#Center for Real Estate

[jcmarchi]

Enabling a circular economy in the built environment

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/enabling-a-circular-economy-in-the-built-environment/

Enabling a circular economy in the built environment

The amount of waste generated by the construction sector underscores an urgent need for embracing circularity — a sustainable model that aims to minimize waste and maximize material efficiency through recovery and reuse — in the built environment: 600 million tons of construction and demolition waste was produced in the United States alone in 2018, with 820 million tons reported in the European Union, and an excess of 2 billion tons annually in China.

This significant resource loss embedded in our current industrial ecosystem marks a linear economy that operates on a “take-make-dispose” model of construction; in contrast, the “make-use-reuse” approach of a circular economy offers an important opportunity to reduce environmental impacts.

A team of MIT researchers has begun to assess what may be needed to spur widespread circular transition within the built environment in a new open-access study that aims to understand stakeholders’ current perceptions of circularity and quantify their willingness to pay.

“This paper acts as an initial endeavor into understanding what the industry may be motivated by, and how integration of stakeholder motivations could lead to greater adoption,” says lead author Juliana Berglund-Brown, PhD student in the Department of Architecture at MIT.

Considering stakeholders’ perceptions

Three different stakeholder groups from North America, Europe, and Asia — material suppliers, design and construction teams, and real estate developers — were surveyed by the research team that also comprises Akrisht Pandey ’23; Fabio Duarte, associate director of the MIT Senseable City Lab; Raquel Ganitsky, fellow in the Sustainable Real Estate Development Action Program; Randolph Kirchain, co-director of MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub; and Siqi Zheng, the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

Despite growing awareness of reuse practice among construction industry stakeholders, circular practices have yet to be implemented at scale — attributable to many factors that influence the intersection of construction needs with government regulations and the economic interests of real estate developers.

The study notes that perceived barriers to circular adoption differ based on industry role, with lack of both client interest and standardized structural assessment methods identified as the primary concern of design and construction teams, while the largest deterrents for material suppliers are logistics complexity, and supply uncertainty. Real estate developers, on the other hand, are chiefly concerned with higher costs and structural assessment. 

Yet encouragingly, respondents expressed willingness to absorb higher costs, with developers indicating readiness to pay an average of 9.6 percent higher construction costs for a minimum 52.9 percent reduction in embodied carbon — and all stakeholders highly favor the potential of incentives like tax exemptions to aid with cost premiums.

Next steps to encourage circularity

The findings highlight the need for further conversation between design teams and developers, as well as for additional exploration into potential solutions to practical challenges. “The thing about circularity is that there is opportunity for a lot of value creation, and subsequently profit,” says Berglund-Brown. “If people are motivated by cost, let’s provide a cost incentive, or establish strategies that have one.”

When it comes to motivating reasons to adopt circularity practices, the study also found trends emerging by industry role. Future net-zero goals influence developers as well as design and construction teams, with government regulation the third-most frequently named reason across all respondent types.

“The construction industry needs a market driver to embrace circularity,” says Berglund-Brown, “Be it carrots or sticks, stakeholders require incentives for adoption.”

The effect of policy to motivate change cannot be understated, with major strides being made in low operational carbon building design after policy restricting emissions was introduced, such as Local Law 97 in New York City and the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance in Boston. These pieces of policy, and their results, can serve as models for embodied carbon reduction policy elsewhere.

Berglund-Brown suggests that municipalities might initiate ordinances requiring buildings to be deconstructed, which would allow components to be reused, curbing demolition methods that result in waste rather than salvage. Top-down ordinances could be one way to trigger a supply chain shift toward reprocessing building materials that are typically deemed “end-of-life.”

The study also identifies other challenges to the implementation of circularity at scale, including risk associated with how to reuse materials in new buildings, and disrupting status quo design practices.

“Understanding the best way to motivate transition despite uncertainty is where our work comes in,” says Berglund-Brown. “Beyond that, researchers can continue to do a lot to alleviate risk — like developing standards for reuse.”

Innovations that challenge the status quo

Disrupting the status quo is not unusual for MIT researchers; other visionary work in construction circularity pioneered at MIT includes “a smart kit of parts” called Pixelframe. This system for modular concrete reuse allows building elements to be disassembled and rebuilt several times, aiding deconstruction and reuse while maintaining material efficiency and versatility.

Developed by MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Associate Director Caitlin Mueller’s research team, Pixelframe is designed to accommodate a wide range of applications from housing to warehouses, with each piece of interlocking precast concrete modules, called Pixels, assigned a material passport to enable tracking through its many life cycles.

Mueller’s work demonstrates that circularity can work technically and logistically at the scale of the built environment — by designing specifically for disassembly, configuration, versatility, and upfront carbon and cost efficiency.

“This can be built today. This is building code-compliant today,” said Mueller of Pixelframe in a keynote speech at the recent MCSC Annual Symposium, which saw industry representatives and members of the MIT community coming together to discuss scalable solutions to climate and sustainability problems. “We currently have the potential for high-impact carbon reduction as a compelling alternative to the business-as-usual construction methods we are used to.”

Pixelframe was recently awarded a grant by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to pursue commercialization, an important next step toward integrating innovations like this into a circular economy in practice. “It’s MassCEC’s job to make sure that these climate leaders have the resources they need to turn their technologies into successful businesses that make a difference around the world,” said MassCEC CEO Emily Reichart, in a press release.

Additional support for circular innovation has emerged thanks to a historic piece of climate legislation from the Biden administration. The Environmental Protection Agency recently awarded a federal grant on the topic of advancing steel reuse to Berglund-Brown — whose PhD thesis focuses on scaling the reuse of structural heavy-section steel — and John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture at MIT.

“There is a lot of exciting upcoming work on this topic,” says Berglund-Brown. “To any practitioners reading this who are interested in getting involved — please reach out.”

The study is supported in part by the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Petard (Part I)

Few things are more wrong than "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Companies sell you out when they can, which is why John Deere tractor milks farmers for needless repair callouts and why your iPhone spies on you to provide data to Apple's surveillance advertising service:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

When a vendor abuses you, that's not punishment for you being a cheapskate and wanting to use services for free. Vendors who screw you over do so because they know they can get away with it, because you are locked in and can't shop elsewhere. The ultimate manifestation of this is, of course, prison-tech. A duopoly of private equity-backed prison-tech profiteers have convinced prisons and jails across America to get rid of calls, in-person visits, mail, parcels, libraries, and continuing ed, and replace them all with tablets that charge prisoners vastly more than people in the free world pay to access media and connect with the outside. Those prisoners are absolutely paying for the product – indeed, with the national average prison wage set at $0.53/hour, they're paying far more than anyone outside pays – and they are still the product.

Capitalists, after all, hate capitalism. For all the romantic odes to the "invisible hand" and all the bafflegab about "efficient market hypothesis," the actual goal of businesses is to make you an offer you literally can't refuse. Capitalists want monopolies, they want captive audiences. "Competition," as Peter Thiel famously wrote, "is for losers."

Few lock-in arrangements are harder to escape than the landlord-tenant relationship. Moving home is expensive, time-consuming, and can rip you away from your job, your kid's school, and your community. Landlords know it, which is why they conspire to rig rents through illegal price-fixing apps like Realpage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/27/ai-conspiracies/#epistemological-collapse

And why they fill your home with Internet of Shit appliances that pick your pockets by requiring special, expensive consumables, and why they tack so many junk fees onto your monthly rent:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/

Tenants aren't quite as locked in as prisoners, but corporations correctly understand that you can really fuck with a tenant over a long timescale without losing their business, and so they do.

Ironically, monopolists love each other. I guess if you loathe competition, a certain kind of cooperation comes naturally. That's why so many landlords have forged unholy alliances with internet service providers, who – famously – offer Americans the slowest speeds at the highest prices in the rich world, trail the world in infrastructure investment, and reap profits that put their global cousins in the shade.

Many's the apartment building that comes with a monopoly ISP that has a deal with your landlord. Landlords and ISPs call this "bulk billing" and swear that it reduces the cost of internet service for everyone. In reality, tenants who live under these arrangements have produced a deep, unassailable record proving that they pay more for worse broadband than the people next door who get to choose their ISPs. What's more, ISPs who offer "bulk billing" openly offer kickbacks to landlords who choose them over their rivals – in other words, even if you're paying for the product (your fucking home), you are still the product, sold to an evil telco.

Under Biden, the FCC banned the practice of ISPs paying kickbacks to landlords, over squeals and howls of protests from industry bodies like the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), National Apartment Association (NAA), and Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center (RETTC). These landlord groups insisted – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that when your landlord gets to choose your ISP, they do so with your best interests at heart, getting you a stellar deal you couldn't get for yourself.

This week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr – who voted for the ban on kickbacks – rescinded the rule, claiming that he was doing so to protect tenants. This is obvious bullshit, as is evidenced by the confetti-throwing announcements froom the NMHC, NAA and RETTC:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Reading Jon Brodkin's Ars Technica coverage of Carr's betrayal of millions of Americans, I was reminded of a short story I published in 2014: "Petard: A Tale of Just Desserts," which I wrote for Bruce Sterling's "12 Tomorrows" anthology from MIT Tech Review. It's a fun little sf story about this same bullshit, dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

Realizing that there were people who were sounding the alarm about this more than a decade ago was a forceful reminder that Trumpism isn't exactly new. The idea that government should serve up the American people as an all-you-can-eat buffet for corporations that use tech to supercharge their predatory conduct has been with us for a hell of a long time. I've written a hell of a lot of science fiction about this, and sometimes this leads people to credit me with predictive powers. But if I predicted anything with my story "Radicalized," in which furious, grieving men murder the health industry execs who denied their loved ones coverage, I predicted the present, not the future:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2024-12-09-radicalized-cory-doctorow-story-health-care/

Likewise in my story "Unauthorized Bread," which "predicted" that landlords would use "smart" appliances to steal from their poorest, most vulnerable tenants:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

It's not much of a "prediction" to simply write a story in which "Internet of Things" companies' sales literature is treated as a straightforward idea and writing about how it will all work.

The same goes for "Petard." The most "predictive" part of that story is the part where I take the human rights implications of internet connections seriously. Back then (and even today), there were and are plenty of Very Serious People who want you to know that internet service is a frivolity, a luxury, a distraction:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

They deride the idea that broadband is a human right, even after the pandemic's lesson that you depend on your internet connection for social connections, civic life, political engagement, education, health and employment:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#fiber-now

Writing sf about this stuff isn't predictive, but I like to think that it constitutes an effective rebuttal to the people who say that taking digital rights seriously is itself unserious. Given that, I got to thinking about "Petard," and how much I liked that little story from 2014.

So I've decided to serialize it, in four parts, starting today. If you're impatient to get the whole story, you can listen to my podcast of it, which I started in 2014, then stopped podcasting for four years (!) before finishing in 2018:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

#

It's not that I wanted to make the elf cry. I'm not proud of the fact. But he was an elf for chrissakes. What was he doing manning — elfing — the customer service desk at the Termite Mound? The Termite Mound was a tough assignment — given MIT's legendary residency snafus, it was a sure thing that someone like me would be along every day to ruin his day.

"Come on," I said, "cut it out. Look, it's nothing personal."

He continued to weep, face buried dramatically in his long-fingered hands, pointed ears protruding from his fine, downy hair as it flopped over his ivory-pale forehead. Elves.

I could have backed down, gone back to my dorm and just forgiven the unforgivably stupid censorwall there, used my personal node for research or stuck to working in the lab. But I had paid for the full feed. I needed the full feed. I deserved the full feed. I was 18. I was a grownup, and the infantalizing, lurking censorwall offended my intellect and my emotions. I mean, seriously, fuck that noise.

"Would you stop?" I said. "Goddamnit, do your job."

The elf looked up from his wet hands and wiped his nose on his mottled raw suede sleeve. "I don't have to take this," he said. He pointed to a sign: "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER."

"I'm not abusing you," I said. "I'm just making my point. Forcefully."

He glared at me from behind a curtain of dandelion-fluff hair. "Abuse includes verbal abuse, raised voices, aggressive language and tone –"

I tuned him out. This was the part where I was supposed to say, "I know this isn't your fault, but –" and launch into a monologue explaining how his employer had totally hosed me by not delivering what they'd promised, and had further hosed him by putting him in a situation where he was the only one I could talk to about it, and he couldn't do anything about it. This little pantomime was a fixture of life in the world, the shrugs-all-round nostrum that we were supposed to substitute for anything getting better ever.

Like I said, though, fuck that noise. What is the point of being smart, 18 years old and unemployed if you aren't willing to do something about this kind of thing. Hell, the only reason I'd been let into MIT in the first place was that I was constitutionally incapable of playing out that little scene.

The elf had run down and was expecting me to do my bit. Instead, I said, "I bet you're in the Termite Mound, too, right?"

He got a kind of confused look. "That's PII," he said. "This office doesn't give out personally identifying information. It's in the privacy policy –" He tapped another sign posted by his service counter, one with much smaller type. I ignored it.

"I don't want someone else's PII. I want yours. Do you live in the residence? You must, right? Get a staff discount on your housing for working here, I bet." Elves were always cash-strapped. Surgery's not cheap, even if you're prepared to go to Cuba for it. I mean, you could get your elf-pals to try to do your ears for you, but only if you didn't care about getting a superbug or ending up with gnarly stumps sticking out of the side of your head. And forget getting a Nordic treatment without adult supervision, I mean, toot, toot, all aboard the cancer express. You had to be pretty insanely desperate to go elf without the help of a pro.

He looked stubborn. I mean, elf-stubborn, which is a kind of chibi version of stubborn that's hard to take seriously. I mean, seriously. "Look, of course you live in the Termite Mound. Whatever. The point is, we're all screwed by this stuff. You, me, them –" I gestured at the room full of people. They all been allocated a queue-position on entry to the waiting room and were killing time until they got their chance to come up to the Window of Eternal Disappointment in order to play out I Know This Isn't Your Fault But… before returning to their regularly scheduled duties as a meaningless grain of sand being ground down by the unimaginably gigantic machinery of MIT Residency LLC.

"Let's do something about it, all right? Right here, right now."

He gave me a look of elven haughtiness that he'd almost certainly practiced in the mirror. I waited for him to say something. He waited for me to wilt. Neither of us budged.

"I'm not kidding. The censorwall has a precisely calibrated dose of fail. It works just enough that it's worth using most of the time, and the amount of hassle and suck and fail you have to put up with when it gets in the way is still less than the pain you'd have to endure if you devoted your life to making it suck less. The economically rational course of action is to suck it up.

"What I propose is that we change the economics of this bullshit. If you're the Termite Mound's corporate masters, you get this much benefit out of the shitty censorwall; but we, the residents of the Termite Mound, pay a thousand times that in aggregate." I mimed the concentrated interests of the craven fools who'd installed the censorwall, making my hands into a fist-wrapped-in-a-fist, then exploding them like a hoberman-sphere to show our diffuse mutual interests, expanding to dwarf the censorware like Jupiter next to Io. "So here's what I propose: let's mound up all this diffuse interest, mobilize it, and aim it straight at the goons who put you in a job. You sit there all day and suffer through our abuse because all you're allowed to do is point at your stupid sign."

"How?" he said. I knew I had him.

#

Kickstarter? Hacker, please. Getting strangers to combine their finances so you can chase some entrepreneurial fantasy of changing the world by selling people stuff is an idea that was dead on arrival. If your little kickstarted business is successful enough to compete with the big, dumb titans, you'll end up being bought out or forced out or sold out, turning you into something indistinguishable from the incumbent businesses you set out to destroy. The problem isn't that the world has the wrong kind of sellers — it's that it has the wrong kind of buyers. Powerless, diffused, atomized, puny and insubstantial.

Turn buyers into sellers and they just end up getting sucked into the logic of fail: it's unreasonable to squander honest profits on making people happier than they need to be in order to get them to open their wallets. But once you get all the buyers together in a mass with a unified position, the sellers don't have any choice. Businesses will never spend a penny more than it takes to make a sale, so you have to change how many pennies it takes to complete the sale.

Back when I was fourteen, it took me ten days to hack together my first Fight the Power site. On the last day of the fall term, Ashcroft High announced that catering was being turned over to Atos Catering. Atos had won the contract to run the caf at my middle school in my last year there, every one of us lost five kilos by graduation. The French are supposed to be good at cooking, but the slop Atos served wasn't even food. I'm pretty sure that after the first week they just switched to filling the steamer trays with latex replicas of grey, inedible glorp. Seeing as how no one was eating it, there was no reason to cook up a fresh batch every day.

The announcement came at the end of the last Friday before Christmas break, chiming across all our personal drops with a combined bong that arrived an instant before the bell rang. The collective groan was loud enough to drown out the closing bell. It didn't stop, either, but grew in volume as we filtered into the hall and out of the building into the icy teeth of Chicago's first big freeze of the season.

Junior high students aren't allowed off campus at lunchtime, but high school students — even freshmen — can go where they please so long as they're back by the third period bell. That's where Fight the Power came in.

WE THE UNDERSIGNED PLEDGE

TO BOYCOTT THE ASHCROFT HIGH CAFETERIA WHILE ATOS HAS THE CONTRACT TO SUPPLY IT

TO BUY AT LEAST FOUR LUNCHES EVERY WEEK FROM THE FOLLOWING FOOD TRUCKS [CHECK AT LEAST ONE]:

This was tricky. It's not like there were a lot of food trucks driving out of the loop to hit Joliet for the lunch rush. But I wrote a crawler that went through the review sites, found businesses with more than one food truck, munged the menus and set out the intersection as an eye-pleasing infographic showing the appetizing potential of getting your chow outside of the world of the corrupt no-bid edu-corporate complex.

By New Year's Day, 98 percent of the student body had signed up. By January third, I had all four of the food-trucks I'd listed lined up to show up on Monday morning.

Turns out, Ashcroft High and Atos had a funny kind of deal. Ashcroft High guaranteed a minimum level of revenue to Atos, and Atos guaranteed a maximum level to Ashcroft High. So, in theory, if a hundred percent of the student body bought a cafeteria lunch, about twenty percent of that money would be kicked back to Ashcroft High. They later claimed that this was all earmarked to subsidize the lunches of poor kids, but no one could ever point to anything in writing where they'd committed to this, as our Freedom of Information Act requests eventually proved.

In return for the kickback, the school had promised to ensure that Atos could always turn a profit. If not enough of us ate in the caf, the school would have to give Atos the money it would have made if we had. In other words: our choice to eat a good lunch wasn't just costing the school its expected share of Atos's profits — it was having to dig money out of its budget to make up for our commitment to culinary excellence.

They tried everything. Got the street in front of the school designated a no-food-trucks zone (we petitioned the City of Joliet to permit parking on the next street over). Shortened the lunch-break (we set up a Web-based pre-order service that let us pick and pre-pay for our food). Banned freshmen from leaving school property (we were saved by the PTA). Suspended me for violating the school's social media policy (the ACLU wrote them a blood-curdling nastygram, and raised nearly $30,000 in donations of $3 or less from students around the world once word got out).

Atos wouldn't let them re-negotiate the contract, either. If Ashcroft High wanted out, it would have to buy it's way out. That's when I convinced the vice-principal to let me work with the AP Computer Science class to build out a flexible, open version of Fight the Power that anyone could install and run for their own student bodies, providing documentation and support. That was just before Spring Break. By May 1, there were 87 schools whose students used Ftp to organize Atos alternative food-trucks for their own cafeterias.

Suddenly, this was news. Not just local news, either. Global. Atos had to post an earnings warning in their quarterly report. Suddenly, we had Bloomberg and Al Jazeera Business camera crews buttonholing Ashcroft High kids on their way to the lunch-trucks. Whenever they grabbed me, I would give them this little canned speech about how Atos couldn't supply decent food and were taking money out of our educational budgets rather than facing the fact that the children they were supposed to be feeding hated their slop so much that they staged a mass walkout. It played well with kids in other schools, and very badly with Atos's shareholders. But I'll give this to Atos: I couldn't have asked for a better Evil Empire to play Jedi against. They threatened to sue me — for defamation! — which made the whole thing news again. Stupidly, they sued me in Illinois, which has a great anti-SLAPP law, and was a massive technical blunder. The company's US headquarters were in Clearwater, Florida, and Florida is a trainwreck in every possible sense, including its SLAPP laws. If they'd sued me in their home turf, I'd have gone bankrupt before I could win.

They lost. The ACLU collected $102,000 in fees from them. The story of the victory was above the fold on Le Monde's site for a week. Turns out that French people loathe Atos even more than the rest of us, because they've had longer to sharpen their hate.

Long story slightly short: we won. Atos "voluntarily" released our school from its contract. And Fight the Power went mental. I spent that summer vacation reviewing Github commits on Ftp, as more and more people discovered that they could make use of a platform that made fighting back stupid simple. The big stupid companies were whales and we were their krill, and all it took was some glue to glom us all together into boulders of indigestible matter that could choke them to death.

I dropped out of Ashcroft High in the middle of the 11th grade and did the rest of my time with homeschooling shovelware that taught me exactly what I needed to pass the GED and not one tiny thing more. I didn't give a shit. I was working full time on Ftp, craiglisting rides to to hacker unconferences where I couchsurfed and spoke, giving my poor parental units eight kinds of horror. It would've been simpler if I'd taken donations for Ftp, because Mom and Dad quickly came to understand that their role as banker in our little family ARG gave them the power to yank me home any time I moved out of their comfort zone. But there was the balance of terror there, because they totally knew that if I had accepted donations for the project, I'd have been financially independent in a heartbeat.

Plus, you know, they were proud of me. Ftp makes a difference. It's not a household name or anything, but more than a million people have signed up for Ftp campaigns since I started it, and our success rate is hovering around 25 percent. That means that I'd changed a quarter-million lives for the better (at least) before I turned 18. Mom and Dad, they loved that (which is not to say that they didn't need the occasional reminder of it). And shit, it got me a scholarship at MIT. So there's that.

#

Network filters are universally loathed. Duh. No one's ever written a regular expression that can distinguish art from porn and no one ever will. No one's ever assembled an army of prudes large enough to hand-sort the Internet into "good" and "bad" buckets. No one ever will. The Web's got 100-odd billion pages on it; if you have a failure rate of one tenth of one percent, you'll overblock (or underblock) (or both) 100,000,000 pages. That's several Library of Congress's worth of pointless censorship — or all the porn ever made, times ten, missed though underfiltering. You'd be an idiot to even try.

Idiot like a fox! If you don't care about filtering out "the bad stuff" (whatever that is), censorware is a great business to be in. The point of most network filters is the "security syllogism":

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

I HAVE DONE SOMETHING.

SOMETHING HAS BEEN DONE.

VICTORY!

Hand-wringing parents don't want their precious offspring looking at weiners and hoo-hahs when they're supposed to be amassing student debt, so they demand that the Termite Mound fix the problem by Doing Something. The Termite Mound dispenses cash to some censorware creeps in a carefully titrated dose that is exactly sufficient to demonstrate Something Has Been Doneness to a notional weiner-enraged parent. Since all the other dorms, schools, offices, libraries, airports, bus depots, train stations, cafes, hotels, bars, and theme parks in the world are doing exactly the same thing, each one can declare itself to be in possession of Best Practices when there is an unwanted hoo-hah eruption, and culpability diffuses to a level that is safe for corporate governance and profitability. #MissionAccomplished.

And so the whole world suffers under this pestilence. Millions of times every day — right at this moment — people are swearing at their computers: What. The. Fuck. Censorware's indifference to those minute moments of suffering is only possible because they've never been balled up into a vast screaming meteor of rage.

#

"Hey there, hi! Look, I'm here because I need unfiltered Internet access to get through my degree. So do you all, right? But the Termite Mound isn't going to turn it off because that would be like saying 'Here kids, have a look at this porn,' which they can't afford to say, even though, seriously, who gives a shit, right?"

I had them at 'porn," but now I had to keep them.

"Look at your tenancy agreement: you're paying twenty seven bucks a month for your network access at the Termite Mound. Twenty seven bucks — each! I'll find us an ISP that can give all of us hot and cold running genitals and all the unsavory religious extremism, online gaming, and suicide instructions we can eat. Either I'm going to make the Termite Mound give us the Internet we deserve, or we'll cost it one of its biggest cash-cows and humiliate it on the world stage.

"I don't want your money. All I want is for you to promise me that if I can get us Internet from someone who isn't a censoring sack of shit, that you'll come with me. I'm going to sign up every poor bastard in the Termite Mound, take that promise to someone who isn't afraid to work hard to earn a dollar, and punish the Termite Mound for treating us like this. And then, I'm going to make a loud noise about what we've done, and spread the word to every other residence in Cambridge, then Boston, then across America. I'm going to spread out to airports, hotels, train stations, buses, taxis — any place where they make it their business to decide what data we're allowed to see."

I whirled around to face the elf, who leapt back, long fingers flying to his face in an elaborate mime of startlement. "Are you with me, pal?"

He nodded slightly.

"Come on," I said. "Let 'em hear you."

He raised one arm over his head, bits of rabbit fur and uncured hides dangling from his skinny wrist. I felt for him. I think we all did. Elves.

He was a convincer, though. By the time I left the room, I already had 29 signups.

#

All evil in the world is the result of an imbalance between the people who benefit from shenanigans and the people who get screwed by shenanigans. De-shenaniganifying the world is the answer to pollution and poverty and bad schools and the war on some drugs and a million other horribles. To solve all the world's problems, I need kick-ass raw feeds and a steady supply of doofus thugs from central casting to make idiots of. I know where I can find plenty of the latter, and I'm damn sure going to get the former. Watch me.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#captive-market

[twstinginthewind]

Hihi! You said minific, yeah? Well if you feel up for it, how about your biggest problematic fave in TWST but 🦇

But they're all problematic! That's what's so fun about them!

---

The bakery on the corner has been the same for nearly a century. And not just in terms of the same ownership; the building itself looks almost the same as the day the business opened, its painted windows and polished wood furnishings maintained impeccably, seemingly untouched by the ravages of time, wear, or vandalism. The bright green and gold three leaf clovers have not faded a bit, and still act like a beacon for those in search of sweets from all over the city.

Inside, the bakery staff always seems to be the same, an ever-rotating cast of rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, smiling young people, dedicated to their positions. Management is always held by a member of the same family - currently, it's a slender, ginger-haired young man with a cunning grin, a mind designed for marketing brilliance, and a collection of nervous tics that become more obvious the longer one speaks to him. The Diamond and Clover families, he says, blinking a bit too fast, have been in a partnership for generations, and have created a place where the traditional flavors of the city can be savored in a pristine, retro-styled establishment! No, sorry, Mister Clover isn't available for comment, he's afraid... He's overnights, you see, making all of these WONDERFUL treats. Have you tried the black-and-white cookies?

The bakery has been working with the same recipes for decades, with some experimental items and changes for modern tastes cycling on and off of the menu as the years go by. There is always at least one member of the Clover family among the front staff, but their talents are most often used in the kitchens.

Kitchens, yes. The small, bright one on the main level, visible from the sales floor, where green-aproned staff decorate cakes and wrap sandwiches to go, is most well-known by the bakery's patrons. But it's not where most of the work gets done. That kitchen is downstairs, below the main hum of the business upstairs.

It's quite a bit darker down there; the overhead lights never quite seem to completely cut through the subterranean gloom. The large room is a temple to cleanliness. Stainless steel counters equipped with sinks, pristine rolling racks with clean and well-used trays lining them, the largest wood-fired oven in the city, a huge storage pantry for ingredients that looks as though it had never seen a rat or an insect in the entire time it had been in use; aside from the insufficiency of the lights, it looks like any baker's dream kitchen. At the far end of the kitchen, a solid double door leads to a small delivery dock. At the opposite end, a securely locked metal door leads to what seems to be a storage room, air heavy with the scents of earth and copper pipes.

During the day, however, it stands empty. The downstairs kitchen doesn't come to life until after dark. To hear Mister Diamond speak of it, it sounds as cozy as a dream. A senior staff member, one of the Clover family, oversees a tight-knit team of bakers to fill the next day's sales needs. They work overnight in order to create all of the breads, cakes, pastries, and snacks that the store needs, following the recipes handed down over generations. Sometimes, a lucky member of the front of store staff will get to join them, and learn from their techniques, too!

Mister Diamond isn't telling the complete truth.

There is one sticking point to this story... how the recipes are handed down. They have not been. The recipes - although many of them have been permanently committed to memory - have remained in the possession of a single man since the 1930s. He's uncertain about changing much, you see, since he remembers very distinctly how each of the classic recipes taste, and he wouldn't be able to check and see how any changes would affect the flavor. And he doesn't trust the collection of great-grand nephews and nieces who work by his side; they weren't there, they couldn't know.

And the little ones that Mister Diamond sends down every once in a while, ugh. No patience, no sensibilities. Mister Clover can hardly stand it; he finds he generally has to convince them to forget everything they learned while working downstairs.

Still, it beats having to source his own meals. And they do become MUCH better workers after he's made use of them once. So devoted to the shop. Ready to do anything for their lead baker.

He gets to live his life unnoticed among the monster hunters of the city, so many of whom rely on his shop for their daily bread... Trey does love that irony.

[gregdotorg]

Wolfgang Tillmans flyin' over my grandma's house with his little camera

[real-estates-posts]

Exploring the Best Commercial Properties in Delhi NCR

In this article, we will explore the features and advantages of the Best Commercial Properties in Delhi NCR-  Gaur City Center, Gaur World Smart Street, Bolt by Bhutani, and Migsun.

Continue reading: Exploring the Best Commercial Properties in Delhi NCR

[mayra-quijotescx]

[Image description: a flyer-style post titled STOP DOING OFFICES with the following bullet points: "WORK WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO TAKE 90 MINUTES BY CAR TO GET TO," "YEARS OF URBANIZATION yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for going to a different building to use the SAME INTERNET," "Wanted to do that anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that, it was called COFFEE SHOPS," "'Can you wrap up your call, we have this room booked' 'how do we get office parking reimbursed' - Statements dreamt up by the utterly Deranged." The flyer continues: "LOOK at what corporations have been demanding your Respect for all this time with all the labor we have given them. (These are REAL FURNISHINGS found in REAL OFFICES.)" There are pictures of, in order, fluorescent light fixtures, workers in an 'open concept' office, and uneven office flooring. Each picture has an increasing amount of red question marks under it. "'Hello I would like to hear [image of headset] half of your Zoom call' They have played us for absolute fools." End description.]

Anyway, with apologies to Doc Wolverine on Twitter for more or less stealing his explanation, the reason is that corporations are trying to maintain office value because the properties were mortgaged for additional liquidity, and if the property value falls (because, for example, no one fucking needs it for the stated purpose anymore), bank liability, and thus mortgage payments, go up.

They want employees to pay for their batshit foolish financial decisions with their time and health.

by @spavel.bsky.social

[pier-carlo-universe]

Previsioni immobiliari 2025 per l’impresa: stabilità dei valori e focus su qualità ed efficienza energetica

Il Gruppo Tecnocasa ha presentato le previsioni per il mercato immobiliare industriale e commerciale nel 2025, evidenziando una tenuta dei valori e un’attenzione crescente alla qualità e all’efficienza energetica.

Il Gruppo Tecnocasa ha presentato le previsioni per il mercato immobiliare industriale e commerciale nel 2025, evidenziando una tenuta dei valori e un’attenzione crescente alla qualità e all’efficienza energetica. Scenario economico e impatti sul settore immobiliare Secondo Fabiana Megliola, Responsabile dell’Ufficio Studi Tecnocasa, il 2025 potrebbe segnare un lieve miglioramento rispetto al…

[ankita-jain]

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7298683146110128129

[simbadiasporarealestate]

House for Rent in Kigali: Your Guide to Finding the Perfect Property

House for Rent in Kigali: Your Guide to Finding the Perfect Property Kigali, the vibrant capital of Rwanda, is a city full of opportunities. Whether you are relocating to Rwanda for work, business, or simply seeking a fresh start, renting a house in Kigali offers a wonderful living experience. The growing real estate market in Kigali has attracted both locals and expatriates, making it an ideal…

[res-management]

Chief Minister of Gujarat, Bhupendra Patel, has proudly inaugurated the state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence at GIFT City in Gandhinagar.

[himalyacitycenter]

[jcmarchi]

Toward socially and environmentally responsible real estate

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/toward-socially-and-environmentally-responsible-real-estate/

Toward socially and environmentally responsible real estate

The MIT student of popular imagination is a Tony Stark or a Riri Williams working in a lab and building the technology of the future. Not necessarily someone studying real estate.

Peggy Ghasemlou is doing just that, however, and she’s traveled over thousands of miles and jumped through about as many hoops to do it.

A licensed architect in her hometown of Tehran, Iran’s capital, Ghasemlou enrolled at MIT to pursue her interests in sustainability and inclusion in the fields of architecture and real estate development. Now, after managing visa and travel issues that required her own superhero-like determination, she’s halfway through earning a master of science in real estate development (MSRED) from the School of Architecture and Planning’s Center for Real Estate (CRE). This fall, she will be working with lecturer Jacques Gordon, CRE’s former “executive-in-practice,” on a thesis involving portfolio management.

Throughout her time at MIT, Ghasemlou has enjoyed her program’s balance of economics, technology, sustainability, and design. She says the curriculum has supported and challenged her in equal measure, but above all, she appreciates the program’s emphasis on financial, social, and environmental responsibility.

“I’m so grateful that I chose MSRED, because they are not just thinking about how to make more money,” she says. “They are teaching us about how to make a lasting positive impact.”

It hasn’t been an easy journey. Visa issues, scholarship rejections, and thousands of miles stood between her and MIT, and the challenges didn’t end when she did get to campus, halfway around the world from her home and family. She beat all those odds, however, and is ready for whatever the future brings.

“When I first arrived here, I had three main feelings: relief, hope, and doubt,” she said. “Now, I am just feeling grateful for my time here and the friendships I have made.”

From design to ownership

While growing up, Ghasemlou loved design “from the start.” That affinity led her to pursue a bachelor’s in architectural engineering, followed by a master’s in digital engineering with a focus on sustainability.

She first made serious contact with MIT while pursuing her master’s, taking the Institute’s online courses to help her with her thesis on zero-energy buildings. She chose both the thesis and the classes out of a desire to “do something positive and impactful” and learned how to use tools to optimize a building’s energy efficiency, among other important measures.

After she earned her master’s, she spent the next five years designing and developing residential buildings for a studio in Tehran. The experience sparked her interest in the financial side of architecture and real estate, and along with it, the intersection of sustainability, economics, and design — areas encompassed by MSRED’s curriculum.

She decided to apply, and was also awarded the Goldie B. Wolfe Miller Women Leaders in Real Estate scholarship.

“The Goldie Initiative is the most supportive community,” she says. “They’re the best thing that’s happen[ed] to me in the U.S. They really care about you, and they really want, in their heart, to help you.”

With women underrepresented in the real estate fields, particularly at leadership levels, awards like this emphasize both the progress that has been made as well as the work that is yet to be done. In Tehran, Ghasemlou founded Girls in Real Estate Development (GIRD), to introduce the fields of architecture and real estate to young women and help create career pathways for these traditionally male-dominated professions.

“I really love to see women being in decision-making positions and to be able to influence different industries in meaningful ways,” she said. “Whatever I learn, I try to [pass along to the next generation]. It might have a small impact on them, but I tell them, ‘If I can do it, you can do it.’”

Once she made it to MIT for her first semester, she took finance and economics courses, which were new subjects for her. Adjusting to a new environment was also jarring, but she credited her classmates and professors for being “incredibly supportive” and helping her “not feel so isolated.”

Her second semester featured sustainability courses — a friendlier prospect, given her background in design — and helped point her in the direction of sustainable portfolio management for her thesis topic.

However, enrolling at MIT was one thing. Actually getting to campus was another.

The long and winding road

Rewind back to last summer. Once the excitement of being accepted to the MSRED program wore off, reality set in. Like other international students, Ghasemlou had to apply for a visa. She did so through the U.S. embassy in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, and began the waiting game. Days turned into weeks, however, so she decided to try her luck with a different embassy and packed her bags for Toronto.

With the start of classes only weeks away, she made the decision to wait it out in the Canadian metropolis. She ended up having to take online classes during the beginning of the semester, but right on the day she “lost all hope,” her visa was finally issued.

In Ankara, that is.

She had already flown over 6,000 miles just to get from Tehran to Toronto, and she was now staring down the barrel of a 10,000-mile-plus trip to go back to Turkey for her visa and then get to MIT’s campus, all while the semester was kicking into gear. That may have been too daunting a prospect for some, but not for her.

“I calculated the hours I was in the airport and airplane: over 30 hours,” she said. “I arrived in Boston, I remember, at 11:30 p.m., then I just thought, ‘Tomorrow, I should go to my classes.’”

Luckily, her family supported her throughout the process.

“I’m so thankful for my parents and my brother — especially my brother — because he believes in me all the time,” she said. “That really helped me go through all the hard times I had to go through to be here.”

Now that she is here, she’s got a lot of big ideas for the future of housing, sustainability, and real estate. She’ll be spending the summer with a Boston-based nonprofit called Preservation of Affordable Housing, assessing units for sustainability goals and updating sustainability criteria.

Going forward, she expressed an interest in staying in Boston long-term, noting its potential to join other cities in becoming “one of the leaders in sustainability.” She’s a believer in policy for effective change-making, and cites New York City’s Local Law 97 (LL97), which requires that large buildings meet certain limits regarding energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions, as an example of a law that is “not just a policy” but also makes people think about the city around them.

Ghasemlou also aims to continue to support other women in the real estate fields, and expresses admiration for female industry leaders such as Fidelity’s Suzanne Heidelberger.

“When I see successful women in this industry, I feel inspired and proud of them,” she said. “I really want to see more and more female leaders in the industry.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Petard, Part III

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#landlord-telco-industrial-complex

Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

And now, onto part three:

One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.

"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."

"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping that no one does for the time being."

"Yeah, I can see that." I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"

"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound — every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."

"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?

"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"

"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"

"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting. It could not stand.

"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"

"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."

She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.

"It's your deal," she said.

I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."

"But?"

"But what?"

"It's my deal but…?"

"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."

I chewed my banana bread.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"

I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.

"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd –" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them! "You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"

"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"

#

I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

"Who is this?"

"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.

"Who is this?" I said again.

"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.

"Bryan who?"

"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.

"What's wrong?"

"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm — he wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them –"

"What if they didn't have any violations?"

He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."

"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"

There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me."

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."

"What kind of records?"

"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."

The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

I was going to turn on the lights.

"You've got all that, huh?

"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."

"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"

"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."

"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"

"I'm on my way."

The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded — sound, video, infrared, data — and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged — whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what it's policy was. No one ever, ever, ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA's message could always be boiled down to seven words: "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE." Or, more succinctly: "YOU LOSE."

I felt bad about Bryan's job. It was his own deal, of course. He'd stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn't held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice-cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that'd do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras' white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infra-red range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him into my chosen spot.

"You got it?" I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost pepper-flavored — though that was mostly marketing, no way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

"I encrypted it with your public key," he said, handing me a folded up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weaksauce — the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student clickbait thrillers — but if he'd really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he'd handed me a hardcopy of the URL instead of emailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

I folded the paper away. "What should I be looking for?"

"It's all organized and tagged. You'll see." He looked nervous. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to call them up and tell them I have it."

"What?" He looked like he was going to cry.

"Come on," I said. "I'm not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I'm about to get evicted, right?"

"Technically, you are evicted. There's a process-server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face-recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. 48 hours to clear out."

"Right," I said. "I don't want to have to go look for a place to live while I'm also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone's Internet connection. Get serious. So I'm going to go and talk to Messrs Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I'm going public with, and it'll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now."

It's time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I'm into it — I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

But the reality is that I can't really help myself. There's some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they're small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack-surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you're a walking, suppurating lesion.

No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER" sign. You start out trying to do something good, then your realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn't seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further towards the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven't succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it — think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge-fund in a leveraged takeover, looted and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

I am terrified of the rot-fungus, because it seems like I'm the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don't they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven't they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they'll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don't these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don't they ever buy a train ticket? Don't they ever eat at a fast food joint? Can't they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I've figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who's fighting seems to be fighting against something else — injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus's rot is what causes all of those things.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

"Lukasz, you're don't know what you're doing. These guys, they're –"

"What?" I said. "Are they the mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?"

He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. "No, but they're ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They're not normal."

The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. "Yeah, that's OK. I'm used to abnormal." I am the most abnormal person I know.

"Be careful, seriously," he said.

"Thanks, Bryan," I said. "Don't worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?"

He chewed his lip. "Don't," he said. "They'll know it was me if you do that."

I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (OK, I'd helped) and he was going to couch-surf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Mass? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable selloutism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

"Suit yourself," I said, and went and made some preparations.

#

Messers Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office-block that only had ten floors, but whose company directory listed over 800 businesses. I knew the kind of place, because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unravelled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con-artists who'd destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

At first I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called "International Holdings (Holdings), Ltd") was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

I punched # # #300# # # on the ancient touchscreen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: "What?"

"I'm here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC."

"Send an email."

"I'm a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero." I let that sink in. "I've got some documents I'd like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC." I put a bit of heavy English on documents. "Please." I put even more English on "Please." I've seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do al-pacinoid overwound Dangerous Dude as well as anyone. "Please," I said again, meaning "Right. Now."

There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. "Come up," a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

#

I'd expected something sinister — a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit-stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT's best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who'd ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end-tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking worksurfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable-trays and conduit. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the worksurfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful, handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

"Lukasz, right?" He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly, though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

The door closed behind me and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

"I'm Sergey. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Some water?"

The coffee smelled good. "No thank you," I said. "I don't think I'll be here for long."

"Of course. Come and sit."

The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who'd sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee-cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. "You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling myself together. "I've got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants — students — who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound."

He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn't pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligble word. It was as though they were all going "murmurmurmurmur," though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

"Ah," he said at last. "Well, that's very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I'll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they're properly dealt with?"

"I can give you a set," I said. "But I'll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the The Tech and the local Wikileaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don't seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater."

"Oh, I appreciate that there's a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn't be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven't seen your documents, and if I had, I can neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I'll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly."

It's funny. I'd anticipated that he'd answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: "we take this very seriously," "we cannot comment on ongoing investigations," "we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem" and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he'd assigned to a bug he owned.

"Sergey, that's not much of an answer."

He sipped that delicious tea some more. "Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that you find out about then everything stops until you've figured out what to do next."

I was off-balance. "I wanted –" I waved my hands. "I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?"

He shrugged. He really didn't seem very worried "Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs."

"What do you mean, 'the labs'?"

He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and worksurfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each others' screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling. "We've got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We're really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There's so much money in it, you know, but mostly it's run by these entitled jerks who think that they're geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys' club." For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

"Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there's a lot of difference between A/B splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters."

At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can't lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

"I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is $400, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is $2,000 a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are $20,000 for full re-plumbing on a 8-10 year basis with a 75 percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?"

"Tenancy parameters?"

He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don't like that look. I suck at it. It's an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I'm dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn't mind it so much. But I do. It's an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

"Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable setpoint of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot water temperature and volume, and so on. It's basically just a solve-for-x question, but it's one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

"And of course, it's all highly sensitive to external conditions — there's a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there's a information-theory dimension to this that's, well, it's amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies.

"Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there's a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That's just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow's dinosaurs.

"If we're going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we're disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That's why we have the labs. They're our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us — without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain-point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

"So there's not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It's possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don't really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We're not a deterministic state-machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it'd be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We're not rentiers, you understand. We don't own assets for a living. We do things with them. We're doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We're discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them — putting them to work."

His eyes glittered. "Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state-machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life-form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

"It's a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move lookahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who's pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different, because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That's fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you'd be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we'd be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You'd be saving us opportunity cost. You'd be part of our chaos-monkey.

"Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I'm not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness and perfect interactions.

"You come in here and you want me to explain, right now, what we're going to do about your piece of information. Here's your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it, we will test those models, and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inventory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?"

I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey's eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body-language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he'd been matter-of-fact, like he'd been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I'd never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

It scared me. I'd encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I'd ever seen. It had a purity that was almost… seductive.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

"I hear that I'm going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound — you've got a process-server waiting for me. That's what I hear."

Sergey shrugged. "And?"

"And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I'm out on the street?"

"What's your point?"

He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman — transhuman? — in that dispassionate mein.

"Don't kick me out of my place."

"Ah. Excuse me a second."

He finished his tea, set the cup down and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

He came back. "Done," he said. "Is there anything else? We're pretty busy around here."

"Thank you," I said. "No, that's about it."

"All right then," he said. "Are you going to leave me your documents?"

"Yes," I said, and passed him a stack of hardcopies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully at the middle and put it in one of the wide side-pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey had talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o'clock. I had to be getting home.

There was a process-server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn't done anything about Bryan's eviction.

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A Comprehensive Guide to Hospitals in Aurora, Colorado

Credit: Image by Acton Crawford | Unsplash

Hospitals in Aurora, Colorado: World-Class Facilities

Aurora is among the most popular cities in Colorado. It is home to friendly people and registered very high growth rates in the twentieth century. This growth naturally leads to the project of creating accessible, high-quality healthcare facilities.

Whether a person has lived in the area for a long time or is new to the area, there is always a need to know who to turn to for help regarding a medical emergency. Many fine hospitals and medical centers throughout Aurora provide medical care.

Hospitals in Aurora, Colorado, provide treatment for conditions such as surgeries, trauma, and other complex illnesses that affect society.

University of Colorado Hospital (UCH)

One of the hospitals in Aurora, Colorado, is the University of Colorado Hospital (UCH), a college located on the Anschutz Medical Campus. It is one of the largest and most reputable hospitals in the United States of America.

UCH is the leading healthcare facility focusing on the new wave of technology treatments and is among the best in the country. Modern diagnosis, advanced technologies, and innovative study services are available in the Level I Trauma Center, which is why it is crucial to the healthcare systems of Aurora.

Children's Hospital Colorado: Specialized Pediatric Care

Children's Hospital Colorado is an institution where families take their children for their medical requirements/needs. It is among those hospitals with an excellent reputation in the United States of America, specializing in treating infants, children, and teenagers only.

From newborn intensive care to pediatric oncology, the Hospital is staffed by high-standard and high-caliber professionals with an appreciation for their work. They adopt a family approach when handling their pediatric cases, with the latest equipment for pediatric patients, which gives parents confidence.

The Medical Center of Aurora: Comprehensive Healthcare

The Medical Center of Aurora is located in HealthONE and has become tremendously popular due to its high level of service for cardiovascular diseases and strokes. The Joint Commission accredits it as a Level II Trauma Center and offers many inpatient and outpatient services.

The treatment facility now contains a certified chest pain center and several rehabilitation departments, making it a pinnacle in Aurora. This makes the patient experience positive for any person seeking medical assistance.

Spalding Rehabilitation Hospital: Restoring Independence

Spalding Rehabilitation Hospital offers specialized rehabilitative services for patients who have undergone severe physical injury, surgery, or an illness. Recovery is the main focus of this building since the establishment offers individual treatments to the patients.

This unit provides physical, occupational, and speech therapies, including robotic physical therapy administered within Spalding. The healthcare institution is committed to offering patients the best quality care, vital in Aurora's healthcare system.

VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System: Serving Veterans

The VAMC of the Rocky Mountain region in Aurora is a newly constructed module hospital that cares for the veterans in the area. This center offers everything from primary care and mental health to an amputee program and $16 million worth of advanced prosthetics.

Special attention to outpatients and a willingness to address community needs make it an essential point for the veteran generation.

Aurora South Medical Center: Advanced Surgical Care

Aurora South, part of the Centura Health System, is the other identifiable health facility in the city. It has an emergency and trauma division and offers general surgical and orthopedic spinal surgery departments.

Aurora South is an insurance company whose range of services does not end with the fields shown above but includes women's health and oncology, thus making it a trusted brand.

Additional Medical Resources in Aurora

Apart from hospitals, Aurora has many urgent care centers and specialty clinics, which present people with other options whenever they do not require the emergency services of a hospital.

Health services such as UCHealth Urgent Care and HealthONE CareNow Urgent Care offer services to patients and clients for persons with minor complaints, injuries, and immunizations during a working day.

These clinics provide more convenient services than a hospital and ER, offering lower costs and fewer wait times than an ER for individuals requiring urgent but non-emergency attention.

It is also easy to find specialized care in Aurora. Other special niche facilities include the Colorado Blood Cancer Institute, Aurora Mental Health Center, and the Colorado Eye Institute, to mention but a few, as they contain specialized care services. Ideally, these institutions serve patients who need high-level or persistent care.

Emergency Services: Always Ready to Respond

To advance its emergency services, Aurora enjoys a strong, well-performing emergency service system that protects and safeguards the city's residents and guests 24/7. This city has one of the best emergency medical services, enabling it to respond quickly, efficiently, and in close coordination to all medical emergencies.

When a resident or visitor uses the emergency line 911, he is connected directly to a centrally located Emergency Operations Centre. The trained people evaluate the scenario and call the proper support, including an ambulance, firefighting personnel, or police officers.

As soon as the call is made, Aurora's emergency frameworks guarantee that people get the best services as early as possible.

These state-of-the-art trauma facilities imply that Aurora is ready for single-patient emergent cases as well as mass casualty incidents.

When it comes to personal injuries, disease, calamity, or any other related scenarios, the city stands to provide state-of-the-art technology, better human resources, competency, and commitment to saving people's lives. Aurora inhabitants may be satisfied to know that help is just a call away.

Making the Right Choice for Your Healthcare Needs

The factors that health consumers consider before seeking care at a specific healthcare facility include category of need, closeness, insurance acceptance, and word of mouth.

Hospitals like the University of Colorado Hospital or Spalding Rehabilitation Hospital are ideal for specialized or outpatient care. If you have an urgent need that is not a true emergency, places such as UCHealth Urgent Care can be a godsend.

In any case, Aurora's numerous healthcare centers guarantee that the inhabitants can turn to doctors when they genuinely need them.

Conclusion

Hospitals and medical centers within Aurora, Colorado, offer comprehensive solutions to healthcare issues within regions so that people may gain necessary treatment. The academic institution level is at the top of the spectrum, like the University of Colorado Hospital.

In contrast, at the lower back, focused on families, there is the Children's Hospital Colorado. Aurora has many doctors who can provide excellent primary care, whether for emergency care, a unique treatment plan, or a simple check-up. This way, you will be prepared with knowledge of these resources for whatever medical scenario you are in.

Understand the area’s appeal through our website at https://movetoaurora.com/knowledge-center/hospitals/.

Hospitals in Aurora, Colorado, offer expert care, advanced technology, and compassionate staff to meet all your medical needs.

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Easiest Way to Invest in Commercial Property with Minimum Amount

In this article, we will explore the easiest way to invest in commercial property with a minimum amount of money. While it may seem challenging at first, there are several viable strategies and investment options that can make this goal achievable.

Continue reading: Easiest Way to Invest in Commercial Property with Minimum Amount