Now imagine a forward thinking municipality that subsidizes development of such pods, both construction and renting. Alongside dense walkable areas. It'd be great for business. And I'd wanna live there!
Imagine paying $700 and not having personal toilet, kitchen, bathroom, a place to keep your things or even a place to comfortably sleep/sit. This is pure exploitation unless it's an exotic tourist attraction.
That's basically what is intended. Since people live in a pod, they'll eat out more often so that's more money extracted from them. Gotta keep the economy going, right?
Spend a few days in the city, but have a larger more affordable house elsewhere away from the madness.
also, this could be a way people "return to office" possibly until a job with sane policies comes around.
(of course the curtain bit is unsettling and not sane)
Practically nobody can afford to do this. Everywhere is about nickel and diming people to be present there. Society has a very terribly serious rent-seeking problem.
Expected value for most people's interactions economically is negative, meaning they pay more out than they receive for their other inputs. How else does the casin... err social entitlement ponzis, do-no-work bureaucracies and administrations, etc, survive? Somebody pays the house.
What is needed is very high corporate taxes, and high taxes on any rent-based (interest, service fees [Netflix, Spotify, your ISP], etc) income after deductions but before dividends or buybacks. We must realign our society back to production if we want to return to material wealth and not end up navel-gazing in poverty like S. Asia.* We can do each others haircuts and oil changes until we're out of clippers and oil, but if not enough clippers and oil are being produced then we're all going to be materially poorer as GNP rises.
(* Spidey's conspiracy-sense: I wonder if some of the push for mindfulness and other S. Asian esoterism lately isn't an attempt at a civilizational software patch on the West, using memetic components evolved to deal with abject poverty in the S. Asian continent over centuries, in preparation for an upcoming sundowning of western economic hegemony. Statecraft has as one of its requisites maintaining order and decorum of the citizen-human livestock.)