projectazorian

Any good realtor will look into the maintenance history of the building and let you know if a special assessment is likely soon, and any good condo board will be transparent with you about this as well.

If you live in a non-rent-stabilized apartment in a market where annual rent increases are the norm, then by renting you condemn yourself to permanent downward mobility unless your income increases by more than your rent every year.

8-10% annual rent increases are not unusual at all in NYC/LA/SF - maybe you can get a 10% raise every year, but I'd wager even most HN posters can't.

For this reason alone, it makes sense to grind to homeownership as quickly as possible if you live in a top tier market. Those locations also de-risk homeownership a bit since they have the largest job markets and highest real estate demand.

If you live anywhere else in the US then I agree, renting starts to look a lot more attractive.

Correct, Chicago. The city's even already bored the station downtown as part of another project, so there's a massive underground cavern in the middle of downtown currently going unused.

The last time I took the Blue Line to the airport it was indeed fast and convenient - but dealing with luggage was kind of annoying, and there was a guy smoking weed on the train. If I were traveling for business there's no way I would use the Blue Line unless it was peak rush hour, and indeed most business travelers don't. Getting weed smoke on your work clothes is a less than ideal way to start a trip, nor is getting sweaty in your work clothes from hauling luggage around the station.

Thus the case for an express train - it would capture those price insensitive business travelers. You could charge $20 a ticket and it would still be a significant savings over Uber. Heathrow Express in London is like this and it seems to work well.

> Price index do not capture the reality of most people cost of living. They don't capture the family that have to buy margarine instead of butter, because butter became too expensive, while margarine became cheaper, Weight both items as the same, and voilá! no inflation, increases in the price of butter were cancelled by cheaper margarine, fuck you if you prefer butter.

I don't know how this works in other countries, but in the US the weights do not change month to month like this. If consumers keep making this choice over a period of years the index will eventually get reweighted, but reweighting only happens once every few years.

(Of course, if you were an official put in charge specifically to cook the books you could just reweight on a monthly basis like you describe, which is something that might well happen now...)

The problem the admin has is that economists at the BLS by and large aren't scared of getting fired. That work experience is gold in the private sector - most of them can easily get a job in finance and 3x-4x their comp.

They're already doing this so that the feds can slap terrorism charges on people who vandalize Teslas.

Yep. My city did a deal with Hyperloop to build an express airport train instead of contracting with a European or Japanese company. Hyperloop pulled out and now there is no train, what a surprise.

You might ask "why don't they just re-bid the contract?" Answer: The new 'progressive' city government is opposed to building a train for 'rich people' since there's already a non-express metro that goes through some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the city. Of course no businesspeople use it and they all take Ubers (many of which are Teslas)

You completely skipped over the defense and biotech industries, I notice. Not to mention DC being the HQ of the US military-industrial complex and the intelligence community. Like I said, there's a lot of bloat in the defense industry, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that it's 100% waste.

> Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?

IMO it's perfectly legitimate for organizations to advocate for their interests as long as they do not engage in bribery. They often have subject matter expertise the government does not, and more information allows for better decision-making. Would you rather the government operate in a vacuum, completely disconnected from what is going on in the rest of the country? Btw, it's not just corporations that lobby, there are plenty of NGOs doing the same thing.

If you want to blame someone for this dynamic, blame the founders of this country, who decided to create a federal district rather than put the capital in an existing city with an existing industrial base.

> Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city.

I was just there for a week, mainly in the downtown area, and honestly don't recall seeing a single homeless person.

> a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying.

Uh, I'd expect someone posting here to know better, given that Amazon HQ2 is in Arlington and us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.

And you skipped over aerospace/defense, not to mention biotech. (Even if there is a lot of bloat in the defense sector, it's not all useless.)

> if AI is so good why aren't people just doing 15 PRs a day on open source projects like Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, etc?

Because those projects are mature and have a very high bar for contributions, so aren't a good fit for AI?

Opening a PR on Linux is very different from opening a PR on a company's non-critical-path CRUD service.

> It just seems like it's always been used as a mildly derogatory term by people who really dislike sports and sports fans.

Yeah, actually saying 'sportsball' in conversation in a non-ironic way is an excellent way to signal that you have poor social skills. No need to yuck someone's yum.

I've been known to drop this one in conversation to see if people pick up on it.

Have no idea if it's still true, but it certainly was in Wenger's time.

> Society only really works if we know we have each other's backs when the chips are down

I'd disagree with this - capitalism tends to reward defection from this norm, and it's been a stable equilibrium for centuries at this point. You have more of a point when it comes to community, but even many intentional communities are massively hypocritical when it comes to this, with higher-status people having the ability to deviate from norms at will.

helpful reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinschaft_and_Gesellschaft

To be fair, plenty of boundary setting is legitimate. I find that hypocrisy is an excellent tell for when someone is misusing the principle. Eg. when someone says "I don't like it when you talk about this subject" and then proceeds to bring up said subject all the time when they have something to say about it.

> And I also have the experience of people really appreciating it if you actually speak and read Japanese.

100%. You don't even need to know that much. Even if you have to switch to English, showing respect by demonstrating some effort to learn the local language and culture goes a long way.

I never got this, but at busy times it was not uncommon to get a super apologetic "we're full" when there were clearly a few seats available. Honestly I get it, foreigners are higher effort to deal with and if you're already busy you might not want to deal with that. Or they could be holding seats for regulars, etc.

Interestingly, Apple Maps is integrated with Tabelog. So using Apple Maps to search for restaurants in Japan can be an effective strategy.

> But even in Kyoto, go off the beaten path a little, and you will find much to delight you!

Extremely true. I just got back from Japan and I was very pleased by how little effort it took to get off the tourist trail, even in Kyoto. Of course some popular attractions are still worth seeing and for those, visiting around opening is usually enough to avoid the worst of the crowds. (If you're flying in from the US there's a good chance jet lag has you up at 5am anyway, so this is an effective strategy even for non-morning people.)

> I'm of mixed minds. I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences, but those days are pretty much gone now.

I don't think they're gone though? I just got back from a trip to Japan and I was very pleased to find these experiences were still the norm outside the most heavily touristed areas. Even in big cities. Have been to Colombia twice in the past two years and it was the same way.

He said "worked with" not "worked at." Likely as a contractor. And if so it's not uncommon for some projects to be very short while others might take 10-20% of your time for 2-3 years. Plenty of time to gather domain knowledge especially if clients are clustered in the same industry.

1992 riots weren't perpetrated by migrants, to the extent they were involved it was as victims. Neither was any of the looting in 2020 to my knowledge.

Btw, nothing significant was "burned down" in 2020 either. Some shops hit by looters closed for a while and eventually reopened. Fairfax was hard hit by looting and if you went there today you would have no clue that anything happened.

The current events are primarily happening in an area that is full of state and federal government facilities, not really anyone's favorite spot. No looting either, there's nothing to loot. The demonstrators are burning Waymos and Bird scooters, better if it would not happen at all, but it's nobody's personal property.

Nobody is incentivized to fix those things, so they don't get fixed. Nobody ever got promoted for making small UI tweaks.

Much better to spend years on an expensive redesign that somehow makes the user experience worse. Now that's how you get ahead.

Let me guess, New York City?

Many people only look at LinkedIn when they're on the job market themselves. Or do so infrequently enough that they only see the message weeks/months later, at which point it feels awkward to respond.

That's when you give feedback that they should spend, say, 30 mins trying to sort the problem out for themselves before asking for help. And that they should take notes or ask over Slack so they can refer back to the answer.

It frequently doesn't work, but even when it doesn't you may still win yourself some unexpected allies who feel the same way. Sometimes those allies are in high places.

> We need labor, there aren't enough spa management and pet groomer positions to build an economy upon.

Is it your impression that spa management and pet care are the only working-class service jobs available?

Most of the trades are categorized as service professions in the statistics. So is construction.

You can get a Toto Washlet attachment for ~$300 (who knows what it costs now after tariffs) that as far as I can tell is almost exactly the same model used in Japan. Heated seat, remote control, dryer, etc.

> I am very much on the fence on this one. I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, based on having been in manufacturing across various industries for over thirty years, that the US and Europe have been on a path to loose nearly all manufacturing capacity within ten years, maybe twenty at best.

I've now been around long enough to remember people saying this 10-20 years ago. Seems to be plenty of manufacturing still happening.