Unfortunately, the illegals *are* taking jobs, just not high-paying ones. Instead, they're taking the low-paying service sector jobs that our own poor citizens should be working, and probably would like to work considering the economy's in the shitter and jobs (esp. for unskilled laborers) are hard to come by.
Sounds like the company I'm contracting with currently. I hadn't worked at a defense contractor for 20 years, when I was an intern in college, so I was a little shocked when I came to work here and found that everyone seemed to be near retirement age. It's OK though, in 10 years they won't need to replace these people because this company (despite being a F500) isn't going to be around I'm fairly sure. There doesn't seem to be much work going on, there's a lab downstairs I use that's full of test stands that look like they haven't been used in 30 years, and there doesn't seem to be much of a future. The company is profitable only because they can bill the DoD ridiculous sums of money for systems for white elephant airplanes.
Why aren't you simply trying to get a promotion to "Architect" at your company?
That's easier said than done. A lot of times, from what I've seen, it's really hard to get substantial raises and promotions at the same company. It's not unheard of for someone to leave a company because they weren't getting any substantial raises, go work at a different company for a while (with a bump in pay), then come back to the first company at a much higher salary. People who stay at the same company generally don't do as well as those who jump around from time to time. (Those jumps have to be well-planned however.)
If you join a startup that fails as a regular employee it is less money and no good times. It is neutral to negative on your resume.
No it's not. If the work experience there is really good, that can help him a lot in the future. It's just like the scenario I described above. Employers like to see good work experience on your resume; no one puts their salary on there. If he gets really good work experience he wouldn't have gotten at his present job, that can open doors to even better jobs (and better-paying jobs) at other companies after the startup crashes and burns.
If you join a startup that fails as a decision maker, it is less money, no good times, and you are the failure
I'm not involved with management jobs and have no experience in that sector, but this sounds pretty good to me. I wouldn't bet my reputation there either.
If you join a startup that is successful it is for less money, hard work, and a swell of money and good feelings when it crests that hump. Then it rapidly becomes mundane and slow changing.
Then you cash in and move on after that point. However, to me this seems like a giant gamble (it's not just money, startups usually require insane hours), and I would probably never take a risk like this myself. Most startups fail, and there's too many horror stories of good people getting totally screwed over by the startup's founders/executives.
Personally, I'd probably stay far away from a startup because I'm risk-averse and don't feel like working 120-hour weeks. But it might work out for some people.
Artists do work, usually, because of a passion for their art. Teachers, OTOH, frequently get into it because it's a solid job and pays decently in many places (not all; some are downright lousy, but others are not). I've met several teachers who fell into it rather than seeking it as a career; basically they didn't have anything better to do and it looked good (one was recruited to it). Open source developers are not all volunteers; many of them are well-paid at corporate jobs. Ask all the developers at Red Hat. This is another big myth. Government jobs pay well, are extremely stable, and have fantastic benefits. Some pay fantastically well too. In the state where I live, every little municipality (about 550) has a separate school district, and the district's superintendants all make $250k. You think they do these jobs for passion and not money? Non-profit executive frequently make huge salaries; being a non-profit doesn't mean the pay is crap, it just means there isn't any profit left over for shareholders.
Yes, there's definitely a balance; money isn't everything, and other factors are important too: time off, location (and cost-of-living), quality of the work, work environment, etc. However I've noticed that (in my industry at least) typically the companies that pay peanuts usually are very deficient on most of these other things too. The big companies that pay well usually do much better all around, except maybe quality of work (being big equals lots of bureacracy and slowness usually). The small companies may give you really interesting assignments, and a lot more responsibility (less overhead and employees, you get more power to make your contribution to the project), but everything else about them totally sucks. It's quite a conundrum really.
No, from what I can tell, NYC is not like that at all. (For reference, I live in northern NJ, an hour's bus or train ride from Manhattan (commutable distance), so I don't actually live there but I'm close and I've been there enough times to know what it's like generally.) In downtown and midtown Manhattan, where all the fancy businesses are (including Google), there are apartments and condos, but the cost for them is astronomical because it's so close to everything. There are some crappier parts of this part of the island, but the nice businesses aren't located there. Most people with money, but not quite so much of it, live farther north, on either side of Central Park, called the Upper East Side and Upper West Side and commute by subway. In the part of town, for instance near Google, where all these nice businesses are located, you're not going to see a bunch of bums or gangs of unruly kids; this is a very expensive, "upscale" area. (Don't get too enamored; due to the city's age, even though it's horribly expensive in these areas, it's still pretty dirty overall. Remember, a few decades ago many of these areas were very run-down; back in the 80s Times Square was filled with seedy porn shops and peepshows and a lot of prostitution, and these days that's all gone as its turned into a glitzy tourist destination. They haven't cleaned everything up yet, as they apparently aren't that good at that.)
Also, there isn't much room for parking (though there are some lots where you can park for $50/day or something like that), but not many people bother, since they take public transit it. Remember, unlike San Diego, NYC does have subways, and they really do work and transport a huge number of people daily, though they are noisy and the subway stations kinda dirty and smelly at times. At least it's not nearly as bad as the 80s when the subway cars were covered in grafitti and muggings were common (remember Bernard Goetz). It also has lots of buses for routes that aren't served conveniently by the subways.
So no, NYC isn't quite like other American cities, which by and large do not have very good public transit. It's not all that great in NYC either, but it's great compared to other American cities which are positively horrible. However, the whole living in the suburbs thing is common here too, due to the astronomical costs inside Manhattan; lots of people commute in by train or bus every day from northern NJ, Queens, Bronx, northern Manhattan (incl. Harlem), "upstate" NY (White Plains area), even western Connecticut (Stamford area). One advantage here, however, is that if you commute by public transit, you don't have to drive, and many of the trains are actually really nice; I'd much rather sit in a comfortable train seat with my laptop and surf or work on a project or just read a book, rather than sit in the driver's seat of a car and battle rush-hour traffic. Of course, these nice trains aren't cheap, but if you compare to your gas and insurance costs (insurance costs more by the mile; you get a discount for driving less miles/year), it isn't so bad, and if you can figure out how to eliminate one of your cars (have 1 car for a 2-adult family, instead of 2 as usual), the train fare will probably end up being cheaper.
The other boroughs are far away; you're looking at an hour-long ride on the subway for some of them, or worse, for Staten Island, a slow bus ride since no one bothered building a subway there for some reason. If your job is in Manhattan and you live in the Bronx, that's no better than living in the suburbs of some city and commuting every day by car for an hour. In fact, in a lot of ways in NYC you'd be better off living in the suburbs in New Jersey and taking a NJ Transit train to work every day; that's usually an hour or less, and the NJ Transit trains are MUCH nicer than the subways (cushy, clean seats facing the same direction and no crowding, vs. hard plastic seats facing each other with terrible crowding and standing room only).
You can't argue for living in the other boroughs over commuting from the suburbs; it's no different by travel time, and frequently worse.
The Silicon Valley office doesn't exactly have much cheaper housing nearby. But the reason they do it is pretty obvious to me: their families live in CT. That's the reason right there. You have to understand, east coasters are not like west coasters. East coast dwellers tend to want to stay near their families and not move far from them. On the west coast, lots of people (most?) are transplants and don't live near their families. So even if Google gave them an opportunity to take their exact same job and move it to the Bay Area, and they could afford much better accommodation there, they wouldn't take it. Also, there's that whole NYC thing: lots of people who live there think it's the greatest place ever and would never leave (except maybe to move to Brooklyn), no matter what, while other people visit and just don't get the attraction.
Huh? I never said it was a good place for a trucking company, just that it appears to be a good place for business. If it isn't, then why are so many financial firms located there? Not to mention web development firms. Obviously it's working out for someone, or else all these companies wouldn't be located there. It appears to be working out for Google too, since they have a huge building in Manhattan.
You sound like someone who demands employees to be "loyal" to the company, to work insane hours, and accept pathetically-low pay, and says that anyone who isn't happy to sign up for this arrangement has a "bad attitude". I wouldn't work for you either.
As long as you have nutritious food in your belly and a roof over your head, having a parent/spouse come home in a good mood and with the time and energy to spend on you
It sounds like the OP's new job opportunity entails more hours than his current, "boring" 9-5 job. If the new job is risky and involves long hours, that's going to take away from the time he has to spend with his family, and also puts them in greater risk for financial strain if the small company goes belly-up.
is going to be worth a lot more than having them come home late/tired/stressed and spend the evening just watching TV to unwind
His current job is a 9-5; he isn't coming home late. That's one of the big advantages of his current "boring" job; the new job is going to have him coming home late. If it isn't stimulating enough, he can pick up a hobby on the side to satisfy that.
What sort of sick culture decrees that only children and retirees should be enjoying life?
What sort of sick culture advises people to abandon well-paying but boring jobs with reasonable hours, and switch to poorly-paying jobs (sometimes paying only in company shares!) with insane working hours so they can pursue "career building"?
Actually, two of the three airports ARE on public transit: the Newark airport and JFK. There aren't two airports in the NYC metro area, there's 3. Just look at the NYC sectional chart and read the SFRA rules.
It is shameful, however, that none of them are on the subway, and only 2 of the 3 have trains connecting them to to the rest of the subway system. (LGA seems to only be accessible by bus.) Public transit in NYC is a complete mess. Part of this is due to the idiotic feature that a large part of the metro area is on the other side of a state line. New Jersey should simply be eliminated as a state, with the northern half being given to the NYC area to form a new state (along with NYC and Long Island), separate from the rest of New York state. Having a metro area divided up between 3 states makes no sense at all and should be rectified.
I don't think you've disproved my assertion at all. Those buildings aren't large enough, not even close. If they were large enough, then the rents inside those buildings would be cheap. But they aren't; they're very expensive. So while they may seem like large buildings, they're really not even close to large enough.
BTW, corporate offices are necessary uses of space in cities anyway; those are where the people in the city are supposed to work. An urban utopia that people are dreaming about has to have both places to work and places to live, all near each other so people aren't wasting so much time commuting. So these giant buildings need to not only have corporate offices, but also condos and apartments for people to live in, and both of these need to be affordable for their tenants. If they aren't, then that seems to indicate a lack of sufficient space, which is a restriction on supply, and drives up costs.
No, they want the companies' money (for taxes), they want the area to be cleaned up and made nice, but they get mad when the rents rise to unaffordable levels and they're forced to move. The problem is, you can't have it both ways. Rents are cheap in crappy places because no one wants to live there; they're expensive in nice places because the demand is higher. It works that way for homeowners too; while you don't have to pay more for a house you already own when its appraised value rises due to gentrification, you do have to pay far higher property taxes, which can force you to move out. But at least in the latter case, you do get a lot of money out of the property when you sell it after its value has grown greatly, which you can then use to buy a decent place somewhere cheaper where the property taxes are lower. Renters just get the shaft.
His big city is NYC, which actually IS a good place to do business, according to the many large companies located there. One of those companies is Google; they have a huge location in Manhattan. There's also lots of giant financial firms there, including Bloomberg LP which employs a lot of programmers.
The problem is, there's no reasonably-priced housing anywhere near that location (or anywhere in Manhattan for that matter), so people have to take long commutes from other places like New Jersey or Connecticut to get to these jobs.
NYC used to be a very affordable place to live; it wasn't that expensive to live in Manhattan decades ago. However, during that time crime was through the roof. Then, various measures were employed which massively reduced the crime, and now Manhattan is probably the safest city (or city portion, and definitely downtown area) in America. However, it's also completely unaffordable if you're not a multimillionaire. Everyone's moving out to Brooklyn (which has also become ridiculously expensive), Queens, NJ, and CT, and riding on trains for 1 - 1.5 hours each way.
What's interesting is that this guy is the director for the New York MTA, the company that runs the public transit in NYC. Google has a location in NYC, and it's right in Manhattan, not in the suburbs. It's in the Chelsea district. It's a pretty nice area; their building is right across from the Chelsea Market (basically an old factory converted into a small shopping mall mostly filled with restaurants and other food stores). It's definitely not a dangerous area (like most of Manhattan these days), but it's not anyplace you can live either; the cost of living there is astronomical. There's a reason so many Manhattan workers are moving out to Brooklyn, Queens, and northern New Jersey, or even out to Connecticut or Long Island.
This idea of having workers living and working near the center of a city sounds all well and good from an efficiency perspective, but in reality it never seems to work out, at least in America. Either the downtown is a run-down dump like Detroit where it's extremely dangerous and there's a lot of crime and poverty, or it's "gentrified" like NYC and the cost of living is absolutely astronomical and unaffordable for anyone but the executives of these corporations (which is, of course, why companies like MTA exist, to move people between affordable areas where the live and the unaffordable areas where their jobs are). It'd be nice if it wasn't like this, but it is, though I'm not really sure why to be honest. I guess we just haven't figured out how to build buildings large enough so that it's possible for everyone to live near the workplaces, so there's a lack of supply for living spaces near the good locations, driving up prices.
No, the value is given by the aggregate activities of the nation. The value of a nation's currency is a perception of that nation's economic strength and stability.
Assange never made a career out of giving people advice on how to conduct their sex lives or personal lives. He's critical of big governments and their actions (such as engaging in wars). Unlike Falwell, he isn't a hypocrite, because Assange is not a government, nor a member of any government, or anyone with any kind of governmental or military power whatsoever: it's impossible for him to practice (or not) what he preaches.
The problem here is that corporate-created money might not be worth anything; it's really not much different than the barter system. If some guy has some bread that I want, and I have a chicken to trade, and he doesn't want a chicken, then we're kinda stuck and I have to waste a lot of time trading my chicken to some third party (or worse, 4th and 5th parties) for something the bread-owner wants.
If Walmart wants to buy bread from BreadCo, what are they going to pay for it with? Walmart gift cards? What if BreadCo doesn't want any such cards, and needs something they can trade with farmers for grain? With more niche industries, it gets even more pronounced. Suppose I'm a small company that sells some custom electronic part, and some other smallish company wants to buy it for some internal project. That company makes wheel bearings. What are they going to give me for my part? Some bearings? I don't want or need any bearings, theirs don't even fit any of my vehicles. Maybe they could offer me Walmart, Target, Amazon, Best Buy, and Google Play giftcards. So you end up with tons of different currencies and lots of disagreements about how much anything is worth in any particular currencies, and people having to constantly exchange currencies for other currencies (many people might refuse the Best Buy cards because they think they're worthless since BB overcharges for everything; many would also refuse Taco Bell certificates because their food is shit). This isn't a recipe for a stable economy, it's a mess. Moreover, you can forget about any kind of automation in the economy, not to mention all e-commerce. How do you exchange these currencies online? What if the vendor doesn't take your currency? Bitcoin (or one of its many competitors) might get around this, but the cryptocurrencies have shown their own problems too, namely extreme instability.
It seems to me the software companies would mostly be screwed, because anyone would be able to just copy their product for free. No government = no copyright enforcement. The only defense they'd have is the need for customers to pay for support services.
Corporations don't have bitcoins, or gold or silver. They just have some bank account that says in a computer database that they have "dollars". So if the government disappeared tomorrow, they'd be broke, except for the places that really do have those things, or control some other valuable resource. The jewelry corporations (and local stores and such) would be very wealthy, the oil companies would probably be very wealthy (valuable and useful commodity), but someplace like Oracle? They'll be broke.
Why would any militia members work for the corporation? The only reason private security works for corporations is because they're being paid. No government = no money to pay people. I suppose they might go back to using gold and silver, but I have a hard time seeing that.
Also, why would anyone continue working for the suits at the corporations, rather than just killing them and taking what they want? Because the mercenaries would stop them? What keeps the mercenaries from just killing the bosses and taking all the gold for themselves? In an anarchy, the people who have the power are the people who are best armed, and are most willing to use violence. You think some 70-year-old suit is going to be able to maintain control?
Oh please; the only reason corporations exist is because the government allows them to exist by legal charter, and because they pay their employees money, which again is created and distributed by the government. With no government, paper money has no value, and corporations have nothing to pay employees. The root of it all is money, and that's a creation of the government. If the government went away, everything would fall apart because of that simple fact; people would have to move to some other form of currency, and corporations would mostly cease to exist unless they control something that can be used as currency (and even here, how would they maintain control of it, without any kind of laws or police to make sure employees don't just seize it for themselves, or murder the executives?).
We're not headed toward "corporate anarchy", we're headed toward (if we aren't already there) corporatist fascism, where the government works for the interests of the corporations rather than the people. Basically, it's something like medieval feudalism, except instead of dukes and lords, we have corporate CEOs, and each corporation is a fiefdom, and all the employees are serfs who have very few rights. The government isn't going anywhere (and in fact, is growing in power) because it's necessary for the existence of the corporations: it creates the money they need to operate, and it maintains the military and police forces needed to protect the corporations from anyone who would threaten them.
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Unfortunately, the illegals *are* taking jobs, just not high-paying ones. Instead, they're taking the low-paying service sector jobs that our own poor citizens should be working, and probably would like to work considering the economy's in the shitter and jobs (esp. for unskilled laborers) are hard to come by.
Sounds like the company I'm contracting with currently. I hadn't worked at a defense contractor for 20 years, when I was an intern in college, so I was a little shocked when I came to work here and found that everyone seemed to be near retirement age. It's OK though, in 10 years they won't need to replace these people because this company (despite being a F500) isn't going to be around I'm fairly sure. There doesn't seem to be much work going on, there's a lab downstairs I use that's full of test stands that look like they haven't been used in 30 years, and there doesn't seem to be much of a future. The company is profitable only because they can bill the DoD ridiculous sums of money for systems for white elephant airplanes.
Why aren't you simply trying to get a promotion to "Architect" at your company?
That's easier said than done. A lot of times, from what I've seen, it's really hard to get substantial raises and promotions at the same company. It's not unheard of for someone to leave a company because they weren't getting any substantial raises, go work at a different company for a while (with a bump in pay), then come back to the first company at a much higher salary. People who stay at the same company generally don't do as well as those who jump around from time to time. (Those jumps have to be well-planned however.)
If you join a startup that fails as a regular employee it is less money and no good times. It is neutral to negative on your resume.
No it's not. If the work experience there is really good, that can help him a lot in the future. It's just like the scenario I described above. Employers like to see good work experience on your resume; no one puts their salary on there. If he gets really good work experience he wouldn't have gotten at his present job, that can open doors to even better jobs (and better-paying jobs) at other companies after the startup crashes and burns.
If you join a startup that fails as a decision maker, it is less money, no good times, and you are the failure
I'm not involved with management jobs and have no experience in that sector, but this sounds pretty good to me. I wouldn't bet my reputation there either.
If you join a startup that is successful it is for less money, hard work, and a swell of money and good feelings when it crests that hump. Then it rapidly becomes mundane and slow changing.
Then you cash in and move on after that point. However, to me this seems like a giant gamble (it's not just money, startups usually require insane hours), and I would probably never take a risk like this myself. Most startups fail, and there's too many horror stories of good people getting totally screwed over by the startup's founders/executives.
Personally, I'd probably stay far away from a startup because I'm risk-averse and don't feel like working 120-hour weeks. But it might work out for some people.
A lot of what you say here is total BS.
Artists do work, usually, because of a passion for their art. Teachers, OTOH, frequently get into it because it's a solid job and pays decently in many places (not all; some are downright lousy, but others are not). I've met several teachers who fell into it rather than seeking it as a career; basically they didn't have anything better to do and it looked good (one was recruited to it). Open source developers are not all volunteers; many of them are well-paid at corporate jobs. Ask all the developers at Red Hat. This is another big myth. Government jobs pay well, are extremely stable, and have fantastic benefits. Some pay fantastically well too. In the state where I live, every little municipality (about 550) has a separate school district, and the district's superintendants all make $250k. You think they do these jobs for passion and not money? Non-profit executive frequently make huge salaries; being a non-profit doesn't mean the pay is crap, it just means there isn't any profit left over for shareholders.
Yes, there's definitely a balance; money isn't everything, and other factors are important too: time off, location (and cost-of-living), quality of the work, work environment, etc. However I've noticed that (in my industry at least) typically the companies that pay peanuts usually are very deficient on most of these other things too. The big companies that pay well usually do much better all around, except maybe quality of work (being big equals lots of bureacracy and slowness usually). The small companies may give you really interesting assignments, and a lot more responsibility (less overhead and employees, you get more power to make your contribution to the project), but everything else about them totally sucks. It's quite a conundrum really.
No, from what I can tell, NYC is not like that at all. (For reference, I live in northern NJ, an hour's bus or train ride from Manhattan (commutable distance), so I don't actually live there but I'm close and I've been there enough times to know what it's like generally.) In downtown and midtown Manhattan, where all the fancy businesses are (including Google), there are apartments and condos, but the cost for them is astronomical because it's so close to everything. There are some crappier parts of this part of the island, but the nice businesses aren't located there. Most people with money, but not quite so much of it, live farther north, on either side of Central Park, called the Upper East Side and Upper West Side and commute by subway. In the part of town, for instance near Google, where all these nice businesses are located, you're not going to see a bunch of bums or gangs of unruly kids; this is a very expensive, "upscale" area. (Don't get too enamored; due to the city's age, even though it's horribly expensive in these areas, it's still pretty dirty overall. Remember, a few decades ago many of these areas were very run-down; back in the 80s Times Square was filled with seedy porn shops and peepshows and a lot of prostitution, and these days that's all gone as its turned into a glitzy tourist destination. They haven't cleaned everything up yet, as they apparently aren't that good at that.)
Also, there isn't much room for parking (though there are some lots where you can park for $50/day or something like that), but not many people bother, since they take public transit it. Remember, unlike San Diego, NYC does have subways, and they really do work and transport a huge number of people daily, though they are noisy and the subway stations kinda dirty and smelly at times. At least it's not nearly as bad as the 80s when the subway cars were covered in grafitti and muggings were common (remember Bernard Goetz). It also has lots of buses for routes that aren't served conveniently by the subways.
So no, NYC isn't quite like other American cities, which by and large do not have very good public transit. It's not all that great in NYC either, but it's great compared to other American cities which are positively horrible. However, the whole living in the suburbs thing is common here too, due to the astronomical costs inside Manhattan; lots of people commute in by train or bus every day from northern NJ, Queens, Bronx, northern Manhattan (incl. Harlem), "upstate" NY (White Plains area), even western Connecticut (Stamford area). One advantage here, however, is that if you commute by public transit, you don't have to drive, and many of the trains are actually really nice; I'd much rather sit in a comfortable train seat with my laptop and surf or work on a project or just read a book, rather than sit in the driver's seat of a car and battle rush-hour traffic. Of course, these nice trains aren't cheap, but if you compare to your gas and insurance costs (insurance costs more by the mile; you get a discount for driving less miles/year), it isn't so bad, and if you can figure out how to eliminate one of your cars (have 1 car for a 2-adult family, instead of 2 as usual), the train fare will probably end up being cheaper.
Wow, really? Where have you seen this? I'm genuinely curious. It definitely sounds like something certain groups of people would advocate...
The other boroughs are far away; you're looking at an hour-long ride on the subway for some of them, or worse, for Staten Island, a slow bus ride since no one bothered building a subway there for some reason. If your job is in Manhattan and you live in the Bronx, that's no better than living in the suburbs of some city and commuting every day by car for an hour. In fact, in a lot of ways in NYC you'd be better off living in the suburbs in New Jersey and taking a NJ Transit train to work every day; that's usually an hour or less, and the NJ Transit trains are MUCH nicer than the subways (cushy, clean seats facing the same direction and no crowding, vs. hard plastic seats facing each other with terrible crowding and standing room only).
You can't argue for living in the other boroughs over commuting from the suburbs; it's no different by travel time, and frequently worse.
The Silicon Valley office doesn't exactly have much cheaper housing nearby. But the reason they do it is pretty obvious to me: their families live in CT. That's the reason right there. You have to understand, east coasters are not like west coasters. East coast dwellers tend to want to stay near their families and not move far from them. On the west coast, lots of people (most?) are transplants and don't live near their families. So even if Google gave them an opportunity to take their exact same job and move it to the Bay Area, and they could afford much better accommodation there, they wouldn't take it. Also, there's that whole NYC thing: lots of people who live there think it's the greatest place ever and would never leave (except maybe to move to Brooklyn), no matter what, while other people visit and just don't get the attraction.
Huh? I never said it was a good place for a trucking company, just that it appears to be a good place for business. If it isn't, then why are so many financial firms located there? Not to mention web development firms. Obviously it's working out for someone, or else all these companies wouldn't be located there. It appears to be working out for Google too, since they have a huge building in Manhattan.
Newark IS in NYC; it's part of the NYC metro area.
But otherwise, yes, the whole public trans setup in NYC is rather broken, especially at the 3 airports.
You sound like someone who demands employees to be "loyal" to the company, to work insane hours, and accept pathetically-low pay, and says that anyone who isn't happy to sign up for this arrangement has a "bad attitude". I wouldn't work for you either.
As long as you have nutritious food in your belly and a roof over your head, having a parent/spouse come home in a good mood and with the time and energy to spend on you
It sounds like the OP's new job opportunity entails more hours than his current, "boring" 9-5 job. If the new job is risky and involves long hours, that's going to take away from the time he has to spend with his family, and also puts them in greater risk for financial strain if the small company goes belly-up.
is going to be worth a lot more than having them come home late/tired/stressed and spend the evening just watching TV to unwind
His current job is a 9-5; he isn't coming home late. That's one of the big advantages of his current "boring" job; the new job is going to have him coming home late. If it isn't stimulating enough, he can pick up a hobby on the side to satisfy that.
What sort of sick culture decrees that only children and retirees should be enjoying life?
What sort of sick culture advises people to abandon well-paying but boring jobs with reasonable hours, and switch to poorly-paying jobs (sometimes paying only in company shares!) with insane working hours so they can pursue "career building"?
Actually, two of the three airports ARE on public transit: the Newark airport and JFK. There aren't two airports in the NYC metro area, there's 3. Just look at the NYC sectional chart and read the SFRA rules.
It is shameful, however, that none of them are on the subway, and only 2 of the 3 have trains connecting them to to the rest of the subway system. (LGA seems to only be accessible by bus.) Public transit in NYC is a complete mess. Part of this is due to the idiotic feature that a large part of the metro area is on the other side of a state line. New Jersey should simply be eliminated as a state, with the northern half being given to the NYC area to form a new state (along with NYC and Long Island), separate from the rest of New York state. Having a metro area divided up between 3 states makes no sense at all and should be rectified.
I don't think you've disproved my assertion at all. Those buildings aren't large enough, not even close. If they were large enough, then the rents inside those buildings would be cheap. But they aren't; they're very expensive. So while they may seem like large buildings, they're really not even close to large enough.
BTW, corporate offices are necessary uses of space in cities anyway; those are where the people in the city are supposed to work. An urban utopia that people are dreaming about has to have both places to work and places to live, all near each other so people aren't wasting so much time commuting. So these giant buildings need to not only have corporate offices, but also condos and apartments for people to live in, and both of these need to be affordable for their tenants. If they aren't, then that seems to indicate a lack of sufficient space, which is a restriction on supply, and drives up costs.
No, they want the companies' money (for taxes), they want the area to be cleaned up and made nice, but they get mad when the rents rise to unaffordable levels and they're forced to move. The problem is, you can't have it both ways. Rents are cheap in crappy places because no one wants to live there; they're expensive in nice places because the demand is higher. It works that way for homeowners too; while you don't have to pay more for a house you already own when its appraised value rises due to gentrification, you do have to pay far higher property taxes, which can force you to move out. But at least in the latter case, you do get a lot of money out of the property when you sell it after its value has grown greatly, which you can then use to buy a decent place somewhere cheaper where the property taxes are lower. Renters just get the shaft.
His big city is NYC, which actually IS a good place to do business, according to the many large companies located there. One of those companies is Google; they have a huge location in Manhattan. There's also lots of giant financial firms there, including Bloomberg LP which employs a lot of programmers.
The problem is, there's no reasonably-priced housing anywhere near that location (or anywhere in Manhattan for that matter), so people have to take long commutes from other places like New Jersey or Connecticut to get to these jobs.
NYC used to be a very affordable place to live; it wasn't that expensive to live in Manhattan decades ago. However, during that time crime was through the roof. Then, various measures were employed which massively reduced the crime, and now Manhattan is probably the safest city (or city portion, and definitely downtown area) in America. However, it's also completely unaffordable if you're not a multimillionaire. Everyone's moving out to Brooklyn (which has also become ridiculously expensive), Queens, NJ, and CT, and riding on trains for 1 - 1.5 hours each way.
What's interesting is that this guy is the director for the New York MTA, the company that runs the public transit in NYC. Google has a location in NYC, and it's right in Manhattan, not in the suburbs. It's in the Chelsea district. It's a pretty nice area; their building is right across from the Chelsea Market (basically an old factory converted into a small shopping mall mostly filled with restaurants and other food stores). It's definitely not a dangerous area (like most of Manhattan these days), but it's not anyplace you can live either; the cost of living there is astronomical. There's a reason so many Manhattan workers are moving out to Brooklyn, Queens, and northern New Jersey, or even out to Connecticut or Long Island.
This idea of having workers living and working near the center of a city sounds all well and good from an efficiency perspective, but in reality it never seems to work out, at least in America. Either the downtown is a run-down dump like Detroit where it's extremely dangerous and there's a lot of crime and poverty, or it's "gentrified" like NYC and the cost of living is absolutely astronomical and unaffordable for anyone but the executives of these corporations (which is, of course, why companies like MTA exist, to move people between affordable areas where the live and the unaffordable areas where their jobs are). It'd be nice if it wasn't like this, but it is, though I'm not really sure why to be honest. I guess we just haven't figured out how to build buildings large enough so that it's possible for everyone to live near the workplaces, so there's a lack of supply for living spaces near the good locations, driving up prices.
No, the value is given by the aggregate activities of the nation. The value of a nation's currency is a perception of that nation's economic strength and stability.
Assange never made a career out of giving people advice on how to conduct their sex lives or personal lives. He's critical of big governments and their actions (such as engaging in wars). Unlike Falwell, he isn't a hypocrite, because Assange is not a government, nor a member of any government, or anyone with any kind of governmental or military power whatsoever: it's impossible for him to practice (or not) what he preaches.
We stopped using ReiserFS because its performance really wasn't very good compared to its modern competition.
The problem here is that corporate-created money might not be worth anything; it's really not much different than the barter system. If some guy has some bread that I want, and I have a chicken to trade, and he doesn't want a chicken, then we're kinda stuck and I have to waste a lot of time trading my chicken to some third party (or worse, 4th and 5th parties) for something the bread-owner wants.
If Walmart wants to buy bread from BreadCo, what are they going to pay for it with? Walmart gift cards? What if BreadCo doesn't want any such cards, and needs something they can trade with farmers for grain? With more niche industries, it gets even more pronounced. Suppose I'm a small company that sells some custom electronic part, and some other smallish company wants to buy it for some internal project. That company makes wheel bearings. What are they going to give me for my part? Some bearings? I don't want or need any bearings, theirs don't even fit any of my vehicles. Maybe they could offer me Walmart, Target, Amazon, Best Buy, and Google Play giftcards. So you end up with tons of different currencies and lots of disagreements about how much anything is worth in any particular currencies, and people having to constantly exchange currencies for other currencies (many people might refuse the Best Buy cards because they think they're worthless since BB overcharges for everything; many would also refuse Taco Bell certificates because their food is shit). This isn't a recipe for a stable economy, it's a mess. Moreover, you can forget about any kind of automation in the economy, not to mention all e-commerce. How do you exchange these currencies online? What if the vendor doesn't take your currency? Bitcoin (or one of its many competitors) might get around this, but the cryptocurrencies have shown their own problems too, namely extreme instability.
It seems to me the software companies would mostly be screwed, because anyone would be able to just copy their product for free. No government = no copyright enforcement. The only defense they'd have is the need for customers to pay for support services.
Corporations don't have bitcoins, or gold or silver. They just have some bank account that says in a computer database that they have "dollars". So if the government disappeared tomorrow, they'd be broke, except for the places that really do have those things, or control some other valuable resource. The jewelry corporations (and local stores and such) would be very wealthy, the oil companies would probably be very wealthy (valuable and useful commodity), but someplace like Oracle? They'll be broke.
Why would any militia members work for the corporation? The only reason private security works for corporations is because they're being paid. No government = no money to pay people. I suppose they might go back to using gold and silver, but I have a hard time seeing that.
Also, why would anyone continue working for the suits at the corporations, rather than just killing them and taking what they want? Because the mercenaries would stop them? What keeps the mercenaries from just killing the bosses and taking all the gold for themselves? In an anarchy, the people who have the power are the people who are best armed, and are most willing to use violence. You think some 70-year-old suit is going to be able to maintain control?
Oh please; the only reason corporations exist is because the government allows them to exist by legal charter, and because they pay their employees money, which again is created and distributed by the government. With no government, paper money has no value, and corporations have nothing to pay employees. The root of it all is money, and that's a creation of the government. If the government went away, everything would fall apart because of that simple fact; people would have to move to some other form of currency, and corporations would mostly cease to exist unless they control something that can be used as currency (and even here, how would they maintain control of it, without any kind of laws or police to make sure employees don't just seize it for themselves, or murder the executives?).
We're not headed toward "corporate anarchy", we're headed toward (if we aren't already there) corporatist fascism, where the government works for the interests of the corporations rather than the people. Basically, it's something like medieval feudalism, except instead of dukes and lords, we have corporate CEOs, and each corporation is a fiefdom, and all the employees are serfs who have very few rights. The government isn't going anywhere (and in fact, is growing in power) because it's necessary for the existence of the corporations: it creates the money they need to operate, and it maintains the military and police forces needed to protect the corporations from anyone who would threaten them.