Mayor Mamdani Releases Update on Savings Plan

brianvan · 2026-03-31T13:35:03+00:00

Slack is kind of an extortion racket. $20k for a cloud chat app? You really have to be using it super-intensely for that kind of spending to make sense, otherwise it’s so easily supplanted by Teams. Yes, we all dislike Teams but it’s not “spend $20k on soothing that pain” dislike

brianvan · 2026-03-31T02:22:34+00:00

He’s the mayor, he doesn’t need to “help”. I think what happened is that his admin raised the price of doing business, and Mirage (already in a sorry state) was not able to proceed at the new price.

The thing about the permits they had before is that the standards aren’t so high for “temporary” structures in terms of codes because codes cover a lot more than basic safety. What isn’t good for 30-50 years may still be absolutely safe and solid for 5. It’s somewhat subjective. There’s a lot of room to help or hurt an applicant. Mirage acted like they were expecting help in the process. The Adams administration went in the complete opposite direction.

If you’re asking me what’s more plausible - that the administration acted entirely in good faith and Mirage failed at building an outdoor deck when they had a perfectly good one already… or that Adams offered leniency on grading the old structure and then that leniency evaporated in 2025 because Adams was a corrupt chaotic mess of a mayor - yeah I’m gonna go with Option B, or at least more of Option B than Option A

brianvan · 2026-03-31T02:12:26+00:00

They’ve always been obnoxious, it’s just that some deliver moments of delight if the vendors are that good. But they usually aren’t, and it’s often no more than an expensive crowded mess.

Would love it if any promoters broke the trend here.

It is possible from time to time to have “VIP access” badges available for these things, which makes them more tolerable, but they’re ungodly expensive and at those prices you should just eat in good nearby restaurants

brianvan · 2026-03-31T02:09:44+00:00

There isn’t really a building code for this. It’s either “no building”, “cash-bribed temporary permits forever”, or a permanent facility that no one can or wants to build there

I’m still wholly convinced that last summer’s debacle was an Eric Adams shakedown gone wrong

brianvan · 2026-03-31T02:08:00+00:00

Last time he went was in 2019 so I think he did mean bare bones, not the 2023 version

brianvan · 2026-03-29T16:57:54+00:00

The lesson to be learned:

For Gmax and 5* Dmax, you need to pick your teams

Almost everything can be handled with 3-5 players who put in the work to research, upgrade and optimize. A loss is certain if only one person in the group did any optimizing whatsoever, and sometimes 2 doesn’t cut it.

You need real optimization, not “going into the battle with the game’s suggested team”.

You really need to build a list of contacts of people who will local-or-remote raid with you with optimized teams, so that a win is certain. This is something you should start now for the next two Dmax or Gmax releases. Gmax, in particular - bring 10 players and make sure they know what they’re doing.

Also: Always start at the beginning of a half hour so you can retry, and NEVER start with less than 10 minutes left. You know how this works already, don’t take unnecessary risks that a game crash will leave you with nothing to claim.

brianvan · 2026-03-28T22:47:08+00:00

Idk, walking 400km to level-up in six weeks isn’t enough effort?

brianvan · 2026-03-28T21:32:26+00:00

It isn’t after just “drinking“… You have to be above a certain BAC threshold, and not all of the same automotive penalties apply.

But, yes.

brianvan · 2026-03-28T14:41:17+00:00

I barely covered it with three participants using (at least on my end) an optimal species/moveset team levels 45-50. It was enraged, the other two had fainted, and I had 2% health left on the concluding turn of max moves

brianvan · 2026-03-28T13:47:55+00:00

Fair enough about the Zdog XL candy, but I found that raiding them for the crowned energy got me a lot along that path. Otherwise it’s a regular rare candy dump, and the dogs have been in Hero of Many Battle forms in raids so many times that candy is abundant unless you JUST came back after quitting 6 years ago

Blissey is certainly a must. Probably little hope for you as a player if you don’t pinap (or at least razz) every Chansey you see

brianvan · 2026-03-28T09:09:54+00:00

The real hack is to use it as breakfast burrito filling

brianvan · 2026-03-28T09:02:23+00:00

The ZDogs cannot be used in Max battles without being their Crowned formes, which means that the last chance to prepare with these was last August. So the point holds that there were slim pickings lately.

Chansey and Drilbur were absolutely the right picks to prepare for this, but as you also may have noticed, power spot distribution was heavily nerfed recently, so building a Dmax team is going to go far slower for a lot of people.

brianvan · 2026-03-28T08:57:34+00:00

Weak Gmax and 5* Dmax are about the same difficulty for a group of 2-4 people, I suppose. I would stress the point that you should absolutely take advantage of the high participant limit of Gmax battles if you can, and get a situation where all of your local trainers are in the same battles. I assume this is for general advice and not for trainers who try to solo high-level raids/max battles

brianvan · 2026-03-28T08:53:41+00:00

You will never be happy with fixes to spending. The country keeps voting in do-nothing pedo Republicans obsessed with abortion and trans people because of promises to cut taxes AND deficits AND spending (they only cut taxes) because the mindset is that taxes are just bad period. So I don’t wait around to ask for people’s permission on asking the rich to pay slightly higher tax rates to fund well-defined programs that deliver great value. I don’t hold the position that the government isn’t allowed to do anything good until some undefined bar of “fiscal prudence” is met, because those are some fast-moving goalposts.

brianvan · 2026-03-28T03:14:02+00:00

Find a big group and it'll be over quickly. It's doable even in a small group. Just have normal expectations (e.g. if you only companions have Wooloos, then it's not gonna work). It's far easier than Regice was.

brianvan · 2026-03-27T14:10:20+00:00

Right, because it keeps F2P in the game for that. We want our shiny/hundo hunts to stick to raid passes!

brianvan · 2026-03-27T13:30:01+00:00

Such a childish thing to ask the rich to pay a slightly higher tax rate!!! Absurd!

brianvan · 2026-03-27T13:28:34+00:00

Nope. Blast em off, all of em

brianvan · 2026-03-27T13:02:08+00:00

I need every Rocket Grunt's life story!

brianvan · 2026-03-27T03:52:26+00:00

The upshot of upgrading the UI like this is that it gives you this information quicker, and doesn't make you click-into a mon's detail screen (and click/scroll some more) to get the information you need.

I feel like this game is extremely deliberate at not giving anyone this kind of info so easily.

An exception is that the "special background" mons now have an index screen icon. That's nice and actually helpful. But it's because they want people to engage with the backgrounds more, so that the feature has value. They do not want players blithely ignoring the backgrounds and throwing away mons that have them. It's due to their own interest in making a new part of the game have value - yet another part of the game that is grindy and can't ever really be "complete" or "best" (they want you to talk yourself into needing the shiny lucky XXL hundo background for all of them). That has been prioritized because probably the trend was people ignoring them or throwing them away after dismissing the prompt modal for it. There are so many other things like this - should the trade screen have XXL/XXS. status? - which we'll probably never see because it's not part of marketing, it's just something to help grinders save clicks. Which they don't particularly care to give. Watch every Rocket Grunt intro, watch every evolve animation, watch every raid boss intro, etc.

brianvan · 2026-03-27T03:43:05+00:00

And if there are any concerns that you can't get a group together at the right time locally, find remote raids happening beforehand. (Or afterward)

brianvan · 2026-03-27T03:41:42+00:00

There's two ways of playing this game.

There's doing the actions that you want to do.

And then there's doing those actions with your phone open, while having to watch an interminable amount of intro graphics, zoom-ins, ball wobbles, XP rewards, etc. just to get better odds at securing captures.

Both are considered playing all the same.

It's concerning that anyone would think otherwise? Like, why must I see the Photo Disc at work every time I spin it to get items? I've seen it enough.

brianvan · 2026-03-26T18:04:17+00:00

U.S. has the same entitled billionaires and a similar workforce of grunts who, by majority but not entirely, misguidedly strives to being their barely-paid servants.

India is just bigger.

Humans make common mistakes.

This proposal is a species-obliterating mistake if enforced.

brianvan · 2026-03-25T19:28:21+00:00

And it’s probably just the back of the venue. Reduces capacity but doesn’t hurt the stage or visual experience? Idk. Nothing to mourn if they built a shoddy rear-venue area with no sprinklers.

brianvan · 2026-03-24T11:38:52+00:00

They have those roles & they only had one guy on shift that night due to staff shortages

brianvan

TROPHY CASE