I will only be surprised on how long it takes for them to admit that they had a drop in incoming student quality.
Stanford hasn't required the SAT for some time, and I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a drop in incoming student quality.
Yes, from what I remember from university, the biggest cause of failing and dropping out was not lack of ability to pass beginning college courses but rather lack of discipline in getting up early and going to classes instead of partying and skipping claasses once on your own and away from mommy and daddy. Standardized tests won't do much to determine that.
So some people who are college material don't have good test scores but conversely some people without exceptional grades actually are rather bright and do fine in college. I was the later.
And you can still take and turn in such tests to support your application, they just are no longer required.
Paper bags? How did people survive before plastic bags were invented?
It isn't like paper bags have no environmental footprint.
True but those costs won't be quite as externalized. Paper bags left along the side of the road will turn into mush and decompose pretty quickly. Plastic bags left along the side of the road will sit there till the state has to clean them up.
Not quite so simple. There is plenty of new supply in Seattle, but nobody is building cheap places to live.
If there were plenty of supply, prices would not increase. If there were oversupply, prices would fall. The law of supply and demand is not hard to grasp.
It is not a surprise that no one is building any place cheap to live, I imagine the building code in Seattle continues to grow in size, complexity and demands on the builder. Evicting delinquent or bad tenants has most likely become more difficult. To adjust to the new reality, developers build to attract affluent tenants that are less likely to trash a place or be late on the rent. Don't blame developers for adjusting to what the Seattle City government is throwing their way.
If Seattle (or any large city) wants cheap housing, the need to make cheap housing something that can realistically be built and managed.
Well, plenty of supply is not the same as oversupply. But to make things more pedantic there is plenty of expensive supply, and little cheap supply. And I can tell by the way you are talking you don't quite understand the situation. By cheap supply, I'm not talking about people who like to trash places or are late on rent, I'm speaking of typical office people not making more than $60k a year being forced out into the suburbs, or at least not able to afford any of the new places that are being built. I make six figures and moved out several years ago because my rent was a mortgage and a fixed rate mortgage doesn't go up (except due to property taxes, which it is) and rent will. The city is currently rebuilding Yesler Terrace for low rent housing, but that's just a few thousand households which won't meet demand for that price range. More expensive apartments are plenty while older places that are paid off are all full. Ever since I've moved here and well before the current property boom, there have been a large number of conspicuously empty buildings in high rent areas, presumably also high taxes also. I'm not familiar with real estate details, but I bet there is some tax write off or other way for Seattle property owners to defray the cost of empty space rather than lower rents.
Can you name any current manufacturer of ICE vehicles that has not ever produced an electric car in the last 10 or 20 years?
Ya, and Kodak made digital cameras too. Some of the first ones even. They still feared cannibalizing their exiting film market to the point that other people came in and did it. I suspect that most ICE car businesses will probably do the same.
How small does the group need to be to get you shaking in your suburbanite boots?
Probably not that much and will society really care? What we are seeing now is the reverse of White Flight. The affluent moved to the suburbs and the city centers got worse, society didn't really care. Now, for economic reasons, the reverse is happening, most city centers are becoming more affluent and the rich are moving back where capital and industry are, and the poor are being forced out into the meth filled suburbs. I suspect those suburbs will get the same care and concern that the inner cities got fifty years ago. Probably even less as cities still had industry and importance back then than suburbs don't now as it is all moving back to the inner cities for reasons of vertical integration, shortening supply chains, and needing large populations of skilled workers.
Better cities have laws. Want to camp in a tent? Try the many wonderful RV parks. Some have tent camping, cabins too.
The better US cities have laws about their streets not getting filled up with parked RV's all day and night.
Naw. Seattle has the laws. The homeless have tents because there are plenty of surplus camping equipment to give it to them. The police still move them here, the trouble is those people still have to go someplace, and the money to move them around quickly runs out. It's much like Trump's immigrant population problem. He's doing the same thing Obama did early in his administration (probably to try and appease Republicans), but it just ends up filling the jails and courts to the point that thing break. Things cost money. The US government can just run up debts, but cities have a harder time doing that. They can either look the other way, or continue to spend money they don't have.
Homeless people -- what do you propose as a solution?
There are more jobs available than there are people to fill them. There's a reason that people congregate in places like Seattle and San Francisco to camp out and set up tent cities. Because those cities encourage it, practically and culturally and financially. You also know this, but are equally annoyed on that front, because it would mean confronting the reality of which sort of monolithic partisan political establishment totally controls places where that happens.
Not in Seattle. The vast majority of homeless here (85%) are people who used to live here but lost their houses to increasing rents. The city center is growing more affluent and the poor are being forced farther and farther out into the suburbs and other cities. If they can't handle a move with first/last/deposit plus relaible transportation to get around, they are ending up homeless.
Having too many jobs in one place is a bigger problem right now in the US because that is what jacks up housing costs and increases commute times.
No, what jacks up housing costs is a lack of housing. This is usually due to regulation / zoning laws preventing higher density housing from being built. If you want cheaper housing you have to build more of it. Subsidizing it without fixing the supply just jacks up the price more.
That might keep prices from rising even quicker, but as Seattle has seen, nobody is going to build new, cheap places to live. All the cheap places to live get remodeled or rebuilt as expensive places. Everybody building is doing so to make more money than can currently be made on the current supply. To get prices to drop, you need the population to actually start decreasing like it did in Seattle after the dot bust. Then rents were actually going down without asking for it for a year or two to try and keep renters as people were jumping to cheaper places.
What was worse is that they weren't begging. I've never seen anyplace where homeless people don't beg.
I’ve worked in Seattle a lot of years, and I’d really like to know what part of town you were in where the homeless didn’t beg. The only homeless people I see who don’t beg are the ones too mentally ill to have any connection with reality.
There are some that beg and always have been (and probably will). I would say the vast majority of beggars I see are the same people I've see doing it for years. I haven't seen the guy with his cat downtown in years, but I still occasionally see the older black man that is fairly well groomed that just holds his hat out like I have for the last twenty years. When I lived on Cap Hill, those begging on Broadway were either street kids or the same few older people who probably did need the money to survive. Now that I moved to South Seattle, there are a couple of beggars that have worked their corners for at least several years now. Even that doesn't seem to match the vast numbers of small house set ups or fields of REI tents (got to love Seattle, plenty of surplus camping gear to go to all the homeless) I see on the same drive. According to the reports I've read, they are mostly people who used to live here but found themselves homeless due to losing their jobs or houses due to increasing rents. I would assume that they are finding themselves in a hard place, some services are keeping them fed, and they eventually make it off the streets after some months.
There may be other reasons, but you gave no data to support your position. In fact, your argument bolsters his position. Housing is in such high demand that investors are looking at multiyear projects (construction) and determining that the increase in demand will likely result in a high enough sale price that margin will be preserved even after all of the challenges of urban construction.
Not quite so simple. There is plenty of new supply in Seattle, but nobody is building cheap places to live. Even the new artist living pods places that have gone up that are glorified dorm rooms were more expensive than the older apartments in the city. Studies have shown that the new building has kept prices down from what is seen in places like SF, but Seattle's population has also doubled in the last twenty years. Another thousand people move in every week currently. Quite simply, Seattle mostly gentrified in the late 90's and not it is growing more affluent and even white people who had nice jobs are being forced out of their houses. Neighborhoods that used to be sketchy now have trendy nightlife and expensive artisan restaurants. Wouldn't be so bad but Seattle is another peninsula city that doesn't have space to provide more highways so traffic keeps getting worse. Lightrail is being built as fast as they can, but it's not really fast enough.
... and they both have a good point. A tax on employment has got to be the dumbest tax, and falls heaviest on the lowest paying jobs.
If they really want more affordable housing, they could start by approving some building permits. It is idiotic to deny, deny, deny, and then declare a "crisis" because the lack of supply pushes up prices.
Please research before you try and speak. SF may be deny, deny, deny, but Seattle has been approve, approve, approve for the last twenty years. Except for some a few well publicized cases of historical old buildings, everything old and cheap is being torn down. Even then, they usually allow for a new building if the original facade is preserved. I can walk outside my place of work and see five different cranes working on new buildings. It's been like that for years and certainly haven't been the same buildings. This also extends many miles outside of the city center, usually following the newish light rail. Main trouble is that nobody (besides the city) is building new, cheap places to live. Housing prices have been going up 10%/year for the last twenty years (except for a bit after the dot bust). Rents are raising. I checked out some of the new apartments that were being built, but nobody is building cheap crap, they're all very expensive studios that cost twice as much as the place I was already renting. If they could build more, they would be but construction is the current bottleneck.
Now, plenty os studies have come out and they pretty much show that this is keeping prices down to less than they would be if they weren't building. The population of Seattle has doubled in that last twenty years which is the problem. Not only are rents higher, but the infrastructure including the highways were built in the 60's and hard to upgrade, especially in such a short time. It's causing growing pains and if there is too much a of a good thing, it is probably the economic boom that Seattle has been seeing. Plenty of people who grew up here are being forced out. A vast majority of the homeless here were living here, but some people are marginal and can't just up and move at the drop of a hat when rent literally doubles from one month to another (Seattle has never liked leases, so most places are month to month, and rental owners are doubling rent so the can kick people out and remodel to charge more). This all puts more load on the city who have to do something even if they ignore the people who live here and go for the top dollar. I have no doubt that one of the goals of the head tax was to slow down economic growth a bit so the city can try and get control on things.
All that being said, WA has no state income tax and is mostly replaced by property taxes, so when comparing the price of housing in Seattle, it really needs to be compared to the price of housing plus state income tax in other cities like SF.
Lots of jobs at Amazon -- if you're an H1-B. Good luck if you're a citizen or >30 -- when I interviewed with them it was obvious I never had a chance.
Sort of been the issue with Amazon since it started. I've had lots of friends go through there and each department is different, but yes, they want young people or those they can overwork. From those friends, I've been told the average employment at Amazon is 18 months. By then, you've either found a better place to work or been laid off. So long as you go in with the understanding that you are just there to pad your resume and jump ship, often to a different department of Amazon, until you have enough experience to get a job will let you relax and settle down that is not at Amazon, it seems to work.
In BC, just a little north from you, there's a limit to rent increases, like 3% a year. My rent increases were $30/year.
It's gets complicated, but basically Washington doesn't have income taxes, they have property taxes instead. In a booming economy, which Seattle has been in since the mid-90's, that hits people in rents and property taxes. For which, leases aren't offered too often, but rather month to month agreements. Even the owners are being forced to remodel or sell because their property taxes are forcing them to. Even fixed rate mortgages are having issues because taxes are causing readjustments to a higher mortgage. I think there are some limits to property taxes, but then there isn't enough money to pay for services. Part of the reason for the resent head tax.
It's all relative, and the people moving into Seattle know what to expect and probably have a nice job or are at least willing to deal with it. It's the natives that are really having issues. My boss grew up in a small depression era house on a huge waterfront plot in Bellevue. He went an checked on it online and he could not even pay the property taxes on it these days. Of course, his house has also been torn down and rebuilt as a huge mcmansion, but most the cost is in the land. If you grew up here and don't have a nice tech job, let alone were old and on a fixed income, you really don't have a good chance to stay without moving farther and farther out. Even if your family owned the house, the property taxes are getting so high to force people to sell and buy someplace cheaper. Of course, WA doesn't have income taxes, they have property taxes, but that is hitting people in unexpected ways due to the booming economy.
Something tells me these numbers are being manipulated. If things really were that good, employers would raise wages. You'd have fast food places offering $20/hr to flip burgers if they needed the labor that badly.
Knowing people who work professionally in the food industry, what employers are actually doing is offering $35k salary plus health care to people as sous chefs and managers and making them work 60-80 hours a week when they can't find more hourly workers. Meanwhile, worthwhile hourly workers who don't fall for that trap are getting overtime and making that $20/hr.
Bullshit, homeless in Seattle because hiring is in fact abysmal.
Amazon and Microsoft still advertise jobs as required by law before they hire H1B.
Those job listings aren't meant to be filled, stop spreading lies about "healthy" job market.
I don't usually reply to godless lying Russian trolls, but I'm in Seattle and seeing lots of what is going on. Hiring is great in Seattle. Walk down the street and most places have help wanted signs up in the windows. Problem is that those jobs probably won't pay rent on anyplace within ten miles of downtown Seattle. As for professional jobs, we were in the market to hire somebody (because our groups people keep getting recruited for other places by their friends) and in the time that it took to post the job, collect resumes, and interview, we ended up with out fourth choice because the first three were employed someplace else before we could offer them the job.
Most of the people that are homeless in Seattle are that way because they are living paycheck to paycheck and getting forced out of their houses and apartments by raising rates without first and last to get a new place at the drop of a hat. Housing is going up 10% a year for the past twenty years. The old, cheap places are being torn down to make new expensive places. Apartment complexes are literally doubling the rent from one month to the next to force everybody out so they can remodel and charge more. This happened to one couple I know three times in the same year. Several friends, despite good jobs find themselves having to sometimes stay with friends or family till they can find a new place to live as not too many people can handle their rent doubling long term. Those without a nest egg, friends, or family will find themselves out in the street, and according to the newspapers looking into the issue, that is what is going on in Seattle.
Not enough gravity to retain an atmosphere permanently
Tens of thousands of years would be good enough for a start though. We can theoretically smash comets into it to create atmosphere, and again every ten thousand years to top it off.
The challenges are quite daunting, and expense likely makes it a non starter during any of our lifetimes. But impossible remains to be seen.
FYI, I haven't done the calculations for the moon, but have done it for Mars. The amount of energy needed to do that to Mars is best measured in total daily energy output of the sun. That doesn't factor in loses due to efficiency or the energy and materials actually needed to set up the delivery mechanism such as setting up earth sized solar collectors to beam energy to the edge of the solar system. It would probably take tens of thousands of years to build such infrastructure and another ten thousand years to add enough atmosphere. If you ship the ice from Jupiter's moons rather than comets, then you can reduce the amount of energy needed by a couple of orders of magnitude though. That helps.
When Rogue One came out, I was skeptical that a spinoff movie could be any good, so I didn't see it at first. I was impressed by it, so figured Solo might be a safer bet than I'd ordinarily expect. Now with the fan reaction, I'm not so sure.
Most of the actual fan reaction I have seen has been positive, placing Solo right after Rogue One and before the prequels and most of the other new movies from Disney. It seems to be more media reaction than anything based on numbers on a movie that is competing against two other movies right before it that were breaking records. It was like the third weekend in a row for me of dinner out and a movie, which was almost too much despite having plenty of extra income and a desire to see it. Lots of people I know saw Infinity War and Deadpool multiple times too. By time Solo came around there was just general movie exhaustion rather then Star Wars exhaustion.
Yes. They are one possible part of the possible dark matter, but it is doubted that if they do exist, they would be all of it. ( Maybe not from TFA, but from a similar FA.)
Trips to Mars don't take two years. SpaceX's Mars plans involve transit times of 3-4 months. You don't need artificial gravity for that, and it is well within what can be done with prepackaged food. A shorter trip also greatly reduces the amount of radiation shielding required.
You do need something a lot bigger than Dragon, which is why BFS has a payload capacity of 150 metric tons and would only start to carry humans to Mars after several unmanned spacecraft had already landed with supplies. It also will have toilets, something that Dragon lacks, which I suspect is something those tourists will be happy to delay their trip a few years in order to have.
I don't think I've seen any transfer orbit times around 3-4 months, although they depend on which attempt you make, but I think we just missed the short trip opportunity for the next 20 years.. They mostly go for about 9 months, so twice that plus another four to six months actually on Mars before they can attempt a return journey, and it's close enough to two years to call it so. Also have it include assembly time in orbit before launch if not a single module, which I doubt it will be. In deep space, radiation and gravity will be an issue for that time period. Of course, testing will be needed to make sure, thus the reason for around the moon trips.
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Not everyone is willing to join the military and volunteer to murder, be murdered, or come back crippled or ill from fighting...
That's why you join the Air Force. They only let the officers fight.
Where did you get the idea that college is a series of standardized tests?
China would be my guess, but only because I'm not familiar with Russian educational system.
Not everybody is made to get up early.
Ya, I learned to drop those 10:30 classes pretty quick.
Stanford hasn't required the SAT for some time, and I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a drop in incoming student quality.
Yes, from what I remember from university, the biggest cause of failing and dropping out was not lack of ability to pass beginning college courses but rather lack of discipline in getting up early and going to classes instead of partying and skipping claasses once on your own and away from mommy and daddy. Standardized tests won't do much to determine that.
So some people who are college material don't have good test scores but conversely some people without exceptional grades actually are rather bright and do fine in college. I was the later.
And you can still take and turn in such tests to support your application, they just are no longer required.
Paper bags? How did people survive before plastic bags were invented?
It isn't like paper bags have no environmental footprint.
True but those costs won't be quite as externalized. Paper bags left along the side of the road will turn into mush and decompose pretty quickly. Plastic bags left along the side of the road will sit there till the state has to clean them up.
Not quite so simple. There is plenty of new supply in Seattle, but nobody is building cheap places to live.
If there were plenty of supply, prices would not increase. If there were oversupply, prices would fall. The law of supply and demand is not hard to grasp. It is not a surprise that no one is building any place cheap to live, I imagine the building code in Seattle continues to grow in size, complexity and demands on the builder. Evicting delinquent or bad tenants has most likely become more difficult. To adjust to the new reality, developers build to attract affluent tenants that are less likely to trash a place or be late on the rent. Don't blame developers for adjusting to what the Seattle City government is throwing their way. If Seattle (or any large city) wants cheap housing, the need to make cheap housing something that can realistically be built and managed.
Well, plenty of supply is not the same as oversupply. But to make things more pedantic there is plenty of expensive supply, and little cheap supply. And I can tell by the way you are talking you don't quite understand the situation. By cheap supply, I'm not talking about people who like to trash places or are late on rent, I'm speaking of typical office people not making more than $60k a year being forced out into the suburbs, or at least not able to afford any of the new places that are being built. I make six figures and moved out several years ago because my rent was a mortgage and a fixed rate mortgage doesn't go up (except due to property taxes, which it is) and rent will. The city is currently rebuilding Yesler Terrace for low rent housing, but that's just a few thousand households which won't meet demand for that price range. More expensive apartments are plenty while older places that are paid off are all full. Ever since I've moved here and well before the current property boom, there have been a large number of conspicuously empty buildings in high rent areas, presumably also high taxes also. I'm not familiar with real estate details, but I bet there is some tax write off or other way for Seattle property owners to defray the cost of empty space rather than lower rents.
Can you name any current manufacturer of ICE vehicles that has not ever produced an electric car in the last 10 or 20 years?
Ya, and Kodak made digital cameras too. Some of the first ones even. They still feared cannibalizing their exiting film market to the point that other people came in and did it. I suspect that most ICE car businesses will probably do the same.
How small does the group need to be to get you shaking in your suburbanite boots?
Probably not that much and will society really care? What we are seeing now is the reverse of White Flight. The affluent moved to the suburbs and the city centers got worse, society didn't really care. Now, for economic reasons, the reverse is happening, most city centers are becoming more affluent and the rich are moving back where capital and industry are, and the poor are being forced out into the meth filled suburbs. I suspect those suburbs will get the same care and concern that the inner cities got fifty years ago. Probably even less as cities still had industry and importance back then than suburbs don't now as it is all moving back to the inner cities for reasons of vertical integration, shortening supply chains, and needing large populations of skilled workers.
Better cities have laws. Want to camp in a tent? Try the many wonderful RV parks. Some have tent camping, cabins too. The better US cities have laws about their streets not getting filled up with parked RV's all day and night.
Naw. Seattle has the laws. The homeless have tents because there are plenty of surplus camping equipment to give it to them. The police still move them here, the trouble is those people still have to go someplace, and the money to move them around quickly runs out. It's much like Trump's immigrant population problem. He's doing the same thing Obama did early in his administration (probably to try and appease Republicans), but it just ends up filling the jails and courts to the point that thing break. Things cost money. The US government can just run up debts, but cities have a harder time doing that. They can either look the other way, or continue to spend money they don't have.
Homeless people -- what do you propose as a solution?
There are more jobs available than there are people to fill them. There's a reason that people congregate in places like Seattle and San Francisco to camp out and set up tent cities. Because those cities encourage it, practically and culturally and financially. You also know this, but are equally annoyed on that front, because it would mean confronting the reality of which sort of monolithic partisan political establishment totally controls places where that happens.
Not in Seattle. The vast majority of homeless here (85%) are people who used to live here but lost their houses to increasing rents. The city center is growing more affluent and the poor are being forced farther and farther out into the suburbs and other cities. If they can't handle a move with first/last/deposit plus relaible transportation to get around, they are ending up homeless.
Having too many jobs in one place is a bigger problem right now in the US because that is what jacks up housing costs and increases commute times.
No, what jacks up housing costs is a lack of housing. This is usually due to regulation / zoning laws preventing higher density housing from being built. If you want cheaper housing you have to build more of it. Subsidizing it without fixing the supply just jacks up the price more.
That might keep prices from rising even quicker, but as Seattle has seen, nobody is going to build new, cheap places to live. All the cheap places to live get remodeled or rebuilt as expensive places. Everybody building is doing so to make more money than can currently be made on the current supply. To get prices to drop, you need the population to actually start decreasing like it did in Seattle after the dot bust. Then rents were actually going down without asking for it for a year or two to try and keep renters as people were jumping to cheaper places.
What was worse is that they weren't begging. I've never seen anyplace where homeless people don't beg.
I’ve worked in Seattle a lot of years, and I’d really like to know what part of town you were in where the homeless didn’t beg. The only homeless people I see who don’t beg are the ones too mentally ill to have any connection with reality.
There are some that beg and always have been (and probably will). I would say the vast majority of beggars I see are the same people I've see doing it for years. I haven't seen the guy with his cat downtown in years, but I still occasionally see the older black man that is fairly well groomed that just holds his hat out like I have for the last twenty years. When I lived on Cap Hill, those begging on Broadway were either street kids or the same few older people who probably did need the money to survive. Now that I moved to South Seattle, there are a couple of beggars that have worked their corners for at least several years now. Even that doesn't seem to match the vast numbers of small house set ups or fields of REI tents (got to love Seattle, plenty of surplus camping gear to go to all the homeless) I see on the same drive. According to the reports I've read, they are mostly people who used to live here but found themselves homeless due to losing their jobs or houses due to increasing rents. I would assume that they are finding themselves in a hard place, some services are keeping them fed, and they eventually make it off the streets after some months.
There may be other reasons, but you gave no data to support your position. In fact, your argument bolsters his position. Housing is in such high demand that investors are looking at multiyear projects (construction) and determining that the increase in demand will likely result in a high enough sale price that margin will be preserved even after all of the challenges of urban construction.
Not quite so simple. There is plenty of new supply in Seattle, but nobody is building cheap places to live. Even the new artist living pods places that have gone up that are glorified dorm rooms were more expensive than the older apartments in the city. Studies have shown that the new building has kept prices down from what is seen in places like SF, but Seattle's population has also doubled in the last twenty years. Another thousand people move in every week currently. Quite simply, Seattle mostly gentrified in the late 90's and not it is growing more affluent and even white people who had nice jobs are being forced out of their houses. Neighborhoods that used to be sketchy now have trendy nightlife and expensive artisan restaurants. Wouldn't be so bad but Seattle is another peninsula city that doesn't have space to provide more highways so traffic keeps getting worse. Lightrail is being built as fast as they can, but it's not really fast enough.
... and they both have a good point. A tax on employment has got to be the dumbest tax, and falls heaviest on the lowest paying jobs.
If they really want more affordable housing, they could start by approving some building permits. It is idiotic to deny, deny, deny, and then declare a "crisis" because the lack of supply pushes up prices.
Please research before you try and speak. SF may be deny, deny, deny, but Seattle has been approve, approve, approve for the last twenty years. Except for some a few well publicized cases of historical old buildings, everything old and cheap is being torn down. Even then, they usually allow for a new building if the original facade is preserved. I can walk outside my place of work and see five different cranes working on new buildings. It's been like that for years and certainly haven't been the same buildings. This also extends many miles outside of the city center, usually following the newish light rail. Main trouble is that nobody (besides the city) is building new, cheap places to live. Housing prices have been going up 10%/year for the last twenty years (except for a bit after the dot bust). Rents are raising. I checked out some of the new apartments that were being built, but nobody is building cheap crap, they're all very expensive studios that cost twice as much as the place I was already renting. If they could build more, they would be but construction is the current bottleneck.
Now, plenty os studies have come out and they pretty much show that this is keeping prices down to less than they would be if they weren't building. The population of Seattle has doubled in that last twenty years which is the problem. Not only are rents higher, but the infrastructure including the highways were built in the 60's and hard to upgrade, especially in such a short time. It's causing growing pains and if there is too much a of a good thing, it is probably the economic boom that Seattle has been seeing. Plenty of people who grew up here are being forced out. A vast majority of the homeless here were living here, but some people are marginal and can't just up and move at the drop of a hat when rent literally doubles from one month to another (Seattle has never liked leases, so most places are month to month, and rental owners are doubling rent so the can kick people out and remodel to charge more). This all puts more load on the city who have to do something even if they ignore the people who live here and go for the top dollar. I have no doubt that one of the goals of the head tax was to slow down economic growth a bit so the city can try and get control on things.
All that being said, WA has no state income tax and is mostly replaced by property taxes, so when comparing the price of housing in Seattle, it really needs to be compared to the price of housing plus state income tax in other cities like SF.
s/ten/twenty/
Lots of jobs at Amazon -- if you're an H1-B. Good luck if you're a citizen or >30 -- when I interviewed with them it was obvious I never had a chance.
Sort of been the issue with Amazon since it started. I've had lots of friends go through there and each department is different, but yes, they want young people or those they can overwork. From those friends, I've been told the average employment at Amazon is 18 months. By then, you've either found a better place to work or been laid off. So long as you go in with the understanding that you are just there to pad your resume and jump ship, often to a different department of Amazon, until you have enough experience to get a job will let you relax and settle down that is not at Amazon, it seems to work.
In BC, just a little north from you, there's a limit to rent increases, like 3% a year. My rent increases were $30/year.
It's gets complicated, but basically Washington doesn't have income taxes, they have property taxes instead. In a booming economy, which Seattle has been in since the mid-90's, that hits people in rents and property taxes. For which, leases aren't offered too often, but rather month to month agreements. Even the owners are being forced to remodel or sell because their property taxes are forcing them to. Even fixed rate mortgages are having issues because taxes are causing readjustments to a higher mortgage. I think there are some limits to property taxes, but then there isn't enough money to pay for services. Part of the reason for the resent head tax.
It's all relative, and the people moving into Seattle know what to expect and probably have a nice job or are at least willing to deal with it. It's the natives that are really having issues. My boss grew up in a small depression era house on a huge waterfront plot in Bellevue. He went an checked on it online and he could not even pay the property taxes on it these days. Of course, his house has also been torn down and rebuilt as a huge mcmansion, but most the cost is in the land. If you grew up here and don't have a nice tech job, let alone were old and on a fixed income, you really don't have a good chance to stay without moving farther and farther out. Even if your family owned the house, the property taxes are getting so high to force people to sell and buy someplace cheaper. Of course, WA doesn't have income taxes, they have property taxes, but that is hitting people in unexpected ways due to the booming economy.
Something tells me these numbers are being manipulated. If things really were that good, employers would raise wages. You'd have fast food places offering $20/hr to flip burgers if they needed the labor that badly.
Knowing people who work professionally in the food industry, what employers are actually doing is offering $35k salary plus health care to people as sous chefs and managers and making them work 60-80 hours a week when they can't find more hourly workers. Meanwhile, worthwhile hourly workers who don't fall for that trap are getting overtime and making that $20/hr.
Bullshit, homeless in Seattle because hiring is in fact abysmal. Amazon and Microsoft still advertise jobs as required by law before they hire H1B. Those job listings aren't meant to be filled, stop spreading lies about "healthy" job market.
I don't usually reply to godless lying Russian trolls, but I'm in Seattle and seeing lots of what is going on. Hiring is great in Seattle. Walk down the street and most places have help wanted signs up in the windows. Problem is that those jobs probably won't pay rent on anyplace within ten miles of downtown Seattle. As for professional jobs, we were in the market to hire somebody (because our groups people keep getting recruited for other places by their friends) and in the time that it took to post the job, collect resumes, and interview, we ended up with out fourth choice because the first three were employed someplace else before we could offer them the job.
Most of the people that are homeless in Seattle are that way because they are living paycheck to paycheck and getting forced out of their houses and apartments by raising rates without first and last to get a new place at the drop of a hat. Housing is going up 10% a year for the past twenty years. The old, cheap places are being torn down to make new expensive places. Apartment complexes are literally doubling the rent from one month to the next to force everybody out so they can remodel and charge more. This happened to one couple I know three times in the same year. Several friends, despite good jobs find themselves having to sometimes stay with friends or family till they can find a new place to live as not too many people can handle their rent doubling long term. Those without a nest egg, friends, or family will find themselves out in the street, and according to the newspapers looking into the issue, that is what is going on in Seattle.
We shall see. Musk always over promises and delivers late, but he does eventually deliver. We'll see what gives when the time comes.
Not enough gravity to retain an atmosphere permanently
Tens of thousands of years would be good enough for a start though. We can theoretically smash comets into it to create atmosphere, and again every ten thousand years to top it off.
The challenges are quite daunting, and expense likely makes it a non starter during any of our lifetimes. But impossible remains to be seen.
FYI, I haven't done the calculations for the moon, but have done it for Mars. The amount of energy needed to do that to Mars is best measured in total daily energy output of the sun. That doesn't factor in loses due to efficiency or the energy and materials actually needed to set up the delivery mechanism such as setting up earth sized solar collectors to beam energy to the edge of the solar system. It would probably take tens of thousands of years to build such infrastructure and another ten thousand years to add enough atmosphere. If you ship the ice from Jupiter's moons rather than comets, then you can reduce the amount of energy needed by a couple of orders of magnitude though. That helps.
When Rogue One came out, I was skeptical that a spinoff movie could be any good, so I didn't see it at first. I was impressed by it, so figured Solo might be a safer bet than I'd ordinarily expect. Now with the fan reaction, I'm not so sure.
Most of the actual fan reaction I have seen has been positive, placing Solo right after Rogue One and before the prequels and most of the other new movies from Disney. It seems to be more media reaction than anything based on numbers on a movie that is competing against two other movies right before it that were breaking records. It was like the third weekend in a row for me of dinner out and a movie, which was almost too much despite having plenty of extra income and a desire to see it. Lots of people I know saw Infinity War and Deadpool multiple times too. By time Solo came around there was just general movie exhaustion rather then Star Wars exhaustion.
Does that make them a candidate for Dark Matter?
Yes. They are one possible part of the possible dark matter, but it is doubted that if they do exist, they would be all of it. ( Maybe not from TFA, but from a similar FA.)
Trips to Mars don't take two years. SpaceX's Mars plans involve transit times of 3-4 months. You don't need artificial gravity for that, and it is well within what can be done with prepackaged food. A shorter trip also greatly reduces the amount of radiation shielding required.
You do need something a lot bigger than Dragon, which is why BFS has a payload capacity of 150 metric tons and would only start to carry humans to Mars after several unmanned spacecraft had already landed with supplies. It also will have toilets, something that Dragon lacks, which I suspect is something those tourists will be happy to delay their trip a few years in order to have.
I don't think I've seen any transfer orbit times around 3-4 months, although they depend on which attempt you make, but I think we just missed the short trip opportunity for the next 20 years.. They mostly go for about 9 months, so twice that plus another four to six months actually on Mars before they can attempt a return journey, and it's close enough to two years to call it so. Also have it include assembly time in orbit before launch if not a single module, which I doubt it will be. In deep space, radiation and gravity will be an issue for that time period. Of course, testing will be needed to make sure, thus the reason for around the moon trips.