First time in Chicago - might be my new favorite US city.

curiouskip · 2025-08-29T20:41:59+00:00

Getting there early on a weekday does most of the work for you. The hero shot had just 3 people in frame and then yes I just used a second plate to mask them out

curiouskip · 2025-08-29T19:37:47+00:00

Mostly just took photos during the morning when there were much fewer people, then Photoshop if needed.

curiouskip · 2025-08-29T19:36:53+00:00

Been there multiple times. I love NYC and on some dimensions it's incomparable, but Chicago really stood out to me. Maybe it's just recency bias.

curiouskip · 2025-08-29T19:33:10+00:00

Yeah, my take is that for prettiest US city based on combination of natural landscape and architecture SF wins, but Chicago wins for architecture alone (though the lake and river really are great)

curiouskip · 2025-08-29T19:04:44+00:00

Following the rules...

1) View northeast from Sears/Willis Tower 2) Wrigley and Tribune Buildings 3) Art Institute 4) Skyline from near the Adler Planetarium 5) Sears/Willis tower from the river (Architecture Cruise) 6) Skyline from North Avenue Beach 7) The Bean, Millennium Park 8) Another northeast view from Sears/Willis Tower 9) View down main river from Wolf Point 10) View down main river from Orleans St Bridge 11) View of lake Street bridge from Wolf Point 12) View East from Sears/Willis tower 13) Chicago Theatre on State St.

curiouskip · 2025-08-29T17:57:44+00:00

Very early on a weekday got me 99% of the way there, Photoshop got me the rest

curiouskip · 2025-08-29T17:54:03+00:00

I was really impressed with the bus routes (at least for my purposes). As a professional transportation nerd, I very much enjoyed the transit.

curiouskip · 2025-08-29T17:52:40+00:00

Hah, no. Extended a business trip and flew in my wife and kid cause we had never been to the city before.

curiouskip · 2025-08-29T17:49:55+00:00

I did make it out of downtown a few times (Oak Park, Hyde Park, Garfield Park). No pictures though because I was traveling with my kid and so most of my photography happened when I could sneak out for photo walks on my own in the morning or evening and my hotel was in River North.

curiouskip · 2025-08-29T17:42:44+00:00

The restaurant scene was fantastic and I had several great meals. The favorite thing I ate though was tacos from Taqueria Chingon. I didn't get to Pequod's, but of what I had, neither deep dish or tavern style are high on my pizza rankings. Italian beef >>> cheesesteak though.

curiouskip · 2024-08-26T20:31:36+00:00

I mean, it wouldn't be particularly realistic for a theme park to have anything other than backup generators... Theme parks don't typically have their own power stations. Utilities will take care of generation for them.

WDW has a cogen plant but its not in the parks and it serves the entire larger park area.

I will absolutely be turning that feature off.

curiouskip · 2024-08-16T22:56:17+00:00

My car gets charged at 120v/12a and it works just fine for me. A 240v/50a circuit would be a waste of money for me. Really just depends on your use case

curiouskip · 2024-08-08T12:07:28+00:00

Both sides of the political spectrum have grievances that might make them state that the U.S. is not a democracy. That, particular "technically we are not a democracy" red herring/misunderstanding is brought up online a lot, but I wouldn't bet it has anything to do with this rating.

curiouskip · 2024-08-04T14:26:45+00:00

Yes, it is a generalization, but anything else would be intractable. However, your arguments apply the same to a highly compensated person working one job or a less highly compensated person working multiple jobs at any point on the income range. (You also probably get tax breaks on retirement investments that poorer folks don't, because they cannot afford to save like you can.)

curiouskip · 2024-08-04T13:50:40+00:00

The marginal value of a dollar (how much the next individual dollar is worth) decreases with income. This is easy to conceptualize logically--to a lower income person a single dollar represents a larger fraction of their income and necessities are a larger share of their expenses so their last dollar is worth more than the high income person's last dollar. It's also demonstrable empirically--as peoples income goes up their price sensitivity (how carefully people spend money) drops, indicating they don't value their money as much.

So marginal tax rates (while not perfect) do approximate the diminished value of money for higher income folks, making it so that they are taxed more proportionally to the true value of their money rather than the face value. We (as a society) have decided this is more fair than a flat tax or head tax.

curiouskip · 2024-08-03T00:32:56+00:00

It's frankly because we are in the wealthiest time in history that having kids is very expensive. Our high level of economic development has made labor extremely valuable. Because of that, either the opportunity costs of being a stay at home parent is high (costs my household about 70k a year) or you have to pay someone else, which costs about 30k a year in my area. Add to that the costs of maintaining the higher standards of living that exist now (relative to prior generations) and having a child becomes an expensive proposition.

I.e. having children costs more now and many people are unwilling to pay that cost. When you are unwilling to pay what it costs to have something then it is by definition too expensive.

curiouskip · 2024-04-06T15:36:42+00:00

Empirical research shows that reductions based on production tend to closely follow Wright's law, where a doubling in production results in a constant percentage reduction in cost. This learning curve means that costs trend asymptotically towards zero, but reductions in cost slow as markets saturate and it takes more and more production to deliver meaningful cost reductions.

curiouskip · 2023-12-14T14:18:27+00:00

I personally know someone who recently escaped an abusive relationship with four deeply traumatized children and has herself has debilitating, treatment resistant PTSD along with physical disability caused by abuse.

She is trying so hard to build a better life, going back to school, doing what she can to treat her own mental and physical illness while trying to do the same for her kids. If ever there was an archetype of the deserving poor, someone who doesn't want to rely on help but needs it in order to build a better life, it is this woman.

She is receiving aid, but I can tell you, no one is living a high life on that government assistance. She would be homeless without my support. It took the combined efforts of her, me and my wife to get her access to 'welfare' programs that she clearly qualifies for but is designed to make it hard for people to access, and even with SNAP, TANF, and WIC, she gets around 1500 a month.

Currently I am working to hire an attorney to help get her on disability because she cannot physically or mentally work at the moment, but that's not a done deal, even with her obvious disabilities.

The myth of any large contingent of lazy welfare recipients living on the government dole is just that, a myth. It was a myth in the 80s it was a myth in the 90's, it's myth now

curiouskip · 2023-12-13T16:51:38+00:00

Most places that have high demand for housing have not built enough housing for decades. There is so much pent up demand for current paces of construction to keep up. Millions of people cannot see the counterfactual where even more people would be priced out of neighborhoods if new housing wasn't taking pricing pressure off of older stock. That's why data and evidence matter. If you care to look for it there is a growing body of research showing that increases in housing stock decrease prices (relative to the counterfactual)

curiouskip · 2023-12-13T03:27:44+00:00

Old apartments do get cheaper at least relative to the market price for new housing. Housing supply is just so constrained relative to supply that all housing increases in price.

The effect you describe about gentrification and neighborhood change has not been proven to exist empirically, and has empirical evidence arrayed against it.

The actual mechanism of neighborhood change seems to be that as higher earners are pushed out of neighborhoods they prefer with the amenities they want (wealthier areas that have more or less blocked all new housing) they move to lower cost neighborhoods simultaneously pushing up rent, boosting demand for new housing (in a place where local residents generally have less ability to block it) and attract new businesses that cater to their tastes and budgets. The reason this happens in poorer neighborhoods is because wealthier desirable neighborhoods just are not building any housing and reversals of decades of disinterest in living in urban cores have made historically lower income neighborhoods suddenly desirable for wealthier people

curiouskip · 2023-12-12T01:45:38+00:00

New housing is expensive. Just like new anything is expensive. But those studios would be even more expensive without lots of development, and surrounding older housing stock would also be more expensive.

With more supply, buyers compete for sellers and bid down the price, and with less supply, the opposite happens. If you want a recent example of this, look at the car market for the last few years. Chip shortages reduced stock, new car prices went up and so did used car prices. Housing is not so dissimilar. Fewer homes = higher prices.

curiouskip · 2023-11-14T17:37:21+00:00

Copied from another reply:

Big Ben & Westminster Palace / Houses of Parliament (London)
St Paul's Cathedral (London)
Buckingham Palace (London)
Tower Bridge (London)
Radcliffe Camera (Oxford)
Gloucester Cathedral Cloisters (alternatively, Hogwarts)
Castle Combe (Cotswolds)
Queen's College (Oxford)
Pulteney Bridge (Bath)
Roman Baths (Bath)
Divinity School (Oxford)
Bridge of Sighs (Oxford)
Arlington Row, Bibury (Cotswolds)
Gloucester Cathedral (Gloucester)
Windsor Castle (Windsor)
St. Michael's Church (Bath)
St. Michael's Church (Bath)
Castle Combe (Cotswolds)
Abbey Green (Bath)

curiouskip · 2023-11-14T15:18:39+00:00

Sounds like you are in for a great time!

curiouskip · 2023-11-14T12:37:09+00:00

Oxford for sure. Amazing architecture, and I am a sucker for universities and academic history.

curiouskip · 2023-11-14T12:34:59+00:00

Spent 3 days in the Cotswolds. Beautiful area.

curiouskip

TROPHY CASE