Bled_man

Hey @A2., thank you very much for your honest, if not terrifying, opinions about what you see transpiring with the economy. What would you suggest a mid-career guy to do with his retirement investments (401k, IRAs, etc) to help ride out the potential upheaval? Thanks!

I believe this place is a new Peruvian restaurant. My wife is Peruvian and we always have to try any new Peruvian restaurants that open up and we just found out about this place this weekend so we will have to make the trip up there sometime. I'm glad to hear that the chicken is good. After eating rotisserie chicken in Peru last year, nothing else comes close. Just to let you know, if you like rotisserie chicken Peruvian style, there is another Peruvian restaurant in Indian Land called Genaro's that has the best rotisserie chicken this side of Lima.

Great looking building! It is totally different than most other buildings in Charlotte and I think it's going to look great in the skyline. Also, just thinking out loud, but I wonder is the brown base underneath the taller tower is the shopping center we heard about earlier in this thread?

Not a problem. Great looking rendering. It is definitely going to make a tremendous impact on the skyline from that angle. I still have to check and see what my view is like in my new building, but I don't know if it will be the same.

Yea, these are taken from one of the SouthPark towers. It's one of my favorite views as well.

Here are some pics I took today from my office. I can't believe that I've had this view for the past year and haven't taken any pics, and this is my last week in this building because my company is moving down the street. You can definitely see how the new towers are making an impact on the skyline. Hope you enjoy.

Again, trying not to stray too far off topic, when building a highrise building you only have the choice of concrete or steel as a building material. There are many things that can be done when formulating your concrete mixture that can help lower the embodied energy of the mix. For instance, the most energy intense part of making concrete is actually make the cement. This is one of the reasons you are starting to see blast furnace slag and fly ash from coal burning used to replace some of the cement in a given concrete mixture. Also, for the aggregate you can used crushed concrete instead of stone blasted from the quarry. For the most part, in concrete highrises the only concrete interior walls you have are around the core of the building and provide lateral support for the structure. This is pretty much the only way to build tall with concrete. In my experience, you will very rarely, if ever, see concrete interior walls that do not serve this purpose. They simply add too much weight to the building for nothing basically. Most of you interior walls are going to simply be light gage studs with gyp board.

I don't want to get into assuming too much here, but in a precast parking structure like this one, the double tees are only supported by a few inches of concrete on the edge of the building. These are only designed to carry vertical loads, so they are free to move horizontally on the support. Therefore, when the car slammed into the outer wall, the wall was moved enough to cause the tee to collaspe. I'm not sure on the design requirements for parking structure walls, but I believe that they are typically designed to handle an impact, but it would not be a full speed impact like you would design bridge railings or interstate barriers for. So if this car was travelling very fast it could have moved this wall enough to cause this failure.

You beat me to the punch. If you see the footage, you will see that the portion that collapsed is not even a parking area. Also, the front end of the car is smashed up pretty good indicating that it hit the wall at a fairly high rate of speed. That's all it would have taken to cause the collaspe.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure that naming the street after Bruton was the city of Concord's idea, not Bruton's.

My understanding is that Bruton started moving dirt without a permit, people started asking the city council what was going on, and then the council rezoned the land to ban a drag strip in a private meeting. That is what ticked Bruton off. And I don't blame Bruton for what the city is doing, I blame the city officials for completely bending over backwards for Bruton.

I haven't had a chance to ride the train yet, but in this article on charlotte.com it says that there are electronic screens at each station that is capable of displaying how long until the next train arrives. Are these not operational yet?

I would love to see a direct flight to Lima. That is where my wife is from and it would make it much easier to not have to go through Miami or Atlanta.

Wow! That is some big news there. This will more than double there international capacity, won't it?

Here is an article I found about this project. It says that there will be 2 14 story condo towers, 3-4 levels of apartments over ground level retail, and wide sidewalks and bike paths. Not sure how much to believe, but they have almost completely finished with the demolition of the one-story structure. They are now just finishing tearing up the slab.