patrick.net

"Living here in the Bay Area is very expensive… "

Thats a mispercention over its history. Actuall products are as cheap as anyplace else. Its the services from others you have to stay away from.

Fact is many people did afford homes in the 1970s. My dad was a carpenter who made enough to pay for mortgage and then some.
The same is true with the mid 80s and mid 90's. You just got to learn
to stay away from the land sharks ( service industry ) that is the big wallet bitter.

There is too much hype in the Bay Area. Big difference is we didnt have what I call "Google Groupies" running around. If you believe its expensive then you will except the prices and overpay. Just say no!

"Anyone see Google’s earnings? Holy cow."

Reminds me of a few B2B companies of 1999 (Gone) and early days at Intel , Apple (had some bad days), Tandem (Gone) and Silicon Graphics (Semi-Gone), Sun (Life Support). Goog will have its day too.

"It costs a lot to buy a place in the Bay Area,"

At the present moment only... that will pass too.

"but renting is not that expensive if you have a job and are relatively presentable (so you don’t scare people when they are interviewing roommates)…"

Exactly, Its good to develop sound budget and savings plan not to mention patients. It builds confidence and security. Just avoid the Service Industry like (Strip Joints) ...

You got it Bork... Good luck

Thanks, Randy.

"Objectivism" seems to be a better description of the prevailing political philosophy of most regular contributors here, incl. me. Unfortunately, there is no "Objectivist Party" capable of mobilizing like-minded Americans disgusted with the corrupt two-party dualopoly, but also not willing to embrace socia1ism. The closest thing so far still seems to be the Libertarian Party, despite including a significant % of extreme right-wing narcissist/anarchists among the ranks.

HARM

An "Objectivist Party" is antithetical. There used to be (still may be) a close adherent in the Natural Law Party. It actually outpolled the Libertarian Party at it's peak (because they had a strong presidential candidate...have you ever really looked in the National Libertarian candidates? I wouldn't have these guys walk my dog usually).

it is not much tougher to be an 18-25 year old kid today as is was when I was an 18-25 year old kid. As a college student I worked two jobs and shared a room to save on rent until I graduated. Kids today will laugh if you tell them to share a room (or get a second job)…

Ironically I'd say the opposite. I think it definitely is a lot tougher to be younger today than in the past. Among other things, college fees/tuition has gone up almost as much as... well... housing.

The tuition at the school i went to went up 5-7% year over year after I graduated. I'm pretty sure that wasn't limited to my school.

Salaries have also definitely not kept up with real inflation (e.g. the inflation number that includes food and energy)

I have never met a homeless person that was homeless due to money issues. It is usually a long list of problems that includes substance abuse and/or metal problems (friends or family will not let people sleep on the street unless they are scared of them)…

I used to feel the same way, until I spent a day volunteering with the United Way. That's when I learned that there's two classes of Homeless people: Visible and Invisible.

Visible: the stinky psychotic people you see in Downtown Palo Alto, Santa Cruz, and Van Ness in SF. They're also chronically homeless. Apparently these represent only a small segment of homeless people. (The crazy male population.)

Invisible: Women and children. There's a lot of these but they're in shelters and otherwise taken care of. It also may be temporary - 2 months at a time, etc. Apparently, this is the vast majority.

What you see is the tip of the iceberg - and ironically the unhelp-able portion. What you don't see is the problem.

Thats a mispercention over its history. Actuall products are as cheap as anyplace else. Its the services from others you have to stay away from.

Dude - groceries at Safeway are 20% more expensive here than the same items at Safeway in Seattle.

Check out the study I did here:

http://www.burbed.com/2006/12/25/heres-your-christmas-gift-20-savings-on-groceries/

Why green beans, ginger, milk, and grape jelly are all 40% more expensive here than they are in Seattle boggles my mind.

Invisible: Women and children.

Where is the man?

El Jefe,

I hear what you're saying about the Bay Area "trustafarians", but I don't think those are specifically the kinds of people to whom Simcha was referring. I think he was saying is that, surviving on your own is extremely hard now even for young people who are willing to forgo 'luxuries' and live spartan lifestyles. And this reality jives with my own personal experience. Hell, I left CA 14 years ago and probably would have stayed gone if a family crisis hadn't forced me back. I'm actually fairly contented with where I am now (renting in a nice neighborhood), but am keeping my options open.

Why green beans, ginger, milk, and grape jelly are all 40% more expensive here than they are in Seattle boggles my mind.

Dude, "sunshine premium".

The cost of living difference in $ is enormous between the BA and other areas. It costs the better part of 50% more here than where much of my family lives in Ohio.

But the purchasing power parity is about the same. Therein lies the confusion.

Actually, people in rural Ohio are worse off, not better, because they have to buy things that are nationally priced on the margins -- meaning assuming our inflated dollars.

hmm, randy h. is converting me to objectivism by degrees...

interestingly, 'libertarianism' seems to be mostly an american phenomenon, the very small number of people i've encountered here who claim to espouse it (mainly from the net) seem to have just gotten an extremely unreflexive wash-over effect from the US.

while i agree with randy about the nuttiness of the extreme libertarian case as it is often presented, ironically *some* libertarian ideals have strongly influenced political discourse and political freedoms everywhere over the last couple of centuries (to our benefit), concerning our present-day understandings of one's 'freedom' to live without excessive state interference. for instance, you can no longer be shanghai'ed into the Navy against your will just by being found drinking in a pub in a coastal town...

"Dude - groceries at Safeway are 20% more expensive here than the same items at Safeway in Seattle"

My grocery bill is around 35-40 a week, with discount. Its all noise level for a single person. For families that may be different. Since you like the Green stuff. I suggest a trip to the farmers markets on weekends.

It costs the better part of 50% more here than where much of my family lives in Ohio. But the purchasing power parity is about the same.

Randy H,

You mean excluding housing, right?

"Dude, “sunshine premium”

Go to safeway and buy Grapes from Chile! Hum!!!!
WTF, in California, of all things.

Am I an objectivist, a libertarian, a sophist, or just a jerk?

hmm, randy h. is converting me to objectivism by degrees…

Hallelujah!! All hail Randy H!

Am I an objectivist, a libertarian, a sophist, or just a jerk?

Who says you have to choose? ;-)

the irony is that the rosy picture of idyllic life presented by the libertarians closely resembles the stated desired outcome of 'true' communism, of independent, autonomous small communities beholden to no-one, where the state has withered away, and people are no longer alienated by their work and power relations in a capitalist colossus from themselves, each other, the nature of their own work, and so on. somehow, some kind of freaky space-time curvature brings the 'far right' into contact with the 'far left'. this is also the anarchist-communist nexus. try telling the average hairy-chested libertarian they are working towards the communist ideal...

I am a software engineer for a semiconductor capital equipment company. We are in a great market position, but cost cutting abounds. We seem to be laying off ppl in dribs and drabs- 4-5% last fall, a "small", unpublished number last week. Meanwhile, there is hiring in India and elsewhere is Asia. I feel fairly secure given my somewhat non-generic skillset, but at the same time, I am keeping my eyes open for opportunities. I would HATE to be in manufacturing here- feel bad for those people.

I thought it was interesting that BearCat mentioned Galil of all places. I worked there when it was in Mountain View. 1 mile commute- can't beat that. Good company, but I wasn't prepared to move to Rocklin. At the time, I felt like SV RE had a few more good years in it and boy was that an understatement!

somehow, some kind of freaky space-time curvature brings the ‘far right’ into contact with the ‘far left’. this is also the anarchist-communist nexus.

Many years ago, my dad told me, "if you go right far enough, you'll run into the far left." I was an adult before I fully understood what he meant.

“Dude - groceries at Safeway are 20% more expensive here than the same items at Safeway in Seattle”

My grocery bill is around 35-40 a week, with discount. Its all noise level for a single person. For families that may be different. Since you like the Green stuff. I suggest a trip to the farmers markets on weekends.

Actually I really like cookies. And the ones I like are 20% more here than the exact same cookies at Safeway Seattle.

I guess the cookies here are sunnier, smarter, and generally more special.

Marx on alienation. Admittedly, he was operating in a manufacturing society, which today, in terms of work opportunities and pay scales, most closely resembles, say, China producing goods for the West from 'globalisation' effects...

Under capitalism, workers are inevitably alienated from their own lives. That is, they do not feel part of their own lives. They are just 'going through the motions'.

Why does Marx say this? Under capitalism, a worker is constrained both physically and psychologically; he is alienated from both nature and himself (body and spirit), and from others. Under capitalism, we see the worker’s progressive intellectual and psychological “dis-integration.”

Marx notes at least five kinds of alienation:

- Alienation from nature (pollution, industrialisation, cities)
- Alienation from the body (harnessing)
- Alienation from fully human species-being (the worker has only an animal-type existence)
- Alienation from others (competition, no time to talk)
- Alienation from one’s own intellectual ability (repetitive work, constrained thought)

Maybe that's why all the people you talk to on the phone all day long sound pissed off...

Tommy writes :

"VMware is hiring and they are doing an IPO later this year…
Google made again a ton of money….

What more do you need in bay area? These two are enough to support our local economy for a while. VMware is guaranteed to make quite a few people rather well off. "

Oh baby! you have a lot to learn my dear boy! Come back after your 35.
A work force of mear 2,500 is hardly going to compare to a workfore of 840,000. Please grow up.

Google will have its day, just like the other "googles back in its day". VMware (buddy works there) is planning a spinoff (not bad!) because everyone from VMware is leaving and the product is flaming out. Employees dont like EMC Parent company anyway. Why did a storage company like EMC buy a SW company VM for anyway? Bad business decision more like it.

"Actually I really like cookies."

I suggest some local brownies during the Height Asbury Street Festival in SF later in June. Its a total buzz trip.

I thought VMware was doing well, and had a good product. Virtualisation is getting to be a really big deal on x86 platforms, I'm looking at converting our legacy system right now...

VMWare is very good, and quite an improvement over the old Ghost/reimage method. I am using it at work right now. It does have some limitations, though --mainly a few applications that don't virtualize well or require "real" access to HW.

I am not an Objectivist for the same reason that I'm not a Scientologist.

I can't support a worldview espoused by horrible, horrible writers.

yeah, we can either use a VM P->V image as a disaster recovery fallback system, or else just run our legacy system entirely as a VM. The ERP runs on Oracle, I don't believe there's any HW problems with doing that, the vendor themselves do it all the time. Except for the speed benefits of spreading over multiple SCSI disk groups and RAID arrays -- that's the only issue I have with it, but for DR and legacy on a low transaction system, who cares...

BearCat,

Web 2.0- I can relate. I love to code, but it has to be something "real". Some would say I am just a bit twiddler. To me, it's all ball bearings and motion controllers nowadays, so it was sad to see Galil and Chris King move away. At least we have managed to hold on to Phil Wood.

The Social Democrat welfare state of Sweden talked about producing 'selective utopias' or 'partial utopias' rather than trying to deliver some sort of socia1istic utopia all at once -- so they would target housing, or unemployment, intensively for several years, to try to improve things -- and it worked. If housing was really targeted as a social right, and taken out of the market to a greater or lesser extent, you would clean up the homelessness and the unaffordability problems all at once... Right now on the news, they are threatening pensioner renters at retirement villages with massive upticks in rent -- causing a lot of consternation. This is the problem of setting everything up as a money-making exercise for some f&cking capitalist pig at the top who thinks they have a 'right' to gouge everyone for their own wellbeing for taking the 'risk' of building a retirement village or trailer park or whatever... better off just building the housing with public money under public control and some social assurances and certainty.

@simcha
nice to hear your story,tks for sharing . Those kids are fortunate to have somebody like you as a compass
@space age
35 to 40bux a week on groceries?

would like to hear what your 21 a week meal plan is on a budget of $1.90 permeal
financial times says americans spend 6.7% of their disposable income on food and that figure surprised me

tell me if I'm a big spender on food but even cheap restaurants take 40 to feed 3 of us with tip no alcohol --ex bac ch burger/fries 8.50
crabcake swich/fries 8.50
1 caesar salads 7.50
cup of soup 3.50
2 sodas 3.50
1 water 1.50
tax 1.98
tip 6
total 40.98

and 4 that meal are you saying that I could feed simcha's client for a week or space age ?
would love to hear your dieticians meal plan for $40 a week
would also love to hear other posters tell me what they think they spend in a week to feed their families

if all of you spend just 40 a person a week for food then I now know how people live in 800k 800sq ft homes
they don't eat cookies nor drink organic milk or bottled water
or fruit vegees cereal or orange juice

hostess twinkees every meal ??

Food can cost more than housing for many people.

I think that completely socializing the housing industry would be a very hard sell in this country. I think that a better model is what has happened around the Chicago area. CHA (The Chicago Housing Authority) built big government housing projects many decades ago and put only poor people in those big buildings without any other real assistance or programs to help them change their lot. This failed miserably. The projects became crime and gang ridden and largely condemnable before they all were torn down.

The dismantiling of the housing projects in Chicago marked a major change in policy and a major shift in how the City handled its poor and homeless. The homeless problem is far from solved but there are some creative things that have been happening in the Chicago Area.

As the projects were being torn down, the people who were still living in the projects were offered section 8 housing and were moved out to suburbs and other areas of Chicago. This way they were moved to better school districts that had more money. Their children could receive better educations and live in safer neighborhoods, in general. Most people are faring better who have moved out of the projects. So, private landlords got their rent paid for by the CHA and were assured of the income. The tenants had, mostly, better housing opportunities. It was a better cooperation between the private sector and government.

The negative side of this was that the neighborhoods where the projects were (i.e. Cabrini Green) were now prime real estate. These properties were sold to private investors and they built luxury condos and apartments on the land. Thus they priced out the people who once lived in these neighborhoods forever. A very small percentage of apartments in those new neighborhoods were set aside for former poor residents. Thus these neighborhoods were gentrified. In Chicago, gentrification means moving white yuppies in and pricing all other poor people out.

Now, the city of Chicago benefits from the property taxes collected from the new property owners in these newly gentrified neighborhoods. Some of the people who were displaced were moved too far out from the City to keep their low-paying jobs. They became jobless in the far out suburbs where they were moved to. Also some of the suburbs used zoning to force only certain lower priced neighborhoods in their respective towns to take these new section 8 people being shipped out of the City. Thus some of the suburbs created new ghettos for urban poor, merely displacing the problems from the City to the suburbs... And this time, the newly arrived were woefully unprepared for what they would find there. No public transportation exists in many of these suburbs. Therefore, there is no way for some of these people to get around to go out and find work, let alone get about to go to work once a job could be found. No education was provided for the displaced people so that they could get jobs that would pay them enough to get a car so that they could get around to find work and maintain stable employment.

So, this solution wasn't perfect. It is better than the government project system that existed before though. So there's more work to be done between the private sector and the government if homelessness can be solved in this country. A more realistic solution in this country is to find a way that government and the private sector could work together to help people help themselves. This would require an organized plan to create better infrastructure, like creating better and more affordable public transportation systems (trains, buses, light rail, etc.) largely run by the government, with cooperation from businesses to train and hire poor people paying them a living wage, and for private land owners to cooperate with business and government to provide affordable housing where land owners profit and tenants benefit from housing they can afford.

This is a very tall task. It takes will, moral fiber, determination, cooperation, and hard work. These things seem to be lacking in our country today. People would rather make a quick and easy buck on markets like, say, real estate or the stock market than actually WORK together to create a just society where everyone wins.

The best way to solve the housing problem is to build, build, build.

We should build until there is no question that housing will be readily available in the future. The society will quickly self-organize into all kinds of neighborhood. Housing will be very affordable in some. Problem solved.

Note that if housing is scarce, higher-income people will have to move into lesser neighborhoods, driving up costs there. The result will be a metropolitan-wide ghetto like the Bay Area.

Bruceb:

"@simcha
nice to hear your story,tks for sharing . Those kids are fortunate to have somebody like you as a compass
@space age
35 to 40bux a week on groceries?"

OK, I live off of $40 per week for groceries. Honestly, I can't afford to spend more. I don't eat out very much at all. If I do, it's under my "entertainment" section of my budget (which is a small item too).

I go to Grocery Outlet for most of my food. They actually have some amazing things there for very little money. Of course, you have to be careful not to buy something that might go bad fast or looks too old... Honestly, I can't afford Albertsons or Safeway. Berkeley Bowl is actually reasonable for green things... fruits and veggies... Most of the rest of their stuff is too darned expensive.

I eat very little meat, because it's expensive. If I do, I make sure that it's a good cut and on sale...

Oh, and if I have to go to Albertsons or Safeway, or even Berkeley Bowl, 90% of what I buy is on sale. I'm not an extremely picky eater so buying what's on sale gives me variety every week.

Would I rather be able to spend more and not have to rely only on what I can scrounge around and find for less? Sure... But I don't have it, and neither do my clients... So, yeah, sad to say, I only spend about $40 per week on groceries.

Also, I grew up in a family where we had very little money. We were broke at the end of every week. My Mom taught me how to squeeze every penny and shop the bargains. So, I'm more used to having to budget very carefully.

Would I rather be able to spend more and not have to rely only on what I can scrounge around and find for less? Sure… But I don’t have it, and neither do my clients… So, yeah, sad to say, I only spend about $40 per week on groceries.

Wow. You are enlightened.

This is the problem of setting everything up as a money-making exercise for some f&cking capitalist pig at the top who thinks they have a ‘right’ to gouge everyone for their own wellbeing for taking the ‘risk’ of building a retirement village or trailer park or whatever

Just when I thought we were making some progress in opening DS's mind... Oh well.

DS,

As you know, most of the regulars here don't particularly care for greedy, self-serving anarchists who call themselves "free market capitalists" (but aren't). But to call every single builder a 'gouger' and say that building never entails any risk (though that's been broadly accurate for the last 6 years or so) is ridiculous.

Any venture that requires up-front capital investment has risk, and real estate development is among the most capital-intensive investments out there. There is a risk of market declines (witness recent builder financial problems with slow sales & land option write-downs). There is regulatory risk, including dealing with unexpected easements, title problems, regulatory zoning hurdles, local politicians who want their palms greased, etc. Builders expect to be compensated for this, just like any other business. Then there is lawsuit risk (witness class action suits pending against Lennar, Toll, Beazer, KB, etc.).

Remove the profit motive and you remove the incentive to build. If you want to cut down on RE price-gouging, why not start by eliminating government manipulation of interest rates (a biggie), reduce direct government subsidies for flippers (limit mtg. interest deduction & cap. gains to just primary house), eliminate government risk underwriting in mortgage markets (GSEs), and encourage competition by removing needless barriers to entry (MLS). Oh, and something the government might do MORE of would be to (a) stop taking massive bribes from the REIC, and (b) actually start policing the banksters and prosecute mortgage fraud. *

(*Not holding my breath on any of these)

But let me tell you something. You will be in a much better position to help people if you are resourceful (i.e. rich). This society revolves around money and that is exactly what you need to get anything done.

If you ignore a few hundred people now, work hard and get rich, then you may be able to help a few thousand people in the future.

Speaking of jobs, Astrid, we are actually looking for a junior associate, a rare thing for law firms nowadays.

I don't know if you all would consider relocating to SoCal, but if so, email me.