Of course this is exacerbated by the Silicon Valley culture thing where being a startup founder or early employee requires being wildly overly optimistic about how likely your project is to succeed.
Which seems related to people like the OP posting grasping arguments about how doomers haven't *proved* we're all *inevitably* going to die (because while a random objective function would kill us, LLM training isn't *random* and who knows maybe we'll get lucky with what kind of nonrandom it is).
Nobody is *certain* that the world will end, preferring "90% chance everybody dies 10% chance you rule the world" to "90% chance everybody dies 10% chance somebody else rules the world" isn't necessarily irrational.
Yeah, though I occasionally still have time to pop in and grab a soda + cookie, or if I end up with a long layover
And that site would cover less than half my hotel spend I think.
I did fly to Japan in JAL business class for 60k AA miles once about ten years ago, glad to hear that's still at least theoretically possible.
In the past year I've spent $0 on Grubhub, $80 on rental cars, and theoretically like $700 on hotels but a bunch of that was Airbnb-ish stuff that presumably doesn't get the 10X?
(Some lounges also won't let you in if you don't have a departing flight boarding pass even if your status and the flight you just arrived on would otherwise qualify you, though I think airlines vary on this.)
The shower on landing thing seems super unreliable, many places (including the US) arriving international passengers can't get back into security to go to the lounge if they don't have a connecting flight. And I've also seen lounges with enormous waitlists for the shower.
Though the issue is apparently exacerbated by that area being full of encampments next to the tracks, since the rules also say to honk if they see a person walking/trespassing alongside the tracks.
The city was apparently told it would cost hundreds of millions to make it a quiet zone. www.berkeleyside.org/2024/09/09/b...
No I don't think they would. (Though they'd probably have the gates down for much longer per train than the US does.)
- Free flights points game: should not influence who you fly, you get more free travel from a single free credit card signup than many years of flying. (I traveled all over the world as a broke PhD student via credit card churning, though it's less lucrative now than it was a decade ago.)
- Checked bags: Worth avoiding whenever possible in my opinion, but of course it depends on your situation
- Elite status points game: key if you travel a lot for work but don't bother if your travel is mostly personal
Yeah that's usually how you get Precheck, but relatively cheap cards like the Venture X or even plain Venture will reimburse that, you don't need a $700/year card to get that. And even if you're paying out of pocket Global Entry is only $24/year which is well worth it.
As an example there are half a dozen crossings in industrial West Berkeley, mostly pretty low traffic (most traffic uses University Ave which is grade-separated) but you can hear dozens of horn blasts from all over Berkeley every time a train comes through.
- Precheck: good value but also any premium card will cover it
- CLEAR: poor value over vanilla Precheck at most airports
- Lounges: Occasionally nice but most trips you won't have time to use them
- Upgrades: mostly don't apply on the sorts of fares normal people buy with their own money
Having some kind of premium card with generic lounge access (e.g. Capital One Venture X, theoretically $395/year but you get more than that back in travel credits) is decent value, but stuff like the United Club Card seems much harder to justify.
Oh no, bureaucratic work to avoid inflicting pain on millions of people every single day.
The cost is real of course but it seems overwhelmingly worth it?
For those insane Brightline crossings the US horn rules are indeed about right, but the same rules apply at minor rural and industrial area crossings which it will never make sense to spend the money to upgrade.
In the US they have to blast just as loud and just as many times no matter how low the traffic volumes at the crossing are.
I recall that Caltrain experimented with less loud / more directional horns and the regulators made them go back to the louder ones.
But they don't blast their horns as loud or as much even at the crossings with worse infrastructure.
Map from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Lombardy%E2%80%93Venetia
Hmm no I guess the Italian ones were named like that even in 1815
Isn't part of this that the Italian ones are almost 100 years newer, by which point the whole world was more urbanized?
Map from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Electric_Railways_Company_of_London
Do you mean UERL triangle?
I'm not sure this manages to be closer to Helsinki transit-timelines.github.io/hel/ than to Jinhua transit-timelines.github.io/yiw/
What places have you been with the most Coruscant/Trantor sorts of vibes (city on top of city on top of city, without a clearly visible ground level)?
Also doesn't mark the bike trail access which is actually pretty nice.
In the past 20 years I've caught 435 flights and missed six. One of those (DL DUB-JFK) cost me like $500 to rebook, one (AK MNL-KLO) cost me like $40 to rebook, the other four (DL JFK-DUB, UA LGA-ORD, CZ ICN-PEK, AS SFO-SEA) were rebooked for free. That amortizes out to like $1.25 per flight.