Bourdain was still dunking french fries at age 44 before he wrote kitchen confidential
294 karma · joined September 30, 2012
Be careful of the stories you tell yourself because they will eventually become true.
Friend can drag a box around any area down to the block and see how many people visit that area, what part of the city they came from to get there, where they went to next, average income, etc etc etc
We all know we are being tracked but seeing him use his software was still shocking. Apparently all data is from 3rd party apps and they charge $30k++ for their real estate analysis service. Who knows how much they pay for the actual data or how many times over it’s sold. It’s all anonymous but adding just a small bit of information about an individual and pretty easy to figure out and track them even off this anonymized 3rd party data.
Scary hours
Money is not evil, but the abstraction of “value” in modern life does cause the problems he blames money for.
Perhaps the jungle/forest tribes way of life is the best and simple way we can be happy. Yet tent communes like Johnston’s seem to be setup in the middle of a town square or within close proximity of a city, and not in nature somewhere actually sustaining themselves.
In the end if we blew it all up we would arrive back to same evolution of living we find ourselves in today.
Even terralingua has a restaurant with a two hour wait now. Tourism is the only real driver of a small town booming imo.
Marfa also does not have a lot of services that are needed for anyone older than 50, like a hospital.
Whether it’s touch screen mirrors, digital art club screens, cell phone charging kiosks, photo booths, sports training kiosks, screens on water faucets, it’s inevitably the same story arch.
The only ones I’ve seen that make money are those that pivot into high-ticket custom events which then you’re not a scalable startup anymore but an agency, or you barely get your investors bailed out by selling some backend tech you developed for stock in another company.
“Be careful the stories you tell yourself because they will eventually become true”
It hit me that I really was telling these stories of how the company was or where the business was going in a negative light and things were simply becoming more and more negative because of me. So be careful!
I raised money, had 6 full-time employees and went hard and a year in realized it wasn’t going to work. It sucked, the stress, the grind, the failure.
That experience has left me in the same state where you realize If you can get a startup off the ground that you can actually do anything you really want to go after.
But the flip side is you also now how have a taste for how bad it can go (if it failed) and now I find I can’t take a step towards anything without that fear.
It was almost like the theives were alerted by the mechanic that he had replaced the cat.
Theives only make a couple hundred from the cat, insurance pays the mechanic a couple g’s for a new one plus labor.
Have you found anywhere else comparable that isn’t insane expensive?
Am I missing a link here or something?
It’s largely been depressing coasting as a zombie. Making enough money to pay the bills but not enough to save or do anything for the future, but have been afraid to start something again for fear of going down this same route again.
Made a seven screen display each with their own pi that sync’d individual videos running on each to create some video art pieces.
Also made a bullet time rig with 15 pi’s and each with their own webcam. There was a guy who did this already with lots of documentation but using his own pi-interface hardware he created. We did it without the pi controllers.
They obscure any data about public services. Contamination in the water table for example. People who ask too many questions are threatened.
People don’t vote these types in. They are in place through power and connections.
Your view is over simplified and not fully informed by reality of the reality politics.
What used to be an extremely affordable, beautiful, and pleasant place to live and mix with the local culture is now gone.
It went from a beautiful town to Disney Land. A gigantic party city. Insane hour long lines of cars to get into the town on weekends. Real estate blew up and gigantic hotels are being built, all the homes in the center are owned by rich people from other countries as speculative investments. Tons of new bars and restaurants have opened but few of them by locals. Rich business owners from other places come in droves looking for more growth to extract money. Most people demand USD for rent or real estate deals and not local currency now, many businesses use foreign payment services for credit cards and the money never flows into the town.
Crime has greatly increased with all the money floating around. Home burglaries, car jackings and street muggings are common everyday of the week anytime of the day.
There have been some improvements from the tourism and a few hundred local families (out of the 100,000 locals that live there) have done well selling the homes their families have owned for generations. Now they can’t afford to live in the center and have to live in the outskirts.
Gone are the local restaurants, pushed out by high rents or because the owners sold the buildings, replaced by generic tourist traps pushing cheap alcohol and over priced food.
The local water supply has been drained, utilities cannot keep up with waste and demand, corruption for permits and zoning changes is rampant.
Literally thousands of homes in generic housing developments are being built in the surrounding countryside. Cheap build profit extracting developments solely to make money as the water table continues to drain lower and lower.
The only thing that has some what saved the city is lack of an airport being close by. Closest is 1.5 hours drive. But another rich entrepreneur is looking to bring a new runway in that is long enough for private jets.
That’s when it will officially be over.
An influx of money benefits everyone, but it’s also at the expense of the city. Is that worth it? I think what bothers me the most is seeing thousands of people crowd the central square and take the same photo of the church over and over and over and over. It’s within everyone’s right, rich or poor to be in that square. No one owns a city, except when the money starts coming in, and then money owns it.