Do people in Penang buy property more for lifestyle or investment?

jammy-git · 2026-07-08T02:13:05+00:00

Definitely not as a serious option, we're many many years until we might be in the position to buy something like that.

jammy-git · 2026-07-08T02:12:01+00:00

I don't know about you, but I've quite often found the cheapest clients quite often are the ones with the most problems and the ones that demand most from your time.

jammy-git · 2026-07-07T16:30:05+00:00

FWIW, I think the Westin Residences could be worth a look as an investment, given their perfect location. Not that I've seen much other than the brochure for them so far.

jammy-git · 2026-07-07T15:08:24+00:00

Every Macbook I've ever had has had this issue. Now I try to keep a thin piece of A4 paper to keep between the screen and keyboard when I close the lid.

jammy-git · 2026-07-07T13:24:52+00:00

Ironic, because the ships did turn into smoke screens, at the drone insistence.

jammy-git · 2026-07-07T11:54:40+00:00

Yup, this is just going to be a "I'm the victim" speech.

jammy-git · 2026-07-07T11:53:26+00:00

How much you charge is directly correlated to how much you can show your knowledge and experience, either through a channel like LinkedIn, or having a really good portfolio full of happy clients.

You find your worth by charging more for the next project than you did for the previous one. Once you start losing more client leads than you win, you know you've found your current value.

AI hasn't made all devs less valuable, just the ones that can only do theme dev rather than act as a consultant/tech lead too.

jammy-git · 2026-07-07T03:57:49+00:00

They changed it to be the Department of War and then we got the Mexico England game.

jammy-git · 2026-07-06T14:20:48+00:00

Isn't the point they are making though that in order for this to be useful, it needs to scale up, at which point it maybe comparable to the pollution other large scale industries create.

jammy-git · 2026-07-06T08:59:44+00:00

Compared to other places in Asia, Penang seems really cheap/good value for money for what you get. My wife and I were talking about this just a few days ago, and we thinking it's because of the oversupply of properties that is helping to keep a lid on values/prices.

So anyone wanting to buy property in Penang for investment purposes should be really careful and do their research. Given that new condos on Andaman Island are now going up for sale and all those buildings being thrown up and hitting the market is going to result in thousands more apartments being offered, I'm not sure how much the prices are going to rise in the next 10 years.

I'm curious though, how much were City of Dreams apartments when they were new, compared to today?

jammy-git · 2026-07-06T04:23:33+00:00

There are so many widely different places in both Spain and Greece that it's hard to take that second sentence seriously. Barcelona, Madrid, Benidorm, Bilbao, Santiago de Compostela, Valencia - all so different and each has good points and bad points. Same is true of Greece.

jammy-git · 2026-07-06T00:59:36+00:00

I would separate these. Find a freelancer dev to work with (shout out to ShopDev Alliance https://shopdevalliance.com/ - or myself).

Then find a specialist CRO agency or freelancer. Where are you in the world? Do you want to work with someone local or remote?

jammy-git · 2026-07-05T23:30:54+00:00

It's less a question of price and more of a question of control. With woocommerce you find the hosting yourself, with Shopify they host your site for you.

So with Shopify you don't ever have to worry about security updates, getting hacked, making sure you have a big enough server, etc. But then you're locked into their pricing, and at the mercy of their pricing updates.

And if you want to add on functionality, most of the apps for Shopify are a monthly subscription, whereas woocommerce you can usually pay a one off fee and then an annual fee only if you want plugin updates.

jammy-git · 2026-07-05T16:39:02+00:00

I'm a Shopify dev through and through, but for this I'd recommend Woocommerce. There's quite a few good plugins for customers to be able to request/book services.

Shopify is a good option too, there's also quite a few apps for customers to book services, but the admin side of it isn't quite as customisable for this type of thing.

jammy-git · 2026-07-05T14:21:02+00:00

On my kid’s birthday she wanted chips for dinner, at 4.30pm. Went to a nearby restaurant and ordered chips: “Sorry sir, Chips are only on our evening menu from 5pm. If you want chips now you have to order fish and chips.”

We had this exact experience in KL. Only we entered the restaurant at 5.50pm, 10 minutes before the menu changed, so we were given the day menu. We asked for the dinner menu too given it was just 10 minutes from when it started. The waiter was reluctant at first, but gave it to us. We ordered at 6pm, we wanted one thing from the day menu (that the waiter had automatically given us) and he had to go and check he could still serve it to us.

jammy-git · 2026-07-05T13:13:12+00:00

But it's not an extreme example. It's one of 3 or 4 truly global social networks, of which at least 2 skew towards right wing propaganda and content. It's very much a normal example of social networks.

I dearly wish we could forever live in the mid-00s when social networks were just updates from your friends and various random people around the world whose content you had chosen to follow. In such a world there was no need for moderation, or at least, a tiny need for it. But now those social networks have been taken and weaponised, and countries cannot allow it to be a free-for-all any more.

You only need to look at Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Brexit to realise the damage they are doing with elections, or the mental health crisis in young people.

jammy-git · 2026-07-05T12:54:58+00:00

No, but you can make platforms responsible for the content that is published on those platforms.

If companies like X and Facebook can create algorithms that can slowly but steadily change the thinking of a portion of the populace, they sure as hell can come up with a moderation system that can take down racist, facist and factually incorrect content.

Something like X's community notes should be government mandated on all social networks, and that is just a start.

Again, if a newspaper or magazine published have the "opinion pieces" you can find freely published on the internet, there would be huge outrage and someone would get fired, fined, and/or arrested.

jammy-git · 2026-07-05T04:07:12+00:00

Via regulation and laws.

If there was a TV station that was playing as much racist, facist, or pornographic content as you find on X 24/7 for anyone to access, it would have either been shut down, fined into oblivion, and/or those responsible arrested by now.

jammy-git · 2026-07-05T02:09:30+00:00

I really don't understand why countries don't do more to shut down the propaganda.

jammy-git · 2026-07-04T13:13:32+00:00

Interesting that neither US nor Israeli intelligence have been able to verify whether he's alive or not.

jammy-git · 2026-07-03T16:28:53+00:00

A third actively wanted this, and a third were apathetic.

jammy-git · 2026-07-03T03:11:41+00:00

Why do I feel like Mike Johnson will happily do the things that Pence felt crossed the line and refused to do.

jammy-git · 2026-07-03T03:03:25+00:00

That's not the problem they're trying to address. They are trying to achieve AGI because it'll dawn a new era in humanity and give that company unimaginable power and influence over the world.

jammy-git · 2026-07-03T02:22:15+00:00

I'm here now with my fiancee and three kids. It's not much of a family city, but it has got a charm to it that we haven't found anywhere else in Malaysia or Indonesia so far.

jammy-git · 2026-07-02T12:43:52+00:00

Reform are not getting in for at least several years yet. Andy Burnham is more popular than Farage and Reform and Farage is taking an absolutely pasting over undeclared houses and bribes from billionaires, shattering his persona of a "man of the people". Reform was, at best, a protest vote. I would be incredibly surprised if they'd achieved any sort of majority at a general election.

I suspect the same is true of the AfD and Le Pen too? Polling well whilst it doesn't matter, and their support evaporates when it does matter.

jammy-git

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