residentfoam

This! Right to the point.

I think Texas got this right. Higher property taxes are assessed every year on the current property value. This has the positive effect to keep the real estate market within reason. Home owners have no incentive to see their taxes explode, unless they plan to sell and move.

CA is a mess! And don't get me started on the fact that property taxes pay for public schools, so if I buy a property today say at $1M whereas my neighbor bought 10y ago and payed $100k guess who is paying the most to finance schools ? It is utterly unfair!

Hence, after almost a decade in SF, I and my finally finally moved on, I kept my job and bought a nice, modern, luxury house in Austin! I and my family are super happy now.

I voted democrats my entire life, I have now realized how wrong I was! SF and CA turned me into a republican! And that's what I vote now.

Yeah I looked into home prices rent/buy. True that you can find something _cheaper_ but not cheap/good enough to justify the lower salary and less tech opportunities. I came to the conclusion that Boston is just as expensive as SF but with less opportunities.

Still, I am sure Zurich wouldn't even come close to the number of opportunities one get in SV.

My LinkedIn account is always flooded by recruiters. That gives engineers leverage to seek new and better opportunities all the time.

Plus networking is also a big one.

Unless you get a job at Google/Oracle and planning on retiring there, SV wins hands down.

The language barrier is also a no go along with cost of living.

If I could, I'd leave tomorrow, but, besides tech, there is another unique aspect of Bay Area: the Biotech scene.

My wife works in Biotech and the only other alternative for us would be the Boston area. But, after running some numbers pro/cons, the Bay Area wins.

So we are stuck here ... for now.

The weather is also overrated. SF weather in particular is boring and sucks!

The weather in SF is boring. Seasons are much better. I like cold winter, fall, warm spring and hot summers.

Had terrible experience with AirBnB support. I had to reach out to them on Twitter and eventually someone got back to me!

You would expect their site to have a clear link to support. Good luck with that.

Clearly a project built for the sole purpose of getting a promotion and then move on. I wonder why would they ever even consider building this thing oO.

fake it until you make it

> if you have years or decades of experience you should have a large network of colleagues

yes, but more often than not, those colleagues best interest is not YOU but their employee referral :) .

At least in my experience, they often try to oversell the company they work at, as the best place to work, trying to get you to join, even if they know it is crap.

I do my own research and always take "ex-colleagues" advises with a grain of salt, basically I mainly trust my judgement, balance sheets for public companies and buzz around like glassdoor, blind, etc .. :)

Let's put aside Chernobyl, Fukushima and all the safety/economic/environment implications those incidents have had.

What about the nuclear waste ? How/where are we gonna store it ? And for how long is gonna be safe, before containers start leaking radioactive st into the environment ? Nobody wants to live anywhere near that st. That's a big problem.

It is also Google.

Looking forward to a Google Container

If I were the US authorities, I'd start asking/demanding Google to stop SSO across Search/GMail/Browser.

Just because I am a GMail user does not automatically mean that you can trace all my web search.

In addition, I'd demand removing Captcha-alike when using VPN services, to avoid them from tracking my IP.

I mean, even if you are not logged-in, they can still correlate IPs across products.

Where was the antitrust in all these years ?

I think it is a little too late now. Companies like Google have grown to the size where it is now impossible to stop them from being a monopoly.

I don't think there is anything, anyone in the world can do to really allow a fair competition in the space.

As for the fines that e.g EU has inflicted to Google in recent years, they are simply ridiculous, considering Google's revenues.