The problem is the lack of social responsibility/potty profit seeking in tourist cities and European cities. I was appalled by the lack of public restrooms in Europe when I visited, and its similar in some US tourism cities. Where I live, which is a decent 1m+pop city, every single store has a restroom, and you are allowed to use it, for free. Even secure locations like office towers always have accessible restrooms on the first floor to the public, where they typically have a shop/restaurant floor. A lot of people, when they go into a store to pee, buy something. Staff clean the restrooms as part of their jobs, and you learn which ones are well kept and which ones aren't and go to those stores more often. For example, when I'm driving to the beach, Chick-fil-a is the go-to food stop because their restrooms are always clean.
When I went to Helsinki and Estonia, only ONE store downtown (Stockmans) had a public restroom and it had a 15 minute wait all day every day. No surprise, this store had a buttload of business too. Everywhere else there's these god-awful porta potties that want to charge you 3$ a use. Its miserable. You either walk around dehydrated all the time or plan your day around bathroom breaks.
The big one is data transformation. Most companies don't have some kind of seamless integration from department to department and system to system. Each department has some sort of input, and most output multiple subsets of that data to different places/departments/people in different formats like as reports, as data loads into other systems, or a smaller data set for further work. Excel allows non-IT folk the ability to handle this work without having to ask a techie every time they want to make a change, which can be frequent. The issue gets even worse when in-house IT departments manage costs via inter-company transactions (cost quotes) for their efforts. No one's going to pay six figures for a rigid implementation that requires IT involvement and revision costs when they can do it in 5 minutes a week in excel. That's not an exaggeration either, its my bread and butter and a real world example to a real scenario.
I regularly get green bar typewriter-style reports for details I need on a quarterly basis. I also must send details on printed reports that they check off manually, printed a file I could email them of course.
Five years ago, I had supply documentation for an audit where the union auditors didn't have computers. We had to print out 16,000 legal-sized pages of documentation and mail it to them.
Most commercial and large-scale shipping endeavors (hell, even UPS) require the sender to insure their package if they want coverage in case of loss. This is the same with commercial container ships, and I suspect the same with airline freight.
Really, not much more can be said. A 'ridesharing' service could still exist without their software, but their software couldn't exist without a ridesharing service.
I saw Dr. Grandin on one of the NatGeo shows. What a great role model for people struggling with autism, as well as women interested in STEM. Well, anyone interested in STEM really. This is a much better interview choice than that crap earlier this week.
Holy mother of god that's expensive. My condo is 3 times that size and my ENTIRE housing costs (including HOA dues, power, cable, mortgage, water) are $950/month.
The problem is you're not comparing based on equivalent lifestyles but by 5x salary. The cost per square foot of housing in SF/SV area is between 5-10x most places in the country. So, in order to be equivalent to the house Bob bought for $250k, you're spending $1.25m->$2.5m on a home, not possible on Alex's income. $250k in the midwest or most smaller cities (~1m pop) buys a LOT of house.
I chose a condo because I didn't want to have to deal with the upkeep of a yard, actually. Now, I kinda wish I'd chosen a house because I don't feel right getting a dog unless I have a backyard, and I'd like a garage for a workshop. The house general price per sqare foot in Charlotte ranges from $100-$200/sqft, SF is $800-1000/sqft. I was just trying to give an example for perspective, to retort the parent post. Being generous, cost of living in those kinds of locations is 4 times as high, so the higher wages (and taxes) rarely make up for it.
I'll say though, one big benefit of living in one of these expensive locations is future mobility. If you manage to suck it up and pay off significant chunks of your mortgage rather than refinancing repeatedly over a 15 year period, it allows you to move wherever you want to in the future. If I really tried I could pay off my condo in 7-8 years, but it wouldn't really add much to my mobility, because the equity would be barely a down payment in one of the expensive cities and I'd have to start all over again. I do get more room for early investing early though due to no major debt.
No, the difference is probably way more than $40k cost of living. I live in a low cost medium-sized city (Charlotte). I have a 1200sqft condo less than 20 minutes from downtown, less than 20 minutes from work, and the best school district in the city. My condo was $120k at the peak of the housing boom brand spanking new. Most houses of 2000-3000sqft range from $250k to $500k depending on quality. You're lucky to find equivalent housing in an equivalent area in SV/SF 3 times that price, unless you're all the way in Sacramento.
Good point, languages don't change much. I guess I'd compare the certs I deal with more to something like a IEEE membership. While memberships to professional organizations can feel kind of scammy, their seminar/etc requirements kind of force you to stay on top of recent events in the industry.
I agree entirely. I play at 2k with a pair of SLI'd 970's, and have been playing Witcher 3 lately. The hair looks phenomenal with hairworks OFF, looks like ass with it on, regardless of graphics settings.
Certs can be used as a form of upkeep for veterans as well.
I work in payroll, where laws and regulations change every single year. If you've been in the industry for 20 years, a good way to ensure you've kept up with the times is to pursue a cert and refresh your knowledge. This also tells the employer that your knowledge has recently been updated on the topic.
Not all experience is good experience. People that have been in my industry for 20+ years without keeping up with the times like to store junk in dozens of file cabinets because they haven't kept up with record retention policy changes and digital format inclusions.
We need more information to determine if the facebook power budget is excessive. Was this a Starbucks latte? A Tim Hortons Latte? A caribou coffee latte? Maybe it was the environmentally friendly post-processed kopi-luwak shit latte?
We all know that person, usually older, who only does actions on the computer via memorizing the exact steps. To understand how they're thinking and how hazy the rest of the UI to them is, recall the last time you had to give instructions to them on the phone without a computer in front of you to reference. Its hard as hell. This is how they're parsing steps, blind to anything outside the steps.
Sadly, this is commonly result of having a crutch available (you). They know they can just call you and not think. I try not to respond to my mom's and grandmother's requests for at least two to three hours, and they figure out 75% of them on their own this way. I also engage them when helping by pointing out the problem and asking them where they think they should go given their current situation. Its greatly reduced their reliance on me and increased their skill with using computers.
Its not early adopters, its a specific subset of early adopters. I highly suspect that this subset is drawn to these products for one of two reasons: First, anti-advertising, meaning that they are attracted to products whose advertising campaigns suck and something about that suckitude or quirkiness draws this subset in. Second, the underdog lovers. Because of bad advertising or press, writing is on the wall early that the product isn't going to launch well, and this subset then looks to buy the "underdog" product.
I'm a coder who stands all day...and I've been doing it for over two years now. I used to experience back pain when I sat all day, but that went away after a month or so.
Interesting to hear your anecdote, but just wanted to make sure on something...do you keep your wallet in your back pocket? This results in a very significant percentage of men's back problems in office environments. My back pain went away when moving the wallet to the front pocket, no change in sitting/standing required.
Some people geek out about cars, some computers, some sports, some beer. In the Carolinas, barbecue is on the list. BBQ is a religion around here, sounds like its similar all the way down there.
I didn't work on this specifically, but this is my way of saying thanks to the people that did. A couple years ago, I got nostalgic and wanted to replay Thief 1 and 2. Turns out, the game looks like crap because the way shading/shadows are handled by graphics cards is completely different than the way it used to work. Correct me if I got this wrong, but some guy wrote a hack that redirected the graphics processing of the game through CPU cycles instead, bypassing the graphics card entirely. With newer hardware this was possible and made the games playable again. Rejoice!
I can't speak for their specific choices, but sometimes games are chosen for the variety of their demands not the specific demand of a title itself, or its ubiquity in previous comparisons as a point of reference. Also, some games tax the shaders more and some games tax the memory more, and some games are poorly optimized resulting in untrustworthy results. They build a "benchmark suite" based on these factors and use it for a good half year or a year. Bioshock Infinite is a demanding and beautiful game at high settings, and was used as a performance target when it was released, so you can compare it to older cards previously benchmarked as a point of reference.
Also, for the high end cards, most of the benchmarks for these are being done at QHD/4K. Because of these newer resolutions, there's a big demand for powerful cards that can run at those resolutions all the way up to 120FPS. Graphics cards makers have a lot of headroom to work with, 50% performance increases would be well received right now and not be considered excessive.
On top of awareness and education, accountability is part of the issue. Significant fines, or possibly jail time for a 2nd offense, would go a long way to preventing this kind of nonsense. Also, a way to identify drones easily should be mandated if they are causing these kinds of problems. I do like the option for firefighters to shoot em down, and think it should be added on top of everything else.
The IRS gives money back on corrections pretty quickly, I should know, I work on them on a quarterly basis. As a matter of fact, they surprisingly also give you interest money on those corrections.
I say this without sarcasm. I played through that game's entire progression and learned a lot about the physics of a car. Playing the harder races and difficulties taught me how to corner properly before I ever took the wheel myself. While I can't stand racing as entertainment, it also gave me a bit more appreciation for those guys that have to do so many laps.
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I think this is actually called the Kobe rule
The problem is the lack of social responsibility/potty profit seeking in tourist cities and European cities. I was appalled by the lack of public restrooms in Europe when I visited, and its similar in some US tourism cities. Where I live, which is a decent 1m+pop city, every single store has a restroom, and you are allowed to use it, for free. Even secure locations like office towers always have accessible restrooms on the first floor to the public, where they typically have a shop/restaurant floor. A lot of people, when they go into a store to pee, buy something. Staff clean the restrooms as part of their jobs, and you learn which ones are well kept and which ones aren't and go to those stores more often. For example, when I'm driving to the beach, Chick-fil-a is the go-to food stop because their restrooms are always clean.
When I went to Helsinki and Estonia, only ONE store downtown (Stockmans) had a public restroom and it had a 15 minute wait all day every day. No surprise, this store had a buttload of business too. Everywhere else there's these god-awful porta potties that want to charge you 3$ a use. Its miserable. You either walk around dehydrated all the time or plan your day around bathroom breaks.
The big one is data transformation. Most companies don't have some kind of seamless integration from department to department and system to system. Each department has some sort of input, and most output multiple subsets of that data to different places/departments/people in different formats like as reports, as data loads into other systems, or a smaller data set for further work. Excel allows non-IT folk the ability to handle this work without having to ask a techie every time they want to make a change, which can be frequent. The issue gets even worse when in-house IT departments manage costs via inter-company transactions (cost quotes) for their efforts. No one's going to pay six figures for a rigid implementation that requires IT involvement and revision costs when they can do it in 5 minutes a week in excel. That's not an exaggeration either, its my bread and butter and a real world example to a real scenario.
I regularly get green bar typewriter-style reports for details I need on a quarterly basis. I also must send details on printed reports that they check off manually, printed a file I could email them of course.
Five years ago, I had supply documentation for an audit where the union auditors didn't have computers. We had to print out 16,000 legal-sized pages of documentation and mail it to them.
Most commercial and large-scale shipping endeavors (hell, even UPS) require the sender to insure their package if they want coverage in case of loss. This is the same with commercial container ships, and I suspect the same with airline freight.
Really, not much more can be said. A 'ridesharing' service could still exist without their software, but their software couldn't exist without a ridesharing service.
Excellent question.
I saw Dr. Grandin on one of the NatGeo shows. What a great role model for people struggling with autism, as well as women interested in STEM. Well, anyone interested in STEM really. This is a much better interview choice than that crap earlier this week.
Holy mother of god that's expensive. My condo is 3 times that size and my ENTIRE housing costs (including HOA dues, power, cable, mortgage, water) are $950/month.
The problem is you're not comparing based on equivalent lifestyles but by 5x salary. The cost per square foot of housing in SF/SV area is between 5-10x most places in the country. So, in order to be equivalent to the house Bob bought for $250k, you're spending $1.25m->$2.5m on a home, not possible on Alex's income. $250k in the midwest or most smaller cities (~1m pop) buys a LOT of house.
I chose a condo because I didn't want to have to deal with the upkeep of a yard, actually. Now, I kinda wish I'd chosen a house because I don't feel right getting a dog unless I have a backyard, and I'd like a garage for a workshop. The house general price per sqare foot in Charlotte ranges from $100-$200/sqft, SF is $800-1000/sqft. I was just trying to give an example for perspective, to retort the parent post. Being generous, cost of living in those kinds of locations is 4 times as high, so the higher wages (and taxes) rarely make up for it.
I'll say though, one big benefit of living in one of these expensive locations is future mobility. If you manage to suck it up and pay off significant chunks of your mortgage rather than refinancing repeatedly over a 15 year period, it allows you to move wherever you want to in the future. If I really tried I could pay off my condo in 7-8 years, but it wouldn't really add much to my mobility, because the equity would be barely a down payment in one of the expensive cities and I'd have to start all over again. I do get more room for early investing early though due to no major debt.
No, the difference is probably way more than $40k cost of living. I live in a low cost medium-sized city (Charlotte). I have a 1200sqft condo less than 20 minutes from downtown, less than 20 minutes from work, and the best school district in the city. My condo was $120k at the peak of the housing boom brand spanking new. Most houses of 2000-3000sqft range from $250k to $500k depending on quality. You're lucky to find equivalent housing in an equivalent area in SV/SF 3 times that price, unless you're all the way in Sacramento.
Take a look at this chart to get some perspective:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Good point, languages don't change much. I guess I'd compare the certs I deal with more to something like a IEEE membership. While memberships to professional organizations can feel kind of scammy, their seminar/etc requirements kind of force you to stay on top of recent events in the industry.
I agree entirely. I play at 2k with a pair of SLI'd 970's, and have been playing Witcher 3 lately. The hair looks phenomenal with hairworks OFF, looks like ass with it on, regardless of graphics settings.
Certs can be used as a form of upkeep for veterans as well.
I work in payroll, where laws and regulations change every single year. If you've been in the industry for 20 years, a good way to ensure you've kept up with the times is to pursue a cert and refresh your knowledge. This also tells the employer that your knowledge has recently been updated on the topic.
Not all experience is good experience. People that have been in my industry for 20+ years without keeping up with the times like to store junk in dozens of file cabinets because they haven't kept up with record retention policy changes and digital format inclusions.
Sounds like you need to pick up Cities Skylines. It takes SC5 out back and punishes it with impunity. Very happy with my purchase of that game.
We need more information to determine if the facebook power budget is excessive. Was this a Starbucks latte? A Tim Hortons Latte? A caribou coffee latte? Maybe it was the environmentally friendly post-processed kopi-luwak shit latte?
We all know that person, usually older, who only does actions on the computer via memorizing the exact steps. To understand how they're thinking and how hazy the rest of the UI to them is, recall the last time you had to give instructions to them on the phone without a computer in front of you to reference. Its hard as hell. This is how they're parsing steps, blind to anything outside the steps.
Sadly, this is commonly result of having a crutch available (you). They know they can just call you and not think. I try not to respond to my mom's and grandmother's requests for at least two to three hours, and they figure out 75% of them on their own this way. I also engage them when helping by pointing out the problem and asking them where they think they should go given their current situation. Its greatly reduced their reliance on me and increased their skill with using computers.
Its not early adopters, its a specific subset of early adopters. I highly suspect that this subset is drawn to these products for one of two reasons: First, anti-advertising, meaning that they are attracted to products whose advertising campaigns suck and something about that suckitude or quirkiness draws this subset in. Second, the underdog lovers. Because of bad advertising or press, writing is on the wall early that the product isn't going to launch well, and this subset then looks to buy the "underdog" product.
I'm a coder who stands all day ...and I've been doing it for over two years now. I used to experience back pain when I sat all day, but that went away after a month or so.
Interesting to hear your anecdote, but just wanted to make sure on something...do you keep your wallet in your back pocket? This results in a very significant percentage of men's back problems in office environments. My back pain went away when moving the wallet to the front pocket, no change in sitting/standing required.
Some people geek out about cars, some computers, some sports, some beer. In the Carolinas, barbecue is on the list. BBQ is a religion around here, sounds like its similar all the way down there.
I didn't work on this specifically, but this is my way of saying thanks to the people that did. A couple years ago, I got nostalgic and wanted to replay Thief 1 and 2. Turns out, the game looks like crap because the way shading/shadows are handled by graphics cards is completely different than the way it used to work. Correct me if I got this wrong, but some guy wrote a hack that redirected the graphics processing of the game through CPU cycles instead, bypassing the graphics card entirely. With newer hardware this was possible and made the games playable again. Rejoice!
I can't speak for their specific choices, but sometimes games are chosen for the variety of their demands not the specific demand of a title itself, or its ubiquity in previous comparisons as a point of reference. Also, some games tax the shaders more and some games tax the memory more, and some games are poorly optimized resulting in untrustworthy results. They build a "benchmark suite" based on these factors and use it for a good half year or a year. Bioshock Infinite is a demanding and beautiful game at high settings, and was used as a performance target when it was released, so you can compare it to older cards previously benchmarked as a point of reference.
Also, for the high end cards, most of the benchmarks for these are being done at QHD/4K. Because of these newer resolutions, there's a big demand for powerful cards that can run at those resolutions all the way up to 120FPS. Graphics cards makers have a lot of headroom to work with, 50% performance increases would be well received right now and not be considered excessive.
On top of awareness and education, accountability is part of the issue. Significant fines, or possibly jail time for a 2nd offense, would go a long way to preventing this kind of nonsense. Also, a way to identify drones easily should be mandated if they are causing these kinds of problems. I do like the option for firefighters to shoot em down, and think it should be added on top of everything else.
The IRS gives money back on corrections pretty quickly, I should know, I work on them on a quarterly basis. As a matter of fact, they surprisingly also give you interest money on those corrections.
I say this without sarcasm. I played through that game's entire progression and learned a lot about the physics of a car. Playing the harder races and difficulties taught me how to corner properly before I ever took the wheel myself. While I can't stand racing as entertainment, it also gave me a bit more appreciation for those guys that have to do so many laps.