Tyrone Wiggum

Now wait just a damn minute! Dave Stewart is worth 10 million dollars are you suggesting undercapitalized ownership is detrimental to running a Major League Baseball. Hang on I've got a Miami area code calling me.

I was listening to The Right Time with Bomani Jones and Domonique Foxworth Friday, and they were discussing David Tepper and the future of the Panthers. Dom made a comment along the lines that Charlotte can support a football team, but just barely. It wasn't out of step with several other articles and talking heads I've seen discussing the idea that Charlotte is somehow in - a wide range of - danger of being a one sport town, whether that's even remotely true given whatever goes on between Tepper's ears. And, it's not out of line with comments I've seen on this website talking about "peer" cities such as Jacksonville, Nashville, or Portland. It's kinda ludicrous. Charlotte's MSA will be bigger than St Louis and Baltimore at the end of the year (and perhaps St Louis already), and bigger than Denver's by the end of the decade given current population trends. Not for nothing, Denver had a baseball team before it had 2 million people. Also, before people jump on CSA, the Triad isn't part of the Charlotte CSA because the Triad isn't nearly the same demo profile as Orlando/Tampa or the way the I-15 corridor works in Utah, among just two examples; tons of people from Winston and Greensboro get down to Charlotte for stuff given that I can get from downtown Winston or Greensboro in the same time it takes me to get from Pyramid Scheme Arena to Ray Jay, or Provo to downtown Salt Lake. Nevertheless, despite the might of the downtown (uptown?) skyline (In North America, only Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Austin are in the same vein of, wait, how big IS this city versus its population, with Austin pulling way, way away in the last five years) and all the positive population trends, there's still a perception of Charlotte being a glorified Cow Town in the sports space, especially when people talk about baseball expansion, the viability of the Panthers, or asking why the Hornets are so sorry (but we should feel fortunate to have their sorriness!). So here's my question: you're in charge of marketing Charlotte as absolutely not a peer city of Sacto, OKC, Jax, Portland, Nashville, etc - outside of the Mayor's welcome message at the never ending construction project on Billy Graham - what three things would you do to change public perception? Cuz, the perception is Charlotte is an also-ran. It was. It's not now. It won't be in twenty years when its peer is Seattle. But, how would you accelerate that perception? End rant

Saw this on Facebook. Sorry if it’s already been posted

I’m probably (almost certainly) dating myself, but every time I see “queensbridge” my mind hears Mobb Deep “yo prodigy tell them what this is dun.” Hopefully this project is 10% as much cool

So, just because I had a little time on my hands this afternoon, I googled "MLB Expansion," and this came up from one of the most recent articles: "Among those four areas vying for a new team, Charlotte has the largest metro area at 2.7 million, 22nd in the nation. Portland (2.5 million) and Nashville (2.0 million) aren't far behind, while SLC is a bit further back (1.3 million) though its larger TV market isn't far off Portland's in size." What consistently blows me away is the innumeracy inherent in quotes such as this. Say Nashville expands by 1.75% compounded annually through 2040. That means it will be as big as Charlotte! Oh, except, Charlotte in 2020. OTOH, if Charlotte expands by 1.75% through 2040, it will be nearly as big as - checks notes - Seattle. Ummmm. Baseball already doesn't want to be in Kansas City, Cleveland, Oakland (now rectified), or Cincinnati, and though it would LOVE to have a solid presence in Tampa and Miami, incompetent ownership groups have made that a bit of a challenge, no? Clearly, the solution is to put a team in what would become the smallest market in the country led by a partner worth 5% of Derek Jeter (how did that work out in Miami? Anyway...), instead of, say, going to Austin or Charlotte, because reasons like such as, and also (maps! How do they work???). Is Las Vegas a better set up than Oakland? Well, I mean, it's the same cheapskate ownership group, so it's one thing to sell out 8/9 NFL games a year or a hockey arena with 18k capacity as the best team in the Western Conference, but something entirely different over 81 games. With an MLB team that might win 40 games this year. When the mighty KC Royals are in town. In what is still one of the smallest markets in baseball. In a hyper regional sport. Cleveland and Nashville are the same size, and Cleveland was 28th in attendance when the Guardians went to the WS in 2016. And that fan base is DIE HARD. Tourists cannot make up for population constraints. Not in Vegas and definitely not in Nashville. I have zero doubt that at some point Charlotte, Austin, Portland, Nashville, and SLC will have Major League Baseball. The question is, why are you gonna put a team east of the Mississippi in that small of a market when Charlotte will be bigger than St Louis and Baltimore in the next three years? Oh, wait, Rob Manfred is in charge. NM.

Something Jacksonville has that Charlotte may never be able to duplicate for medical students: the smell of raw sewage in the morning, permeating the entire city. Every M2 is gonna deal with sepsis or a perfed bowel, and what better way to get them ready than a city that smells like burning soiled diapers. Mierda, Jacksonville!

A developer needs to park a tower - to the east I guess? - of Epicentre. For decades it's bugged me - as far back as when Paul Cameron was the sports anchor on WBTV and Delano Little did Friday Night Football - that the WBTV cam had a hole there. Is that even a development spot? Is that the Levine Wasteland? Surely to goodness there's a developer who can put the original 50 story version in the hole? All the development south of 277 and North Tryon and Brooklyn Village and the Atrium/Wake med tower are very welcome, just please, in my lifetime, fill that hole (save the obvious rejoinder or I shall bonk you to Horny Jail)!

This looks like a troll. I can tell by the trolling and from trolling a few threads in my time. For future reference, please turn your font blue and/or end your post with an /s, otherwise your trolling will be reasonably construed as bad faith trolling and you will be marked as a troll given that this is your FP. Have ya been to Toronto/Cologne/London/La Defense?

BB&T has historically designed the ugliest towers in banking and we're suddenly surprised they have no sense of taste or aesthetics. I am shocked, SHOCKED! Be careful what you wish for UP; last thing Charlotte needs is a 40 story soviet block monstrosity in brown and blue.

Well, even though I missed your reply deadline, I very clearly owe you a meal involving Hite and Bulgogi. On my Mount Rushmore of bad takes, this one is now carved in. Very clearly Independents didn't break nearly as hard for Biden as the polls indicated, and more Dems went for Trump than reported. On a positive note, Bulgogi!

Even though UP occasionally exasperates me, it is a fun place for me to - usually - be silly, look at cool photos, and and get the pulse of the 704. As such, make you a deal: if I am wrong - as in, Biden wins by less than 3% or outright loses - I'll buy a drink on the roof of that bar all the cool kids take pics from Uptown when C19 is over for any UPer who shows up (valid handles only). And if you're wrong, you do the same? Using that filthy lucre in the coffers of UP? I'm good for it....

Shenanigans = Trump going to court to prevent legally cast ballots from being counted. Which, his surrogates have said he will do and which certain state GOPs are doing. And RCP? Why don't you just say "my crazy uncle says Biden ate a baby"? The Washington Times and Spectator are about as intellectually equal to The New Yorker and The Atlantic as Kip from Napoleon Dynamite is to Luke Kuechly physically, yet RCP has no problem putting crazy psychopath wingnut up against Ta-Nehisi Coates for "balance." All that said, I'm just some rando on the intrawebs, so if we're gonna go all BSAB let's put some Krispy Kremes on it. Say, five dozen? Or we can just pretend that Rasmussen and Zogby and Trafalgar have a clue what they're doing till tomorrow.

All of this is related to NC ONLY: I'm getting a kick out of the national coverage of North Carolina in this election: on balance, it's awful. Trump won in 2016 for two reasons: 1) unaffiliated voters broke hard for him, wiping out the dem's numerical advantage, and; 2) dems defected en masse such that the 300k advantage in registered voters only translated to a 100k advantage in the actual results. "Republicans will swamp democrats on election day." That's weird, given that Rs outnumbered Ds by only ~4k votes on election day in 2016. Will it happen this year? Could but here are the problems: 1) unaffiliated voters are swinging even harder towards Biden than they did towards Trump in 2016, creating a lead among "independents" of hundreds of thousands of votes, and; 2) dems are staying with their candidates this year while Republicans are defecting in the same percentages the dems did in 2016. I don't know how the data gets dumped when the polls close, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that Biden will win going away tonight no matter what happens, simply because there aren't enough votes left to change the outcome. If the polls from Meredith/yougov/CNN/WSJ are to be believed, Biden has a 200k+ advantage with unaffiliated voters and a 400k advantage with partisans going into today. That's kinda game over barring shenanigans.

Wow that is a callback! /I loled.

My ghostwriting credits include "The Big Short," "The Smartest Guys in the Room," "Liars Poker," and "Three Years an Elevator Shaft: the Belk Theater Hotel Boondoggle." /s

Let me disabuse you (and a bunch of other posters of that notion) of that. Say we need to build a high 8/low 9 figure project. First, the C-suite needs to all get on the same page as to why and what our vision is. Then, we take the idea - JUST THE IDEA - before the board to begin nothing but selecting architectural firms and to get permission on a budget for said firms just to get back to us with plans, on top of getting approval on a budgeted range for the project. Once we've got the schematics in place, the architectural firms come back before the C-Suite and pitch us, and we either take our favorite back to the board, or, in some cases, we have all of the finalists pitch the board and then tell the board who we favor and why. We may have the greenlight to proceed, but we still have to go to investment committee and have them formally liquidate assets to fund construction at given time intervals. Then, we go to the finance committee to get approval on a cash flow schedule. Then, the board is appraised at regular intervals of where we stand on construction, even if it's a routine five minute presentation at the regularly-scheduled meeting. Even a whiff of cost overruns land us back before investment and finance and the board. At no point does anybody say, you know what? Some rando on a construction forum said our tower is (fill in the blank); we really need to, at great time and cost, get the architects re-engaged and jump through a bunch more hoops because somebody said something on the internet. Even the notion that the 2nd largest utility gives a damn what gets said about its construction and design on this board is a horse race between narcissism and naivete, yet wander over to the Duke Tower thread and you'll see example after example of that. Moreover, I've seen it suggested that Fortune 500 companies have reconsidered moving here based on what's posted on this board. It's delusional. I have yet to see anything "leaked" that didn't come out same day as a press release in almost 20 years of lurking/posting on this site, but I have seen a ton of "leaks" that turned out to be wrong, dead wrong, and impossibly, call-the-white-coats wrong. What Quora/Reddit/Fark/UrbanPlanet think about anything has no bearing on the way business is actually condcuted 99.9% of the time, and in the instances it does, show me, cuz I've yet to see one. This tower is no different, and anybody who's ever built ANYTHING approaching this price tag would have given it a <1% chance of actually happening, as others have. Finally. if you have the money to build this tower, you build it. It's already built. We've had a meet-up in the lobby and gotten drinks back in 2018 to celebrate. It wasn't, it isn't, and it's not. /rant

Don't you dare say I told you so in these forums!!! There are many many people who know many many things who KNEW this hotel was getting built despite it taking three years to build a six story elevator shaft who just KNEW this project was a done deal, it was just complicated because reasons, and it's STILL complicated because EVEN MOAR reasons! This website is fun for pics as an expat from the 704; otherwise, it's... just... reckless speculation.

Ya'll are cute. A-Rod AND J-Lo can't get a team, but JT can? And Nashville can? Lulz. As I've said in the Charlotte speculation thread: MLB doesn't wanna be in half a dozen markets it's currently in; it sure as hell isn't gonna decamp from KC, Cleveland, Cincy, Oakland, Miami, or South Side for the 36th largest metro area in the country, which already has two major league franchises. Charlotte will have more than 3 million people in 2030 and STILL won't have MLB. Portland will have 2.7mm people in 2030 and STILL won't have MLB. Nashville might have 2.3mm people in 2030 and STILL won't have MLB in 2050.

Yo, I've got wood flooring in my home too! I put drywall in my home, so Wrangler must put drywall in his home. I buy wood floors, so Wrangler buy wood floors. I buy an axminster carper; Wrangler cannot afford. GREAT SUCCESS!!! /King in the castle king in the castle....

They could have torn down the theater, rebuilt it with modern materials honoring the original plans, tore that down, rebuilt it again, tore it down, and rebuilt it again in the time it's taken them to not build the hotel tower. This is the behavior of an outfit that is wildly under capitalized. It reeks of incompetence, at best, and I say that as somebody who's been involved in far more expensive projects (plural) than this that involved a hell of a lot more than preserving an old theater in a tight spot. Labor market tightness creates weeks to a couple months long delays not three years.

How dare you say a 400 foot pencil box tower that will never get built is boring? Do you have no decency good sir knight? fudge this project. In twenty years you wouldn’t know it was there from 277 anyway. But, reasons!

Oh ye of little faith! Don't you worry they'll have that seventh elevator floor poured by Halloween! And then we'll all make excuses for why the 8th floor won't get poured before Xmas!!!

I have zero education myself, I've just been a bunch of places and seen a bunch of things. As the youth say, this is try-hard. I've had the luck and good fortune in my life to stay at the end of the overwater pier facing Otemanu in Bora Bora, at the George V in Paris, and, unfortunately, at Trump Vegas, and Trump Vegas was the George V by comparison. I'm all for 90 degree angles to the norm; this is just bad.