wcfields

Qualifying it with "near the sea" and NOT seaside you could include some of Baja, Mexico areas around Rosarito. $100k these days though won't get you the best place, but if you could swing $200k you can get a condo in an older building and/or a small house.

You can purchase something in a village between Rosarito / Ensenada for $100k too.

I think the bait & switch on those $2000 stimulus checks that became $1400 really pissed a lot of people off.

Future of finance: Your own mattress (cold wallet) or a bookie incorporated in a tax-haven (exchange)

I fully agree, the 2019-2021 Bolt [1] has been my gold standard for the right combo of touch and tactile. Climate and radio preset buttons fully separate and easy to see/touch.

It's a shame they went more "slick" with the 2022 refresh, still tactile, but just more flush and less accessible without a glance. [2]

[1] https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/OYAqe/s1/2020-chevy-bolt-e...

[2] https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/02/2022-...

I actually just turned down a job offer, albeit a w2-contractor role, as a PD at Apple, for this reason alone. Even though it had the possibility to become full time at Apple, I’d rather be fully remote at my current company.

> fewer people need stuff and there are fewer people to make stuff

But, that's the whole gist of our economy: lots of people needing stuff (consumers) and lots people making stuff (labor).

> economically active populations

I've seen this thrown about and have to take this with a grain of salt because even the infirmed/elderly/retired are still part of the economy. They consume food and resources, albeit they aren't out buying durable goods and new cars, but they are paying rent/mortgage in their retirement communities, eating food, buying CPGs* (some of which fully rely on an older population).

I'll take the example of my two relatives that died from COVID, neither had underlying conditions: One was a 65 yo former airline mechanic on the verge of retirement with a McMansion in Houston area, he spent a lot of money keeping up that lifestyle, and when he passed my aunt moved back to a small town, and downsized, considerably shrinking her spending. They had planned to spend the next 10 years in an RV that is no longer going to happen. The other is my 46 yo cousin with 4 kids and was a seven figure earner in sales living in Kansas City area. Again, huge amount of spend and now his wife is getting by with a massively reduced house and budget.

* Did the hard candy industry take a nose-dive? Should I be shorting Werther's Original stock?

> I don't think the US can be summed up with a single word.

I think it can, I've been thinking about this and it's "scam".

Like, think how often everything in our country is a straight up scam. Healthcare, parking tickets, basically anything you buy. It's almost all snake-oil flim-flam every which way and as a 'consumer' you have to wade through the mire every single day to get scammed as little as possible.

I think you're being purposefully obtuse, but here's why:

- SNAP / EBT / Foodstamps for people making so little money. Add onto that, Food banks.

- Farm subsidies for many cheap foodstuffs (Corn) causing massive cheap, albeit junk food that can sustain.

- I can literally grow food in the ground for "free", put it in mason jars and save my food for a year. I can't open a fresh can of broken-arm at the fixed cost.

- Food is fungible, if I'm hungry, I can wait 2, 3, 8+ hours to eat, or have a quick snack until meal time. It's not like I need a Big Mac infusion in the next 10 seconds or else I'll die from lack of special sauce.

- You have many options of food. You can eat Soylent, rice&beans, or steak for every meal at various price points. You don't really get an ala carte when it comes to Chemotherapy.

- You can always eat monkey pellets [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/moreplatesmoredates/comments/qbfkfl...

Yeah, because with transfering money via Western Union you have one problem: they take a cut, but the person on the other end gets fiat in their local currency and you pay in your local currency.

With sending bitcoin you have many more problems: converting your local currency to bitcoin, and if you're like 99% of regular people using a hot-wallet like Coinbase and they take a cut to buy bitcoin, waiting for that to clear, sending it to another bitcoin address, waiting for that to clear, then the person on the other end has to cash out. Is there a coinbase-like in DR? If we're talking about underbanked, then how do they get their money? Is there a window for this coinbase-like thing that will pay out in fiat of the local currency? I've seen plenty of bitcoin ATMs around my area, but none are for withdrawal.

Well, you did it. You get go choose whatever you want to do now. This goes for all of you on this site too that need to go touch grass.

I'd like to think I'd take inspiration from Nick Stellino, a former Wall Street guy that made a ton of money and then decided to start over as a chef:

"he had built a successful career as a stockbroker. Nick’s Wall Street career was lucrative, but he realized something was missing. ... He decided to pursue a culinary career. ... With no formal experience, Nick was told he couldn’t work as a chef. Not to be denied a job in the industry, he initially took a job as a dishwasher. He went on to apprentice with some of the best chefs in America. While working in the restaurant business, he realized that he wanted to share his enthusiasm for cooking with others and that a television cooking show would be the best way to do that." [1]

I'm sure there's some embellishing here, but the point stands that you have unlimited options now to pursue what give you joy and purpose. Want to be a watchmaker working on antique Rolex timepieces? Starting an all organic bespoke wedding cake business? Running for City Comptroller in the next election?

[1] https://www.nickstellino.com/about-nick/

Pro stuff gives a glimpse of if we lived in a perfect world, SDI (and HD-SDI) would have been the de facto standard for video everywhere.

Municipalities are in an arms race to criminalize homelessness to push the issue to another city (defacto being Los Angeles).

> cnn+ doesn't actually give you live cnn

Ok, now that's just insane.

Tangentially related, Reminds me of this: In Los Angeles there's a few very prominently displayed billboards at a shopping center for the Galaxy S4 that has somehow remained up [1]

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/deKaDdMjM3U4P1Gb7

The word "Starting" is the real lawyer'd up word there. Starting has so many meanings.

In my work life I've started hundreds of projects, and a few actually make it beyond a line in a planning document!

If I can give any home buying tip from my experience of buying two houses it's been to look at places that are in "the middle". Both homes I've bought in SoCal have had some god-awful photos online, and the finish is new-ish, but done by someone in the 70s so it's new but tacky in a little-old-lady way.

This ends up pricing the house too expensive to flippers, and not nice enough to sell compared to other houses because it doesn't have the farmhouse sink and looks exactly like a grandma took out a home equity line and renovated (which is what happened).

I've never had an unsafe car persay, but when working with a small budget you'll end up with a high-mileage 2010 Toyota Corolla. (Turo says "Cars that have more than 130,000 mi/200,000 km may remain listed as long as they’re in excellent condition") [1]

What I've noticed on Turo is now there's a large mix of 'big' players: Unregulated car rental biz that have 10+ beaters of Echos/Sparks/Minis/Focus, or, a buy-here/pay-here used car dealership that's renting out everything on the lot.

[1] https://support.turo.com/hc/en-us/articles/203991940-Vehicle...

Haven't lost a game yet using PENIS / TOUCH as my first and second.

For the up-thread commenters, It's like people here can't fathom that a Fortune 107 corporation wouldn't implement policies that follow an ECON 101 supply/demand curve.

Semi-related:

RING A BELL (213) 223-6101

Perhaps "the most DVD movie" [1], second only to "Fight Club" in people's opinions.

[1] https://twitter.com/freemaneric/status/1473337573326180364

Before Ubiquiti turned into a garbage fire my go to recommendation for power/performance/budget was used Ruckus APs and pfSense router.

I’ve been there on the IT side. Company had two meetings simultaneously on either side of the building and I was in the server room disabling GSuite accounts and remotely locking laptops.

Absolutely brutal 40% headcount slash after we lost a major client. And, someone went to the “stay” meeting that was escorted to the correct meeting by a manager too.

My happy thought: I’m sure that someone, somewhere has an ancient door keycard badge program that they can finally virtualize because of a mouse driver.

I work in the advertising industry (media buy side) and we buy the feed from VideoAmp (Vizio) to determine linear TV spot reach better than Nielsen.

We only buy for our clients and get a feed of only their placements, but essentially VideoAmp knows how many Vizio TV’s are online in every zip code and from that can with a fairly high confidence interval give a statistical accurate determination of what played on TV.

Most media includes ACR (auto content recognition) fingerprints for this purpose, either through VideoAmp or Comscore (comcast set top boxes).

The whole game for them is for you to get your “Smart TV” online and they entice with apps and now tons of shovelware-esq free TV channels like PlutoTV.

150 shares were offered in the "Backblaze Directed Share Program", and I've been a customer since 2011.

Following Someone1234's comment[1] Stupid idea(?): Attach a mid-power laser to zap bugs, could even be a DIY project with an arduino and an PTZ mount.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29015202