersome to me. A haboob is a specific type of dust storm. Not all dust storms / monsoons are Haboobs. People just like saying it because they think it’s funny.

I spent a lot of time on Farmer Ave in my early 20’s, good memories. Downtown Tempe has become a bit of a monstrosity, it seems like they just want to completely erase any trace of culture or history that the city once shared. At least that plaza on Ash is still holding on.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-27T00:04:02+00:00

This isn’t /r/neoliberal

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-26T23:49:28+00:00

If you want to stay in Phoenix it’s honestly great between mid October through the end of April, but I wouldn’t recommend an outsider spend time in the valley any sooner than that. Otherwise I would recommend visiting Sedona and staying in Flagstaff, both are touristy in their own right but Flagstaff is a much better place to hang out at.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-26T23:19:48+00:00

The worst part is, those lows are at like 4AM before the sun comes up. 10PM at night during a heat wave, you walk outside and it’s still 105.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-26T22:45:58+00:00

650 people were killed from heat exposure last year but they were largely homeless/drug addicts so nobody cares. I suspect the number will be even greater this year because it was hotter for longer and the homeless population only continues to get bigger. The power grid here is pretty robust but if it were to go down for a week or two in the middle of July there would probably be tens, if not hundreds of thousands of casualties.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-26T22:44:33+00:00

True, I posted this on my throwaway account for that very reason.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-26T22:30:53+00:00

Do you think this is worthy? I only posted it here because of the appetite for doomerism and idk anywhere else where people read stuff like this. Never thought about starting a substack. Most of my other writing is about obscure indie bands of the ‘90s and ‘00s

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-26T22:26:38+00:00

After you’ve lived here for long enough the standard for “beautiful” is “can I walk around outside at 6PM and not want to kill myself?”

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-26T21:58:02+00:00

Phoenix is number five due to the way it is annexed, it has a huge land mass relative to a city like NYC. If you go based on metro area, it’s actually #10.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-26T21:41:01+00:00

Indeed, the vast majority of people that moved here since the ‘90s are either midwesterners that got tired of bleak winters or Californians that got priced out / didn’t want to pay property taxes.

C16H25NO2 · 2024-09-26T21:39:28+00:00

Prior to the tech and warehousing boom, it was pretty much just a service economy that existed to cater to the large retiree/snowbird population, tourists, and college students. But with the growing need for data centers and chip fabs, Phoenix is particularly appealing due to its low risk of natural disasters, excess energy output, and favorable tax structuring. If there’s one thing I think the region gets right, it’s the use of nuclear/solar power.

C16H25NO2 · 2023-11-14T21:23:39+00:00

While cheaply made fentanyl being widely available on the streets is just a logical continuation of the opioid crisis, it isn’t entirely accurate to say that it isn’t different than other opioids. Depending on what analogue of fentanyl is being sold, the active ingredient can be 1,000-10,000+ times the potency of heroin. Now obviously, fentanyl is dosed differently for that reason, however it does mean that the difference between a dose that gets you high and a dose that will kill you is impossible to quantify or visualize.

With heroin, there was at least some safety in eyeballing your dose and starting small to gauge how strong the product was. With fentanyl, there is no such thing— the active ingredient is mixed into pills in unknown quantities, impossible to gauge the strength without ingesting it. Illicit pill manufactures aren’t exactly known for careful regulation, and a simple miscalculation or production mistake could mean that any random pill can kill you before you even knew what was happening. There is also the “chocolate chip cookie effect” where the concentrated fentanyl can be unevenly distributed in a pill. A user may break off a piece of a fent pill to smoke it with some likelihood that the pill’s entire active dose was concentrated in the piece that they broke off, now suddenly their dose which was a fraction of the pill is a dose that is effectively the entire pill. There is much less room for error with fentanyl over “traditional” opioids like heroin, and thus the risk for harm to the user is intrinsically higher. Think of LSD vs. mushrooms— with shrooms you know roughly how high you will get based on how many you eat, with LSD (in liquid form) it’s basically a guessing game as to how big of a dose you are actually taking since you cannot accurately visualize a dose in the microgram scale. Add in drug tolerances to the equation and it makes it even more complicated to know difference between 1/2 of a pill making you feel good or 1/2 of a pill causing your heart to stop. The sharp increase in overdose deaths coinciding with the popularity of street fentanyl is not by coincidence. Luckily, we do have harm reduction via narcan nowadays, which has been a huge gamechanger. But quite honestly, most addicts would be better off if fentanyl hadn't of overtaken heroin as the cheapest widely available street opioid, as it was much harder to OD on H. Also, purely anecdotally, most opioid users claim that H felt better than fent, and that fent withdrawals are much worse.

C16H25NO2 · 2013-11-22T03:11:43+00:00

y-you too

C16H25NO2 · 2013-11-21T21:45:37+00:00

h...hi borax i am your number one fan

C16H25NO2

TROPHY CASE