Bose = Better Off Somewhere Else

The problem isn't the lack of appetite from builders...they're putting the finishing touches on a housing development on Treasure Island between SF and Oakland that literally sits atop a former radioactive waste spill. As long as land acquisition + construction + taxes + profit > sale price, they'd build atop a pile of dogshit floating in the Bay if they could. I think the locals in South Bay refer to that concept as "seasteading".

In my part of the woods (Lafayette, just east of Berkeley/Oakland) our local species of NIMBY have waged a thus-far successful fight for almost two decades against a proposed development at the other end of town. Although the stated objections have included traffic, quality of life issues, school capacity, and environmental concerns, the real reason is that no elected official wants to be responsible for telling their constituents that $1M in equity just evaporated like a fart in the wind so that their kids (or, more likely, someone fleeing SF or Oakland) can afford a starter house.

Actually, they'll probably take a video of it. Which is kind of Jack's point...you want to enjoy the homicidal clown in the moment.

Apparently the Internet yields the same answer as his colon:

California breaks energy record with 80% of state's power generated using renewable methods

Not the majority every day, perhaps, but we're getting there.

I make a six figure salary working in tech in the SF bay area. My girlfriend earns over twice what I do working in HR at our local friendly mega-corporation. Technically our two salaries put us in the bottom end of the storied and oft-maligned 1%. Our situation stems from equal parts of luck and hard work, and I'm grateful to be in it.

Were we to buy a house in the area that isn't lead or mold-infested, riddled with bullet holes and mediocre schools (here's looking at you, Oakland!), or needing a 2-hour commute, we would be living paycheck to paycheck to afford the mortgage. As it is, we're currently making someone else rich who had the good fortune to buy the place when it was a cow pasture. How the hell people making a fraction of what we do survive, I have no idea, and my heart goes out to them. One major reason California was such a dynamic economy at the beginning of the tech revolution, and why Texas has been growing like gangbusters recently, is that the cost of housing was dirt cheap in both locations. Employers could pay lower wages, and employees would wind up with more in their pockets after the basics of food and shelter were paid for than the current state of insanity we find ourselves in.

Fix that problem, and employers won't have a problem paying people lower wages, because then they could actually afford to live on a lower salary. Doing so requires disabusing people of the notion that their house is a lottery ticket guaranteed by God and the U.S. Constitution to pay off, as well as confronting an army of gray-haired NIMBYs who stand to see their property values fall, and who vote reliably in every damn election. I won't hold my breath.

I had a buddy who worked at pets.com back in the day. For years, whenever the subject came up (usually after a few shots of bad tequila), he would trot out his description of the company: "It took us $300 million dollars to figure out that nobody wants to buy cat litter online". For about a decade, that got laughs.

The last time I bought cat litter, it was from Amazon. Just because an idea seems impractical to the masses now doesn't mean it won't percolate through the culture in time. Given its inability to scale and aversion to any kind of regulation, Bitcoin will likely join pets.com in the /dev/null of history.

Someone should turn this phrase into a flashing neon sign placed strategically across the street from Paul Ryan's office. Yes, it's the meatspace equivalent of a <blink> tag, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

http://www.newgeography.com/content/001680-how-texas-avoided-great-recession

Part of why the cost of living in Texas is low is that they did not implement the same land use regulations that California did in the 1970s, and they belatedly learned their lessons during the S&L crisis of the late 1980s. The combination of vast supply and firmer limits on lending have kept prices in Texas low, and more money in your pocket.

By contrast, my beloved Golden State responded by crimping supply, rather than address the transit issues that sprawl creates or allowing for concentrated vertical development a la New York City in places like SF and LA. As a result, California turned into a speculator's paradise.

I am a Sanders-loving socialist, and think that the best way to undercut speculators is expanded public investment in housing and regional rapid mass transit systems. However, by pandering to NIMBYs and squandering the money we set aside for transit (here's looking at you, BART pension plans), California really screwed the pooch on this issue.

You've left out an important piece in the middle of the saga, and frequently the one with the loudest explosions. I like to call it "Gentrification II: The Wrath of NIMBY".

I live down the street from a cute little 1,700 square foot ranch house with a yard in Lafayette, just east of Oakland and Berkeley. It went for $1.7 million. In my native San Diego, no slouch when it comes to overpricing, it wouldn't command even a third of the price. Should the cities in the Bay Area do the sane thing and allow for concentrated vertical development near BART and other transit lines, the value of that place would plummet. Do you think the idiot who bought that house is going to let a real estate developer undercut the value of his investment without a fight?

Instead, like his aging hippie brethren in SF, he will make all sorts of arguments about preserving the "character" (translation: affluent whiteness) of the neighborhood, and fret loudly about the quality of life issues that increased density would bring.

The problem Chairman Pai must now confront is not unlike what his fellow Republicans in Congress are facing with healthcare: the market does not always produce socially optimal results. There is no market solution in which insurance companies will look at 55-year old cancer patient with diabetes, kidney stones, two knees in need of replacement, and a raging case of herpes and think to themselves "Hmmm...I smell Profit!". From the insurance companies' perspective, the most profitable healthcare plan for that fellow involves a coffin.

Likewise, if it costs $20-50K in trenching and cabling to connect a single rural user at halfway decent broadband speeds, there's no way the ISPs are going to ever break even on that customer if he's paying $50-100 a month. Hence, the market completely ignores the poor and those living in the sticks.

It's admirable that Chairman Pai recognizes that universal Internet access is central to economic prosperity, and I wish him the best of luck despite the source of his nomination, but achieving universal broadband will not happen unless there is a mandate from the government that it happen, as well as considerable funding in the form of tax credits or direct expenditures. Waving around hands and solemnly intoning "The Market knows all! The Market solves all!" will not make those realities go away any more than it would in the healthcare debate.

I am unaware of anyone ever being denied internet access because of gender, religion, or sexual orientation. However, there are racial disparities in internet access owing to our history of segregation. Many of the high-poverty neighborhoods bypassed by ISPs are, not surprisingly, places that fell victim to redlining and the urban blight that followed it.

Not exactly...

http://www.politifact.com/ohio/statements/2012/may/14/rob-portman/rob-portman-says-student-loan-money-was-used-cover/

Short version: during an unexpected spasm of fiscal sanity in 2010, the government cut $58B in wasteful fees that were being paid to banks. Of that savings, around $9B was used to shore up the ACA funding. Nearly $10B went to shore up Pell grants. While it's true that more of those cost savings could (and probably should) have been passed onto students drowning in debt, it's not like there's a line item on your Navient statement that reads "ACA Surcharge".

During the 1970s, the wage gains that made the middle class grow in the 50s and 60s collided with crude oil shocks to create stagflation. In 1979, Carter appointed Paul Volcker as Fed Chairman, who jacked interest rates up all the way to 11.9%, intentionally sending the economy into a crater in an attempt to bring down inflation. This act tossed millions of people out of work (my father included), but it did bring inflation under control. The Reagan "boom", such as it was, came not from sound Republican policy, but from the good luck of being in office when the intentionally inflicted pain stopped.

Whether you view Volcker as a hero or a villain (I tend towards the latter), Reagan's economic policies had little if anything to do with it. He simply inherited the outcome of labor and capital battling over who would bear the cost of the oil shocks. In that battle, capital won. It won so decisively, in fact, that Wall Street named a credit card after it to commemorate the victory.

I love Linux and open-source software. I used a Linux desktop for 15+ years as a software developer. For servers, it's a no-brainer. I'm rooting for Linux.

For audio work, I won't touch Linux with a 10-foot cattle prod. It's just not there yet, and it's not going to be anytime soon.

I spent several years attempting to keep Linux at the center of my studio, and I wish I hadn't. The user experience for a seasoned studio engineer is light-years behind Windows and Mac. I was forced to compile real-time kernels and custom versions of Ardour, got rid of my MOTU interfaces because the manufacturer hates Linux, spent countless evenings swearing at xruns, and developed a well-honed contempt for JACK's almost Windows NT-like stability. Working with MIDI and audio required lashing Ardour, Rosegarden, and Hydrogen together with duct tape and wishful thinking. Audio latency was never decent enough to use most effects while monitoring.

Every time I hit record with other musicians, I said a small prayer to the USB bus gods that nothing would explode mid-take. This is not a mindset conducive to creativity.

Did it actually work? Yes, after a fashion. There are some bright spots: Alsa Modular Synth sounds awesome, the Calf Audio plugins are as good as anything on the proprietary side of the fence, and Ardour is serviceable in a 2003 kind of way. I managed to record a few albums of material using that setup, but it was not an experience I would recommend to anyone. It felt like I was doing more tech support than creating.

Eventually I sucked in my open-source pride and bought a Mac with Logic Pro X on it. Pretty much everything that I've done on it worked right out of the box. It hurt my soul to hand $3K to an Apple Store genius, but now I spend my free evenings recording instead of swearing. I can only hope that Richard Stallman doesn't show up at my front door to lecture me, or worse yet, sing that god-awful GNU song at me.

Time is money, and free time is the most expensive of all. If you value your creative time in the slightest, don't bother with Linux. Get a Mac or PC, load it up with an industry-standard DAW, and make some noise. You may not please St. Ignucius, but you will at least be productive.

PostgreSQL supports transaction DDL statements (e.g. ALTER TABLE, CREATE TABLE). MySQL doesn't. If you run a poorly-written upgrade script against a MySQL database and something goes sideways, your only recourse is to restore from backups. This means that any sane MySQL upgrade plan involves testing the upgrade on a replica of the database first. For large or mission-critical deployments that usually isn't an option.

If all you're looking for is a cheap DB to serve a Wordpress blog about your hamster, MySQL away. Otherwise, use PostgreSQL. You'll sleep better.

Good certified professional coders working in a non-HMO setting can make north of $25 an hour if they are productive. They are also very difficult to find. Since the job that coders do determines whether or not your facility gets paid for a $20K procedure, most places tend to err on the side of caution and spend the extra cash on a good one.

The reason that Kaiser doesn't pay as much for their coders is because the only time Kaiser submits claims to an external entity is for certain subsets of Medicare patients. Otherwise, they are both the insurance company and the provider, which means that they don't have to spend lots of time and money convincing an insurance company to cough up the requisite payment. They will occasionally outsource care to a third party lab or surgery center, but that's the exception.