Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Subsidized lifestyle

Word on the street is the Chase Sapphire Reserve card - the preeminent travel rewards credit card - is increasing its annual fee. What started at an already hefty $450 per year is now a whopping $795 per annum. COVID-era inflation comes for everything eventually.

Of course, Chase has all sorts of new card benefits to potentially offset the price jump. But it’s all predicated on one thing: cardholder spending. This is a classic case of spending money to save money, which only works if that money is what you would have spent regardless. If you wouldn’t have in the first place, then you really shouldn’t have.

I did sign up for the Sapphire Reserve when it was first introduced many moons ago. The signup bonus was super generous: 100,000 points on a $4,000 initial spend (worth a thousand dollars in cash value.) Coupled with the $300 travel credit per year, the true annual fee was only $150 at the time. As an annually traveler, it was not difficult to for me to “break even”, so to speak.

That 100,000 bonus point allowed me to fly first class to Korea in 2017. Truly living the champagne life on a beer budget. But that was during a time when lots of capital was going toward subsidizing a rich person’s lifestyle for the mundane middle class earner. Surely you remember: UBER rides used to be cheap, thanks to the company continuously burning through VC cash to hide the real cost.

Did we honestly think we can afford to have our burritos hand delivered from the taqueria for only a few bucks? DoorDash fees used to be not so exorbitant, too.

Well, those sweet subsidized days are over. The premium travel reward credit cards are now only for those who can comfortably spend the high amount necessary to reap the rewards. Good news for me, I cancelled my Sapphire Reserve soon as COVID prevented any sorts of traveling.

Row my own gears

In this blog I often write about how life is about tradeoffs. If you choose to have a kid, you must wave your single lifestyle goodbye. Trying to have both will only end in misery. To move out of my parents’ house, I had to sell my car, one that I still miss to this day. But it had to be done.

Speaking of cars, a typical mark of a car enthusiasts is the ability to drive the manual transmission. My first three cars all came with the row-yourself stick. On my fourth car (don’t waste your money on cars, kids), the manual was not an option. And since then, I’ve not had to select my own gears for the past six years.

And I really miss it! There’s an incredible joy to the stick shift. A perfectly executed heel-toe downshift is satisfying every single time. In order to experience this joy again, it would mean buying a manual transmission car. But that’s when the pros and cons start to factor in.

Ideally, I would buy a second car to supplement my current BMW M2 Competition (automatic). However that’s not a good use to money because I don’t even drive the M2 much as is. Having another car to simply sit around? I don’t have the kind of income level to support such luxury.

I can replace the M2, but then I would have to drive stick-shift all the time. Part of why I bought the BMW in automatic - manual was an option - is to avoid the pain of constant clutch use whilst stuck in traffic. There’s no doubt the automatic gearbox is superior in any situation that isn’t a spirited drive on windy mountain roads.

We truly cannot have it all, can we? We pick a path, and try to forget all the tradeoffs and might have beens. Sad to say, but I think I’m okay with never owning another manual transmission car again. The pleasure I got from my previous manual gearbox cars are memorable chapters in the book of me, and it’s fine for those chapters to close.

Do you even cardio, bro?

A few days ago I did some cardio on the exercise bike for the first time this year.

Let’s just say I really should incorporate cardio back into my exercise rotation. I’ve been so focused on chasing higher strength numbers that I promised myself to get back to cardio after hitting predetermined weight milestones. (Three plates on the back squat for reps, for example.) Priorities, you know.

Obviously, having solid cardio health can be helpful to adding weight on the barbell. Especially for the squat. Heavy squats for 10 plus reps is incredibly taxing - at least for me, an average man of nature. By the time rep eight comes around, I’m having to take extra time between reps, not because my legs are tired, but to catch my breath.

But long cardio session are so boring, no matter if we now have unlimited Internet videos to keep us entertained. Given the choice between cardio and leg day, the latter will always win out for me.

In this current dopamine hamster wheel world of ours, where fast rewards gets rewarded, weightlifting can be very additive indeed. Especially when you first start out. Every new week you’re adding more weight to the bar, or doing more reps than the last. The first time I moved my own bodyweight in pounds on an exercise was like the floodgates opening to a gush of new possibilities. You want to keep going and going until the next milestone, then the next.

What I am trying to avoid is turning weightlifting into my entire personality. It’s tough, because the rabbit hole - as with any other hobby - is deep. I have to remind myself that this is all towards keeping a fit body for as long as possible. Once you get past a certain weight number, anything more is for the ego. At some point I will simply maintain, rather than chase.

That will do it!

Word on the street is OAK - Oakland’s airport - is renaming once again. After the failed attempt to lure unsuspecting travelers to think it is SFO - San Francisco’s airport, OAK is now named Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport.

People will absolutely do everything but fix the reputation of Oakland.

There’s a reason we avoid flying into and out of OAK. The city’s high crime reputation is not worth the risk of whatever savings we get on the plane ticket. Now that Southwest - of which OAK is a hub - is just like any other airline, there’s absolutely no reason to choose Oakland.

Heck, why stop at changing the name of the airport? Rename Oakland to something else so that tourists would mistake it for a place that’s actually safe.

My friend was recently in Oakland for a concert, and his car got broken into. Coincidental as it may be, the town can’t escape its reputation when it gets constantly reinforced. Instead of rearranging the deck chairs, it needs to patch the gaping hole left by the iceberg.

If it isn’t for tourists, at least do it for people who actually live there. Oakland residents deserve a community free of quality-of-life harms.

Not enough memory

The generic, no suffix iPad is the best iPad for most people. I have the 9th-generation version, and it’s a great media consumption device. You know, for when I don’t want to turn on the TV, can’t be bothered with my MacBook Pro, or take the iPhone off the charger. First world problems demand first world solutions. We need devices with different display sizes to suit our immediate tastes, damn it!

Let me then continue to complain in a first world way: the standard iPad does not have enough RAM. The 3 GB in my iPad is paltry, and the 4 GB the 10th-generation now comes as standard is not that much better. The problem is using browser with lots of tabs open. There isn’t enough memory to keep everything on memory. Jumping between tabs can include lots of reloading. You had a spot in an article where you were reading? Well, you just lost it.

I’ve been eyeing an upgrade to the iPad Air with 8 GB of RAM, but the frugal me cannot force open the wallet. After all, I do have a MacBook Pro with 32 GB of memory. I could always use that for tab-intensive duties.

There’s got to be an end with memory inflation? The first laptop I ever bought - a 2007 MacBook - came with 2 GB of RAM. In 2025, the cheapest MacBook Air comes with 16 GB. It’s a chicken or the egg question: are apps truly demanding more memory, or are developers being lazy in building memory-hungry apps without a care? We’ve been joking about Google Chrome tabs using an absurd amounts of memory since tabs were a thing, and yet it seems the fix hasn’t ever come from the browser side! Manufacturers simply kept adding more RAM into their devices.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be jumping between tabs. Focus on one thing at a time, am I right?

What's the deal with ballpark food?

Honestly, why is it so expensive?

I mean, it’s always been expensive. But with the inflation of the past few years, it has gotten utterly insane.

For the first time this baseball season, I attended a Giants game in person. While game tickets have largely remained the same price due to the team sucking for the past years, the food prices at Oracle Park have gone straight up the scale. I can’t believe I paid nearly 10 dollars for a small hot dog - way smaller than what you can get at Costco for $1.50.

And my ballpark favorite - the chicken tenders and fries - is nearly $19! People seem happy to pay the high prices, too. The lines for food were long and plentiful. Maybe I’m the only poor amongst a sea of high-income earners. Probably true! The median individual income for San Francisco (2023 data) is estimated to be around $90,000 (Thanks, ChatGPT). I make less than that, so that means more than 50% percent of the population makes more than me. (I paid attention in math class.)

Anyways, because I seldom go to the ballparks these days (back in the early 2010s, I’d go to dozens every season), splurging that amount on food is no big deal. It’s all psychological, you know? Because I’ve experienced the food price being almost half of its current levels, it’s very painful to pay for that. My anchor point is way different than someone who’s never been to the ballpark and seeing the price list for the first time.

As I’ve many times before, I don’t adjust for inflation.

Always take the shot

I hate to say I knew it.

Indiana Pacers star guard Tyrese Haliburton strained his calf muscle in game 5 of the NBA Finals. When he then decided to play in game 6, I remarked to my friend that he is playing with fire. A strained calf is an easy gateway to blowing out the supporting achilles tendon.

Sure enough, during this evening’s game 7, Haliburton tore his achilles in a non-contact play. Absolutely devastating. With their star player out, the Pacers predictably lost the game. The Oklahoma City Thunder is your 2025 NBA champions of the world.

We can obviously understand why Haliburton chose to play on a bum calf. Making it to the NBA Finals is incredibly difficult, needing a ton skill and a decent amount of luck. There are no guarantees for any player that they will make it back in the future. So this Finals might be Haliburton’s only shot at the gold. Of course he would throw all caution into the proverbial wind.

He’s made enough money in his career that any jeopardy to Haliburton’s future earnings is not as salient as giving it his all to win a championship. The older him would probably look back at it with regret if he sat out the last two games and the Pacers lost. That’s not an alternative timeline he wishes to live.

The key here is that Haliburton took the risk. Certain opportunities in life only shows up once at a given time. If you don’t take the shot (no pun), that’s it. It won’t ever come back around again. Crushed as he might be at the injury, I doubt Haliburton would do it any differently.