Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 323 posts

Re: A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

#251

Post by pc86 »

lisper wrote: post #218
anarazel wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually complaining that the higher house price wouldn't be good for you, because you'd have to pay tax when selling? I'm still not sure this isn't all sarcastic.

Nope, not sarcastic at all. I live in a house that is much too big for me. I bought it during the crash when prices were low. I would like to move to a smaller house, but I don't because it's too expensive. I can't just trade my house for one of equal value and come out even. It would be very expensive for me to move to a house of equal value, and the higher prices go the more expensive it gets. I have no objections…

> I have no objections to paying taxes.

First you're complaining about "huge" capital gains, which is literally a tax on profit you made for doing nothing. A tax, might I add, that is much less than income tax. Second, you're complaining about Prop. 13, which just means you're upset about the prospect of paying the property taxes you actually owe, as opposed to the wildly deflated ones from when you purchased.

I don't think you understand just how out of touch you're coming across, and nothing in your statement suggests you have anything but objections to paying your fair share of taxes.

Re: A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

#252

Post by DesiLurker »

komali2 wrote: post #106
greyfox wrote: post #58

this woman needs a car drive it as far into the city as possible then park it and use transit

And sit in traffic for an hour instead of relax on a train for 2? Ew. What this lady needs is a sweet GSXR-1000 to split all the way to paradise. I don't know why more people don't take advantage of the fact that lane splitting is legal here, it's a fantastic way to cut commute time in half. Plus you get free or super cheap parking pretty much wherever you want.

My dear, Bikes aren't cheap if you factor in the funeral costs!

Seriously though, the amount of additional risk of life/limb/etc you'd be taking by biking to work isnt worth saving an extra hour given the raised attentiveness you have to be on throughout the commute.

What we all really need is cheap selfdriving vanpool networks that dynamically optimizes routes based on traffic flows. or better yet hub-to-hub VTOL human transport drones. In all honesty I think we'll see those before we'll see legislative action helping the housing crisis.

Re: A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

#253

Post by cabaalis »

wbl wrote: post #191
cabaalis wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really a bad thing, just maybe disappointing. I've been a professional coder for 10 years, and now am at an "executive"-level at a small startup, and I make the high end of that. In my area, that is a very strong upper-middle-class salary, though 180 would be better. It's sad at first to see that someone who is simply in a different area geographically is afforded so much for so little effort. However when you fa…

What's wrong with high pay?

Sorry? I re-read my comment and I didn't say anything about high pay.

Re: A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

#254

Post by dsfyu404ed »

QML wrote: post #221
kevinburke wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's $12000 extra on rent per year, which is a lot to someone making $80k a year.

Take the time to commute (8hrs) into consideration. Is that extra $12000 worth it?

Probably. They mentioned apartment sizes in the article. The other quality of life improvements would be pretty massive since her commute puts her somewhere her dollars go much farther because she's not competing with the SV crowd for goods and services.

Re: A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

#255

Post by dsfyu404ed »

logfromblammo wrote: post #224
KekDemaga wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct, I was conflating zoning and building codes a bit there. Zoning should take the lions share of blame when it comes to costs.

I didn't really understand zoning until I witnessed a bunch of Southern middle-class white moms agreeing with their middle-class black mom neighbor about how they all hoped that the new construction on the [formerly agricultural] lot next to the subdivision would be restaurants instead of apartment buildings, because the latter attracts "the wrong kind of people". Then I looked at the zoning map for the municipality,…

The kind of behavior is the status quo everywhere not just the south. It's a byproduct of people only getting involved in these things when they think it's going to affect them in a negative way. I.e. Only the people who associate apartments with black people and don't like black people care about the issue.

Re: A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

#256

Post by pavel_lishin »

mmanfrin wrote: post #91
ucaetano wrote: post #52

San Francisco has more than twice the area of Manhattan, with half the population. The San Francisco Bay Area CSA has about the same population as Switzerland, with 2/3 of the area of Switzerland. Both have similar GDPs. If someone wanted to live in Germany, and commute to work in Zurich, with Swiss salaries and German cost-of-living, their commute would be about 1h15min. The housing and infrastructure problems in th…

San Francisco is surrounded by cities which are not San Francisco. Manhattan is part of New York City, and is surrounded by more of New York City. If someone lived 80 miles away from Zurich, in a German town such as Sankt Märgen, Google is telling me that it would take 2h 51m [1]. This tells me that if the woman in the Article made that same distance commute in German/Switzerland with, say, 30 minutes of slack, she w…

New York is also surrounded by New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island, Westchester, etc., etc., etc., and people commute into the city with reasonable travel times.

Re: A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

#257

Post by wang_li »

icebraining wrote: post #179
wang_li wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same principle applies.

How so? What do highly paid workers in the city have to do with her job?

She presumably provides a service to those in the area where she works. Whether she makes sandwiches or gives life advice, the price paid by the consumers of her service should be somewhat correlated with the cost of living in the area.

Re: A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

#258

Post by sageabilly »

QML wrote: post #221
kevinburke wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's $12000 extra on rent per year, which is a lot to someone making $80k a year.

Take the time to commute (8hrs) into consideration. Is that extra $12000 worth it?

In the article she can work from home some days a week (I know for feds in DC, it's mandatory 5 days out of 10, so maybe at least that many for her) and she has a government job which (for many in the non-tech, non-startup world) is the Holy Grail of jobs- incredibly stable, great benefits, pension, etc. She's 61, so in her mind the trade-off might be worth it if she plans on retiring at 65 (and perhaps even earlier if she's got a ton of time in her PTO bank). Coming at the angle of a young tech person raising a family, the trade-off might not be worth it, but for an older person with retirement coming soon, the priorities are different.

Re: A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

#259

Post by dsfyu404ed »

owenversteeg wrote: post #209

Why isn't there a good, inexpensive bus? You can fit almost one hundred passengers on a single bus. Buses are pretty fuel-efficient per passenger, easy to reroute if you have more/less demand, and you can go directly to where you need to go. They scale very well - if there are only 20 people or so you can send a small bus, if there are thousands you can send multiple large buses. Sure, traffic can be an issue, but I'…

>Why has nobody done this?

You're vastly underestimating how bad rush hour traffic is. Also, the longer the bus is on the road the more likely it will be to be in it. Then you run into the same problem where you're getting a 5am bus for a 9am job even though it's only a 1hr drive on paper

Re: A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M

#260

Post by mahyarm »

dtech wrote: post #217
jdavis703 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a rent controlled unit and still feel we need to eliminate Prop. 13 (prevents property tax increases caused by property asset increases) and eliminate rent control. Both are removing people from having skin in the game when it comes to housing policy. If everyone can feel the pain, maybe everyone can figure out a way to stop the pain.

Are there any concrete plans on how to implement this? In the densely populated parts of the Netherlands we've had an unhealthy housing market for decades, partly because of government subsidized mortages through tax breaks. "Everyone" kind of agrees that is should be abolished, but the polical and popular will is laking, and people won't be able to pay their mortages anymore if it happened too sudden. Also it would…

I would start by reducing it bit by bit and avoiding large voting blocks that would be hurt by the changes.

- So for example, prop 13 would only apply if your above retirement age for example. (Avoiding old people)

- Or prop 13 only applies to somewhere where you live as a homeowner. (Not a lot of people have second homes)

- No secondary residences or rental properties would get prop 13 benefits.

- Prop 13 benefits cannot apply to corporations / LLCs. (Many people don't have their own house under a corp since they lose a big capital gains tax break if they do)

- Prop 13 benefits cannot be passed on to your children through a trust or whatever else.

Post reply on HN