Comment by cucumber3732842

Eh, you're gonna piss off a lot of jerks with the bit about communism and while you're not directly right, you're absolutely correct to be barking up the tree of central planning.

Everything looks the same these days because everything has to comply with local implementations of state implementations of the same federal regulations because that's how we do things in the US.

Feds take all the money. Feds doll it back out to the state in the form of grants with strings (drinking age is probably the most famous). States implement said strings which really means tell the locals to do it for the most part. And the states and locals are happy to enforce whatever if it means that the feds pick up 50% of the tab of that new traffic light they need that's 49% more expensive because it's built to federal standards, or whatever. Maybe it's a school thing or a sewer upgrade or whatever.

So then you get this stupid paradigm where even stuff that isn't McDicks or some other national chain with a brand they want to be consistent still gets built to look the same because it's complying with the same guidelines about turn radiuses and stormwater planters and interior/exterior light levels, etc, etc, etc and at any given point in time there's only one or a few cheapest ways to do all that. Any deviation is purely surface level, a custom color on a tile or panel. Chili's gets a brass chili for the door pull. The weed dispensary across the street gets a blunt. But it's still the same goddamn vestibule entrance built to the same dimensions that the same calculation spits out.