LocutusOfBoard

If there are going to be casinos, I don't want to see any of this Indian gambling nonsense. The rules should apply equally to everyone. Might as well have urban and riverboat casinos if there arre going to be casinos.

It was in the link fool. GM & Ohio General Motors is a mighty presence in the Buckeye State, with: * Nearly 20,000 employees (making GM Ohio's largest manufacturing employer and sixth- largest employer overall). * More than 65,000 retirees. * Nearly 40 percent of Ohio's annual car and truck sales. Good job. :drunk:

I dunno. I'm not privvy to the financial sheets. But my guess is that looking at it from a more instinctual, "Was it worth the investment?" gut feeling POV, my guess is yes. $100 million is not an excessive cost for a project of this size, BTW. Big universities like OSU easily drop tens of millions on new buildings.

GM is a great company. Although Toledo is known for Jeep, it also has a sizeable GM Powertrain plant. I will always have a special fondness for GM products. GM has a 27% market share nationwide, but a 40% share here in Ohio. :clap:

It's sad to see the courts destroying a project like this. If he's not allowed to build an entrance on appeal, what then? Will the building be torn down? What an immense waste of resources. Many judges just want to feel powerful. By destroying many people's hard work, they achieve a personal sense of power. but at what cost to society?

Who do liberals think pay for all the city services, but the companies, and the rich people through property and income taxes? I guess many urban liberals are not opposed to rich folks living in their city. But it wasn't without heavy cost that they came to this conclusion. This is a dramatic turnaround from the 1960's, when Coleman Young drove most of the middle class and upper class people out of Detroit, as well as a lot of the big businesses, because he didn't want them to be there. Detroit was left as a city of poor people, but who would be around to pay for the services? Now there are only cuts in services and school closings. It wasn't just Detroit. There are other cities that have needlessly antagonized their wealthy residents, who promptly fled to the suburbs. Unfortunatly, these are the folks who paid the bulk of income taxes to support city services. Although I guess some other liberal cities like San Fransisco did not antagonize their rich, and continued to prosper. The best bet (and quickest way) for cities to grow their tax base is to attract wealthy people who want to live there. The top 10% pay more than half the taxes. And the poor pay few or no taxes. Once cities have their services (good roads, schools, ,and enough police) they can begin to attract the middle class once again.

So the ODOT put and end to it? Thatt's unfortunate.

I wish there were more projects like this, either public or private sector. There are too few well maintaned apartment complexes within walking distance of the SW part of campus. Many people live in houses operated by slum lords. The rest drive into campus from the outer parts of Columbus.

This project is meant for graduate and professional students. Some of you OSU undergrads will just have to accept that. Also when I was an undergraduate, I had the misfortune of living above (and slightly adjacent to) a bar. It was noisy until 1-2 am each night. It was difficult to get to bed and up early on time. Now for some of you, you may think, "what's the problem"? Isn't college all about drinking until 3 am, then waking up at 12 the next day and skipping all your classes so you can drink some more? Believe it or not, those graduate and professional students actually have real work to do. Many of these people need to be in bed by 10 so they can wake up early and go to class at 8:30. Also, they need a quiet studying environment. Many of them have wives, and they don't want to live in a place that has a bunch of drunk frat boys stumbling around outside in the evenings. There's enough of that kind of self-induced squalor at OSU. As for yuppie stores, the apartments are renting for $800+ for a 1 bedroom, so you tell me. It seems like they're attracting the wealthier grad./professional students, many of whom probably now live at the Meridian, so they will also have the kind of retail that these people want. I won't be living there myself since it's out of my price range. With increased supply prices have to come down, so some of the other nice apartment complexes nearby might have to drop their rents slightly. There's definitely a lack of good housing in and around OSU, especially for grad./professional students. Also with this kind of money coming in from renters and probably also from business tenents, it seems like the whole venture may turn a good profit for the university (as opposed to subsidizng the rents of yuppies), so claims by undergraduates that your tuition money is going toward this are unfounded. The only problem with this project is that it's not big enough. I really wish they were building more units, because then likely the prices would be lower. Right now these will be highest in demand resedential units amongst the medical and law students, and those few with the most money will be the ones to get them.

Yay! Sprawl! My favorite! :) I hope they build this thing. Ohio is hurting for tourist resorts, given the size of the state.

I've driven the roundabout in Dublin. It seems kind of pointless to be honest with you. I'm not so sure it's such a good idea, with most people in America being unfamiliar with them. It is actually somewhat complicated to figure out the traffic pattern on it. There are two lanes going around the circle and it's not so simple figuring out what you are and are not allowed to do on the roundabout.

SE and Eastern Ohio are somewhat hilly, and less attractive from a farming standpoint, and therefore more like PA in their foresting pattern. But the Northwest chunk of Ohio starting in Columbus and going North and West from there is large mostly treeless expanse. The farms were definitely smaller. There werre more people farming and each person's farm was smaller on average. I was saying that there's more forested land in Ohio today because some of the farmland has reverted back to its natural state through public/privatte forestation efforts, or disuse of old farms for economic reasons.

Here in Ohio there is too much farmland for my tastes. 100 years ago, there was even more. A lot of the forests in Ohio have sprouted up recently. There's more forested land now than there was 100 years ago, despite all the claims of "suburban sprawl destroying wildlife". Of course 300 years ago, Ohio was thick with trees. But the Europeans cut them all down, and they drained the swamps in NW Ohio. Not that I'm complaining. Farming was less efficient back then. You needed several times as much land to grow X amount of food. Also, that's how most folks earned their livelihoods. But today, farming employs 1-2% of the public, and contributes about 1% to GDP. Most food grown in the U.S. is exported overseas. People say I-80/I-90 from Cleveland to Toledo is the ugliest drive in the country. Now I'm not saying we need to shape our state just to look good, but they make a good point. Most of the trees on that stretch have been cut down all there is is farmland. In this country we have too much land being farmed, and too many people farming. That's why the government pays out so much in subsidies. Some of it is to prop up prices, some of it is actually to pay farmers not to grow anything on their land. I think these policies are counterproductive. The U.S. grows some 50% of the world's food, so reducing some farmland (or even cutting half of it) is not going to lead to any food shortages at home. I really think here in Ohio it would be productive for the government to buy back land from farmers and convert it into green spaces. We had some relatives visiting from another country, and as we were driving around Ohio, we explained to them that typically if you're going through what appears to be a forested area, you're actually in a city, because there are probably houses behind those trees. In the rural areas, they've cut down most of the trees in Ohio. I'm no environmentalist, but I think the predominant state of Ohio's landscape (brutal looking, treeless rural farms) is unfortunate. I'd like the rural stretches to be something more like upstate NY or Pennsylvania, with a good mix of farms and also forested spaces in between.

In a lot of suburban developments, especially housing developments, some of the trees and local wildliffe is preserved. In farmland, all of it is utterly destroyed, and replaced by only one form of vegetation that may or may not even bbe local. Farmland is much more destructive to the environment than suburban developments are.

Looks good. I like it.

There's nothing natural about farmland. They are paying people to have farms now? What a wasteful policy. If they want to increase the natural state of Ohio, they should buy farms and let trees grow on them (i.e. convert to parks). That's natural. Not farms.

Is Hagan the guy whose married to Captain Janeway?

It was in response to the previous post that Cincinnati is getting the shaft. All I know is that other states who have tech economies don't need to hand out bags of money to get the businesses there. Are we getting businesses that are interested in being in Ohio, that have real, profitable, long-term business concepts? Or are we getting businesses that have devised clever schemes to eat taxpayer funded handouts and then close shop? Or if they are legitimate companies, where is the proof that once their handout runs out, they will actually stay in Ohio, and not just move to Silicon Valley? If a company naturally sets up shop in Ohio,, you can tell they have some interest in the state - i.e. the state is good place for them to do business. If a company comes to Ohio because you hand them $25 million, then it's probably likely they are coming there for the money rather than for your state. Also, if these guys need money, why can't they get it from banks or venture capitalists? That raises the question that maybe we are getting the crappiest of crappy tech companies that have business concepts so badly put together that the only ones dumb enough to fund them are state bureacrats handing out other people's money. Also why the discrimination in favor of tech companies? Nobody knows what sector of the economy is going to take off in the future. That's why the government is not supposed to discriminate. 3 years from now, there could be another massive tech bust. Ohio is putting all its eggs in one basket once again.

The whole thing is rife with corruption. It's not about whose got the best idea. It's about whose got the best political skills. Or whose got the best lawyer. That's why when the government tries to pick winners from losers, it fails.

Read this: http://www.defenselink.mil/brac/pdf/Appendix_C_FinalUpdated.pdf Some states are making out like bandits in this "base closing" plan, like Texas, Georgia, Florida, Colorado, Tennessee, Indiana.

The state government in Ohio grew by 80% in 1990's, even though the population only went up by 4-5%. Most of that growth was funneled into creating public sector jobs in Columbus. Taxes screw the rest of the state, and then create employment in Columbus. That's how it is in Ohio. Also many state legislators spend most of their time in Columbus. Of course, Columbus's welfare becomes more important to them their own constituency's welfare, which they become distant from.

You might not liike it, but that doesn't give you the right to tell people what they can and can't build.

Who wants to do business in Toledo with the chimpanzee Jack Ford at the helm? Can't blame OI for leaving. In 4 years, Ford has run the city into the ground.

Your wife's probably got you supporting her. She doesn't have to worry about little things like "money".

You probably think that if $5000 spent on a kid creates X amount of results, then $10000 creates 2X. And if we spend a million, then we'll create another Einstein. I'm afriad you don't understand the concept of diminishing returns. If we keep taxes high, I guarantee that we'll end up in living in a state of stupid people, a state of dullards worse than the deepest redneck reaches of the South. Why? Because most smart people go to college, graduatte, and then get good paying jobs. They don't want to be fucked over by Ohio's 9 tax brackets. Once I'm out of medical school, I don't want to pay 7.5% of my income to the state ggovernment. You might that think that's selfish, but I don't care what you think. People respond to incentives. And the incentives here in Ohio are to fuck ovver the people who earn the most money and create the most economic output. If I can have several thousands of dollars more each year by living in Texas or Florida, you better believe that I'll take it because I have student loans to pay off. I've taken advantage of the system that you speak in favor of, the spending on public education. I'm being educated at a publically funded medical college. But if the state wants to screw me afterwards, I'm not going to stick around. In fact, from my class historically 60-70% of the grads. do residencies in other states.