underhill

I feel like the crowd-sourcing / SEOing / optimization of reviews on the internet has, for all its benefits, made everything too noisy and untrustworthy. I know myself and a lot of other people first search reddit now instead of google because it's impossible to get anything written by a real nonbiased human otherwise.

For similar reasons I've used things like Yelp less and less and tried to use professionally editorialized reviews (Eater, The Infatuation, Bon Appetit, etc) for food, well-known travel sites/bloggers for hotels, etc. There's still some paid incentives there too obviously but I can at least calibrate it to how much I align with the publication.

Same thing happened with me @ Apple last year. Went through 4 or so interviews with the expectation that it was a remote role. Then the day before the big remote "onsite" I was told they actually wanted someone in-person. So I removed myself from the process. I'll chalk it up to 2021 being a confusing time for everyone - but I felt pretty burned by it.

Oh yeah - I've seen plenty of not-confident-bikers hop on scooters and ride them in the street.

Even though riding a scooter in the street is often fairly terrifying, I feel like there's some kind of easy mental jump that has people getting on without nearly as much reservation as they would have hopping on a bike.

I take both Jump e-bikes as well as various scooters on the regular. Honestly I prefer Jump Bikes - it's almost always cheaper and faster and safer. I definitely feel more "seen" by cars as well.

That being said, with a scooter you aren't pedaling at all. Even on an e-assist bike you're still getting the adrenaline pumping and sorta sweaty. And a lot of people are afraid of riding bikes in traffic, so while even though bikes are actually much safer, there's a lower mental barrier to entry with scooters. People who almost never ride normal bikes (which is most people) have a harder time adopting the mindset of taking a bike share, e-assist or not.

Plus scooters are straight up more fun to ride with a group of friends - it's a genuinely fun thing to have out of town friends do.

It doesn't have to totally replace cars. The ideal is to drop down from a 2 car household to a 1 car household and only use it for bigger errands and trips, or you drop down to a 0 car household and use the money you save on car payments, gas, and insurance to occasionally rent or carshare. The best is for biking/walking/transit to replace daily trips to/from places like work, dinner, downtown, the movies, the park, etc.

This doesn't really change much unless you spend much time in/around Philly.

As it currently stands, there is no direct interstate highway between Philly and New York. If you ever take a Bolt or Megabus between the two cities you'll notice it usually takes exit 4 on the Turnpike and drives through suburban Cherry Hill NJ to get into Philly. To get between the two cities you have to exit and take a more local road through NJ for a couple miles. This interchange will connect it so you can go directly from "Pennsylvania 95" to I276 to "NJ Turnpike 95". (Except now all called "95")

If you are driving direct from New York/Boston to DC, you'll in all likelihood never see this interchange and continue take the NJ Turnpike all the way down to Delaware in order to bypass Philadelphia traffic and construction.

This is totally anecdotal, but I (and apparently many other people online) have had pretty terrible experiences with Zelle, moreso than I've noticed with other fintech services.

A family member tried to send me money, which used to work perfectly fine via the bank's older transfer methods (including PopMoney), but once the bank switched to Zelle they somehow lost the transaction completely because my bank had yet to integrate with it.

Zelle's app and help pages were terrible and directed me to create an account and download the app to get the money out. I did that and the money was still nowhere to be found. The bank customer service wouldn't touch it because it was Zelle's fault, and my family member apparently had to wait on hold for an extremely long time with Zelle to get it sorted out and get the money back in their account. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare that could have been for less financially-secure or tech-forward people.