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Non-Tech : Kirk's Market Thoughts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Arran Yuan who wrote (11555)	7/6/2021 11:30:18 AM
From: Kirk ©	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 26710

What makes you feel that way and what are you comparing it to? Set my feet on JFK Airport on August 31st, 1994. Love NYC, especially Manhattan, ever since! My GF of 18 years feels the same about Taipei, Taiwan where she still has a place to visit every year until Covid... but is looking forward to 2022. She loves the transportation and ability to get so much good food at a low price. NYC has the transportation and I hear the nightlife and restaurants are second to none but it is fairly expensive for the average person. When I went there on a very limited expense account for a conference with my boss, decades ago, I really enjoyed getting out and walking just for the people and building watching, much like Chicago.

To: Arran Yuan who wrote (11555)	7/6/2021 2:24:16 PM
From: Sun Tzu	2 Recommendations Recommended By Arran Yuan Kirk © Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 26710

NYC is a very unique place. People who love it will have a hard time living anywhere else b/c no other place is comparable. For me the picture is mixed. This is of course a very subjective opinion, as it has to be. What I like about NYC: (1) If something can be bought or sold, it is bought to sold in NYC. The amount of choices open to you is absolutely astonishing. E.g. You don't have to just settle for Chinese food or even good Chinese food. Not only you can get the food from every region that most people have not heard of, you can even get authentic "fusion" food such as "Indian style Chinese food" or "Malaysian Chinese food." The same goes for everything else from clothing to electronics to toys to whatever. (2) The same goes for the breadth of services. Do you have guests coming over but don't have the time to cook? You can get a chef to come to your apartment (the doorman will let him/her in) and prepare the meal, set the table, and leave before you and your guests arrive. Do you need your laundry done? I had a drycleaner on my main floor and a bulk laundry right around the corner. And the prices are cheap enough that it is not worth it to do it yourself. It is standard practice for the supermarket to deliver your shopping to your building free of charge. (3) The art scene. I enjoyed going to gallery openings, mingling with budding and established artists, and all sorts of live performances. (4) As I said, the prices, except for things that are land or labor intensive are much cheaper than anywhere else. (5) New yorkers are nice people. Hollywood makes it seem like NYCers are mean or wierd. But they are some of the friendliest people I have seen anywhere. The thing to understand about them is that they are blunt. They call it as they see it and they are very as a matter of fact about it. This is not a sign of rudeness. It is just who they are. The flip side is that they have a thick skin. They don't take offense for many things that would rub people elsewhere the wrong way. I found Californians to be very thin skinned in comparison. The flip side is that Californians are exceptionally polite. You rarely see another driver honking at you no matter how slow you are behind the lights, whereas in NYC the driver 2 cars behind your will honk at your if you spend a second too long behind the lights. What I don't like about NYC (1) If it cannot be bought or sold, then it is hard to find in NYC. There are a lot of "glue" or "nicety" things that many other cities provide. They are almost non-existent in NYC. This includes clean roads, noise free space, green space, etc. There is a very sharp focus on money and return on investment that just doesn't exist anywhere else. For example, back when there was public pay phones, in every city you could drop a quarter, pick up the phone and turn around to look at some road or shop sign. Not in NYC. The phone cords were just long enough to reach your ear. You'd have no wiggle room. And your quarter would last you only a few minutes before you had to put in more money. Scale this to everything else. This makes NYC come across as cheap and greedy. The situation has improved a lot in recent years. But it is still behind other cities. (2) Lack of space. This is not just about cramped living. Shortage of space limits what things are available to you. From pool halls to swimming pools to parks or skating arenas or even restaurants. Space is at a huge premium, as it would have to be for a small island with so many people in it. One side effect of this is the vertical expansion. Which in turn means that it could be nicest summer day and you will not get a single ray of sunshine on the pavement as you walk between 60 story buildings. I am just too outdoorsey for that. However, this negative becomes a positive during fall and winter. So I do enjoy NYC more then ;) (3) If you are a DIY kind of person, then you will have a hard time in NYC. They lifestyle is designed around buying and selling goods and services, not doing things yourself. This is sort of related to #1 above, but it is different in that really the means of doing it yourself are hidden, inconvenient, or just impractical. Eventually I found my way around it (to the degree that was possible). But it wasn't easy. I actually considered creating a NYC map similar to Nancy Chandler map of Bangkok. But Manhattan is too complex for that. Plus you'd have to use layers of transparency as the city exists at multiple levels and not just the street level. (4) Old infrastructure. Of all the cosmopolitan cities that I have been to, NYC has the worst infrastructure. This is not an easy problem to solve. Infrastructure that is relatively easy to rollout, is rolled out in NYC first. The population density makes it the most logical place to test out ideas. However, once the concept is proven, other cities will take the lessons of NYC and make it better in their own city. As a result, the novelty lasts a brief period in NYC while the outdated lasts a long time. Infrastructure that is not easy to deploy (e.g. subway system or even the electrical grid) will just hang around forever until the costs of maintaining it way exceed replacing it. Just how long do they last? When I arrived in NYC and for a decade after, you still had a city block with DC electricity from when Tesla and Edison were competing over the electrical standard!! So here's my summary of the good and the bad of NYC. Overall I lean on the good side and would not hesitate to be there as a single person. But for family life, for all the reasons that I described plus a few more that will hamper raising young children there, I chose to leave.