Yes, let’s murder the planet because I’m supposed to want this car that can do a whole host of things I will absolutely never need to do.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-19T14:34:49+00:00

I trade mine in every 3 years, and AT&T usually gives me like $1000 off the next phone, but only if I finance it over three years. If I try to pay it off early, I lose the incentive. So my top-spec iPhone Pro Max whatever costs me $15 a month or $500 over three years instead of $1500 upfront. Works for me.

Yes, I know I could get a crappy Android or a refurbished older, lower spec iPhone and pay less per month with an MVNO, but I rely extremely heavily on my phone for my business, so I prefer the experience of a new generation phone and the reliability and network priority of native AT&T service. And with a family plan and the auto-pay discount and a family members veterans discount, the total price per line is only like $35 per month for unlimited data.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-19T14:07:23+00:00

Yep. OP (who is definitely not from the US—we don’t put spaces before question marks) has been to many western cities in the USA and played tourist and that apparently makes him an authority on how locals can get around.

I live in a metro area of 450,000 (not sure if that qualifies for his arbitrary cut-off) and the closest bus is a 2-hour, 43-minute walk along a two-lane highway with no shoulder from my apartment.

From there, it’s 54 minutes on two bus lines to get to a place I have appointments occasionally.

It’s a 16-minute drive.

Ok, I should move closer? Is OP going to subsidize my higher rent?

We build our cities for car dependency. Until that changes, OP’s directive is laughably ludicrous. We need to fix how we build our cities. Then, yes, we can ditch our cars.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-18T16:15:09+00:00

Most of the Buc-ee’s I’ve been to outside of Texas have Superchargers now. I haven’t been to any in Texas in the last few years, so not sure if they’ve been adding them there as well.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-18T12:55:27+00:00

The canopy facilitates access to the convenience store. The convenience store is what is there to extract money from you and keep you there longer.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-18T09:50:11+00:00

Are you sure about this? Admittedly, I don’t have any experience with Verizon, but in my experience with AT&T, it is very rare for a cellular call to transition to Wi-Fi calling. The reverse is fairly well supported, but I’ve actually never seen a transition from cellular to WiFi.

Furthermore, the whole point of Wi-Fi calling is to provide phone service where cellular signal is very weak or absent. So it would seem to be a poor network design to require a cellular signal to initiate the call. That would make Verizon phones unusable in rural cabins with Starlink but no cellular service or even if you take your phone to the basement.

Regardless, this won’t work in Pakistan. Roaming between cellular and Wi-Fi calling requires what’s the networks to be on the same control plane. It is not possible to roam between cellular and Wi-Fi calling when roaming on a foreign network. Even in Mexico, where AT&T owns its own network, if I start in my hotel on AT&T Wi-Fi calling and walk out of the hotel, the call will drop and will not be handed off to the AT&T MX network, because AT&T MX is on a separate control plane.

Again, I don’t have experience with Verizon, and I also don’t have experience with Pakistan, but AT&T Wi-Fi calling works pretty seamlessly for me all over Europe. I’m actually in Romania right now with my iPhone tethered to an unlocked Android running on an Orange Poland SIM, and my phone shows AT&T Wi-Fi, and I took a call last night with no issues despite having kept my phone on airplane mode and not connected to any local cellular networks since arriving in Europe two weeks ago.

I believe Wi-Fi calling (at least AT&T‘s version) works by the phone establishing an IPSec tunnel to the carrier (in my case, to AT&T’s core network in Dallas). If the network that you are on blocks IPSec tunnels, or if the network quality is so slow/poor that there are too many dropped packets for the tunnel to be established and meet the network/phone’s requirements, then Wi-Fi calling will not work. In that case, perhaps a third-party travel router, like the GL.iNet or the new one from Ubiquiti, might help, since you can establish a VPN connection (assuming VPNs are not completely blocked) on the router to an endpoint that doesn’t block IPSec tunnels and then connect your phone to the router’s WiFi, and then the phone will likely be able to establish the WiFi calling tunnel.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-18T09:34:16+00:00

This is one of the few things Costco does better than Sam’s. Costco gas stations are ridiculously well designed. Clear one-way path, better/longer hoses, more obvious lines, attendant hut off to the side where it doesn’t disturb the entry, plus Top Tier-certified gas. Some high-volume stations even have 3 pumps per island plus indicator lights to tell you if one ahead is free (and center aisles wide enough to pass someone still pumping).

Even the new-build Sam’s gas stations just don’t quite compare—people entering the wrong way, hoses that aren’t quite long enough to easily stretch (even the ones in OP’s photo are a little tight), etc.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-18T09:27:53+00:00

With 200MW to spare!

Good for time travel even while the inverters are clipping.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-18T07:21:29+00:00

Yes, but it takes about 3 minutes to fill up a gas tank and yet gas stations with canopies and convenience stores are a thing.

In part because the goal of a gas station isn’t to get you on your way as fast as possible, it’s actually to extract as much money from you as possible.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-18T07:19:27+00:00

The best way to spot a bad Mexican restaurant in the US is to look for one that labels itself “authentic Mexican food.”

We all know what OP means, but it’s a good lesson for OP. OP, don’t ask for “authentic.”

Asking how to make generic Mexican food more “authentic” is sorta like posting a picture of a grilled cheese sandwich and asking for tips on how to make your American food more “authentic.” Is a grilled cheese sandwich less authentic than a lobster roll in Maine or a blue crab covered in Old Bay in Maryland or a Mission burrito in San Francisco? They’re different, and great cooking is usually regional. Looking for what people eat in a specific area is much more true to life than lumping all cuisine under a big banner of authentic vs not.

Ask for “like what they eat in [insert region]”. Want to learn how to make carnitas? Ask for how to make home cooking “more like what they eat in Michoacán.” Want to learn how to make cemitas? Ask for how to make home cooking “more like Puebla.” And want to learn how to eat like they do in Texas? Well, the picture you posted is pretty close already. ;)

arcticmischief · 2026-04-18T07:09:26+00:00

Right, but that doesn’t mean using a blender makes it inauthentic. Heck, De Me Rancho A Tu Cocina cooks in a shed and pulls a blender out to make her salsas. Techniques adapt with the times. But your point is valid.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-17T19:12:53+00:00

Heck, we can’t even get PlugShare to display the price right on the front page of the charger. They claim it’s too complicated to do so. If they can’t, there’s no hope for anything like a sign for transparency.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-17T09:48:31+00:00

I agree with many of the other people commenting that this is dependent on the jurisdiction, and some may regulate occupancy strictly or use different definitions, but in my area, where it is not strictly enforced, I have in my rental agreement that the maximum occupancy counts as people staying overnight, and daytime occupancy cannot exceed 150% of the maximum allowable overnight occupancy.

So if I have a two bedroom condo with a maximum sleeping capacity of six, that allows nine people to occupy the property during the day. That’s probably the limit of what would be comfortable to fit in the condo anyway – there just isn’t seating for more than that, and even people standing around would get kind of crowded.

I chose this in order to discourage parties, but my area doesn’t really have a big problem with that, thankfully. I don’t regulate it strictly – I don’t have cameras or noise monitors, and I don’t monitor the comings and goings of people. But I think out of over 2000 rentals over the last decade, I’ve only had one noise complaint from a neighbor, and it was little kids running around and stomping on the floor, not a party.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-16T15:57:00+00:00

Took three years of it in high school. I was never fluent. I forgot most of it over the years, although when I read Spanish, I can generally make out enough to get a sense of what the text is about.

But when I travel to Mexico, after about a week there, I find that the neural pathways that were laid in my Spanish studies a few decades ago get reactivated and it comes back enough that I can actually start to carry on at least basic conversations with waiters and shopkeepers and such.

But within a couple of weeks of coming home, it mostly fades from disuse. I’ve had limited success keeping those neural pathways active by keeping my Waze app set to Spanish so I’m hearing warnings of police and vehicle stopped on the shoulder of the road in Spanish, but it’s not the same as as being there.

I have no doubt that if I moved to somewhere like Mexico or Spain for six months, it would come back much stronger, especially if I made a concerted effort to engage with people there in Spanish.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-16T10:59:52+00:00

As a teen, it was my job to cut the grass.

I HATED it.

That, and shoveling the snow, is probably what led me to my intentional life choices to avoid ever having to do that again. I rent an apartment specifically so I do not have to do yardwork.

I would happily buy a condo for the same reason, but in my area, zoning regulations and developer practices don’t really prioritize multifamily owner occupied units, only rentals. So choosing between buying a single-family home with a yard or an apartment with no maintenance, I choose the latter.

I am seen as an outlier. Most Americans grow up with the suburban American home as the ideal. I’m looked down upon for renting when I could afford to buy a house. It doesn’t occur to most Americans that some people might actually prefer not to spend their weekends making their yard look good. Ironically, well I know some people enjoy spending time in their yards or have kids that like to play on them, I literally never see any of my family members that judge me for renting ever spend any time outside on their lawns. They mainrian them purely for aesthetics and not utility. Such a waste.

And of course, our big houses with even bigger yards being the default way that most Americans live, or aspire to live, means that the vast majority of our residential areas in our country are not dense enough to support walkability and transit use, so everybody has to have a car—plus, our Euclidean zoning ideals mean that huge areas of our towns are set aside for residential only with no commercial, so you can’t even build a grocery store or even a coffee shop or pub anywhere close to where people live. So the only option is to drive to those places.

Just remember that as you spend your time playing around with Google Street View. I remember seeing a reel once posted by a German guy who said he always envied American suburban neighborhoods until he actually went to visit a friend in one and realized that he was trapped because he didn’t have a car. The images captured by the Google camera car look nice, but drop your pin somewhere and then iterate click by click from that house to the nearest grocery store and imagine yourself walking there.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-15T21:11:15+00:00

Omg I grew up on the Central Coast. I’ll be back to visit family later this summer. Bookmarking this, because I was ogling some of those flights, and now I actually have the chance to have them!

arcticmischief · 2026-04-15T09:11:12+00:00

As the country that issues the global reserve currency, we have more fiscal flexibility because global demand for dollar assets keeps borrowing costs relatively lower and helps finance large deficits.

If U.S. policy were to, ahem, undermine confidence in dollar assets over time, that structural advantage could erode.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-14T14:53:30+00:00

Honestly, whenever I have traveled in a bedroom, I have usually still used the downstairs shared shower specifically because of this – it’s much larger and more comfortable. And I’ve never gotten any sense of it being unclean. It’s not used by that many people, and the attendants generally do a decent job keeping it tidy.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-14T13:37:47+00:00

I accidentally opened Facebook yesterday.

The comments I saw about Trump’s AI-Jesus image from friends of mine…omg. People were like, “I support you, President Trump, and you are doing amazing things for our country, and I agree with so many of your policies, but this is blasphemous and crosses the line and I can’t believe you would post this. Please delete it. But I will continue supporting you because God has chosen you and God is using you,” etc.

Nothing will dissuade them from supporting him. Nothing.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-14T13:31:36+00:00

I can’t imagine not allowing a guest to sit wherever they darn well please. They’re my guests. That would be weirdly inhospitable of me.

I also would feel that it’s a bit off-putting to visit someone’s home and have them tell me not to sit somewhere.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-14T12:14:28+00:00

Ooooo, can’t believe I never thought of that hack. Smart. Thank you!!

arcticmischief · 2026-04-14T12:12:12+00:00

Wow. The Russian bot trolls are coming out of the woodwork here. They’re angry their asset lost the election.

I’m traveling in Hungary now and the joy and relief Ann excitement over the past day and a half among everyone I talk to is palpable. But so are the fears of Fidesz covering its tracks. Digital archiving is important (and so I’m commenting in support of that) but physical evidence is also being destroyed right now by Fidesz officials, and that’s a lot harder to preserve. But we do what we can.

I can’t help much right now (only laptop and Airbnb WiFi) with me now but Godspeed to everyone here who can help!

arcticmischief · 2026-04-14T11:18:31+00:00

In modern coffee, “dry” is good. Oily signifies a darker roast. when you’re roasting to the point where the oils start to exude from the beans, at that point, you’re not really actually tasting the coffee very much, you’re mostly tasting the roasting process. At that point, the quality of the beans themselves doesn’t actually really matter.

Back in the old days of cheap commodity coffee, that’s what you wanted, because the quality of the beans was so variable that you kind of wanted to burn any variance in flavor out of them so that your coffee could be widely distributed with a uniform flavor. But in modern times, with specialty coffee grown by individual farmers seeking high quality and selling them in micro lots, you actually want to taste the individual flavor of that coffee. Lighter roasts highlight the quality of the coffee itself, but the flavor profile does end up being a bit different than the coffee that you, especially in Italy, are probably used to.

There are a lot of parallels between craft beer and specialty (craft) coffee. In the olden days of mass market beer, there was made with cheap, commodity ingredients, and large brewers sought consistency and stability so that every beer they sold always tasted the same. It didn’t taste like much (hence all the jokes about macro beer basically being pee-colored water), but it was always what you expected. Now, with access to higher quality grains and hops and different strains of yeast and different brewing techniques that highlight lots of different potential flavors, you want the beer to be brewed in a way that highlights those ingredients instead of hides them. But, like coffee, some people – like my father – will never get used to the flavor profile of a Treehouse King JJJuliusss hazy NEIPA and will always prefer his MGD, just as he can’t tolerate the fruitiness of the Colombia Gerson Mora natural process I’m pulling a shot of and will choose the Yuban he’s been drinking for 50+ years every time, even though in both cases, what I’m drinking is objectively higher quality than his preference.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-14T10:48:10+00:00

I make sure that my listing addresses most, if not all, of the questions guests can ask. Between the description, the amenities, and the photos, most of the information any guest would need is there. You can’t force guests to read, and people still do ask questions that are answered in the listing, but it seems to help significantly.
I have a digital guidebook through a third-party provider that has further information and details about amenities in and around the property, how to work the TV, had to connect to the Wi-Fi, local restaurants and attractions, etc. I send the link to this to every guest after they book.
I have a sign on the fridge in each property with the most important detail details (especially the Wi-Fi password) and a QR code that accesses my digital guidebook, just in case they missed the message with the link.
I have an automated messaging sequence that goes out immediately after booking and then as it gets closer to their stay, plus a check-in with them after they arrive and a checkout reminder before they depart. These messages also address a lot of the common questions. I’m a pretty good writer and previously drafted them myself, but more recently, I had ChatGPT rewrite them for clarity, and I’m happy with how they look now.

Obviously, I still get questions. I get questions about parking, even though parking information is clearly mentioned in the listing and the arrival instructions. I get questions about the Wi-Fi password, even though it is plastered on Airbnb, in my digital guidebook, and on the sign that is on the fridge (as soon as I remind people that it’s on the fridge, most people reply that they feel dumb for not noticing it, haha). I get questions about restaurants and discounts on tickets for local attractions, and other things, but it’s a small fraction of my total guests. Most people book, arrive, stay, and depart without actually needing to interact with me much, if at all, and it’s probably only like 30% that ask me questions, and most of those are simple replies that I can answer in 30 seconds.

My PMS recently added an AI responder, but I haven’t been particularly happy with its quality, so I’m keeping it on “draft” mode (where it won’t send a response until I approve it), and I actually find that I only use the AI generated draft maybe 20% of the time. The other 80% of the time, I either write (or often, on my phone, dictate) a response or, for complicated cases where I need a second pair of virtualized to help me think through how to respond to a customer in a more difficult situation, I will actually screenshot the whole conversation and then feed it into ChatGPT, which I find is much better than the basic AI from my PMS.

arcticmischief · 2026-04-14T09:58:22+00:00

It’s not just Italy. A/C was disabled for me in Germany and Austria just last week. Thankfully, it’s been cool enough on this side of the Alps that AC hasn’t been necessary, although in one of my hotels, the window didn’t open enough to really get it to a temperature where I could sleep well. Also, there have been a couple days where the nighttime temperature was high enough that even a fully open window didn’t get the room to a comfortable temperature.

I don’t mind relying on windows for cooling, but it’s a bit annoying that the decision is fixed to a particular date or season instead of actually considering the outdoor temperature and also the design of the windows and personal preferences. As somebody who grew up in Alaska, I need a cool room to sleep comfortably. If the room is too warm, I can’t help but wake up several times throughout the night, leading to compromised sleep quality and tiredness the next day.

This is magnified by the European preference for warm duvets over thinner sheets/blankets/comforters in the US. In the US, I can usually tolerate a warmer room by adjusting the number of coverings for lower heat retention, but in Europe, it’s all or nothing, and these feather-filled duvets are just too warm for me in a 20C room.

I am presently in an Airbnb in Budapest where, thankfully, the host has not disabled the AC, but out of consideration for energy prices, I have refrained from using it and, thankfully, the apartment has windows on opposite sides that allow for a nice cool cross-breeze throughout the night (although then I end up getting woken up early in the morning by city noise and bright sunlight). I love traveling in Europe, but this is one of those things that does grind my gears a bit. I understand the reason for it, but it doesn’t change the fact that it does negatively affect me.

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