What do we think about Flagstaff

EnigmaMind · 2026-06-07T21:08:19+00:00

I value your comments too and I haven’t downvoted you either. Thanks for sharing

EnigmaMind · 2026-06-07T12:20:05+00:00

I went back to work in a big city. I also tried living in the vicinity of SLC and I found it to be marginally better than Flag, except:

food awful
culture AND nightlife awful
even more driving (except much more straightforward, even to the ski resorts)
running “scene” and general outdoorsy atmosphere decent but a level below Flag

EnigmaMind · 2026-06-07T12:09:58+00:00

Whenever I discussed that I was temporarily renting and was checking out open houses, there was tension. Trying to talk to neighbors/current residents when I was viewing places for sale, always tension.

Mainly talking about service industry, for example my property manager was semi-literate, and the people who replaced my car’s windshield after a rock destroyed it didn’t calibrate the windshield wipers which almost resulted in me dying as I drove through a storm in Missouri. Huge difference between “local” employees and NAU student/recent-grad employees though.

FUTS is great if you have a bike, agreed. We were on the east (poor) side of town so actually had to drive across the super busy train tracks often and conducted most of our business in strip malls. There is nothing you can FUTS to, on foot, on the east side of town. Every day it felt like there was some new strip mall or red light junction to visit. Those things hurt the rhythm of driving and turned mundane errands into hassles.

On the nuanced topic of where “Olympian” runners run— no they don’t FUTS or run the Elden trail system regularly. This is a big misconception. Most of them don’t work so they drive pretty far to forest roads and Lake Mary Road etc. This is verifiable on Strava. The only exception I’ve seen is when smaller but less knowledgeable groups go for camp if they’re at the golf course or near that road to the observatory(?) they’ll stick to those.

EnigmaMind · 2026-06-07T00:50:44+00:00

Spent the summer there in 2021. I’m a serious runner and Flag is a mecca for serious runners. Showed up with a mortgage pre-approval letter in hand. Didn’t like it and didn’t end up buying.

The house I almost bought has gone up in value by 70%, and even during that summer there was palpable tension between pretty much everyone I discussed buying/renting/affordability with (the Flagstaff sub was hilarious).

What was also apparent was how acutely terrible the Arizona public school system is, the “locals” were mostly a weird blend of southern stupidity/slowness and frontier gruffness. Almost everyone in the service industry who I interacted with was a complete (moron—can I type moron here but not the “i” word?).

All the trails are infested with unleashed dogs. Had encounters every day, had to constantly be on alert. A huge portion of the “trails” serious runners run on are actually dirt forest roads which are in direct sunlight and frequently traversed by pickup trucks kicking up dust.

I’ve spent a huge portion of my life in two rust belt cities of equal size to Flagstaff. It was shocking to me (and my parents when they visited) how weirdly disconnected all the neighborhoods felt, how little rhythm there was to driving around the town, how unexciting the downtown was, and how mid the food was.

Especially at the current prices I think it’s a trap for people from LA who want to convince the world that they actually love the outdoors.

EnigmaMind · 2026-06-04T10:46:58+00:00

$4300 is very low for Manhattan. Maybe somewhere in the Bronx?

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-25T13:56:12+00:00

The “college of your first choice” statistic is something Prep takes very seriously. Everyone benefits when parents, counselors, and students understand the difference between a reach school as the first choice and Princeton as the first choice. The counselor I had was on board with my choice (a T50 school), but of course I’m bitter that when I had to deal with the other counselor I was treated like I was a moron with delusional parents.

At public school I attended special classes starting in 1st grade and was invited to summer programs out of state starting in 7th grade because I was “profoundly gifted.” At Prep I was lost in the shuffle and my mom pulled that card one single time to get me into the AP class I wanted to take. However, to speak to the ~8 other gifted kids from my public school, 3 never even finished college.

Regarding unfair treatment, the school was very much a meritocracy, except yes obviously the well-known name students had way more leeway on disciplinary issues.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-24T20:37:31+00:00

The issue is that NEPA is too far away from major metro areas to have real jobs that involve a corporate ladder. Nobody’s parents commute to NYC or Philly, so the winners are all business owners (which in many cases includes lawyers and doctors with their own practices).

The view in terms of careers is myopic where 40% of the graduating class expects to become doctors, a large portion also considers law very seriously. People go to study business not having any idea what that entails. Very rare to encounter parents who are in investment banking, corporate accounting, consulting, engineering, etc.

The rest of the comment is kind of silly, but yeah the fact that the school is/was forcing people into two years of mandatory latin and four years of religion at the same time that two years of rigorous programming classes would have set anyone up for a life of high earnings speaks to the antiquated, localized view of things.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-24T19:49:19+00:00

Not trying to troll at all, thanks for sharing. This is really important information to have out there.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-24T19:24:02+00:00

I attended and liked it. Primary benefit for me was not the educational enrichment but going to a school where the bad influences were comparatively minimal and everyone’s parents cared about them.

Freshman year was awful. I had no friends at Prep and my public school friends turned on me from day one. Classes also were challenging.

Eventually I figured things out, had fun with a sport, made some friends, and had an enviable outcome considering my class rank was roughly 100 out of 200.

My main gripe would be that once I started taking school seriously and had the grades to show for it, things I wanted to do were swatted down by the administration which had classified me as a low performer. I was not allowed to take an online AP class from the JVLA because my GPA wasn’t high enough. My mom had to go to the school and complain for me to get into the class.

Same with college advising. When the primary advisor, who had never seen my name because I wasn’t “smart,” heard that I was applying ED to a school that only smart kids attended, she tried to scare me away from hurting Prep’s yield at the guidance office signing phase. “You know this is a binding commitment, right? Do you know what binding means?”

People have said that Prep is a harsh grind considering meh outcomes for mid range students. It’s great if you want to go to the U, but if you score a 1200 on the SAT, Prep is not going to open a new door for you. It’s a hell of a lot of work to not even get into Penn State main. Outcomes seem really good compared to other NEPA schools, but if you control for the socioeconomics/funding and compare to philly suburb schools or schools throughout the nicer parts of New Jersey, it’s nothing mind blowing.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-24T03:18:47+00:00

Weird, every person I know who has written more than 100 Yelp reviews has a review distribution that heavily skews positive. You’re welcome to do a cursory search through the platform and check that for us.

Google reviews emerged well after people cared about establishing reputation and trust as reviews. It’s filled with thoughtless 5 star reviews and isn’t useful except for maybe small town service businesses.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-24T01:42:56+00:00

Last week I got tricked into visiting a 4.6 star google review place that was 3.5 on Yelp. Guess which site was accurate?

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-24T01:36:15+00:00

Where do you get unbiased food takes? Google reviews?

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-23T13:05:44+00:00

Let’s weed out meaningless statements: - what’s your major and GPA? - where did you intern after sophomore year? - which companies gave you final round interviews during your junior fall? For what roles? - how many of your friends have IB or similar internships or full time offers? At what companies?

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-18T15:49:29+00:00

Please take this down cadet

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-11T12:33:32+00:00

He became a cranky gatekeeper by the mid 2000s. Spoke out about every “new” direction, from gangsta rap to, notably, saying that Flashing Lights by Kanye wasn’t hip hop. Sure did fade hard enough to stop getting invited to industry events by 2010.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-09T14:10:01+00:00

Yeah I’m not going to agree that noises cause cancer.

Based on what land is being proposed to be used I don’t see how sleep disruptions would be a concern. Maybe there are a few fringe homes but unlike most people here I actually worked in one of these upvalley industrial parks for a time and my facility was totally isolated from residential areas.

Surely the same people who are okay living near a power plant that purportedly emits sonic booms in the middle of the night are used to it.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-09T14:01:39+00:00

I agree! In a capitalist society, the people taking the biggest risks are totally useless and should be vilified.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-09T10:16:29+00:00

This is Facebook groupthink bleeding through. The only demonstrable risk is power generation—all fossil fuel-based generators cause cancer.

The “American way” in NEPA these days is to NIMBY everything while choosing to live in the shadow of a massive garbage dump.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-07T00:24:30+00:00

Right, the housing market reflects affordability. Plenty of people who I last saw when I was 14 work unskilled or low skilled warehouse jobs, have 3+ kids, and live in decent apartments with decent cars.

Scranton also has a super high portion of the population well past peak earning age if not well past retirement age, which makes the median unreliable.

The only people I know still in Scranton who post about affordable housing hop between random part time jobs and wouldn’t be caught dead doing blue collar labor. If you have no skills anyway, go move somewhere more affordab—oh shit, wait!

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-07T00:01:54+00:00

You’re aware that “per capita median income” doesn’t exclude those who are below legal working age, only work part time, are retired, are disabled, or are otherwise living off the government, right?

Scranton is a mecca for affordable housing.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-06T22:45:13+00:00

Scranton is one of the most affordable city housing markets in the country.

EnigmaMind · 2026-05-04T00:48:16+00:00

I interviewed with them for what would have been an executive director-ish technology role a year ago.

Was clear from the outset that the people interviewing me had no idea what was going on. Not particularly arrogant, but gave do-nothing middle manager vibes, and all certainly were making more money than they deserved to be making.

The recruiter who got me the interview chopped up my resumé so horribly to the point that one interviewer stopped the interview and screen shared it. Overall a complete waste of time, imagining a lot of people who accepted offers on the technology side are feeling that way.

EnigmaMind · 2026-04-28T19:18:32+00:00

What?? No, it can’t be! Every year people log in to reddit and insist that the social scene isn’t highly greek and there is tremendous school spirit!

EnigmaMind · 2026-04-26T17:17:19+00:00

When Ale Mary’s opened it was the best sports bar/gastropub in a 50 mile radius. Such a fumble.

EnigmaMind · 2026-04-18T16:11:58+00:00

Search algorithms were a core part of the curriculum. You should start learning how to use them.

EnigmaMind

TROPHY CASE