This is very cool and I'm glad you were able to build it.
On the contrary though, I've been fascinated with simple non-technical solutions to problems lately. For example, my buddy hates it when people use his driveway to turn around. He lives on a corner lot and the layout is prone to people turning around in his driveway, and apparently this is a pet peeve of his. He was talking about installing a gate, or a retractable pole that he could extend from a hole in the driveway, all these intricate technological solutions, etc. I gave it some thought and got him a street cone off eBay to put in his driveway. I leveraged human psychology over technology and it worked like a charm and only cost $30.
For your example, I would just put a do not disturb sign on the door. The flip around kind they have at hotels. It takes getting up, but just as effective and you get a few steps in. Of course you don't get to learn and build stuff, but like I said, I'm fascinated by simple solutions right now.
But you have to remember every time to flip it before a meeting starts and after it ends. If you don’t then it will start being ignored because its never accurate. It also doesn’t work if you get an impromptu call or meeting you weren’t planning for. If you have a simple, predictable meeting schedule, a sign could be fine, but an automatic solution can work a lot better in other situations.
>But you have to remember every time to flip it before a meeting starts and after it ends.
Agree, but it's an easy habit to pick up.
>If you don’t then it will start being ignored because its never accurate.
Yes, that pavlovian response works both ways. If people keep interrupting my meetings, I'll remember to put up the thing. Remembering to take it down when the meeting is over is more problematic though.
>It also doesn’t work if you get an impromptu call or meeting you weren’t planning for.
It does. I've never had a meeting where it didn't take me a few rings to get my AirPods in anyway.
I totally agree with most of what you said and I appreciate the technical solution presented. Like I said my mind is just into finding simple, non-tech solutions right now. Also another benefit of the simple solution is it costs probably a buck or two, cheaper if I made the tag myself with scissors, part of a cardboard box and a marker.
The problem with both solutions is it doesn't work for dogs who typically can't read. An even simpler solution just occurred to me. Shut the door when I'm in a meeting.
>It is _also_ your job to make them less bad - this is good because your incentives are aligned.
This depends on the number of shits given. I can make anyone better who gives a shit, but there are a whole lot of people who don't and are irredeemable. If this seems to be the case, it's best to cut bait and find someone else quickly. In the 90s, it was "hire fast, fire fast," and somehow this was discarded. It was a tough but highly effective model for making really good teams.
To add to this, it seems people are either unwilling or unable to figure things out for themselves. There are some proprietary things that are really tough to figure out, but it seems a lot of devs these days spend about 5 minutes, then ask for help. "Back in the day," devs would spend a day or two banging their heads agains the before asking for help, and they were better for it.
This no shits given isn't limited to developers, but BAs, PMs, Biz and QA people. It seems a lot worse today than 10 years ago. I ended up spending a good chunk of my day doing people's jobs for them. The people that were hired to take stuff off my plate end up putting stuff on my plate.
Personally I'm with you on "many people no longer able to figure stuff out". However, we may differ on the time frames we're willing to "take" from them.
Back in the day, you figured stuff out on your own, because you had no other resources. I remember breaking my computer's ability to boot into a working DOS prompt (too long ago to remember what exactly went wrong and how I fixed it). I had a few hours until I would have to tell my dad that I "broke the computer" I had just gotten. That was motivation to try a lot of things and figure it out. My dad never knew in the end coz I fixed it. I also had no internet or other people around to ask for help even if I had wanted to.
But today, if I see someone struggling for a day or two on something that in the end I'll be able to solve for them in less than 5 minutes once they do ask, then I do think that's too long given they have the whole wide internet, AI tooling as well as coworkers to help them out available to them. The worst for me is when they struggle with the same type of stuff over and over or when they are unable to pick up the strategies I used when solving it for/with them. I try to solve things with them as much as I can but with some people it's just too frustrating. Like you want to just throw lots of things at the wall quickly and see if they stick but they're too slow / don't even seem to understand the concept or don't have enough ideas of what to try and throw at the wall.
Google is certainly a monopoly in several sectors, search and YouTube come to mind. Amazon is a duopoly with Walmart and both need to be dismantled, but the damage to main street was done a long time ago. I'm not sure where Apple is a monopoly. People argue the App Store but only for the iPhone and iPad, but I feel that takes some mental gymnastics since it's somewhat niche and other stores for other phones exist.
I agree, but the way the law is applied in the United States, anything that increases prices is more likely to be seen as a monopoly from a legal perspective.
Thats a reason why Apple is so against the opening up of the App market, and wanted to die on the hill of stopping apps for letting people know about offline purchase options.
They had issues long ago with the iBooks Store, of all things. Particularly absurd given the nature of Amazon’s business.
>That makes intuitive sense, but quickly falls apart when you do any rigorous analysis. Buying a house might cover your shelter needs, but you still need to eat, and you can't eat bricks.
This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.
>Moreover if the fear is your portfolio losing value, buying a house doesn't really mitigate that. Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank (eg. something like Detroit).
This analysis is an edge case and in no way represents the norm. I'm not sure of any area that has gone from Bay Area prices to Detroit prices in a single lifetime.
>Even in some sort of apocalypse scenario a house isn't obviously better than stocks, because the whole concept of owning a house relies on some sort of functioning legal system.
Another crazy edge case. It's saying don't buy a house because an asteroid might hit. I'm pretty sure that newly non-functioning legal system wouldn't protect your stock portfolio either. If it comes to that, best to invest in bullets and whiskey.
>On the other hand there are very real problems with investing in "bricks / house". It has historical under-performed stocks.
Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.
>Moreover a single house provides poor diversification compared to a basket of stocks and its performance is tied to the economic health of your local area.
You shouldn't ever put all your money in stocks. Putting money in real estate, bonds, CDs, cash, etc. is the definition of diversification.
>If you lose your job, there's a good chance that your house won't fetch a high price.
Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job. If you lose your job and haven't saved up enough runway, you could default on your mortgage. You could also not pay your rent. You get kicked out either way, but the bank should cut you a check for the equity you have remaining, minus whatever fees they conjure up.
>All of this makes for a poor risk adjusted return, and it's unclear how "has value to you" counters this.
All of your points were based on invalid assumptions, edge cases, or are irrelevant when compared to paying rent. Buying a house is a long game.
>This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.
The problem is that in much of the anglosphere, housing is so scarce that you have to ignore such rules of thumb, or live in the middle of nowhere.
>This analysis is an edge case
>Another crazy edge case
If you ignore edge cases, then you're left with just the median case, and that says that at current price levels, houses aren't worth investing in because they have historically worse returns than stocks, and provide poor diversification.
>Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.
This calculator[1] factors everything you listed, and the math doesn't work out for the hottest housing markets. It might work out for Miami or Huston, but not San Francisco or even Albuquerque. Using default assumptions implies a break-even price-to-rent ratio of 14, but most US metros are far above that[2].
The nice thing about the calculator is that if you don't agree with the assumptions, you can plug in your own numbers. I'd like to see what numbers you come up with to make to make the math work out in favor of buying in the top US cities.
>Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job.
The point isn't that a Bay Area housing market will crash because Google Employee #68908 lost his job, it's that if there was an AI winter/tech crash, that will result in Bay Area housing prices dropping, along with layoffs.
> The problem is that in much of the anglosphere, housing is so scarce that you have to ignore such rules of thumb, or live in the middle of nowhere.
This is a bit circular, supply-and-demand-wise. Especially in the US - why is demand in some areas so high that people will bid houses in San Jose up to 2M+? Why aren't they buying the same thing for 450k in Dallas?
Why aren't the companies based in those crazy expensive areas and paying million-plus total comp to large sections of their workforce being eaten alive by ones with lower labor costs in other regions?
Housing is scarce in the areas that are already the most densely populated, which itself is a bit of yogi-berra moment.
Too much discussion about housing in the US focuses only on the supply side and ignores the geographic concentration of demand that has happened over the last few decades. Is that centralization good for the country in the long-run regardless? Obviously that centralization goes back way longer in many European countries, so was the distribution and the number of growing populaces in cheap, not-yet-established areas part of the secret sauce for the 20th century US? Could you start the companies that made the Bay Area what it is today in today's Bay Area? Could you even start them in somewhere cheaper today, or would you not be able to get the talent to join you there? We're five years into remote work being way more common than it ever was before, and it hasn't broken that stranglehold of concentration yet.
>We're five years into remote work being way more common than it ever was before, and it hasn't broken that stranglehold of concentration yet.
That's partially because big companies decided WFH was now verboten. Part of it was because execs in that area didn't want their personal property values to go down, I suspect. I'm sure there was also governmental pressure as well to protect the auxiliary businesses like local restaurants, protect tax revenue like property tax state income tax, etc.
> This calculator[1] factors everything you listed, and the math doesn't work out for the hottest housing markets
That's a great calculator; I remember using it like a decade ago. And while it includes all factors they listed there are a few it doesn't:
1. If interest rates go down, you can refinance, but if they go up, the inflation and appreciation values likely will as well, but your rate is fixed, for (up to) 30 yrs (!!)
2. It's relatively easy to make improvements while you live there (and capture increased value when you leave)
3. The calculator assumes that the down payment and cost difference vs renting would be invested, which is fine but ignores psychological realities that prevent this more often than not
Also:
> The best hedge is to also "invest" in something that has value to you. Like bricks / house.
The suggestion was mentioned as a 'hedge'. The point being: you don't know what the values entered into the calculator will really end up being. Having some costs locked in can help with concerns around cash flow (and shelter costs are usually a significant percentage of costs overall). It's an "also 'invest'" strategy, so there's a whole lot not included in the calculator here as well
I will agree that this could play a massive factor, but it's a massive "if" you're banking on. There's no guarantee that interest rates will dip, and the longer it doesn't dip the worse the math works out for you. Sure, tons of homeowners refinanced during the pandemic, but that was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Moreover stocks also rallied in the same period, which raised the opportunity cost of the equity you have locked inside your home.
> but if they go up, the inflation and appreciation values likely will as well, but your rate is fixed, for (up to) 30 yrs (!!)
No, higher interest rates makes house prices dip, or at least suppresses growth, not the other way around. All things being equal, higher interest rates means higher monthly payments, which means buyers have less buying power in absolute terms. We see this reflected in housing prices after the fed hiked interest rates.
>2. It's relatively easy to make improvements while you live there (and capture increased value when you leave)
I reject the premise that making improvements is some sort of positive value activity. If you're staying for a long time, then that 10-year old kitchen remodel isn't going to boost prices much by the time you sell. If you're selling in the near future, then you run into the problem of realtor fees eating into any profits, because moving frequently means such fees can't be amortized over longer periods. In either case there's risk associated with renos. They can be botched or go over budget, and all things being equal as a buyer I'd rather buy a non-renovated house for $x, than pay $x + $50k for a house that the previous owner spent $50k renovating. By all means, do that kitchen reno to make your home a nicer place to live, but don't think it's something that pays for itself.
>3. The calculator assumes that the down payment and cost difference vs renting would be invested, which is fine but ignores psychological realities that prevent this more often than not
Fair point, although I seriously doubt people who do rigorous buy vs rent analysis are the type of people who can only be cajoled to save through a house/mortgage
>The suggestion was mentioned as a 'hedge'. The point being: you don't know what the values entered into the calculator will really end up being. Having some costs locked in can help with concerns around cash flow (and shelter costs are usually a significant percentage of costs overall). It's an "also 'invest'" strategy, so there's a whole lot not included in the calculator here as well
The values could easily work against you as well. For instance if housing costs rise slower than expected. This is a real possibility with the rise of YIMBY in politics and boomers selling up as they retire. Moreover how is parking most/all of your savings in a single asset (ie. your house) considered a "hedge"? Maybe it can be construed as a hedge if your portfolio was all MAANA stocks, but I'm not sure how anyone would think shifting from a globally diversified stock/bond portfolio (ie. a bet on the global economy) to a single house in the US is a "hedge".
>It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?
It mattered enough for someone to pay you money to do it, and that money put food on the table and clothes on your body and a roof over your head and allowed you to contribute to larger society through paying taxes.
Is it the same as discovering that E = MC2 or Jonas Salk's contributions? No, but it's not nothing either.
He was virtue signaling. It's sadly all too common these days. As if he or any human isn't capable of horrible atrocities given the right circumstances. Don't let him or anyone stifle your speech. Say what you need to say regardless of the sniping. You can't turn in your karma points for anything anyway, not even a little eraser.
Lying under oath would catch a perjury charge as well.
In the United States, the general perjury statute under federal law classifies perjury as a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to five years.
Stick at it for at least 2 years, keep improving, it will get better. I got a BigCo on my resume early on and I'm glad I got it, but I don't particularly care for BigCos; all the friction makes it too hard to get anything done and it drives me nuts.
>The quality of the apps I'm seeing seems vastly technically overengineered, almost like 100 different hero engineers added their own "tricks" just to seem clever, make a name for themself, make everyone else's life harder, and then pat themselves on the back while writing extensive documentation about why their little chrome extension or alternative way of doing things solves X,Y,Z (while completely ignoring how convoluted and burdensome they've now made something that, while technically inconvenient, was utterly simple to understand prior).
This is what endless interviews full of leet code questions buys them. At least all their engineers can estimate how many ping pong balls will fit in a school bus.
On the contrary though, I've been fascinated with simple non-technical solutions to problems lately. For example, my buddy hates it when people use his driveway to turn around. He lives on a corner lot and the layout is prone to people turning around in his driveway, and apparently this is a pet peeve of his. He was talking about installing a gate, or a retractable pole that he could extend from a hole in the driveway, all these intricate technological solutions, etc. I gave it some thought and got him a street cone off eBay to put in his driveway. I leveraged human psychology over technology and it worked like a charm and only cost $30.
For your example, I would just put a do not disturb sign on the door. The flip around kind they have at hotels. It takes getting up, but just as effective and you get a few steps in. Of course you don't get to learn and build stuff, but like I said, I'm fascinated by simple solutions right now.