that's cheap if it's a decent place in a nice neighborhood. i was doing 1500 (utilities included) on nob hill with 3 other roommates and 1 bathroom a year ago. and that was the cheapest i could find in a decent location, and that's including many of my emails that went unanswered.
For historical perspective - when I first moved out to the Bay Area in 2009, I paid $900/month for a master bedroom + private bath in a 3BR townhome, in Mountain View. My roommates paid $650/month.
If you've never been through a downturn in the Bay Area, you'll be amazed at how low prices can go (and also at how many people can become unemployed and move back to where they came from).
I've read Yelp reviews on a previous 2/2 in San Mateo. $2600 at that point, one review had a price listed a few years back (~2011), ended up being near 20% increase year over year.
Also heard of the U-Haul stories of where there was none left in the bay because everyone moved out. Don't think that's going to happen this time around. Think that start ups, or at least their employees will be acquired into bigger/more stable companies. Did that happen last time around? For example, did Yahoo, AOL, PayPal go on a buying spree?
20% YoY increases is about right in boom times. My rent increased by about $300/month/year from 2011-2014, then has been roughly stable since then. It was stable from 2009-2011 though.
In 2009, most of the startups were really small Web 2.0 outfits with 2-6 employees. However, the big companies were laying off people, and very few companies were hiring. I was initially going to apply to E-Bay/PayPal (I had a contact there), but the day that I was going to apply they announced they were laying off 5000 people, and I was like "Welp, that's not happening." My roommate worked at EMC and went through 3 rounds of layoffs, with about 3/4 of her department laid off. Was very lucky to end up at Google, which according to the news media was in hiring freeze (like everyone else) at the time; I had an awkward conversation with my recruiter where I was like "Are you actually hiring right now, or am I wasting my time?" What tended to happen was that the big companies cherry-picked the startup founders/employees that they really wanted and laid off all their low performers, and everyone who didn't have a track record of producing stuff was basically fucked.
I wasn't around for the dot-com bust in 2001 or the 1991 recession, but my understanding is that they were far worse in Silicon Valley, because the dot-coms had hired a large number of underskilled workers who literally had nobody willing to hire them when their employers went bust. I suspect 2017 will be worse than 2009 but better than 2001 in tech; unicorns collectively employ many more people (particularly low-skilled people) than Web 2.0 startups, but the crash this time is a slow-motion slowdown and doesn't seem to be affecting all companies, and so there's time for stronger companies to pick up the pieces of weaker ones.
2009 and (allegedly) 2017 are nothing like 2001. Within one week, my office building (in Seattle) went from being completely full of startups to 50% occupancy. I distinctly remember one day walking around and seeing multiple people in their offices crying with their heads in their hands. The whole market basically disappeared overnight. I had only been working for a year at that point, so I was completely screwed. It was 3 years before I could get an entry level job in the industry again (at 2/3 of my previous salary). Anyway, what's this about a crash? I've been job hunting and every company I've interviewed with says they are having difficulty finding people.
Yep: first, rents crash in the East Bay and other outlying areas, and then as traffic diminishes people who were paying $$$ to rent in PA/MA/MV decide that it wouldn't be so bad to live farther out. Rents then drop everywhere, although home sale prices never really drop much in PA/MA—they just level off for a while.
Condo prices can drop - in 2009 there were 2BR condos available for about $400K, while the cheapest you could get in early 2015 were about $900K. You're right though, I didn't see single-family homes drop much even in 2009; they still went for more than a million.
I had a 2 bedroom lease in Adams Morgan, one block off 18th, for $2500 last year. We've since bought a place a few blocks away, so I'm unsure if it's risen.
And I pay a $800 a month mortgage for a 3500 square fort castle with 5 beds and 4 baths on 1/2 acre in BF Indiana. Doesn't mean I am getting a good deal though, just where I happen to be.
I would way rather be paying more for a city home :)
I'm in the opposite situation. I moved to Washington from a small Rust Belt city. The last house I toured there was a historic 5500 ft^2 Victorian 6 bd 5 bath, in the most desirable location, and thus with near instant liquidity. It was listed for $500k. With a local bank, which knows the housing market in the area, the mortgage would have been less than $2000/mo.
Considering the inexpensive housing, an excellent Jesuit preparatory school for $7k/year, the low cost of living, and the huge scholarships to the city's University, a family of five could live extremely comfortably for $150,000-$200,000/yr. Couples with occupations such as lawyer, doctor, engineer, or small business owner live like they're downright rich.
I suppose it's the old adage that keeps me in DC: You could sell your house here and live like a king anywhere else. But you never will, because you're afraid you'll never be to get back.
on short notice and short term, you're competing with hotels which are astronomical on monthly terms, or impossible to find (because they could simply rent out nightly).
I don't understand why this sentiment is gaining so much traction lately. I'm not claiming to understand the complex world of economics, but I do recognize great inventions - and our world is full of them.
ML is the one I'm most excited about at the moment.
1. We are currently inside the second longest bull market in US history. Markets are cyclical. We are far more likely to be toward the end of the bull market than the beginning.
2. Interest rates have begun to normalize, albeit very slowly.
3. Source rock fracturing and enhanced oil recovery has bought us another 20 years of bumpy plateau. We are squandering this by employing civilization's best minds building Tinder, Uber, Snapchat, etc. The last "great inventions" were the microprocessor and the lithium polymer battery. Every disruption in the last forty years has been variations of ever more hedonistic consumerist enablement, while the clock continues to tick on future energy supply.
The reason investors are not interested in funding enterprise software (which usually increases productivity, and eventually standards of living) is that big companies have not been interested in optimizing their operations for many years now, because:
- business is good due to lowered competition (market consolidation)
- cheap/free debt can be used for various forms of financial engineering (stock buybacks, etc), making EPS look good
recessions and depressions usually happen after federal gov decides to reduce deficit spending. I'm curious if there is any indication of this happening. Possibly after elections...
You can see here that every time there was a slowdown in deficit spending or a surplus there was a recession or depression. Notice that before the great depression, there was a long period of surplus and following surplus during Clinton years there was huge issues.
Let's hope Hillary does not repeat Bill's mistake.
> ML is the one I'm most excited about at the moment.
I don't deny that ML is useful (I work in the field of statistical inference), but I am bothered by the characterization of "ML" as a great invention.
First off, "ML" is not really new per se; it has gone through iterations over a long time frame. Pattern recognition (via discriminant analysis, a method that is still popular in a variety of circles) was introduced in 1936. One could argue that there were statistical works addressing this at even earlier time frames - see e.g "The History of Statistics" by Stigler that focuses on linear regression, a method with at least 250 years of history. Popular methods like nearest neighbor date to at least the 1970's. Even the "revolutionary" deep learning paradigm had most of its key architectural ingredients mapped out by the 1980's or early 1990's - the main changes have been the scale at which one can operate these algorithms, tweaks of algorithms, etc due to improvements in hardware. This in turn has fed a bunch of further developments, the stage we are at right now.
Essentially, what has happened is that "ML" has appropriated a variety of disciplines and techniques under its umbrella, many of which have existed for a long time.
As for why concretely (i.e from an economic perspective) I lack the same level of enthusiasm as many others here, I have the following test: Amazon (or for that matter Google or your favorite search engine) has rarely been able to recommend me a nontrivial product (nontrivial in the sense of transaction magnitude) that I liked within the first few links. The best nontrivial products that I have acquired have always needed meticulous searching through a variety of diverse sources on the web (reddit, youtube, random blog posts/discussion forums including hn, etc), conversations with people, etc.
Same goes for movie recommendations, and miscellaneous other things.
This was true 7 years back, it is still true today for me.
This suggests either that these problems are genuinely hard (e.g at an NP-complete fundamental level), or that we still don't know how to come up with good recommendation systems, or that companies have failed to incorporate/package techniques into a good product, or that I am just an outlier with respect to recommendation engines.
I don't disagree with you, but this is the first time in history that ML(deep learning in particular) has become useful due to hardware and software availability. I can now buy commodity hardware and run ML experiments.
Additionally on a theoretical level there are new things being discovered every day it seems. I mean, batch normalization wasn't even discovered until 2015.
There's a long road ahead, but I believe it will be filled with better and better inventions.
Windows 10 is an absolute mess, and I would recommend a Linux distribution (Fedora in particular) over it even for the casual user. Nowadays Fedora just works.
While raw "existence" is free, a sheltered existence is most certainly not. In many areas it is illegal to live in a tent or in a car, for example. It is also illegal to camp in a national forest for longer than 2 weeks.
> While raw "existence" is free, a sheltered existence is most certainly not.
I was replying to "We have to pay to exist?", not "We have to pay for a shelter?".
Being free to do something does not mean the means to accomplish it should be free of charge. I know lots of people think otherwise and therefore believe things like food, healthcare or accommodation should be given to them somehow for free, fortunately most people don't agree.
The point is that they are still paying money. Calling it a "tax write-off" to the layman sounds like they're just doing it to reduce how much they pay in taxes. I.e. It sounds like tax-evasion/fraud.
His point specifically is that tax write-offs don't reduce how much you have to pay overall. They may even increase it. They just redirect some of it to other purposes such as research instead of paying taxes.
Keep dreaming. If we cannot even understand or live in accordance with the life support systems of what is literally the most habitable and human-friendly planet in the Universe then there's no way in hell that we will be able to successfully colonize a lifeless planet.
Stop thinking about outer space when we are in the middle of an anthropogenic mass extinction here on planet Earth.
> literally the most habitable and human-friendly planet in the Universe
Well, we don't know that it's the most habitable; it's just the most habitable we know of. And huge sections of it are completely unsuited for human life. 2/3rds of it will kill a human being in a matter of hours. Anything above or below, let's call it 50 degrees latitude is inhospitable without technology, and the equator isn't a great place to live, either.
It almost certainly is the most habitable planet for life as we know it today because we and our environment co-evolved to match the conditions. Just because 2/3 of the planet (not sure how you arrived at the number / what parts are in the denominator) doesn't meant it is meaningless to what allows us to live here (e.g., oxygen and food supply from the oceans).
OTOH I disagree with the notion that we have to have a full grasp on how to sustain us on this planet before we can make other planets inhabitable for us. I think there are things we will only learn if we try. I am not saying that trying right now is feasible, though.
I agree that we have an extremely low probability of finding a planet that could host our biology as well as Earth's given that we evolved here, but I refute your absolute claim.
Invasive species don't co-evolve to exploit the ecosystems they stumble upon. They happen upon a ecological space where there are incredibly low hanging fruit that they are better equipped at taking advantage of. Imagine space-faring humans stumbling upon a world where the oceans resemble that of the Earth's as they once existed in the 1500's--a world densely populated with an abundance of marine life, ripe for harvesting.
While there is some probability that biochemistry is not 100% universal (ie. alien metabolites could be toxic to humans or cause an immune response), I imagine there are scenarios where the same set of molecules and polymers are used. The principles of biochemistry are going to be similar in a lot of places in terms of how energy is exploited and harnessed.
I think it's incredibly more likely that humans will never be interstellar travelers en masse than to say that Earth is the optimal naturally occurring human habitat in the universe. As far as we know there is an infinite space full of limitless planets. Plenty of biological solution space with which to theoretically work / exploit.
I'm going to assume this is a serious comment and that you are attributing global warming as the cause of the feared extinction.
In that case I think you should dial it back a bit. Humans are pretty adaptable. Even assuming the changes in temperature and sea-level are on the high end of predictions, we will adapt. People will move, infrastructure will be built, and so on. Mass extinction certainly isn't going to happen from global warming as we understand it today.
You might argue there there will be mass casualties, but that is also uncertain, difficult to quantify, and is quite a different thing than 'mass extinctions'. Of course, mass casualties due to weather has and is already a problem -- it isn't something that is uniquely associated with global warming.
This opinion really bothers me. The absolute best way to maximize chances of humanity's survival is expand off this rock. Improving survival chance here is of little consequence compared to essentially ORing the likelihood of survival over the independent existential threats.
