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I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

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Re: I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

#71

Post by seanp2k2 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #50
pestaa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a sad way to waste your life. I'm sure he had other options considering he worked in an office at a "large aerospace firm," right?

Wasting money on rent is the bigger tragedy.

Yep, every time I sign a check for Bay Area rent, I consider how I'm in the wrong industry, since the land owners have to do very little to continue to extract rent from their one-time-purchase of land (I know, tax is a thing too, but pales in comparison to the returns they must be getting on the land).

I'm not super interested in buying a house here, since >half a million for a tiny spot of land in the suburbs with a tiny 2-bedroom house that needs major repairs is absurd to me. I'd much rather live in an office while paying off a house in Fiji, then move into that in 20 years and work a lot less.

Another alternative is living in an RV. I've considered this, and since Bay Area rent can pay off a really really really nice RV in ~5 years, it's s viable option. The biggest hiccup is where to park it; national parks would be awesome, but they're not free, Internet access is spotty, and it'd be a long commute every day. Even working remotely, month-to-month RV park communities can be over $500 a month, so that doesn't quite feel like you're beating the game of rent-seeking by property owners as much as I'd like. RVs also require maintenance and probably won't last as long as a house, but even if you get 20 years out of it, or buy it used and sell it where the depreciation is much less per month than rent would have been, you can come out ahead.

Re: I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

#72

Post by seanp2k2 »

VLM wrote: post #69
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I got paid a Google salary, there's no way I couldn't afford to find an apartment in Santa Clara County. Note I didn't say fancy condo, 3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn, or townhouse.

I talked to a google recruiter a couple years ago and if I took the job and moved to mountain view, my current lifestyle of "3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn" would be utterly impossible, so goodbye. This was very close to the national peak of the housing bubble, things may have gotten better since then.

It's pretty much impossible to find even the crappiest home here for under half a million. For what you describe, even if it's next to a freeway in a "bad" neighborhood with a crap school district, that'd be a few million easy.

Re: I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

#73

Post by ultimape »

austenallred wrote: post #65

I lived in my car under similar-ish circumstances. Was getting a company off the ground, needed to be in Silicon Valley to raise money, was unwilling to pay $800/month for a single terrible bedroom, and had read a lot of Thoreau and already given away almost everything I owned to vagabond around China. It's kind of a pain living on $200-300 a month, but it's really not that bad. You start to realize that most of the…

How do you eat well and not cost a ton of money? I imagine you don't get the opportunity to store food or cook it effectively.

Re: I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

#74

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

VLM wrote: post #69
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I got paid a Google salary, there's no way I couldn't afford to find an apartment in Santa Clara County. Note I didn't say fancy condo, 3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn, or townhouse.

I talked to a google recruiter a couple years ago and if I took the job and moved to mountain view, my current lifestyle of "3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn" would be utterly impossible, so goodbye. This was very close to the national peak of the housing bubble, things may have gotten better since then.

The problem is that you insist on living the mid 20th century American Dream.

Re: I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

#75

Post by shoegumfoot »

melling wrote: post #7
ebiester wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The compromise is losing 2 hours a day in your car. This is why I didn't take the job in LA.

Google Maps says Koreatown and Venice Beach are 15 miles apart. Some time late in the 21st Century or early 22nd Century humans will realize that great mass transit can really make life more enjoyable, and that'll be a 15 minute commute. It's pretty amazing how bad things have to get before people wake up.

> Some time late in the 21st Century or early 22nd Century humans will realize that great mass transit can really make life more enjoyable, and that'll be a 15 minute commute.

Nah, the second phase of the Expo line will be complete in a few years, and the purple line will be finished long before then, too. Won't be quite 15 minutes, but should be under 25.

Re: I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

#76

Post by xkcd-sucks »

ldd wrote: post #49
shanemhansen wrote: post #15

I've heard people who live with their parents proclaim how great it is. They don't have to pay rent or do their own laundry or anything us terrible materialistic people do. It's great for saving money. For reasons that I hope would be obvious I'm not interested in that sort of "lifestyle choice". This guy is worse because at least people who are mooching off their parents aren't literally stealing from them.

I live with my mom and my sister and do the cleaning, cook daily for our lunch and dinner, sweep and mop the floor, buy groceries, handle bills, etc. Most of the people that I know that live at home do the same. How exactly are we mooching off our parents?

Maybe there's a trend towards shaming families because families are economic structures which compete with governments and corporations?

Re: I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

#77

Post by lawnchair_larry »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #74
VLM wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talked to a google recruiter a couple years ago and if I took the job and moved to mountain view, my current lifestyle of "3 bedroom ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn" would be utterly impossible, so goodbye. This was very close to the national peak of the housing bubble, things may have gotten better since then.

The problem is that you insist on living the mid 20th century American Dream.

Not really. That's current day for most of the US. It's SF that is broken.

Re: I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

#78

Post by yoplait_ »

Retra wrote: post #63
crucifiction wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cumulative happiness over your life is the goal then the first one is clearly the wrong approach. The probability that you will die/become incapacitated/have health issues before you can either build up or enjoy for a long period of time that F-U money puts a discount on the entire end state.

Why would cumulative happiness be a goal? Happiness is not a things that accumulates.

... Time spent happy does accumulate.

That means he wants to have spent a life being happy as much as possible.

Re: I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

#79

Post by cafard »

At the end of the 1980s, I worked with a guy who was forty, newly divorced after about twenty years of marriage, and out to have the early twenties that he considered he had missed. After hearing about a late-night burglar alarm once or twice in the building, I asked the programming section's administrative assistant whether this guy was living in his office. She looked away, and didn't want to discuss it. I don't think that he was destitute, just thrifty. He had, he said, a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, but I suppose he couldn't stay with her all the time.

Re: I secretly lived in my office for 500 days

#80

Post by Retra »

yoplait_ wrote: post #78
Retra wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would cumulative happiness be a goal? Happiness is not a things that accumulates.

... Time spent happy does accumulate. That means he wants to have spent a life being happy as much as possible.

No, memories accumulate. And in my very normal and apparently common experience, rose colored glasses and "I earned my success by struggling" make up for any past lack of happiness I've experienced. Those memories are white-washed unless you've had some severe trauma.

So the only thing that really matters is if you currently happy, or if you are about to become happy. Nothing accumulates.

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