gigawhat

Payday loan shops.

Don't pretend you can legislate around that problem-- if payday loans against UBI were illegal, the black market (loan sharks) would fill in the gap.

Yup, if married and you've been there a couple of years. $250k if single.

Still, almost anyone who bought a house a few years ago in the area is sitting on at least $500k in gains. So even if taxes on the remainder are arguably fair from a revenue perspective, they are another constraint on housing market liquidity.

Weirdly, I own a house and think I'd be better off if prices fell-- fell a lot. I bought a few years ago and would be happy if prices uniformly dropped to those levels.

Why? I want a 50% bigger/nicer house in the same area. But bigger/nicer houses have increased in price proportionally to mine. So the gap in absolute dollars between what I have and what I want has expanded quite a bit. My income has increased, but not really enough to cover the gap.

Strong increasing prices really only help homeowners to the effect that they're eventually willing to downsize or move to a lower-cost area.

If prices rise strongly and proportionately I suspect it just causes stagnation. I can't really upgrade without a windfall, thus my house stays off the market. So other folks can't upgrade to my house.

I used to rail against the H1-B program until I realized that the body-shop consultancies aren't hurting demand for my services. . . they're increasing it.

It seems like at least 75% of the body-shop projects end up being so poorly executed that people like me inevitably get called in to revamp and clean up the mess.

By all means, corporate America, keep giving out big projects to the lowest bidder, who will throw their international cheap labor at it. Then call me up to pick up the pieces in a year or two at my usual high rate, working from home 100%.

An even better real-world example might be manual transmissions, which are now both slower and less efficient than modern automatic counterparts. Some people (like myself) prefer them regardless.

Terrible comparison. Your car payment doesn't tend to increase unpredictably with your car's value over time, as property taxes almost certainly would.

I think I qualify as one of those people, and I make way more than $150K, and have done so for a decade. And I work 40 hours a week.

The people who puzzle me are those who fetishize programming so much that they don't demand proportionate cold hard cash to do it well.

What's "uncharacteristic" about the name? It's the actual doors that are silly and gimmicky, so the naming is apt.

Scientists are trained to despise anecdote.

Not sure what science has to do with this anyway; this is basically a matter of public-policy/politics/economics.

I'm no libertarian, but how about market forces? As fewer blue-collar workers can afford to live in or close to SF, the labor pool will shrink and wages will go up.

"Up In the Air" didn't promote the simplified life; it basically tore it apart.

I am Bender. Please insert girder.

I guess one doesn't need a car at all with a helicopter parent.