I did a similar thing with Roller Coaster Tycoon. I sent screenshots and explanations of my designs to Six Flags. I was probably around 10 or so. I think I got one generic letter back from them unfortunately.
For some time, I wanted to become a Roller Coaster designer.
Sorry, can't help myself!
The Ralphie running demo on the site is hilarious.
Some say, you could just use Ralphie's actual runs from this past year, true randomness!
We use it a lot for a specific use-case and it works great. Mongo has come a long long way since the release over a decade ago, and if you keep it in Majority Read and Write, it's very reliable.
Also, on some things, it allows us to pivot much faster.
And now with the help of LLMs, writing "Aggregation Pipelines" are very fast.
We were piloting the new Snapdragon X Elite Surface Laptops to roll them out to our org about 3 months ago. Loved everything about it, but when it came to software... things became messy. The MSFT Office suite was great, as well as any browser of course. Then we had to make sure some older Excel plugins worked for financial users, they didn't. Had to use some workarounds. We tried our front end app Node build pipeline.. we gave up and had to put it in a container to get it to build properly. Tried a few things through the cpu emulator, it was no where near Apple's at their launch of M1. Ultimately, we had to go back to the Intel Surface Laptops. It felt like the ARM laptops were rushed about a year too early...
Exactly. I think many people start overthinking things in banking.
Most accounting/finance departments are ok with rounding pennies every month.
I run a Commercial Real Estate Servicing platform, where we are accruing interest on large balances daily. Our method is to not do the rounding daily, but add up all the numbers for a given period, say a month, and then round to the penny and create a single adjustment rounding transaction along with it. Accounting departments love us for it.
If we rounded daily before storing the amount, the adjustment for accounting is usually a few pennies at least every month they have to make. Our method, it's roughly $0.01 per year with monthly periods, adjusted usually at the very end. Which on a $20MM loan, is very well within the bounds of acceptable.
Noninvasive, with any sort of accuracy that can be used for anything, is most likely impossible.
So back to "invasive"... what can we do... embedding a device under your skin, right around where your watch goes, that can be powered and communicate with the watch. While also making sure the device is not rejected by the body and stays in place.. AND has no other adverse side-effects. I think this is where it'll ultimately end up for the people who want it. sub 10 min procedure to put it in and should last for quite some time (maybe dissolves after 5 years for upgrades?)
On properties like this, that is still possible, BUT..
It wouldn't happen with the same borrower on the same deal/loan. It would go into a whole new construction type of loan (which is usually some sort of short term "mezz" financing for the transition period), and then get underwritten on maybe a 10 year.
The issue with the above now though is the transition to multi family costs a lot. Many will try and get cities/states to subsidize it. And then getting a good loan to make the deal work in unknown. Nobody makes deals like that happen when there is this much uncertainty in the CRE market. If you can't secure financing post construction to make the cap rate work.. you're done. Deal is dead.
I'm in the CRE (Commercial Real Estate) finance tech world.
Most borrowers are currently electing to extend the maturities out another year, many getting IO (interest only) extensions from their lenders, rather than fall into special servicing. "Special Servicing" is the process to take deals like this and find the best outcome for the lowest lender on the capital stack waterfall. Fortunately, there are many processes in place to handle these kinds of things and not left for the taxpayers to bailout... typically.
Bailout? Why? Because it's not just these "rich" landlords/investors that lose their money. They are pension funds, retirement funds, Teachers retirement funds, public service funds, your neighbors' annuity, etc.
The whole thing is a big circle of money that becomes increasingly more complicated in each CRE cycle of boom/bust. The sentiment in the CRE world is definitely of uncertainty and caution right now. Many are optimistic about later this year and things turning around. It's not only Office either, many multifamily deals were done with a cap rate that could not be sustained, and now the deal is no longer "cash flowing", so the borrower cannot service the loan and they can't raise rents either as that side is also under pressure. With Office, companies are still not fully in office, combined with the layoffs, and the prospect of a down economy ahead has them cutting spending where they can. The leases don't renew, and the borrower has no ability to refinance with the rate hikes.
We're in a very delicate time period right now and one catalyst can send it in either direction, very quick.
Try multiple windows. I use Tree Style Tabs extension, and have around 1,700 tabs open across three windows. Yes, it can be slow.. sometimes.. but for the most part.. everything is pretty smooth still!
Yes, it's crazy.. but this is essentially my bookmark system.
I take backups of the "session" so if something did happen, I can recover all of them. And every few years, I quickly go through them and start afresh. Bookmark what might still be relevant, and discard the rest. It works for me
Some schools, like The University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business, have taken aggressive measures in the past to fight grade inflation.
They implemented a "hard average" at each grade level. So freshmen business course, the average had to be a C-. Soph: C, Jr: C+, Sr: B-.
It certainly achieved the goal for the school, as a whole, to fight grade inflation... but..
For students, it was very important to be above the mean... otherwise your grade would typically get moved down. Which isn't the worst, since they compared it to competition in the job world... but hard to say that when students are paying an obscene amount of money to attend.
The other challenge was the smaller courses, with ~10-15 students... very difficult to get an A+ in those courses as you had to be the top 1-3 in the class.
I think they have since abandoned this grade inflation policy..
But yes, GPA is basically irrelevant now in comparing across schools...
Another analogy I use for friends who ask (I have a sizable NFT 'bag'(investment)):
I say why do people buy Rolex watches and Gucci purses? Status. So you can't show off a 'real' Rolex well in the digital world. NFT's are that. Provably scarce. Verifiable.
The luxury industry is massive and people crave to have status and/or 'belong' to something. NFTs are no different and they are not going anywhere. It is early.
Started using Obsidian last week. It's so easy and works how ever you want it to. Roam Research is nice, but it's geared toward a specific way of writing.
Also, the Syncing across devices they provide for $4/m right now is a steal and very effortless.
Of course you can take backups using Git, very easy.
It's much worse than you realize.
Most of these rentals are cash flows that pay the debt service on a loan. Which most of the time is securitized.
Those securities are packaged up (sound familiar...?) and sold to investors. Who are these investors you ask? Mostly institutional investors who are responsible for.. your retirement, pensions, etc. So it's not the "rich landlord" that doesn't get his rent money, it's your next door neighbor who is a retired teacher living off the teachers pension.
I did a similar thing with Roller Coaster Tycoon. I sent screenshots and explanations of my designs to Six Flags. I was probably around 10 or so. I think I got one generic letter back from them unfortunately.
For some time, I wanted to become a Roller Coaster designer.