>A core idea is that a house sells for a positive value. But that presumption is likely false. Houses at unattractive places in poor condition might actually represent a negative value.
This reminds me of an incident in Vancouver, where the city sought to expropriate single room occupancy (SRO) hotels (read: slums). They felt that each property was worth negative value, but they estimated the value as $1 because:
> We are unaware of any instances of property being transferred with a negative value. Therefore, a value of $1.00 is concluded for the subject property with the knowledge that a purchaser would be required to assume the financial obligations with either holding or demolishing and redeveloping the property.
It can depend a lot on the shape of your batch to my understanding. A small batch job can be tasked out a lot quicker than a large batch job waiting for just the right moment where capacity fits.
I'm not familiar with this app but based on the read, it sounds like they're essentially relying on someone to sneak into the target's phone, install an apk with a 'Settings' logo, where you grant it all permissions (I assume the installer facilitates the process of manually granting full permissions for each permissions type and disabling battery optimization). Android does allow you to effectively delegate full permissions to an app like that, albeit in a manual way.
>The thing I found most remarkable is that house prices there are not much less than in Seoul proper (that's what I was told at least), which just seemed utterly absurd - what market forces could drive prices of a farmer village (because that's what it is, really - although the houses looked nice) surrounded by landmines and that is a pain in the ass to get in and out of to that of a first world metropolis?
You are literally paid to live there and be a human flagpole through a tax-free salary of $82,000 USD for agriculture (as of 2013, likely higher now), as well as free education, agricultural incentives and preferential tax treatment. [1] On top of that, there's only a handful of homes, effectively amounting to an artificial housing scarcity.
If we are talking about Daeseong-dong, Wikipedia says “Only individuals who lived in the village before the Korean War, or are descendants of those who did, are allowed to move to the village”
So the market of potential buyers is quite limited. (Unless they allow absentee landlords-i.e. you can buy this house, it is illegal for you to live in it, but you can legally rent it to someone who can legally live in it.)
Although I imagine “former residents and their descendants” may be a much larger group of people than the current population. Not sure how many might want to move back to their (great) grandparents village though
The one that I frequently hear of as a layman (not a lawyer) is Toronto Pearson Airport's Preclearance, which has a very strict and narrow view of the TN Status eligible occupations.
Obviously anecdotal but I've had zero issues with preclearance at Pearson as a TN holder, both crossing and when applying for TN. They usually just ask me some combination of where I work for, what I do, and if I know when my TN expires, and that's it. My experience applying there has also been incredibly uneventful. I guess engineering is a bit easier to do though, especially if you have a strong application that's been done by lawyers.
I've been given hell by immigration about my TN when flying directly into US airports though.
Conversely, preclearance at Pearson royally screwed up my TN visa after claiming that the other ports of entries were doing it wrong. I have received multiple TN from HOU and, in general, I like the CBP at HOU. EWR was always friendly as well in my opinion. I personally prefer getting my TN at land border crossings because they tend to take the "gather all the facts" approach vs. airports have a procedural approach that feels highly dependent on the agent you get. My most recent TN was I-129 which I think is a waste of money but if someone else is paying for it and you have the luxury of waiting in the US, then it's a seamless experience.
I remember at the start of COVID, scoring a Steelcase Leap v2 from a guy who was scooping up office chairs from failed Silicon Valley startups and hauling them up to Canada. Super chill dude, and totally upfront about basically making a 100% profit margin by gluing on new armrests to these wholesale fire-sale finds. It really highlighted the interesting economics of the time - a lot of businesses probably thrived just by redistributing stuff from regions in freefall. You have to wonder how much of the "supply chain" was actually just people moving stuff from places that were dying to places still kicking. Kind of a morbid redistributive supply chain, when you think about it.
I worked on warehouse software in the late aughts that did this in the housing shit in the us. Literally it was a bunch of companies buying pallets of shit from other companies. Basically, whomever was left holding the bag at the end, lost.
So, what happens if you work in an area where the cost are high but the margin is low? You might make $100K but have $85K in costs. You still have $15K in income. Does this apply to those self employed or only wage earners (gets a paycheck)?
Google Maps in many urban areas is actually aerial imagery. Satellite imagery serves a different use case - often for difficult to access areas where aerial photography is not viable or permitted.
I love Miniflux. I found TT-RSS to be much too cluttered and I enjoyed Miniflux's focus on minimalism & privacy, but that's a personal opinion. It also doesn't require a mobile client: it works just fine in a mobile browser, a big deal when most Android apps for self-hosted RSS readers are either ugly or unmaintained.
Setting up Miniflux was problematic because documentation around its pSQL & environmental variables aren't too well-documented or universal in implementation.
However, I've noticed a lot of people really don't like Miniflux because it is very minimal and doesn't try to do everything.
This reminds me of an incident in Vancouver, where the city sought to expropriate single room occupancy (SRO) hotels (read: slums). They felt that each property was worth negative value, but they estimated the value as $1 because:
> We are unaware of any instances of property being transferred with a negative value. Therefore, a value of $1.00 is concluded for the subject property with the knowledge that a purchaser would be required to assume the financial obligations with either holding or demolishing and redeveloping the property.
[1] https://council.vancouver.ca/20191106/documents/cfsc2.pdf