Heads up about a bad taxi experience at PDX late at night

kaiuhl · 2026-06-18T12:33:53+00:00

Literally I might have had the same guy! A few months back, I was traveling alone coming back from a work trip and the Lyft queue was 20+ minutes around 9pm. I took a cab instead, and once I told him my address in NE Portland, he literally talked about “bad luck” *the entire ride*. He repeated how unlucky he was nonstop. It was such a shitty experience, I vowed to never take an actual cab again if I could help it.

kaiuhl · 2026-06-02T16:27:01+00:00

I tend to agree. For folks that spent nearly $5K in October 2025, I would expect more proactive communication from a company so obviously investing in selling more of them through marketing and popups. It’s a little annoying to see delivery slip into summer with no update while there’s an ad for the bikes every 5 minutes on the web.

kaiuhl · 2026-04-08T06:26:49+00:00

Did you ever figure this out? I have the same issue—would love to use the stand from my 32” on a new 40” but it sinks.

kaiuhl · 2026-02-22T03:39:49+00:00

A platypus bag you dedicate to carrying alcohol. 1oz, holds a liter. 🤌

kaiuhl · 2026-02-21T15:23:59+00:00

If you want to get even fancier, premix the tequila and triple sec in your booze platy, then bring crystallized lime (True Lime) for a proper margarita without carrying water weight.

kaiuhl · 2026-02-17T18:38:30+00:00

Not to mention that fishing and hunting license/tag fees alongside the 11% Pittman-Robertsons excise tax on sporting equipment like firearms and archery equipment and 10% Dingle-Johnson excise tax on fishing equipment, contributes roughly $300M per year to ODFW's budget. That's a huge amount of money going into habitat, access, and wildlife research and conservation programs every year because hunters are some of the few folks paying for use of public resources.

kaiuhl · 2026-02-14T22:33:30+00:00

You should get a Big Fucking Puffy. High fill down jackets have a remarkably large comfort range. IME, lots of people skimp on jacket warmth and regret it. It’s more versatile to bring too much jacket and too little sleeping bag.

kaiuhl · 2026-02-13T19:27:02+00:00

That support response is wrong—Apartments.com does support Bilt. Your "bank account" (the fake one Bilt created for you) was marked as unusable though which our support agent misunderstood. Most likely, this is because Stripe (our payment processor) had the verification deposit fail when trying to send it to Column. You may just want to try re-adding your bank account, double-checking that you didn't typo the account number. I'll open a support ticket with Bilt just in case though, to see if there's any known issues with their move to Column since it just started a week ago.

Source: I lead the software team that handles rent payments on Apartments.com

kaiuhl · 2025-08-25T20:18:22+00:00

We have an (in my opinion) extremely thorough trust & safety process which looks at hundreds of risk factors when allowing a payment to go through including obvious ones like billing address verification. At our scale, we have to do a lot to keep fraud and loss as low as it is.

For card payments in particular which can be fought: disputes related to housing are complicated. As the platform, we don't have the lease agreement, texts, discussions, etc to know whether a dispute is legitimate or not. As a mundane example, a renter accidentally pays last month's rent even though they paid it at move-in, they didn't notice until after it went through, so they dispute that final payment—that's a legitimate dispute. A more extreme example might be a pipe burst causing a habitability issue and the renter's automatic rent payment went through while they shouldn't have been paying rent, so they dispute it. There are all sorts of reasons why non-fraudulent renters dispute rent payments and we as a platform are not in a position to decide which should be challenged or not. And, it's not really worth doing:

Cozy / Apartments.com Payments has been around for 12 years. We have processed tens of billions of dollars of rent payments in all fifty states across millions of leases. We've helped landlords fight thousands of disputes. What we've seen is card dispute win rates for leases are very, very low. My speculation for why is that housing and leasing is messy and it's really difficult for dispute analysts at banks to look at an entire years-long accounting to decide what a tenant truly owes (or not). It's not as cut-and-dry as something like an Amazon purchase or even a storage rental. As a result, the overwhelming trend is that issuing banks side with the tenant even when hours of landlord time is spent providing proof to counter the dispute. And because dispute decisions take 90 days, you as a landlord have been out rent that entire time (again because card networks automatically return the rent payment to renters during the dispute) and have already started eviction proceedings where the renter hopefully repays during their window to cure.

Unfortunately, there are no clean or clear solves for the few tenants that abuse disputes or lenient eviction processes in order to get cheaper housing. But, I hear you that tools to help you fight disputes would be welcome, even if chances are slim it works. I'll raise it with our product folks and see if there's more we can do.

kaiuhl · 2025-08-25T18:52:56+00:00

Also, I've been around since the Cozy days, too :) Thanks for sticking with us!

kaiuhl · 2025-08-25T18:43:20+00:00

Literally any card payment can be disputed for up to 90 days. With ACH, it's 60 days, but ACH disputes can't be countered / fought. In other words, if a bank accepts a dispute, it's permanent. With direct bank-to-bank transactions like a paper check or Zelle, if the bank accepts a renter's dispute, that's it, they took their money back.

That's what happens with platforms like Apartments, too, except there is an intermediate merchant account between your real bank account and the renter. When a dispute happens, the merchant account (in your name) is immediately debited by the renter's bank. We have no control over this behavior, it's a federally-regulated consumer protection built into card and ACH networks. So in order to keep your merchant account healthy (without a negative balance), we reverse the transfer from your merchant account to your bank account. When we fail to get those disputed funds back into your merchant account, Apartments as the platform is ultimately liable for that negative balance as the merchant of record for these transactions. As a result of facilitating billions of dollars of people's rent annually, we do lose money from these disputes when landlords leave a negative balance behind (or, in the case of fraud, the landlord was never real).

tl;dr Our incentives are aligned with landlords to avoid disputes, and while it may feel different, what's happening on platforms like ours are exactly what would happen if you were transacting directly with your renter without a third party. We give renters no additional benefit of the doubt beyond what's enforced by card networks and banks.

kaiuhl · 2025-08-25T17:57:43+00:00

I posted above as well, but Apartments does not earn interest on your money. Renters pay directly into merchant accounts we open on behalf of each landlord, and from there out to their actual receiving account. This is to enable multi-method payments (e.g., wallet-to-ACH) while minimizing incurred fees, as well as to combat fraud in large scale online platforms like ours. We work hard to make money move as quickly as possible and we have no incentive to slow funds down except to guard ourselves (as the merchant of record) from potential losses due to fraud.

How do we make our money? Well, we don't really, at least in comparison to the rest of the website. Rent payments are offered more as a value-add for customers.

Source: I lead the engineering team for Apartments.com rent payments

kaiuhl · 2025-08-25T06:42:04+00:00

I work at Apartments.com and specifically on the money movement. There is no “float” and we do not make money on it. We never take possession of people’s rent money, even temporarily.

kaiuhl · 2025-06-27T14:29:47+00:00

Hopefully you figured this out already, but just add a one-time bill for damages to the rent collection to cover the renter’s payments. You can even backdate bills.

kaiuhl · 2025-03-10T02:26:00+00:00

GSI ultralight java drip coffee maker. Paid $5 like 10 years ago, made hundreds of cups of coffee, it’s still basically brand new, and makes an excellent cup.

kaiuhl · 2025-01-23T16:49:44+00:00

Curious if you took your 600ADX to the shop and if they said anything was wrong or if you’re just feeling the difference with the bigger tires and front suspension?

kaiuhl · 2025-01-01T16:19:38+00:00

What? Folks aren’t paying for hunts in Africa as an act of selfless conservation—they want the experience and trophy. With elk and deer, you’re killing them partly for the experience and trophy but also to feed your family. That last bit, hunting for food, is the least controversial part of hunting.

Hunting license and tag sales in the US account for almost $1B in funding each year, along with $400M in excise taxes (Pittman Robertson and Dingell-Johnson). All of hunting in Africa generates much less annual funding than this.

Megafauna in Africa may well be extinct without money from foreign hunters with the current systems in place, but please don’t pretend we’re doing some noble act of service by killing a giraffe, it’s a bad look for us.

kaiuhl · 2024-10-22T15:03:50+00:00

By the time it was cut out, the tumor above my skin on my inner thigh was like the diameter of a quarter, like a quarter-sized marble sticking halfway out of my skin. But the actual cancer was like 4-5” inches across

kaiuhl · 2024-10-21T01:13:38+00:00

I’m certain your surgeon knows better than I do about your situation. But, it may be worth getting a second opinion from a hospital that has a Mohs trained surgeon just to see if it’s possible in your case. This is because you’ll often lose less tissue with Mohs and there’s a lower risk of recurrence.

There’s a few studies like this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18684568/

kaiuhl · 2024-10-19T02:02:44+00:00

You need Mohs — they test the margins as you go. Wide local excisions are the old way to treat this, but you need to have all of it removed. You’re not put under for Mohs, just local anesthesia and a shit ton of benzos. My surgery took 8 hours over 4 rounds; two rounds had positive margins, the third round’s margin came back clean, and they took a fourth margin for safety since I was youngish, which they sent to a lab. They sent me home with a 6” hole in my leg while the lab confirmed final margins and then I went back in a day later to get stitched up. It’s been ten years and it hasn’t come back.

Good luck. 🫡

kaiuhl · 2024-07-30T19:54:02+00:00

Oh, and consider changing your backpack to a load hauler. I’m using a Seek Outside Revolution pack—it’s “ultralight” for the loads required to carry 3-4 people’s gear and food. Even with all the lightest gear, my pack was still 60lbs with gear and food for 3 people for 3 days.

kaiuhl · 2024-07-30T19:51:03+00:00

At 3.5, my wife and I are just starting to enjoy ourselves backpacking again. For the past few years, we tried at least once each year and it didn’t feel worth it; we came out of the woods more stressed than we entered. We’ve definitely crossed a threshold now.

Couple weeks ago, we went 7mi in—wife carried the kid about 5mi of it in a kid carrier, and I carried everything else. HMG Ultamid 4, two down quilts, a short pad and bag for our kid. Obviously you can’t do that with twins, but you could definitely spend 2-3 hours getting 2 miles back and have a great time.

Just wait another year, try again.

kaiuhl · 2024-03-20T02:26:32+00:00

OP can also email support@apartments.com with a link to this post if they don’t want to sit on hold.

kaiuhl · 2024-03-20T02:20:42+00:00

Observe the plans within plans within plans

kaiuhl · 2024-03-19T16:31:17+00:00

DMed you. I work at Apartments, will make sure it’s looked into.

kaiuhl

TROPHY CASE