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Just bought EQP to requalify for IHG Diamond through end of 2025! Since I usually buy miles for 0.5 cents, the $768 to buy 110,000 EQP was only a $218 premium, and I get Diamond again
Ran into the Mexican car insurance scam with Budget in Merida, Mexico 🇲🇽
Base rate was $18 USD a day, but if you didn't get the CDW costing minimum $85 USD a day, I had to put down a deposit of 330,000 MXN / $16,000 USD which obviously got rejected by all my credit cards.
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Updated 2/6/2021
A couple months ago, I wrote a post about Asian grocery/food delivery services. Since then, I’ve been using Weee! the most, though Yamibuy actually has a wider selection and greater coverage. Weee seems to promote their products more frequently with various discounts and has also been greatly expanding their daily bundles. You order multiple days’ worth of bundles in advance.
This is not entirely travel related, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to write. In March of 2020, I moved to Japan, right before the coronavirus pandemic really hit either Japan or the United States. Moving here was something I’ve intended on for a long time, and I maintain that it was one of the best decision in my life, despite complications from the pandemic. This will be a multi-part post, from the background motivations, to the processing moving there, and then practical tips for others making the move.
Melio Payments is very similar to Plastiq, which you’ve probably all heard of. It’s a way for you, as a business, to pay a vendor or another business using a debit or credit card (they can also do bank transfers) and by sending either a check or ACH to the vendor.
Debit cards and bank transfers are currently free, while credit card has a 2.5% fee, similar to Plastiq. The ACH transfers to the vendor appear to be faster (within 24 hours), whereas Plastiq may take a few business days. Check speeds are about the same for both, about 7-10 days.
TL;DR the lugg app is easy, reasonably priced, insured way to move. Download the app here and use promo code LU765311 for $10 off.
In preparation for moving to Japan, I needed to move all the things I wasn’t sending over to my parents’ place. So began the usual process of messaging a bunch of moving companies on Yelp and Thumbtack.
The annoying part of this is they will quote an hourly rate, but it’s hard to tell what extras are being charged and compare them reasonably, such as base fees, gas charges, whether or not the time to drive to the pickup or drive back from the destination is charged, whether you will be charged double drive time or not, or material costs. After asking a bunch of companies, I was getting quoted anywhere between $240-$450 dollars. To compare, the last time I did this with slightly more stuff, it ended up being around $400 dollars. Furthermore, scheduling is all done through the conversation, and you don’t always know whether a company is available or not, and it’s hard to control what time they come.
Hot off my recent trip, I have a few new recommendation guides! I’ve been to Bangkok a couple times before, and combined experience from those trips with some new research. We’re always open to suggestions though!
This was perhaps my 3rd time to Osaka, but I really never got a good feel for the lay of the land until this time. I spend 2.5 days wandering around to the best restaurants, bars, and cool places to see, so I think I have a decent handle on it now!
TL;DR the reservation system is absolutely unreliable, and without the Uber Pass, is just not worth it.
I’ve been using JUMP bikes and scooters with the Uber Pass for a few months now, and the free 30 minutes a day absolutely made it worth it for me. There were a couple of issues though. Frequently I would encounter bikes with non-working e-assists. Even more annoying though, I would go up to bikes and scooters (I would check that they were available on the app), try to reserve them, and get hit with mysterious errors that they weren’t reservable. The issues seemed to have gone away over time.
With the advent of Bluetooth earphones, and in-flight WiFi, I’ve had multiple experiences of having my music listening and WiFi connection interrupted by switching on airplane mode. Fortunately, there is a trick to keep airplane mode from turning off those services!
Here are the full instructions courtesy of Doug Lynch on XDA Developers, but I’ll summarize the steps.
The setting for which radios turn off in airplane mode is controlled by a global system setting, which can be modified using the Android Debug Bridge, or adb. To connect to the Android Debug Bridge, you must enable Developer Mode.
Using China’s cashless alternatives like Alipay and WeChat has always been a hassle or impossible for foreigners without Chinese residency or a bank card to use. Given that China is moving to an increasingly cashless society, but without widespread acceptance of foreign credit cards, being unable to use either of these methods made being a tourist fairly inconvenient. You could still pay a normal taxi with cash, or pay small amounts with cash if the merchant took it, or go to higher end places that could take card, but plenty of merchants wouldn’t accept anything other than mobile pay or wouldn’t have the proper change.
I wrote before about riding JUMP bikes for free, up to 30 minutes a day with the Uber ride pass. JUMP scooters have recently been added to the network, and it seems like they are also included in the free 30 minutes a day with a ride pass. The 30 minutes comes out of the same pool as the bikes. So far, there seems to be no reservation fee on the scooters, just a $0.33 per minute charge (beyond 30 minutes that is), which is similar to how the JUMP bikes were priced for me initially.
After Robinhood took the consumer market by storm in 2013 by offering completely free trades, analysts predicted it would only be a matter of time until the major brokers followed suit. I personally keep a small portion of my assets in Robinhood, though they haven’t been exactly without controversy. Robinhood has been accused of possibly not providing the best order speeds and pricing, as they take revenue from sending their order flow through 3rd party market makers. There was also the botched launch of Robinhood Cash. For what it’s worth, here’s my Robinhood referral 🤣.
