>In New York, for example, starting salaries for FBI agents hover around $73,000. But a nonprofit group in the city reported people need to earn at least $100,000 to afford food, housing and transportation there.
Does this hold truth? I know it's expensive city, but 73k is also median salary here, do they want to say that more than half people here cannot afford basic needs? That doesn't sound right
The issue I see with comparing median salary to median rent for a one bedroom is that tons of people (especially young folks just starting out) want to live in desirable places and are willing to share living costs in order to do so. So even if you could magically reset a desirable locality to have comparable median rent and salary, very quickly rent would exceed salary as people that really can’t afford it move anyway.
And if you instead pin salary and say that the median salary at every company must be $X, rents will increase for the same reason.
I suppose you could ban living with roommates, and require median salary at every company to equal some state mandated number. I don’t think that will go well for anyone but you could.
It's also a problem because the median tells you nothing about who goes without. For that you need to know the distribution. Bottom 5% of housing cost vs bottom 5% household income is more informative.
This is common practice across the US and the rule-of-thumb 40x generally tries to take most cases into account. i.e., 40x after taxes and other typical debt levels is "risk appropriate" for landlords... Though don't get me started on how this reduces landlord risk to a level where they should not see profits...
It does seem odd though when you consider one person with 40x may have a completely different net than another.
The $150K number for a family of 4 sounds about right, but $100K for one person in NYC seems pretty far off. I have a lot of friends living in desirable neighborhoods making half that.
(The disconnect here is always around expectations: it will invariably be revealed that this includes a 1/2BR with no roommates within walking distance of the person’s workplace, when in reality much of this city has roommates and uses mass transit. Law enforcement are mere mortals like the rest of us; they can stoop to taking the subway to work.)
I don’t disagree, but it’s not really about fair: it’s about what the expected standard of living is in NYC. NYC is historically a city of renters and roommates, and that is reflected in the split view between average “asking” rents ($3500) and actual rents ($~1700)[1].
This isn’t to say the city can’t or shouldn’t be more affordable. But the idea that everybody gets their own 1BR at average US rental prices is not immediately compatible with the city’s housing stock (or troubling trends, like dedensification).
New American dream is a grown adult living with roommates like a child, and dying in a small box connected to a thousand other boxes that you’ll never even own.
You need to be "grand fathered" into proper housing to afford it.
My theory is that the churn of workers in the metropoles due to housing costs is why there are vacant jobs which made the workers move there in the first place. A self enforcing loop.
A quick google gives me median rent of $3500. After tax, 73k comes to about 54,599. Divided by 12 is 4,546 per month. So you have about $1,000 a month for utilities, food, gas/train, etc. It seems difficult to live on.
And on top of it that’s a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. Forbid wanting to have a 401k or some savings, afford any amount of travel or continue education…
I make 200k and spend >60% on housing in California. Pay ~75k in income taxes,leaving 125k,then another 20k in property taxes, then 60k mortgage. Leaves about 40k for bills and retirement.
Exactly. Regulations have made it so expensive and difficult to build housing in many parts of California (and other major cities in the US), that the demand outstrips the supply and it leads to unaffordable housing.
I keep seeing memes about housing costs in the 1960s being so cheap. I also wonder what the housing regulations were at this time. I'm guessing pretty light compared to now.
There was a lot fewer people back then, in most places the ratio of people to available housing was much lower. The network effects were also far weaker, expensive air travel and worse communications meant that people didn't move to big cities as often.
The most extreme example the world has to offer is not representative of what would happen if the US legalized housing. HK has almost 200x the population density of the US and almost 100x the population density of California.
Slums can be found in nearly every country's history. Housing regulations are important: it's zoning restrictions that cause availability problems, not quality regs, and it's important to make the distinction. (When your community is exempt from zoning regulations, you can do things about the problem: https://macleans.ca/society/sen%CC%93a%E1%B8%B5w-vancouver)
But zoning restrictions on housing maintain the prices of existing real-estate "investments" (see https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/housing-should-be-afford...). We're not going to have change until real-estate owners abandon the idea that housing is supposed to be profitable.
(Btw, I still think "don't build on floodplains"-type restrictions are important, even though those are also zoning restrictions.)
Regulation is the culprit, though. Even if you banned Blackrock, foreign investors, and multiple investment properties, rents would be unchanged because the housing stock is simply deficient near people's workplaces, and it's regulations that prevent that from changing.
I mean, Op started right off the bat with the idea that op would love to live in a communist society.
By all means Op can say that they agree with some Marxist ideas, but when the real human costs of that model are very well proven out by now it should be a red flag if someone doesn’t acknowledge those costs from the jump. I’m not surprised this quickly went to suggesting Stalin wasn’t so bad.
Churchill purposefully starved the people of Bengal yet he is still revered. The Bengal famine had a similar death toll to the holodomor, yet one is ignored and the other used as a constant point to discredit.
You literally proved my point, One can't say "Stalin's 5-year plans were overall successful and copied by other countries" without "but holodomor". Yet you can say all you want about Churchill or Britain's policies without a smug "Bengal famine" appearing.
Bro you cannot just call famine "smug", nobody here is honoring Churchill as well, so stop using whataboutisms, there is tons of cases of leaders that didn't kill milions of people with their policies
How is building yachts for people who demand it more wasteful than producing perfumes, collectibles or nicer lamps?
Who gets to decide what is waste as long as there is demand?
In a democracy, ultimately the public should get to decide. Even if "taxing yachts" is not a win for the economy it might be a win for society. The USA is way too timid when it comes to using the tax code to incentivize and shape companies' and people's behavior. We really need to "re-internalize" the costs that big business and the rich externalize onto the public, and one way to do this is to impose very narrowly-directed taxes at things that the public bears but doesn't benefit from.
I think good conversation is lot about confidence of people involved. I had terrible conversations (or at least their attempts) where people threw at me questions so quickly I haven't had chance to plant some doorknobs.
Many of encounters where I had to resist their "and you?" questions, as I saw an opportunity to expand on what they were saying.
Which I find weird because then I am completely terrible at group conversations (as there is already taker & giver, so I just go to role of listener)
I had colleague that was 10x developer but 0/10 communicator, if he didn't receive separate first message with "Hi, how is it going?" without me waiting for his answer before requesting something, he wouldn't reply.
It was such a dead end for getting things done (he was productive on his things, but blocker for everybody else.
I once worked with someone who got visibly frustrated when people didn't stop in the hallways to listen to her lengthy response to the phatic "how are you?" expression. She treated it as a genuine question.
I had similar issue on Windows 10, so not sure if only 11 is affected. (After startup whole startbar was frozen and internet as well for 20-30 minutes). Reinstalling windows helped but only until all updates were installed.
No idea if the issue still persists, I switched to Qubes OS already.
It shows once again how knowing fundamentals is important at more advanced level. There is this overall motion "very wide tables are the future of DWH", but in reality depends on context and how your setup is built.
Doesn't it depend on database size? at least I heard somewhere online that column based is not really worth implementing if your regular tables have less than 10M rows.
The term "data warehouse" is commonly used to define two different things:
1. The database where all business data for a wide swath of a company's operational groups relevant to reporting and analytics lands.
2. A specific type of database appliance/platform that is optimized for holding the type of data described above, which product is typically multi-node and often based around columnar storage of data. More recently these also emphasize ingesting or providing transparent access to to unstructured data (typically with functionality to push down queries to big data stores or other external data sources).
The first is an observation about use cases and is agnostic to technology. The second is a specific type of product that fills the use case of large instances of the first.
That's a good perspective on it, thanks. I'm absolutely guilty of seeing the term it through the lens of the technical solution rather than the problem class.
All knowledge is worth having and the pursuit of this knowledge will help us become more than we were. I appreciate that.
That said, consider the path of the warehouses over the last 20 years. Previously, you needed teams of data developers and engineers with modeling experts to put forth a datawarehouse that may solve a companies problem. Now, you _can_ toss very wide tables in a cloud data platform (snowflake, redshift serverless, synapse) and it likely will 'just work'. Sure it can be faster, but these problems are being slowly removed from something we have to care about.
I'm a data specialist, and my knowledge is going to be worthwhile for a good long time, but the premium that exists for it will go down I think.
Edit: plus in NY you have all those HoA payments, so you pay really high price for not renting the place out