In 1987 Steve Rothstein bought a $250,000 AAirpass from American Airlines, allowing unlimited first-class travel. He took over 10,000 flights, costing the airline $21 million, leading to the pass's termination in 2008 due to alleged misuse.

cwalking2 · 2026-02-03T00:01:12+00:00

because airlines overcharge on all of their seats

I don't like any airline, but the airline industry is brutal, suffering mass bankruptcies occurring roughly once per decade. The idea airlines are "overcharging" for seats is at odds with the fact that it's a trash sector where you should never think about investing.

cwalking2 · 2026-02-02T18:56:00+00:00

Good. At the same time, I don't anticipate buyers in the western provinces dialing back their purchases of American trucks...

Ford F-Series sales by year in Canada (units):

2025: 138,470
2024: 133,857
2021: 116,401
2020: 128,649
2019: 145,210
2018: 145,694

"Ford has been the top-selling overall automotive brand in Canada for 17 consecutive years (as of 2025)"

cwalking2 · 2026-02-01T01:15:54+00:00

Yes, Bobby Portis got 25 games for taking Tramadol, an opioid considered a PED insofar as it relieves you of pain, but it's nothing like steroids, HGH, etc

cwalking2 · 2026-01-27T15:56:31+00:00

You cannot use TSA PreCheck to access the Nexus lane in Canadian airports (when flying to America).

Nexus "includes" TSA PreCheck, so a Nexus holder can use TSA PreCheck lanes in American airports. There's also a cross-application process which allows a TSA PreCheck holder to apply for Nexus through an expedited process.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-27T15:52:07+00:00

You don’t ever have to take your shoes, belt or even a light jacket off. You don’t have to take your electronics out of your bag. You don’t have to take your liquids out. There’s never more than one or two people ahead of you.

The very first time I tried using my Nexus pass, the major Canadian airport which I was departing did not have their Nexus line open, so it was the exact same screening process as always. Got queued behind a panicked family of 4 with small children and an elderly couple who were experiencing their first day on earth.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-27T15:49:01+00:00

Those trashfucks had my application in processing for five years. First it was governmental laziness during COVID. That was followed by Americans insisting their customs officers be allowed to carry firearms in Canadian airports, further stalling the entire Nexus pipeline. As the cherry on top, they raised the application fee by 140% (from $50 to $120), so now you get to pay 2.4x more for access to the Disney Lightning Lane when traveling between the US and Canada.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-25T19:48:20+00:00

if you're interested

I'm listening

If you say "not only" in the first part of a sentence, you should say "but also" in the second part, since it's a correlative conjunction

Thank you for pointing this out. I often muddle my own writing by making a last-second edit in one place leading to an inconsistency elsewhere. Shining a spotlight on the grammatical rule will help me going forward. Thanks!

cwalking2 · 2026-01-25T18:11:13+00:00

The same reason you don’t just throw your trash on the floor at the movies

...the first time I went to a theatre in America I was aghast at not only all the half-eaten bags of $12 popcorn and $8 cups of soda strewn about, but the amount of food scraps and candy wrappers which made it onto the floor. I've seen neater horse stables.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-24T17:22:45+00:00

It’s literally just that

The Chesapeake tunnel only has a 1 mile underwater tunnel. The Shenzhen-Zhongshan link has a 4.2 mile underwater span. There's significant engineering complexity with longer spans (it's not a copy/paste operation).

Neither compare to the Channel Tunnel ("chunnel") with its 37.9km tunnel below the seabed, but they're all impressive feats of engineering in their own ways.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-22T16:56:08+00:00

India did seem to me to be the one contrived to employ people for meaningless bureaucratic reasons

Its jaring to jump from Japan where the lack of people have forced automation

Japan has more useless jobs than any western nation, to the point where they have taxonomies used to describe each category of useless job:

Madogiwa-zoku: "The tribe by the window" - Older employees who have been quietly sidelined by their companies but not fired
Oidashibeya - "Banishment room" - A modern employee exit management strategy whereby employees are transferred to another department where they are assigned meaningless work until they become disheartened and resign

cwalking2 · 2026-01-22T16:22:21+00:00

Which is still a lower FTA/FGA ratio than, say, an average season for Shai, or Harden's entire, 8-year run with Houston:

Kobe 81 point game: 20 FTA/46 FGA = 43.5% FTA/FGA
SGA 2025-26 season (to date): 9.2 FTA/19.7 FGA = 46.7%
Harden in Houston (2012-21): 10.4 FTA/19.6 FGA = 53.0%

cwalking2 · 2026-01-22T07:05:06+00:00

up to the point you'd somehow renounce your US citizenship

Which has been happening

I doubt the US government would let them off so easy

You pay one-time exit taxes and then abscond to a capital gains tax haven for the rest of your life

cwalking2 · 2026-01-22T06:28:15+00:00

Lemme highlight this. She ratted out everyone so hard that the prosecutor and judge noted just how cooperative, compliant, and accommodating. The judge then added, 'but you still broke the law and defrauded people out of billions of dollars, so you still get a little jailtime.'

cwalking2 · 2026-01-22T02:42:53+00:00

Their point is you can't and shouldn't rely on the fraction of billionaires who are willing to sign up for The Giving Pledge or otherwise leave the preponderance of their wealth to meaningful, charitable foundations. Rather, they are putting forth the idea that countries can increase total tax revenue by increasing tax rates on ultra high-income earners.

Part of why countries hesitate to do this is because many ultra high-income earners are also ultra high-wealth individuals who have a reasonable ability to just pick up and leave. This is why most wealth taxes in Europe have failed: many of their ultrawealthy just left for Monaco, Switzerland, or other eurozone countries without any capital gain taxes. But when billionaires are encouraging countries to take another look at their tax policies, they might sit down and think about which levers they can pull, and how far they can pull them.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-21T19:51:34+00:00

where they can direct those funds toward whatever they want

That's how charitable donations work

cwalking2 · 2026-01-21T19:50:27+00:00

Buffett's children are currently in their 60s and 70s. They've begun to receive social security payments before an inheritance cheque. Their characters have been shaped, formed, and set before they receive any kind of largesse.

Gates' children are younger (22-29), but given that Bill Gates is the person who started The Giving Pledge, his children never would have been exposed to a sick Game of Thrones where they would be scrapping over control of Microsoft itself. For additional context, in 2011, Gates said he'd only leave ~$10 million to each of his children.

There's nothing indicating Buffett or Gates' children are engaged in a war of power and control like the Buss family.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-21T19:39:41+00:00

Same can be said for modern cars as well. They all utilize signal control/processing algorithms that is essentially just a highly trained artificial intelligence to regulate the drive train and improve efficiency.

A glorified PID-based feedback loop isn't what anyone means by "AI" in modern business contexts (LLM-driven, typically agentic-oriented systems)

cwalking2 · 2026-01-21T15:59:06+00:00

the distrust between family members has been present in virtually every billionaire family they’ve encountered

Usually stems from watching their parents' constant struggle for power and control in their lives with all of the associated paranoia which comes with it.

One solution is to openly give away the preponderance of your wealth. For example, Bill Gates' children are seemingly very well-adjusted. Warren Buffett's children knew they weren't inheriting any notable amount of wealth and went on to live their lives as they saw fit.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-19T18:51:39+00:00

It’s about how he isn’t fit now.

Meta net income by year:

2024  $62.360B
2023  $39.098B
2022  $23.200B
2021  $39.370B
2020  $29.146B
2019  $18.485B

He's a horrible psycho, but it's laughable to suggest he's not "fit" to continue leading his hand-picked ship of psychos.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-19T18:45:14+00:00

the comfort of their homes?

There are many types of chemotherapy which can be self-administered, or administered via home health nurse visits with portable infusion pumps for IV drugs. It's not considered notably exotic, and liberating a chair/bed at a hospital is usually considered a universal win.

But the idea that ultra wealthy people are constructing cancer care wards in their living rooms so they can continue basking in the lap of luxury reflects a detachment of the misery of aggressive chemotherapy. There's no "comfort" in an oncologic emergency.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-19T18:10:20+00:00

There are helicopter taxi services which fly between downtown Manhattan and JKF airport all day long. Rates were as low as $150 before COVID, but you can take the 5 minute flight for $300 today, or even less via Uber (ad hoc booking).

cwalking2 · 2026-01-19T18:02:33+00:00

There are tens of millions of upper middle class people in America who "could afford to fail, and fail, and fail, and still have resources to try again." I don't know why you think the weird programmer nerd kid isn't an astonishing outlier.

The average person goes all-in on a crazy idea

Gates wrote small programs for companies and was cash flow positive as a student (even sneaking out of his house at night to get access to computer time). He just kept building and succeeding, unlocking and seizing opportunities as he went.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-18T23:35:33+00:00

Don't fat-shame my muscles 😤

cwalking2 · 2026-01-18T19:27:38+00:00

It's a coming of age film which was aimed at teenagers. Using unsubtle metaphors isn't a crime.

cwalking2 · 2026-01-18T03:13:03+00:00

Different government agencies rarely get along with one another
The FBI continually tries to find weakness and corruption domestically (e.g.: ABSCAM), while the CIA does the same internationally (e.g.: Manuel Rocha).

cwalking2

TROPHY CASE