brianmartinek

Joined 13 years ago

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Member since

Jun 6

brianmartinek.com

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Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago

+1 to this. I use Dex https://getdex.com/ and I see a few other apps in the feed too. There is clearly some market demand.

Life gets busy and it helps to have something more than just a stock contacts app.

Comment · 9 years ago

With one of my recent Amazon deliveries, a picture was taken of the package sitting in front of my mailbox. It was accessible through the Amazon app when I received the delivery notification. It's an apartment building, so it was nice to know where it was left since the location of packages delivered seems to vary based on which company delivers it.

My very first thought when I saw it was this was a solution to prove that a delivery took place in cases of package theft.

Comment · 9 years ago

Regardless if it's FAKO or FICO score that you are looking at, they are calculated on the same credit history in your credit report (as far as I know). So, even if the scores are calculated in different ways it's reasonable to expect a high VantageScore 3.0 score will also show as a high FICO score too, even if the numbers aren't exact.

Does anyone know the specific differences in how these two scores are calculated?

Comment · 9 years ago

I recommend the Bose QC headphones. I currently use the QC35 wireless ones but have also used the QC15 and QC25 before that. Open office plans are terrible for my concentration and wearing noise canceling headphones makes a huge difference.

I usually listen to lyric-less music such as Focus@Will, Spotify playlists, or use a white noise generator.

Comment · 9 years ago

Agree with this view. Only the state can force that type of cooperation. MN did a variation of this in the early 70's to stop Twin Cities municipalities from competing against each other with tax breaks in order to attract companies. The result has been the only metro region that works together for the benefit of the region, not individual towns.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-mir...

"No other large American city has adopted a plan like Minneapolis’s to sprinkle business taxes across a region in order to keep the poorest areas from falling too far behind."

"In the 1960s, local districts and towns in the Twin Cities region offered competing tax breaks to lure in new businesses, diminishing their revenues and depleting their social services in an effort to steal jobs from elsewhere within the area. In 1971, the region came up with an ingenious plan that would help halt this race to the bottom, and also address widening inequality. The Minnesota state legislature passed a law requiring all of the region’s local governments—in Minneapolis and St. Paul and throughout their ring of suburbs—to contribute almost half of the growth in their commercial tax revenues to a regional pool, from which the money would be distributed to tax-poor areas. Today, business taxes are used to enrich some of the region’s poorest communities.

Never before had such a plan—known as “fiscal equalization”—been tried at the metropolitan level. “In a typical U.S. metro, the disparities between the poor and rich areas are dramatic, because well-off suburbs don’t share the wealth they build,” says Bruce Katz, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. But for generations now, the Twin Cities’ downtown area, inner-ring neighborhoods, and tony suburbs have shared in the metro’s commercial success. By spreading the wealth to its poorest neighborhoods, the metro area provides more-equal services in low-income places, and keeps quality of life high just about everywhere."