251–260 of 280 posts
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"we cannot force the cost of living to drop" That's exactly what rent control does. I guess it's ok to not even try to make an argument on HN these days.
Rent control doesn't force the cost of living to drop: it just shifts it. The ROI on apartments drops substantially, so investors aren't incentivized to make new buildings, but instead maintain their current ones as cheaply as possible until they're unserviceable.
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I can also understand that. Now these people, not making a lot of money. They at least had a social support system, happy with friends families etc. They had a place they could call their own, and the pride that comes with it. You've taken their support system out. In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pi…
> In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pissed at the system and live in prison, it's your tax dollars either way. This solution makes me really uncomfortable. You're completely disregarding the individual and saying that we are responsible for creating an environment for them and ultimately, we are respo…
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San Francisco is not "The Valley"
And now I just feel silly. But anyway... building high-rise housing is probably a good idea.
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I'm a 40+ Programmer making good money with a family of five. A year ago I thought long and hard about moving away. In the end, I decided to stay because we have family here. Here's my unsolicited advice: if you are less than 30 and don't plan on being a dual-income family, move away no matter how much income you have. It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area: your net worth will be entirely tied to your p…
> It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area Until your first layoff. Then it's an absolute blessing to live somewhere where your next job is one more exit up 101. This is the thing that everybody who works in tech forgets. If you live in Pittsburgh, Tulsa, or Lubbock, you are in for a many month job search--or you are leaving the city-- when (not if) you get laid off. Seagate had this problem a couple years…
The Bay Area is not the only place with a high amount of tech jobs. Sure it may have the most but there's many other cities with plenty of openings.
Searching "software engineer" job listings on LinkedIn[1] shows:
San Francisco (12,676)
New York City (6,619)
Washington D.C. Metro (5,613)
Seattle (4,584)
Boston (4,452)
Chicago (3,933)
Los Angeles (3,135)
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> If you are getting free money from the government, it means you can't manage your own life. No particular offense to you, specifically, but this sentiment is something that makes me rage. There are not enough jobs for everybody . We have MORE than doubled productivity since 1970. That means that HALF the jobs since then have vaporized. Gone. Kaput. Never to be replaced. If you were not "talented" enough to be born…
"We have MORE than doubled productivity since 1970. That means that HALF the jobs since then have vaporized. Gone. Kaput. Never to be replaced." There are lots of jobs that can't even be filled right now. Many jobs have vaporized, but there are also plenty of new positions. With all of the support here for open source, do people even care that jobs have been lost as a result? As an example, my last company probably s…
Sure. But mostly it's like this, the Natrona Heights, PA steel mill just got a very expensive reinvestment and retooling. It now employs about 600 when it used to employ 4,000.
And of those 600, most of those now require fairly technical training while the vast majority of the previous 4,000 jobs could be filled with a basic level of training.
So, you need at least 3,400 jobs to materialize out of thin air.
Even if I assume that you could magically turn all those people into engineers, until you show me where those 3,400 jobs are, the rest of your arguments are moot.
The only retort I ever get is: "Well, they should move." Move where? I can repeat that job-loss ratio for cites all over the US from big to small--Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Allentown, Poughkeepsie, Burlington, etc. So, you can't just move ALL of those city's population to Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin (although the tech folks are trying very hard to disprove that statement with their actions by flooding those areas with people).
NOBODY has been able to tell me where those jobs that people should move to are. That's because they don't exist.
> People can still get into a trade..and make good money without going to college..yet all of the stats I've seen show this is not happening. Why?
Companies say they want more tradesmen. What they really want are cheaper tradesmen. I don't see salaries rising in the US, at least, so the job rate is at rough balance.
> So you push for open source and new technology, which reduces jobs, and now expect a bailout from the middle class?
I certainly don't wish to reverse automation--especially in things like steel mills where it replaces very dangerous jobs.
However, you can't just hang people out to dry either. Education doesn't magically make a job appear (just ask the non-technical PhD's about that).
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> It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area Until your first layoff. Then it's an absolute blessing to live somewhere where your next job is one more exit up 101. This is the thing that everybody who works in tech forgets. If you live in Pittsburgh, Tulsa, or Lubbock, you are in for a many month job search--or you are leaving the city-- when (not if) you get laid off. Seagate had this problem a couple years…
> Until your first layoff. Then it's an absolute blessing to live somewhere where your next job is one more exit up 101. The Bay Area is not the only place with a high amount of tech jobs. Sure it may have the most but there's many other cities with plenty of openings. Searching "software engineer" job listings on LinkedIn[1] shows: San Francisco (12,676) New York City (6,619) Washington D.C. Metro (5,613) Seattle (4…
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> In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pissed at the system and live in prison, it's your tax dollars either way. This solution makes me really uncomfortable. You're completely disregarding the individual and saying that we are responsible for creating an environment for them and ultimately, we are respo…
You know, it's quite possible to treat adults as independent agents who are responsible for their own actions and yet acknowledge (and possibly even be sympathetic to) the fact that these same adults can be subject to external forces which put them in a really tough spot.
Yes, some people do have the story of "got laid off after 35 years, company stole my pension, now I'm homeless", or "had a long, expensive medical emergency, now am homeless". You can pinpoint the external force. But this piece showed one thing in particular that was striking: it seems it's rarely one major event that plunges someone into a bad situation like these (consider that none of these videos had one "this is what happened" sound bite). It seems like it's the snowball effect of bad decision after bad decision.
What do we do with people who are in really tough spots because of the compounding behavior of bad decisions? "We invest in the educational system so kids learn how to avoid these spots" -- ok, great, but what do we do with THESE people, today?
Accepting the "external forces" thing is a slippery slope, because now somebody is the arbiter of You Did It To Yourself vs. It's Not Your Fault. Who can we trust with that position? Is it even moral to make that judgement? Was this whole comment satire on being the arbiter of justice?
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>You've said, ship 'em out! Retrain them! If they don't want to do those things, do nothing. It seems you have misunderstood my point. I'm not saying to load them up and ship them out. I'm saying that if they want help, the best utilization of limited resources will be in helping them move somewhere more affordable. But they don't have to accept help; it isn't being forced on them. I'm saying offer options, not enfor…
And I keep saying, rather than propose a menu of options to the community without getting their input, get their input. Our conversation is now going something like this: You: If they want to move, move them, otherwise do nothing Me: Ask them what they want You: I'm not saying they have to move, just that that's what we can do Me: Ask them what they want You: You misunderstand, they don't have to move, but that's the…
So sure, have a conversation and find out where they want to be in their life, but it's madness to think they'll give you insight into how to fix what got them there.
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> My sentiment is not classist or elitist. You just think poor people should have to move out of their homes because rich people decided they want to live there. Got it. > The same argument applies to people of all socioeconomic background. Yeah, rich people get forced out of their homes because they can't afford them all the time. /s
I'm a 40+ Programmer making good money with a family of five. A year ago I thought long and hard about moving away. In the end, I decided to stay because we have family here. Here's my unsolicited advice: if you are less than 30 and don't plan on being a dual-income family, move away no matter how much income you have. It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area: your net worth will be entirely tied to your p…
I'm hoping to be able to save ~$240k and buy a modest house on the outskirts of Portland or Tacoma and have a little left over.
I'm just wondering if there's anywhere else where I could save money like this?
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> I hate rent control, but I think it's a symptom of incumbents' unwillingness to allow more development, No. It began in SF as a very-specific response to Prop 13, which is essentially property-tax-control Both are bad policies in terms of market distortion and are often the overlooked elephants in the room in discussion of housing supply and affordability.
What? Rent control did not originate in San Francisco, and has been around a lot longer than Proposition 13. Its history in modern economics goes back to world War 1, and the concept of economic rents and the need to regulate them originates with Adam Smith in the 18th century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rent_control_in_Engl...