HOV lanes in the bay area are terrible. We pay to build these lanes and then the government makes us pay to use them? Seems terribly unfair. Its also unfair to make the poorer people spend more of their time commuting than the wealthy.
You don’t have to be wealthy to pay to use them, you just have to value the time savings more than others. Imagine a “poor” person late for their job where they will get fired, they might value the lane more than a “rich” person just cruising around for fun. Whereas if it weren’t an option at all the poor person in this scenario loses their job and is strictly worse off.
Your assumption that rich people spend less for fun than poor people can afford to spend to survive is not something I think I'm confident enough in to trust it as the basis for policy like this.
Who doesn't use the roads? How would you get anywhere without taking a road? Even if you didn't drive, whatever transport you're using except maybe a helicopter, would use the road.
i don’t agree with the notion that everything provided by the government must be free at point of use, seems like a childish and foolish way of running a society with real resource constraints.
Childish and foolish? That's the way these roads have been utilized for decades before someone figured out a way to extract more tax dollars from the public.
I'm merely 47 and I don't really feel like I'm any older than I was in my 20s. Smarter hopefully, wiser certainly, but I never really completely put away childish things.
IMO always take the money. Money to me is like water. If you're dying of thirst, that first glass of water is extremely important, the 100th, not so much. You really only need enough money to do the things you want, raise your kids, and retire. The money after that isn't going to bring nearly as much happiness as that first bit.
You could say the same thing about any language. Writing "dumb" code is easier to understand especially in the small. But Go with function that take functions and return functions, channels and generics, can quickly look as complex as other languages.
Prior to the EpiPen, people carried the Ana-Kit. It became commercially available in 1963 and was a little kit containing a syringe pre-loaded with epinephrine, antihistamine tablet(s?), and a tourniquet.
People in anaphylactic shock sometimes (often?) need more than one dose, and antihistamine should be taken asap. The epinephrine just bridges the gap until the antihistamine kicks in.
I liked the Ana-kit because the syringe had 2 doses in it (you turned the plunger 90° for the second dose) and the antihistamine. It was much cheaper, and it was pretty easy—- just pull off the needle cap, stick your thigh to the hilt, and press the plunger.
Despite the relative ease of autoinjectors like EpiPen, I was pretty upset when Ana-kit was discontinued and I had to start carrying EpiPens. That’s why I always get the generic 2-pack prescribed and keep it in a ziplock bag with a couple Benadryls.
The article says that tourniquets are no longer recommended. It doesn't seem like a tourniquet would be of any help if you ingested something but reasonable for insect stings. Anyone who has taken a first aid course gets warned multiple times about the danger of leaving a tourniquet on too long but maybe random people aren't aware of it.
I grew up in communist bloc, finely oppressed by russians with their military bases all around, ready for nuclear WWIII that never came.
Peanut butter isn't something I ever saw before being adult and well into 90s, it simply wasn't a thing, I guess evil capitalist invention with the only goal to subvert our fine communistic paradise, like ie Star wars movies. Raw peanuts were frequent though, I guess one of very few things that actually made it through very badly functioning central planning and wasnt stolen by aparatchicks and collaborants for themselves. Never ever met a single kid having any sort of peanut allergy during growing up, never knew its a thing. I recall one or two with asthma, hay fever and thats it. But same could be said about any form of mental diseases/issues for whatever reason, anxiety, adhd variants and so on... either ignored, undiagnosed or really on much lower levels, dont know.
Kid misbehaving? A fine smack or some other physical punishment settled things at least in primary school. Then things started to change a bit till they overcorrected these days.
This is such a strange modern take. Parents didn't "allow" their children around others. Unless they were royalty most wouldn't spend more than 40 minutes a day with their parents. We don't see the that concept coming to American until the late 80s, early 90s in affluent neighborhoods to socially distinguish themselves from "ghetto" families
not true, and although this is anecdata, it's worth mentioning. I had a friend who wasn't allowed to spend the night in the 80s because my parents let me keep my 410 shotgun under my bed (I didn't have any ammunition).
It is absolutely amazing to me that we now know how SIDs works. And incredibly tragic that the prevalence in the eighties was because so many more parents smoked in the house.
We think of smoking as something that kills by eventually causing cancer, but it is much worse.
Something I've noticed is that some cities are better for renters, and others are better for buyers.
My current city in central Europe is very renter-friendly. A nice apartment would cost $600k, but rents practically never exceed $1500/month. Under such circumstances an apartment doesn't seem like a great investment.
I've also lived, briefly, in Canada -- where rents were often extremely high relative to home prices. (I have a friend who pays $300/month on a mortgage and rents the place out for $2000/month. At the same time, the house has nearly tripled in value over the past ~7 years.)
I saw this when I lived in the Chicagoland area. A co-worker was giving me the business for renting instead of buying something. The he let it slip that his property tax alone was $35k/year, almost 2x what I was paying in rent, and that didn’t even include the mortgage.
Surely this must not have been a like-for-like comparison, unless your landlord is very charitable or somehow secured a much lower property tax rate than your coworker did (as is possible in California through various Prop 13 mechanisms). Have you looked up what the property tax bill is on your apartment?
He had a nice house in an expensive area. I think his wife was someone important at a bank.
I was in a one bedroom apartment, so not like-for-like, but I didn’t need or want anymore space than I had. I was also in a nice area, and in the nicest apartments in that area, as far as I could tell.
A couple people who moved out there when I did bought places, and I heard nothing but regrets from them a year later.
That's an enormously high property tax bill for Chicagoland. I live in Oak Park, famously one of the highest-taxed areas in the county, in a relatively large house, and my taxes are not close to that (more than $10k less).
I don't doubt you or your friend, but their situation was unique.
Who are these people who can afford $6k/month for a rental? It has to be a very small percentage of the population, yet I see these kind of numbers thrown around a lot.
Statistically, I’m in the top ~5% of income earners (from the data I can find), with no debt, and I couldn’t afford $6k/month.
I bought a house because I don't understand the rental market anymore. I don’t really like being a home owner, but the rent prices these days are so out of hand. I think the most I ever paid for rent was $1,680 and I felt irresponsible doing that. I don’t know how all these rentals are full with the prices they’re charging. Does everyone have roommates?
The $6k number is a touch high, but the answer is realistically 30-something DINKs and up. I make $150k a year, let’s say, and if I have a spouse with a corporate career let’s say it’s similar so maybe $250k-300k per year in income? Well that’s about $12,000 in income after taxes, medical, and a 10% retirement contribution.
So, yes, $6k per month is house-poor numbers, but it’s workable for sure. If you’re even better off, good for you, it may fall into affordable range.
Making that much, I wouldn’t want to put anymore than 25% of my take-home toward rent. That would mean making $312k take-home… after taxes, retirement, etc.
Maybe I’m conservative, but being house poor while making $300k is insane.
I’m thinking someone would need to be pushing $400-500k for household income. That would put them in the top 3%. I don’t get the supply and demand curve on it. Making that much, and renting. It’s an even smaller market than the full 3%.
> I’m thinking someone would need to be pushing $400-500k for household income. That would put them in the top 3%. I don’t get the supply and demand curve on it. Making that much, and renting. It’s an even smaller market than the full 3%.
I know a couple in that range of HHI (doctor/lawyer) who sold their house and moved to a rental in that range.
Their take is that their time is very valuable to them, and dealing with their house involved a bunch of time spent on management and administration that can’t be made to adequately go away without effectively hiring a house manager.
I wouldn't want to purely out of the waste, but from a risk perspective, why not? Your other costs don't scale with housing or income, so if you're spending $70k on housing, you might be at $100k overall expenses. Add another $50k for income taxes and $50k for retirement savings and you're still at 50-100k left over for whatever you like (using 250-300 household income).
6k for a mortgage would be scary in case of job loss, but for rent, whatever, just move.
The lease terms would be important. Not all leases let you out whenever you want.
Plus, if a sizable portion of that household income is in the form of stock or a bonus, that isn’t showing up each month in the paycheck, lowering the monthly cash flow. If there is a layoff early in the year before the bonus pays out, and you can’t exit the lease, that would be a bad spot to be in.
There is still risk on the table, depending on how some of this is structured.
With the numbers I had it only takes 1-2 years to save 1 year of runway, so just do that first (presumably you've had a chance to save before getting your 250-300k income anyway). I suppose that the type of people to spend 6k on rent probably aren't saving much, but they could if that were their goal for some reason.
my life cannot be uprooted based on the whims of a crummy landlord or because my obligation has crept out of my budget
i bought conservatively and now have a tiny payment relative to what i’d otherwise have to pay to live in the bay area. peace of mind is hard to put a price on
Here a variable rate is norm and has been since I remember.
I was eyeballing a particular house with specific financing in mind just before covid started, and if I'd pull a trigger on that transaction my monthly payement would more than double at some point.
Not faster than rent. You can always challenge your property taxes and shop your homeowners insurance. If your rent goes up, you can only move, which isn’t really an option when all landlords are raising rents in lockstep.
Half of American renters are cost burdened, for example.
Presumably those go up roughly the same for rental properties as well. So while your payments may still go up, you're paying it either way on top of interest/rent.
some parts of california have been affected by insurers more than others, but in those more minimally affected? prop tax is suppressed via prop 13 (for better or worse), and the cost of insurance is a drop in the bucket relative to what id be paying for a roof over my head otherwise tbh
Scala definitely had some missteps but its much nicer to program in than Java and simpler as well. I mainly program in Go these days but I could imagine explaining the benefits of Scala over Go to my coworkers. It would be embarrassing trying to do the same with Java however.
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