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Even Apple and Google Engineers Can't Really Afford To Live Near Their Offices (fastcompany.com)
That's according to the Y Combinator-backed real-estate startup Open Listings, which looked at median home sales prices near the headquarters (meaning within a 20-minute commute) of some of the Bay Area's biggest and best-known tech companies. Fast Company: Using public salary data from Paysa, Open Listings then looked at how many software engineers from those companies could actually afford to buy a house close to their office. Here's what it found: Engineers at five major SF-based tech companies would need to spend over the 28% threshold of their income to afford a monthly mortgage near their offices. Apple engineers would have to pay an average of 33% of their monthly income for a mortgage near work. That's the highest percentage of the companies analyzed, and home prices in Cupertino continue to skyrocket. Google wasn't much better at 32%, and living near the Facebook office would cost an engineer 29% of their monthly paycheck.
So they can't survive with two thirds of a presumably good paycheck? What's the title on about?
They forgot to deduct all the California and local taxes before you ever see that amount.
California has the highest US taxes on everything.
Those cities are expensive because the tech companies are there. Mountain View, Cupertino and Sunnyvale were orchards and farms with dirt-cheap housing before the rise of Google, Apple, Facebook, Intel, etc.
Anywhere the tech moves; high prices will follow. Just look at Portland and Seattle.
In a place like California, between paying local, state and federal income taxes, plus social security and medicare taxes, the government is probably letting you have only HALF of your paycheck. Perhaps 60% of you're lucky. So of the 50-60% you're allowed to keep, spending 28-30% of it on a place to live is going to give you maybe 20-30% for ALL other expenses. I certainly wouldn't want to live that way.
In a place like England too. I am certainly happy to live this way and I even advocte for people of my income level paying more tax.
Civilisation is paid for with taxes.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
But they want that CA lifestyle I guess.
What is this CA lifestyle thing? Got to love living in poverty making $100+K/year. But hey, the sunset ocean view from the refrigerator box is stunning every evening it's not raining and the neighborhood isn't on fire...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
In a place like England too. I am certainly happy to live this way and I even advocte for people of my income level paying more tax.
Civilisation is paid for with taxes.
You have a somewhat sane healthcare system, so you don't have to spend yet another 10-20% on healthcare for your family.
Civilisation is paid for with taxes.
That's possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard. No, government is paid for with taxes. To confuse government with civilization is sad. really sad.
Civilization happens in spite of government, not because of it.
Good government is the result of civilization, not the cause.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Civilization happens in spite of government
Not to any significant extent. Otherwise I would just kill you and take all your stuff.
It's a positive feedback loop. A small amount of civilization comes together, and it starts to grow. At a certain size, a small amount of government is needed to organize the civilization. The small government allows the civilization to grow a bit more, which requires a bit more organization and thus a slightly larger government. The feedback loop continues for as long as the value of being organized is greater than the cost of the government.
The governments valuation has nothing at all to do with house value on the market. That's just government greed.
The price of real estate is determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. Period.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
There are a lot of places on Earth that have no functioning government (and therefore have no taxes). One would think that the the "taxation is theft" crowd would be flocking to these places en masse, but for some reason they are not. Interesting, that.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Taxation is systemic theft
FFS, this is even worse than the copyright=theft meme. Taxation is a levy. It's a portion of personal (household/business) wealth paid to a governing body to fund public works. It's no more 'theft' than membership fees that cover costs of an organisation.
an institutional framework of extracting wealth from people
That's better, even with your use of scare-word 'extracting'
through the threat of violence
... and then you're back to ranting
a perfect example of terrorism
Hot tip; in english, words have meanings and 'terrorism' doesn't mean 'bad thing I don't like'.
A society that admits the practice is, by definition, uncivilised.
Only if we use the ... irregular definitions that you've used.
I presume you favour a low-to-zero tax system. You'll happily ignore the enormous benefits that come from living in a country and civilisation that's been built from the wealth that so many other citizens, past and present, have pooled and concentrate on the limitations that expecting you to make a similar contribution places on you, and/or the inefficiencies (and even corruption) of those we've arranged to spend this wealth.
While I'm sure that you're quite capable of re-inventing civilisation on your own with nothing more than a small set of nail clippers, most of the rest of humanity have consistently, across history and culture, seen the benefit of pooling resources and co-operating. So would you mind very much setting aside the keyboard that taxes have helped build and stop posting on the internet that exists only because of taxation and find some lonely place to beat your manly chest and declare loudly about how much of a rugged individualist you are? Or is Poe's Law biting me in the ass?