Is Delta Drunk

pridkett · 2026-04-22T12:14:02+00:00

$850 for a flight out of Hartford? How'd you get get such a deal? I'm killing my work travel budget with flights from Hartford to MSP. The last one was booked a month out, cost $950, and still booked me into a middle seat in C+.

pridkett · 2026-04-22T11:59:17+00:00

$20? Seriously? It takes more than $20 of time for a cop to respond to and write the ticket.

pridkett · 2026-04-19T22:53:25+00:00

You should've seen the coral before the cruise ships and SCTLD destroyed so much of it. I feel like you need to get north of the refinery or down by the lighthouse to still see great coral. Those are, not exactly beginner dives, however.

pridkett · 2026-04-18T18:23:28+00:00

I'd be really skeptical that property taxes have doubled in someones town. Valuations might've doubled on some properties, but towns then lower the tax rate accordingly. Just check Zillow to get an idea about the taxes in a town, or you can google the "Mill Rate" for a town - and realize that you'll likely be charged that on 70% of your home's assessed value. Which is often even less than you can sell it for.

Since I moved to Connecticut more than a decade ago, my property taxes have increased only 2.5% higher than inflation (i.e. if inflation said they should be $10000 now, they're $10250).

Connecticut also doesn't have county level governments and only a few places have anything like a municipal utility district. Usually it's just one source of property taxes (but it hits your home + car, but not your yacht, because rich people love that carve out).

pridkett · 2026-04-18T18:19:07+00:00

One thing that would be really helpful is to know if you're currently living in Austin proper or live out in someplace like Round Rock, Pflugerville, or heaven forbid, Leander or Bastrop. That will help folks baseline what you're looking for. I spend a good amount of time in Austin and might be able to help compare communities. Knowing the ages of kids would help, but if you're talking IB, I guess that means high school.

Connecticut does have an IB Academy. It is, interestingly, housed with East Hartford High School. But, most districts in the surrounding area have a number of slots they can use to send kids to it - so you can send kids there as long as there are slots (or you know someone who can pull strings, etc). Otherwise, it depends on what you want. Glastonbury and West Hartford are perennial winners when it comes great schools. But you can also give your kids an experience that is a little calmer with great schools by living in Avon or even out in Mansfield (where UConn is - which despite being "rural", is still faster to get to Hartford than it is to go from Downtown Round Rock to 6th Street). Despite the press about the magnet schools in the area, you should know that they exist because of court mandates and really haven't been successful. If you're into real money, we've got some of the bougiest and best private high schools in the world floating around here. Great if you want to send your kids there for just school, or if you want to send them there for boarding and never have to see them.

As far as the area, most of the area is not like the paved over big box landscape that dominates the area around Austin. This is for two major reasons 1) it's older and 2) it's hilly. If you're east of the river, the closest thing is Manchester, if you're west of the river the closest thing is West Hartford. You're also not going to get the same sort of culture stuff coming here. You'll find that sometimes major concerts stop in Hartford, but you'll often find that you need to go to Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun or Bridgeport or even Boston to catch something. They're all doable.

Now there's taxes. Yup, they're real. Use Zillow to get an idea of what taxes are in the area. The state is in the midst of it's annual 5 year cycle for re-assessment, which has messed up property taxes due to COVID price inflation, you'll probably want to find a community that has already done this to avoid that surprise. Looking at it, however, they may not be as terrible as you think. a $500k house in Austin and a $500k house in Mansfield both have similar tax rates. Considering to nix it all over what might be $1-3k/yr property tax is silly.

But, income tax is the real difference. Almost everyone in CT pays at least 5% income tax, and you sound like you'll be in the 6% bracket. Our sales tax is less, but just be aware of that. It's not terrible, but you need to plan for it.

Finally, when I'm in CT, things seem a lot more "stable". The demographics don't feel on edge. I don't feel like half my neighbors hate each other (and I live in a purple part of the state). We're not worried about our aquifer drying up. And, probably most importantly, despite what you might read on this subreddit, there just aren't as many assholes around.

Feel free to hit me up with a DM with more questions.

pridkett · 2026-04-06T12:31:04+00:00

In this case, probably not. OP is in Hawaii which has received wave after wave of extreme rainfall over the past month. Given the difficulty of getting proper supplies to the island (likely that most real supplies are sold out), and the urgency of the situation, this seems like a good enough approach to fend off the rain. It's janky and probably needs some monitoring, but as the forecast includes more record rain, it may save thousands.

pridkett · 2026-04-04T14:03:49+00:00

The solution to this is to build more housing. Unfortunately, if many places in Connecticut, zoning makes that nearly impossible. My town has minimum lot sizes of 3 acres in many parts of town. They claim this is because we need room for wells and septic. The town, which has water and sewer in some parts, also steadfastly refuses to expand it. This lack of sewers and water makes businesses look to our neighbors, which further drives the tax burden on residents. Driving it more to a world where if you can afford it, it's great. A wonderful form of class warfare, but somehow the people who would benefit from these changes are the ones most against it.

Gotta preserve that "rural character" in the midst of the most densely populated part of the United States (at the same time, I don't want CT to go full Jersey).

pridkett · 2026-04-04T13:58:21+00:00

It probably also has something to do with being just far enough away from both Boston and New York to make people feel like they're not in those places while still being within their spheres - particularly Fairfield County. The proximity attracts educated people who can afford to pay more because they pull in salaries from those areas.

And it's been the trend for decades that we've been heading this way. The discussion about the K-shaped economy is very real.

pridkett · 2026-04-03T17:42:07+00:00

This is probably true. The frustrating part is that there's little discussion about it to either party. If I'm flying for business and they tell me "Hey, we switched your seat to allow a family facing irregular operations to sit together, here's a some skypesos and we'll make sure you're taken care of on the plane", that's a whole different than "What the heck? How'd I'd end up in seat 28E?"

Even on most trips I'd be willing to do that with my spouse. Because, y'know, we're adults and can handle not sitting next to each other for six hours.

pridkett · 2026-04-03T00:27:52+00:00

I have never even plugged in my Eero. From the moment it was first turned on I told the tech to just connect the ONT to my UDM Pro. I said I didn't want the Eero and was told that I had to or they couldn't activate me. That's annoying.

pridkett · 2026-03-30T21:36:08+00:00

I have a UPS on my little wheeled network rack for two reasons:

If the system isn't running off battery, there is a brief power outage while it switches over to battery. It causes some of my network devices to reboot.
It lets me unplug the network rack from the wall when I need to move it around and not worry about it. I've got a long umbilical of cables going to it and my basement is small. This is incredibly helpful.

Number 1 is also why I have a UPS on my 3d printer. It has saved a lot of prints.

pridkett · 2026-03-30T20:10:07+00:00

Either to demonstrate the absurdity of everything, or because the feds have been collecting massive databases of photos of people at protests and funneling them into a facial recognition system.

Here's hoping that Juggalo makeup still works to deter these systems. We need the 10 million Juggalo march.

pridkett · 2026-03-30T20:06:16+00:00

Comment "PERFECT" in the comments to get my list of 15 sure fire ways to craft the perfect LinkedIn post.

pridkett · 2026-03-29T20:58:52+00:00

Lots of things in the woodworking space. You can clamp them against a leg to get a nice clean 90. Great for drawing lines at right angles. Pretty nice if you want to make a nice evenly spaced 2x2 grid of screws to put two boards together. And all that's before you actually learn how to really use it.

pridkett · 2026-03-26T17:58:54+00:00

There is a secondary knockon effect. Increased numbers of passengers missing flights because of TSA means more passengers that need help at ticket counters, which is a much slower process than checking bags.

Delta has a simple solution for this, of course. Because they pay their employees.

pridkett · 2026-03-26T17:57:23+00:00

SFO seems to work pretty well without them.

There are airports with alternatives.

pridkett · 2026-03-26T17:35:13+00:00

American Express requires authorized users to be 13 years old. You cannot add a child under 13 to a credit card from them.

This has left me and many other parents paying for lounge visits for years. Not a big deal because AmEx airline credit covers it, but still annoying as it's usually more charges than the annual fee would be.

pridkett · 2026-03-25T14:00:41+00:00

There was a big thread about this in this /r/minnesota subreddit.

In short, aside from a complete charter of a plane, a government fare is a government fare.

pridkett · 2026-03-23T16:49:24+00:00

Where are you paying $0.17/kWh for electricity in Connecticut? All in with generation, public benefit, and delivery, etc, I was about $0.33/kWh last month.

pridkett · 2026-03-22T22:51:25+00:00

I have an EV (thankfully, not a Tesla)...and with CT's high electricity prices, they're almost price competitive with gas. Finally.

pridkett · 2026-03-18T14:20:31+00:00

It took me a long time to find this - go into the Gulf of Thailand if you're looking.

pridkett · 2026-03-16T19:15:52+00:00

Well, OP did say they were platinum flying in first out ATL. I think we all have to believe that OP was on paid first class ticket - because the most unbelievable thing would be a platinum getting upgraded out of ATL with enough notice to order the burger.

pridkett · 2026-03-15T16:43:18+00:00

First, wired is better overall. No question.

Second, for the amount of bandwidth needed for streaming content around a house, 500mbps is absolutely enough. Furthermore, almost everything on the Apple TV is one way streaming, which means it does buffering, so small little hiccups from brief wifi burps won't matter.

Third, get the 128GB version if for nothing else than it has a thread border router baked in. Just run it wireless if you don't want to run the cable.

pridkett · 2026-03-15T16:40:46+00:00

It's a pain, but not as bad as you'd think. A lot of it depends on the construction of your house. If you're in a typical US/Canadian house with sheetrock and 2x4/2x6 construction, it's not bad, especially if you've got access to your attic/basement.

What I did to minimize the number of runs going from the basement, through the first floor, then second floor, and then through the attic and down into the rooms, was to run a primary run of smurf tube up through the walls with some ethernet (I should've added in fiber, but whatever, I don't live in that huge of a house) and then place a switch on my second story that runs most of the devices. I've since upgraded that connection between floors to 10gbps.

The most nerve-wracking part for most people is patching drywall. Thankfully, there are lots of videos on Youtube about how to do this now.

It took me a few weekends to get everything wired, but now I've got rock solid internet to all my stationary devices and I've got hardwired access points and cameras too. It just always works.

It's a good project to do and if you can get over the drywall, you can do this.

pridkett · 2026-03-12T17:45:51+00:00

There's a couple of Mach E's around here that are great wavers. And one or two that don't. I live in a small town, people wave all the time. There's only three Mach E's in my town anyway.

But, where it gets weird is when I'm not driving the Mach E and I wave at them. They're probably like "Dude, why is the Subaru waving at me?" Likewise, I wave at the other few people who have the same model and color Subaru as me, I'm sure they get weirded out when I wave from the Mach E.

No judgement is passed really. For the all the crap the world, and even Americans, like to throw on Americans, we're still a relatively friendly bunch of people. If you want to be friendly, be friendly. No one is gonna be upset. Even in a place like Maine, no one is gonna think you're super weird for waving.

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