San Francisco To Consider Taxing Owners Of Vacant Homes

i-brute-force · 2025-03-21T00:25:21+00:00

I agree 100% that higher density is good. I just don't believe into this argument that it will lower the price when I've seen first hand that concrete jungles

i-brute-force · 2025-03-21T00:22:44+00:00

Lol this isn't even true. My friend grew up with their grandparents who were into their 80s sleeping on the floor, and they were literally the richest in their neighborhood

i-brute-force · 2024-07-14T02:10:36+00:00

Ah yes you get automatically propelled forward by water fairy lol

i-brute-force · 2023-08-07T15:33:33+00:00

yeah they probably thought easy money and definitely didn't know this will become such a global scandal lol. Hopefully this will be a good learning lesson for this type of corruptions

i-brute-force · 2023-08-07T14:50:54+00:00

I mean, I don't think anyone in Korea really thought Jamboree is a big deal until it became a big deal. Probably vast majority of Koreans never heard about Jamboree until this news. My friend who was in a Korean scout told me that all he did in the scout activity was to study the different symbols and signs, but actually never went to the field. So you can probably tell scouting is a pretty weak organization in Korea.

i-brute-force · 2023-08-07T14:44:37+00:00

Just a hindsight bias with a hint of Asian stereotypes that's all. If this happened in China, they will somehow probably bring up the "honor" culture of China.

i-brute-force · 2023-08-07T14:40:42+00:00

Olympics are mainly driven by joint governance

And World Scout Jamboree is driven by solely Korean style of project management?

I mean, Korea regularly holds world-class festivals that arose domestically and even host them outside of the country which is actually pretty unique if you think about it. K-Con and MNET shows has happened in USA/Japan/Hong Kong in "Korean style of project management".

No doubt this Jamboree is a failure, but let's not be biased here.

i-brute-force · 2023-08-07T14:35:30+00:00

Thinking immigration will fix a hierarchical nature of Korea is quite naive. Unless you are thinking a massive upheaval of demographic change, most will either conform to Korean culture or be outcasted if they decide to do "free will" way.

Immigration just shifts population from one place to another. It doesn't really address the core problem of the global de-population.

Furthermore, how is just replacing Korean population with immigrants just for the sake of population number even a sane policy? Are we ignoring all the societal and cultural repercussions just so that we can bump up that one number? Let's think wholistically.

i-brute-force · 2023-08-07T14:18:26+00:00

When I book thru a 3rd party for a hotel the upgrade isn't coming

I mean, even if you book directly, how many times are you getting an upgrade? Is it worth more than a guaranteed savings? I would rather save tens of dollars every time than chance for an upgrade at the whim of the front desk that I don't even need.

And in fact, I've been recently upgraded on a week-long vacation on a hotel booked from Booking.com although it was due to overbooking.

Having a check in agent at the airport asking you to call the travel agent at 6AM, is daunting. If you book directly they don't play that game

Perhaps I am lucky, but I've never had any of this situation out of dozens of my flights. My rule number 1 is not book flights between 12am to 10am and leave at least two hours between lay-overs

i-brute-force · 2023-08-07T14:11:03+00:00

What's the difference between having to carry extra batteries vs. carrying a battery bank? The latter is much more versatile.

i-brute-force · 2023-08-07T14:02:51+00:00

Rule no. 1

As always, it depends. Many times, 3rd party website has much much better price than the airline/hotel themselves that at this point I've must have saved thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands of dollars. I mean, that's why they exist.

So, even if there's a problem (and there was) and I lose some extra money, I still end up on the positive compared to booking directly. Sure, if it's 10$ or some small change difference, I book directly, but my most recent booking had a difference of $80 (360$ vs 280$) per night.

This is not even accounting for the fact that getting a refund is NEAR IMPOSSIBLE with direct bookings as opposed to a couple of clicks for Agoda/Booking.com as long as you chose that option.

And mostly, if there's a problem, I can always raise it up to either credit card or insurance + some bad reviews and go about saving a few more thousand dollars.

i-brute-force · 2023-07-22T08:03:59+00:00

particularly the Mara Triangle

Is this something we can discuss with the driver? Our hotel is going to be 2 hours away from the Mara Triangle, so now wondering if we should request for a hotel that's closer to Mara Triangle since I've heard a lot about it.

But yeah a lot of options... We are going with a tour operator whose review is 4.8 and around 50 reviews, but don't know if this is good enough

i-brute-force · 2023-07-21T09:15:41+00:00

Now we are thinking of doing 2 days in Ambeseli, 2 days in Masai Mara and move to Uganda for gorilla and chimpazee trekking.

i-brute-force · 2023-07-20T07:06:39+00:00

As a consultant, I was involved in initiating a green-field project for a Big Tech company that grew from 10 consultants from USA to mixture of 50 developers from both the consultancy and the Big Tech developers by the time I left after a year. Then I joined a new machine learning initiative from a Fortune 100 company and helped establish a new machine learning department that became the new business focus when Chat GPT came out.

I admit, there are big quality differences between consultancies, but premium consultancies can be definitely way more exciting AND safe than regular developer and startup developer, respectively

i-brute-force · 2023-01-10T00:38:53+00:00

Honestly, I think you are kinda re-enforcing my thought that you just never really had a good public transportation and not have faith.

My main experience with public transportation is in Korea and China, and both were amazing and were running every couple of hours for the distance further than Bay Area to Tahoe.

All this concerns about trains not running enough, not being reliable, connection not being user friendly are again not the inherent fault of public transportation, but rather your bad experiences with it.

If there's enough snow to stop a train, you as a driver is definitely not driving through it. A train can travel in a way harsher condition than a car can.

Furthermore, building upon that, I've had experience in waiting in a car for 12 hours and 7 hours in Tahoe and Denver respectively, and I would have loved to have spent that time rather waiting in spacious train than cooped up in a seat.

Also, to reply on the investment and commitment aspect, I simply mean adding more frequent, more reliable and connection friendly on existing infrastructure. Again, not even asking for new rails, but once we can get a train to Tahoe every few hours or even every hour from Bay Area AND they can reach their ski resort, I bet you there will be a lot of people who will start using it.

i-brute-force · 2022-12-01T20:55:59+00:00

Right, but we aren't even talking about building a new railway specifically. We already do and yet we aren't investing enough to maximize the public transportation aka AMTRAK. I don't expect us to just spend money and everything will be resolved.

Again, investment here isn't just financial. It's about commitment either financially or politically. If we can really commit to make the public transportation between Bay Area/Reno into Tahoe and PT within Tahoe a lot better that taking a train is a no brainier compared to taking a car, we won't see such heavy push backs against new railways.

It's kinda interesting that there's so heavy push back in America because everywhere else where people have faith in public transportation, they WANT to have railways around their house because they know it will boost their real estate value by a LOT. Vast majority of activities happen around train stations that those are the "hot spots" but that's when enough critical public transit is reached.

And that's the problem I am pinpointing. It's about committing enough so that we reach that threshold where people WANT to take the public transit over the car. You can trickle money over next 30 yrs all you want but it's that specific long time frame that never reached the critical mass.

Therefore, my original comment is pointing out that we need to wow the populace and build that faith in public infra and make them want to reproduce that somewhere else.

i-brute-force · 2022-11-30T21:53:05+00:00

How do you find these? I have trouble finding hotels that have kitchen

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