If you think Seattle isn't constrained geographically, you have no clue what you're talking about. The area is worse than SF in many ways. SF has accessible relief regions, while Seattle has a lake with only two bridges and yet another lake east of that. All that region is filled from past boom periods. SF's metro area extends into the Central Valley, while Seattle has mountains, water, and a live volcano blocking it in. At best, it is slightly worse than SF.
The same thing happened to the town I live in. It got some national attention 8 years ago and the population nearly doubled in that time. It went from a cool/funky/nice place to live to constant traffic, high house prices, and all the old families leaving due to the influx of rich people from elsewhere.
I ended up in Seattle after a move from San Diego almost four years ago. I came for the weather, shockingly-enough, not the tech sector. In fact, most job offers I saw out of the region that weren't at one of the companies you mentioned, paid laughably-bad. Like a solid 30% cut from where I was at. The only thing that drew me in was housing prices...
Fast forward to today and I don't know why anyone would do it. The built infrastructure is third world grade and worse than just about anywhere in flyover country. About 80% of existing houses are slapped-together wooden structures that date from one of the past boom periods (ex: Boeing in the 60s-70s) and are literally rotting and/or being eaten by insects. These houses go for at least 600k anywhere within less than an hour commute at rush hour from anywhere you might work. Anything of half-decent quality near AMZN or MSFT will be approaching or exceeding 1M.
Then, no matter where you are, traffic is unconscionable. It has often taken me over an hour to drive from Lower Queen Anne to I-5 between about 3-7pm on a weekday. Then you'll deal with heavy traffic on the freeway almost no matter the day of the week. Traffic jams that stretch on for miles are seen every day of the week with alarming regularity. Redmond and Bellevue's traffic near the MSFT campus should be somewhere in Dante's Inferno. About the closest comparison I could make is to the driving in Riyadh, with similar third-world driving skills and even faster cars.
That said, the surrounding region is beautiful and if you could somehow find work at least an hour outside the Seattle-Tacoma-Everett-Eastside metro area, housing is flyover-cheap and there is no traffic. On the other hand, you probably won't be able to get high speed internet - I know tech workers within the metro that suffer through slow DSL because they simply have no alternatives - you'll have sketchier options further out, like the wireless service my crazy former coworker dealt with out in Sequim (he made a four-hour commute so he could afford a house with a separate room for each of his children). You also wouldn't want to raise children there due to a statewide heroin epidemic and some of the worst schools in the nation (my coworker's wife homeschooled, making it workable, but they moved to Idaho about 6 months ago for a better lifestyle).
Honestly, for the cost of living to income ratio, if you want to live on the west coast, Los Angeles is a much better deal. Even the Silicon Valley area is better since they have decent schools and a working road network...
The only things propping up Seattle as a destination are a VC-backed startup bubble and being the headquarters of the tech giants you mentioned.
I should also take this opportunity to point out (before anyone thinks I'm comparing apples:apples) that they're entirely different genres. The Star Trek universe is proper Science Fiction that is heavy on the science (Star Trek fans are almost invariably nerds.) while Star Wars is a fantasy series based in space (The fans are better described as geeks and are most closely related to fans of a mainstream fantasy series like Harry Potter.). The only similarities are that their names start with "Star", they're set in the future, and they include highly inaccurate portrayals of space travel.
Star Trek wouldn't exist without the replicator. Without it, it wouldn't have been possible to create a utopian communist society where the last bastion of competition was for position in a military type organization. The reason we followed a Star Fleet crew is that it's one of the last remaining outlets for social structure power plays and allows for exploration instead of mundane day-to-day bettering of oneself that you're free to do or ignore entirely. It says, "What if?", from a perspective of a socialist utopia.
Star Wars takes the positives and negatives of human nature, applying it in a fantasy world. They're more stories about people and a family line in this world. There's no actual science fiction involved, just a backdrop environment for these fantasy characters to live their lives. Star Wars is simply very mainstream fantasy that is pretty realistic about how things would go if the world existed.
"RFID/NFC blocking" wallets are all the rage these days. That is a far bigger scam than this product, which is simply far too late. The only contactless payment method I have is my phone now, after my last contactless card expired a few years ago. I haven't seen a PayPass or payWave card in years, but average people see the chip in their card and believe it doesn't require contact for some reason (My parents and some older doctors I know went full on tinfoil hat when they first got them before I corrected them.)... Fear of the misunderstood or unknown severely affects a lot of people.
Mind you, this does have some potential abusive applications, they're just not really that lucrative. Most public transportation systems have started using contactless cards that have effectively zero protection. The most famous is the Oyster Card, but there are numerous branded versions out there. Toll passes are probably also subject to this kind of abuse. There is little incentive for these agencies to increase their security, too.
If you think that's bad, you should see cities in the US that are in demand. My city has been gaining 20-30% YoY for the last 5-6 years while incomes of locals have been declining. Most are being purchased by foreigners that leave them vacant in a metro with a dire lack of housing due to local geography.
I used to live right next to a three-way stop sign. Can confirm that it's worse than simply letting them roll on through. There were an amazing number of cars and motorcycles that sounded like they had no mufflers taking off hard from that stop every night. The cops started watching for them due to noise complaints, so you'd sometimes hear that roar then sirens.
I also hate speed bumps because they seriously ruin usability for everyone and they damage cars. Those cars also damage the bumps so they're even more difficult and dangerous to traverse...
When I was 4-5 years old, Dave, my dad's best friend from childhood, gave my family a Commodore 64, a stack of magazines, and a programmer's reference manual. I learned to code when I was 5 and started programming when I was 6. By the time I was 7, I had to start learning to optimize my code and conserve memory.
By the time I started college, I had many years of experience under my belt...
I'd kind of chuckle at that. Who would buy their products? They would have no incentive to even hire the manager as there would be no point having them in the US at all.
Cheap labor is only cheap until you have nobody to sell anything to, which happens faster the cheaper your labor.
It's most efficient to produce as close to your customers as possible, so this is definitely in the cards once robots can replace humans.
The big bonus is that they'll need people like us to fix/maintain these robots... Probably not everyday maintenance (we have robots for that), but definitely anything beyond that...
Interesting idea that I could get behind... I'd say 2x prevailing wages for the skillset/title and a minimum of 2x average household income would be sufficient to make it unpalatable to use an H-1B for anything short of someone you legitimately cannot find or train. It'd also drive local wages up for anything in demand because they could save money by hiring local vs. hiring someone on a visa. It'd create fierce competition among the best and brightest all over the world to get in on the program because it'd give them instant high salaries, increase local salaries to what the market would actually bear for the skills, draw more people into unskilled work they consider below them (because they could live on the now-increased incomes), etc. It'd also kill a lot of crufty companies that aren't actively profitable in their space to make way for ones that will be. Everyone would win except MBAs trying to goose quarterly statements.
Real inflation is in the high teens, if you count housing and daily necessities. Anyone that didn't start buying houses back in the mid-90s is suffering tremendously from inflation. My parents can get by on 1/3 of my income because they've had a mortgage on their house for 20 years now. My 1/1 apartment costs over a quarter of my income and my monthly food costs have doubled in the last three years. To buy a house comparable to theirs would take 120% of my pre-tax income.
On top of the high inflation, interest rates are near zero. You can't even save money to buy a house without it being eroded away almost as fast as you save it. I dream of the 10-15% APY interest banks were paying on savings back then.
We already elected the modern equivalent of Carter for two terms, that's how bad our options have been.
Honestly, we haven't had a worse field in every party with national ballot access in my lifetime and perhaps since a couple of generations before mine were old enough to vote. It's unconscionably bad.
Really? There's a big difference between totalitarian socialism (colloquially referee to as "communism" in the West) and other forms of socialism/communism. There have been many highly successful group that would.have persisted, peacefully, indefinitely if it wasn't for the outside world interfering. I'd argue that socialism is the natural state for humans as they historically lived in smaller groups where labor and the fruits thereof were shared among members of the group according to need.
Few average people will be running these LGA2011 boards/processors. The important news is that the mainstream i7 now has 6 cores. It really isn't affecting much else, as workstations have been built with Xeon processors for many years now, which have all had more than 4 cores for quite a few years now.
Only gamers and people with an OC fetish buy "Extreme" processors; everyone else just buys Xeons.
It's more than an eternity in the NodeJS world. Since the libraries and frameworks are under active development by a bunch of people that are happy to make backward compatibility breaking changes, it's likely that they'd be stuck on an archaic version indefinitely. That isn't making it future-proof, it's making development a constant task (as it is with any software that is in continuous use for a long time), except it will be more extensive than normal maintenance (which is 95+% of the time in the lifecycle of average software).
The only difference between older platforms that are no longer "cool" and new ones is the age of the developers you hire: NodeJS is almost entirely people at the very beginning of their careers, while older languages are known by older and more established developers (that command higher salaries, although this gulf has been shrinking considerably in the last few years).
People that want the latest all the time are simply afraid of grey hair and people that refuse to work 16 hour days with zero social life until they're obsolete and discarded. Most of those older developers already lived that and don't want to do it again.
Good luck to the OP, I suppose, if they push forward with it.
There are more poorly-written libraries and more fragmentation in the Node.JS space than there is even in the PHP world. Beyond this, it's like developing on dev code. They've made major fundamental changes to Node in the last couple years that we've been using it that we have to almost completely rewrite our code every year or so to keep anywhere near current.
I wouldn't change. It feels like a flash in the pan tech, it's just that developers are available for it and development is pretty rapid if they use decent front-end libraries.
If I had it to do over again, we'd use front-end JS libraries with a more traditional server-side language that isn't like developing on quicksand where fundamental functionality changes require completely redesigning/developing your site code all the time.
Not saying all shows angled toward men were/are great, though. The 1980s was basically nothing but a stream of low-budget man shows that were utter crap. They were as bad, if not worse, than daytime soap operas. Sadly, shows oriented toward women have never caught up, they're still just as bad as they have been decades. Women were just conditioned to endure it.
Most TV is crap, anyhow. I don't own one, but my fiance does and she watches her trash shows. She even calls them that and tries to watch them without me. We do share a love of a handful of shows that probably have a predominantly-female audience, so you can't always predict what males will like or dislike. I mean, the pinnacle of reality TV is probably Project Runway, but I bet people assume only women and gay men would enjoy it.
I think the mindless drone D-only voters are more like 70%. The R-only voters are probably around 90%, but it's because they have absolutely no other options that would make then comfortable.
The thing I'm not so sure about is the polls we see that claim Clinton will win all these blue states. If anything, many will be razor-thin victories; we might see another case where the popular vote doesn't match the electoral college. Many of these states that they claim are solidly Clinton massively preferred Bernie.
What happens in states where >70% of D voters oppose Clinton and support Bernie? I can't see Trump getting their votes, but I could see a ton of them not voting or protest voting to avoid voting for Clinton. It could be enough to allow the other side to win.
Worse, people that don't declare a party are a large portion of the population now and they overwhelmingly prefer Bernie. They also perfer Trump over Clinton (which is absoluely mind-blowing). How these two facts are simultaneously true is beyond me, but that's what polls have been saying for months now.
No matter what happens, the US loses. It's the same as it has been every election cycle since I've been alive.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think Seattle isn't constrained geographically, you have no clue what you're talking about. The area is worse than SF in many ways. SF has accessible relief regions, while Seattle has a lake with only two bridges and yet another lake east of that. All that region is filled from past boom periods. SF's metro area extends into the Central Valley, while Seattle has mountains, water, and a live volcano blocking it in. At best, it is slightly worse than SF.
The same thing happened to the town I live in. It got some national attention 8 years ago and the population nearly doubled in that time. It went from a cool/funky/nice place to live to constant traffic, high house prices, and all the old families leaving due to the influx of rich people from elsewhere.
I ended up in Seattle after a move from San Diego almost four years ago. I came for the weather, shockingly-enough, not the tech sector. In fact, most job offers I saw out of the region that weren't at one of the companies you mentioned, paid laughably-bad. Like a solid 30% cut from where I was at. The only thing that drew me in was housing prices...
Fast forward to today and I don't know why anyone would do it. The built infrastructure is third world grade and worse than just about anywhere in flyover country. About 80% of existing houses are slapped-together wooden structures that date from one of the past boom periods (ex: Boeing in the 60s-70s) and are literally rotting and/or being eaten by insects. These houses go for at least 600k anywhere within less than an hour commute at rush hour from anywhere you might work. Anything of half-decent quality near AMZN or MSFT will be approaching or exceeding 1M.
Then, no matter where you are, traffic is unconscionable. It has often taken me over an hour to drive from Lower Queen Anne to I-5 between about 3-7pm on a weekday. Then you'll deal with heavy traffic on the freeway almost no matter the day of the week. Traffic jams that stretch on for miles are seen every day of the week with alarming regularity. Redmond and Bellevue's traffic near the MSFT campus should be somewhere in Dante's Inferno. About the closest comparison I could make is to the driving in Riyadh, with similar third-world driving skills and even faster cars.
That said, the surrounding region is beautiful and if you could somehow find work at least an hour outside the Seattle-Tacoma-Everett-Eastside metro area, housing is flyover-cheap and there is no traffic. On the other hand, you probably won't be able to get high speed internet - I know tech workers within the metro that suffer through slow DSL because they simply have no alternatives - you'll have sketchier options further out, like the wireless service my crazy former coworker dealt with out in Sequim (he made a four-hour commute so he could afford a house with a separate room for each of his children). You also wouldn't want to raise children there due to a statewide heroin epidemic and some of the worst schools in the nation (my coworker's wife homeschooled, making it workable, but they moved to Idaho about 6 months ago for a better lifestyle).
Honestly, for the cost of living to income ratio, if you want to live on the west coast, Los Angeles is a much better deal. Even the Silicon Valley area is better since they have decent schools and a working road network...
The only things propping up Seattle as a destination are a VC-backed startup bubble and being the headquarters of the tech giants you mentioned.
Replicators.
I should also take this opportunity to point out (before anyone thinks I'm comparing apples:apples) that they're entirely different genres. The Star Trek universe is proper Science Fiction that is heavy on the science (Star Trek fans are almost invariably nerds.) while Star Wars is a fantasy series based in space (The fans are better described as geeks and are most closely related to fans of a mainstream fantasy series like Harry Potter.). The only similarities are that their names start with "Star", they're set in the future, and they include highly inaccurate portrayals of space travel.
Star Trek wouldn't exist without the replicator. Without it, it wouldn't have been possible to create a utopian communist society where the last bastion of competition was for position in a military type organization. The reason we followed a Star Fleet crew is that it's one of the last remaining outlets for social structure power plays and allows for exploration instead of mundane day-to-day bettering of oneself that you're free to do or ignore entirely. It says, "What if?", from a perspective of a socialist utopia.
Star Wars takes the positives and negatives of human nature, applying it in a fantasy world. They're more stories about people and a family line in this world. There's no actual science fiction involved, just a backdrop environment for these fantasy characters to live their lives. Star Wars is simply very mainstream fantasy that is pretty realistic about how things would go if the world existed.
"RFID/NFC blocking" wallets are all the rage these days. That is a far bigger scam than this product, which is simply far too late. The only contactless payment method I have is my phone now, after my last contactless card expired a few years ago. I haven't seen a PayPass or payWave card in years, but average people see the chip in their card and believe it doesn't require contact for some reason (My parents and some older doctors I know went full on tinfoil hat when they first got them before I corrected them.)... Fear of the misunderstood or unknown severely affects a lot of people.
Mind you, this does have some potential abusive applications, they're just not really that lucrative. Most public transportation systems have started using contactless cards that have effectively zero protection. The most famous is the Oyster Card, but there are numerous branded versions out there. Toll passes are probably also subject to this kind of abuse. There is little incentive for these agencies to increase their security, too.
If you think that's bad, you should see cities in the US that are in demand. My city has been gaining 20-30% YoY for the last 5-6 years while incomes of locals have been declining. Most are being purchased by foreigners that leave them vacant in a metro with a dire lack of housing due to local geography.
I used to live right next to a three-way stop sign. Can confirm that it's worse than simply letting them roll on through. There were an amazing number of cars and motorcycles that sounded like they had no mufflers taking off hard from that stop every night. The cops started watching for them due to noise complaints, so you'd sometimes hear that roar then sirens.
I also hate speed bumps because they seriously ruin usability for everyone and they damage cars. Those cars also damage the bumps so they're even more difficult and dangerous to traverse...
When I was 4-5 years old, Dave, my dad's best friend from childhood, gave my family a Commodore 64, a stack of magazines, and a programmer's reference manual. I learned to code when I was 5 and started programming when I was 6. By the time I was 7, I had to start learning to optimize my code and conserve memory.
By the time I started college, I had many years of experience under my belt...
I'd kind of chuckle at that. Who would buy their products? They would have no incentive to even hire the manager as there would be no point having them in the US at all.
Cheap labor is only cheap until you have nobody to sell anything to, which happens faster the cheaper your labor.
It's most efficient to produce as close to your customers as possible, so this is definitely in the cards once robots can replace humans.
The big bonus is that they'll need people like us to fix/maintain these robots... Probably not everyday maintenance (we have robots for that), but definitely anything beyond that...
Interesting idea that I could get behind... I'd say 2x prevailing wages for the skillset/title and a minimum of 2x average household income would be sufficient to make it unpalatable to use an H-1B for anything short of someone you legitimately cannot find or train. It'd also drive local wages up for anything in demand because they could save money by hiring local vs. hiring someone on a visa. It'd create fierce competition among the best and brightest all over the world to get in on the program because it'd give them instant high salaries, increase local salaries to what the market would actually bear for the skills, draw more people into unskilled work they consider below them (because they could live on the now-increased incomes), etc. It'd also kill a lot of crufty companies that aren't actively profitable in their space to make way for ones that will be. Everyone would win except MBAs trying to goose quarterly statements.
Real inflation is in the high teens, if you count housing and daily necessities. Anyone that didn't start buying houses back in the mid-90s is suffering tremendously from inflation. My parents can get by on 1/3 of my income because they've had a mortgage on their house for 20 years now. My 1/1 apartment costs over a quarter of my income and my monthly food costs have doubled in the last three years. To buy a house comparable to theirs would take 120% of my pre-tax income.
On top of the high inflation, interest rates are near zero. You can't even save money to buy a house without it being eroded away almost as fast as you save it. I dream of the 10-15% APY interest banks were paying on savings back then.
We already elected the modern equivalent of Carter for two terms, that's how bad our options have been.
Honestly, we haven't had a worse field in every party with national ballot access in my lifetime and perhaps since a couple of generations before mine were old enough to vote. It's unconscionably bad.
You also need to count out those that have been stripped of their voting rights (felons).
Almost two years now. We're currently on our third major rewrite in that time.
Color me corrected.
Now I have a different question: What is the point of these processors if they overlap completely with Xeon offerings?
Back when laptops were bricks and battery life was counted in minutes, not hours.
Smart people don't want to be in federal politics, even though we tend to elect the person with the higher IQ in basically every modern election.
Really? There's a big difference between totalitarian socialism (colloquially referee to as "communism" in the West) and other forms of socialism/communism. There have been many highly successful group that would.have persisted, peacefully, indefinitely if it wasn't for the outside world interfering. I'd argue that socialism is the natural state for humans as they historically lived in smaller groups where labor and the fruits thereof were shared among members of the group according to need.
Few average people will be running these LGA2011 boards/processors. The important news is that the mainstream i7 now has 6 cores. It really isn't affecting much else, as workstations have been built with Xeon processors for many years now, which have all had more than 4 cores for quite a few years now.
Only gamers and people with an OC fetish buy "Extreme" processors; everyone else just buys Xeons.
It's more than an eternity in the NodeJS world. Since the libraries and frameworks are under active development by a bunch of people that are happy to make backward compatibility breaking changes, it's likely that they'd be stuck on an archaic version indefinitely. That isn't making it future-proof, it's making development a constant task (as it is with any software that is in continuous use for a long time), except it will be more extensive than normal maintenance (which is 95+% of the time in the lifecycle of average software).
The only difference between older platforms that are no longer "cool" and new ones is the age of the developers you hire: NodeJS is almost entirely people at the very beginning of their careers, while older languages are known by older and more established developers (that command higher salaries, although this gulf has been shrinking considerably in the last few years).
People that want the latest all the time are simply afraid of grey hair and people that refuse to work 16 hour days with zero social life until they're obsolete and discarded. Most of those older developers already lived that and don't want to do it again.
Good luck to the OP, I suppose, if they push forward with it.
There are more poorly-written libraries and more fragmentation in the Node.JS space than there is even in the PHP world. Beyond this, it's like developing on dev code. They've made major fundamental changes to Node in the last couple years that we've been using it that we have to almost completely rewrite our code every year or so to keep anywhere near current.
I wouldn't change. It feels like a flash in the pan tech, it's just that developers are available for it and development is pretty rapid if they use decent front-end libraries.
If I had it to do over again, we'd use front-end JS libraries with a more traditional server-side language that isn't like developing on quicksand where fundamental functionality changes require completely redesigning/developing your site code all the time.
...but those intended for men usually suck less.
Not saying all shows angled toward men were/are great, though. The 1980s was basically nothing but a stream of low-budget man shows that were utter crap. They were as bad, if not worse, than daytime soap operas. Sadly, shows oriented toward women have never caught up, they're still just as bad as they have been decades. Women were just conditioned to endure it.
Most TV is crap, anyhow. I don't own one, but my fiance does and she watches her trash shows. She even calls them that and tries to watch them without me. We do share a love of a handful of shows that probably have a predominantly-female audience, so you can't always predict what males will like or dislike. I mean, the pinnacle of reality TV is probably Project Runway, but I bet people assume only women and gay men would enjoy it.
The average is still high in the US. Somewhere around 30k, not including rings. It's insane. The wedding industrial complex is absolute madness.
I think the mindless drone D-only voters are more like 70%. The R-only voters are probably around 90%, but it's because they have absolutely no other options that would make then comfortable.
The thing I'm not so sure about is the polls we see that claim Clinton will win all these blue states. If anything, many will be razor-thin victories; we might see another case where the popular vote doesn't match the electoral college. Many of these states that they claim are solidly Clinton massively preferred Bernie.
What happens in states where >70% of D voters oppose Clinton and support Bernie? I can't see Trump getting their votes, but I could see a ton of them not voting or protest voting to avoid voting for Clinton. It could be enough to allow the other side to win.
Worse, people that don't declare a party are a large portion of the population now and they overwhelmingly prefer Bernie. They also perfer Trump over Clinton (which is absoluely mind-blowing). How these two facts are simultaneously true is beyond me, but that's what polls have been saying for months now.
No matter what happens, the US loses. It's the same as it has been every election cycle since I've been alive.