8,041 karma · joined July 10, 2012
There's lots of vacant land on the SF peninsula, but no cheap land. There is cheaper land (not the same as cheap land), as you say, in the east bay, but the non-SF tech jobs tend to be on the peninsula or south bay.
BTW, this is the first time that I've heard Belmont or San Mateo or Redwood City being described as "ritzy." :)
It's not as much a hierarchy as different areas appealing to different types of people and families, with a big property size/walkability dividing line being I-280.
Let's say you have the nice problem of spending $10M+ on a house. If you want acreage and multiple guest houses and privacy and your own vineyard and stable, you might end up west of the 280 in Woodside off of Whiskey Hill Road. This is the Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs (Jackling House), Thomas Siebel, and Gordon Moore approach. Trivia: I was talking to a general contractor last week who said Gordon Moore's home upgrades/maintenance on his estate in a private valley on the north end of Woodside kept his business afloat during the 2008 downturn. If you want significant acreage, you'll need to budget tens of millions.
But in Woodside you don't get very much within walking or horseback distance, except Roberts Market/Bucks/Woodside Cafe. If you prefer the south bay with even less within walking distance, you might end up in Los Altos Hills or the hills overlooking Saratoga or Los Gatos. Portola Valley is another option.
If you want a 10,000+ ft^2 estate behind walls close to El Camino, you choose Atherton. If you want to be able to commute to SF and don't mind cooler weather, you choose Hillsborough. If you want to walk to a thriving downtown area with excellent restaurants, you (likely) lose the walls and gates and buy a more modest house for the same price in Palo Alto. The Palo Alto approach is what some Google and eBay executives have done, what Steve Jobs did in addition to the Jackling House, and what Tim Cook reportedly has done.
And here I thought it was because Stanford owns over 8,000 acres and is exempt from paying state property taxes on it. :) Cite: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/business/california-scruti...
I spent a few years covering 2A topics for CBS News.com (this is before I left to found Recent.io). This is true in my experience. As <brudgers> says, you can be interested in shooting sports without being interested in hunting, but I've found that both groups of people tend to be broadly pro-2A.
Note this may not have been true a generation or so ago. But since then, we've seen a ratchet effect where anti-gun politicians have tried to impose more and more restrictions. One effect has been to turn the NRA into the potent political force it is today. This coincided with the rise of the anti-gun left, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who in this clip seems to say she wanted to ban all guns (or all rifles?) but didn't have enough votes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rA6oX6eWWs Barack Obama, or his aide, filled out a questionnaire in 1996 saying he supported a state law banning the "manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns": http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire1newes... http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire2.html San Francisco tried to ban possession of all handguns: http://mccullagh.org/sf/handgun-ban/ And so on.
This has been done in the name of cracking down on gun crimes. But the same weapon that can drop a 250-lb deer can also drop a 180-lb man, and even casual gun owners have become politically active and aware in a way they were not a generation ago (when politicians on the left were not as anti-gun as they are today). Also some of the recent wave of anti-gun legislation sweeps in weapons used for hunting purposes, which helps to explain this support for 2A rights.
Housing prices on the SF peninsula once were in line with the rest of the country. Then came anti-development fervor, pushed in large part by existing homeowners who benefited from a rise in demand coupled by fixed supply.
That's one reason why, even though I have enough land to build a small guest cottage that I could then rent out on the SF peninsula, my local government makes it cost-prohibitive or impossible to do (can't cut down trees, can't disturb natural habitat, can't build within 40' of a stream, etc.). That's also why Facebook's massive new campus logically should be surrounded by high-density housing instead of ranch homes on quarter-acre lots, and isn't, and why no housing can be built within walking distance of the Googleplex in MV.
Thomas Sowell, an economist at Stanford's Hoover Institution, wrote about this back in April:
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20140423-op... "There are people who claim that astronomical housing prices in places like Palo Alto and San Francisco are due to a scarcity of land. But there is enough vacant land (open space) on the other side of the Interstate 280 freeway that goes past Palo Alto to build another Palo Alto or two — except for laws and policies that make it impossible. As in San Francisco and other parts of the country where housing prices skyrocketed after building homes was prohibited or severely restricted, this began in Palo Alto in the 1970s. Housing prices in Palo Alto nearly quadrupled during that decade. This was not from expensive houses being built, because not a single new house was built in Palo Alto in the 1970s. The same old houses simply shot up in price. That is part of the unacknowledged cost of open space and just part of the high cost of liberalism."
Neither is Manhattan. From the NYT in 2009, and prices for schools and child care and real estate have only gone up since then:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/fashion/08halfmill.html "Five hundred thousand dollars — the amount President Obama wants to set as the top pay for banking executives whose firms accept government bailout money — seems like a lot, and it is a lot. To many people in many places, it is a princely sum to live on. But in the neighborhoods of New York City and its suburban enclaves where successful bankers live, half a million a year can go very fast."
A lot of this is real estate and private schools, of course. You could get a 5br/5,000 ft^2 house in Green Bay, Wisconsin for 400K: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3318-Whittier-Ct-Green-Bay...
While a 5br/5,000 ft^2 prewar apartment (not even a single-family home!) in Manhattan would be $24M, and that's with a kinda small and not very attractive kitchen: http://www.mironproperties.com/NY/NYC-Apartment-38737-Upper-...
Many folks, like you, are better off moving away from the Bay Area and taking a salary cut if they don't already own a house and would like to buy one.
These $1.5M single family homes (and those would be far lower than the median in many towns around here) tend to be owned by double-income professionals or long-standing owners paying pennies on the dollar in property taxes who have little incentive to sell. On the higher end, I've seen folks with significant liquidity events who no longer rely on income move to Palo Alto or Woodside, or perhaps Los Altos or Portola Valley, but then you're talking $5M+ and over 4,000 ft^2 and possibly a guest house or pool house too.
In my neighborhood there's a CEO at a funded sensor chip startup whose wife works at a large tech company, a physician married to another professional, an investment banker whose spouse doesn't work, some Stanford faculty married to other professionals, a partner at a major Silicon Valley law firm, and some retirees. The retirees are often paying around 1/20th what I do in property taxes -- less than what they'd pay if they were to move to Florida or Nevada, I imagine.
To try to answer your question more directly, if you're buying a $1.5M place and putting 20% down, Zillow says you can afford the resulting mortgage on a $265K/year salary: http://www.zillow.com/mortgage-calculator/house-affordabilit...
That seems like a stretch to me, but if it's accurate and banks believe it, you could get a mortgage on that $1.5M house if each person is making $140K a year or thereabouts. Hope it doesn't need repairs or remodeling!
Facebook did not enable SSL by default until about only half a year before Edward Snowden went public: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/11/14/platfor...
The absence of SSL and presence of plenty of fiber taps provides a pretty big big data stream to mine...
http://www.braysisland.org/ "Recognized by enthusiasts as one of the premier locations for bird hunting in the southeast, Brays Island provides everything you need for a memorable and productive hunt. Of the island's 5,500 acres, 3,500 are untouched woods, marshes and fields set aside as nature preserves to guarantee your hunting enjoyment..."
"The Brays Island Gun Club is the premier site for the enjoyment of shooting sports. With the finest facilities for clay shooting, we offer numerous forms of target shooting, including skeet, trap, five-stand, plus a newly re-designed sporting clays course featuring a picturesque 15 stations..."
I'm not a hunter, but the inn looks quite pleasant. I'd go there for a visit if I were retired.
(Perhaps I'm overly cynical, though I've seen this before on other platforms.)
I haven't used Ruby Motion myself -- do you know how much of the code can be reused excluding platform-specific UI stuff? There's a significant difference between 5% and 95%. :)
* Porn exists on the Internet! LET'S PASS A LAW BANNING IT. That became the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
* Images of adult porn actors can be morphed to look like minors! LET'S PASS A LAW BANNING IT. That became the Child Pornography Prevention Act.
* U.S. citizens can use encryption that can't be easily broken by FedGov! LET'S PASS A LAW BANNING IT. That became the bill approved by one House of Representatives committee, which did not become law.
* Spam exists! LET'S PASS A LAW BANNING IT. Except the Can-Spam act actually legalized spam with opt-out mechanisms and overruled state laws that actually did ban it.
* Internet piracy exists! LET'S PASS A LAW BANNING IT. The No Electronic Theft Act made it a federal felony punishable by years in prison to share a copy of, say, Microsoft Office with your friend.
* Gambling exists on the Internet! LET'S PASS A LAW BANNING IT. That became the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.
* Porn still exists on the Internet! LET'S PASS A LAW BANNING IT IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES. That became the Children’s Internet Protection Act.
* U.S. citizens still can use encryption that can't be easily broken! LET'S PASS A LAW REQUIRING SURVEILLANCE BACKDOORS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS, EMAIL PROVIDERS, PHOTO SHARING STARTUPS, ETC. That became the FBI's draft legislation; my article disclosing details in 2012 is here: http://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-we-need-wiretap-ready-web-sites...
Politicians are reactionary. Some of the above laws did not get enacted or were struck down; others are on the books today. We shouldn't count on congresscritters to do the right thing when the law is provably, laughably out of date. In fact, generally they do exactly the wrong thing. :)
If I were the hiring manager (and I've been a hiring manager before) and were aware of your probation, I'd be curious and want to skim the plea agreement. But if you were doing white-hat stuff, as you say, it wouldn't interfere with me offering you a job.
You're right that option #2 can work: EFF has represented me and a dozen or so other plaintiffs in a case where we won at the Supreme Court, and the ACLU has represented me in two cases. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't admit the possibility of winning is real. :)
But if you argue for option #1, history matters: what significant pro-privacy law has Congress enacted in the last 15-20 years? (I can name plenty that have gone in the other direction.)
More to the point, HN readers are more likely to be in a position to pursue option #3. We do have a few lawyers and law students here, but far more engineers, CS students, and programmers.
But it also shows how long it takes for the legal system to fix these problems. I wrote these articles over 7 years ago about how cops in San Francisco and elsewhere were searching phones a decade ago, and the practice has likely been going on for even longer: http://news.cnet.com/Police-Blotter-Cops-need-warrant-to-sea... http://news.cnet.com/Police-blotter-Cops-OK-to-copy-cell-pho...
This may be a lesson for HN readers trying to solve privacy problems.
Option #1, enacting a new law, tends to be an exercise in futility: California rejected a fix to cell phone searches in 2011, and Congress did nothing on cell phone searches (nor has it enacted a law to fix warrantless email searches or rein in the NSA post-Snowden).
Option #2, relying on the courts, may work, but it may not. It took 10 years to fix cell phone searches, and only after millions of dollars worth of concerted advocacy by EFF, ACLU, etc. And it might have gone the other way: remember the courts have blessed the erosion of Fourth Amendment protections because of the War On Some Politically Unpopular Drugs.
Option #3, creating technology, works as soon as you can deploy it, and is subject to the laws of mathematics rather than whether a SCOTUS justice is a crankypants today when it comes to privacy. Of course the NSA may try to subvert your encryption/anonymizer/etc., but its attempts may fail, and, besides, intelligence agencies already subverted Congress long ago. :)
Note I'm not making a normative statement here; rather I'm agreeing with the previous statement that this is FedGov's claim about the extent to which the BoR applies to non-US citizens abroad.
If I were Microsoft, I'd give significant $$$ to folks who have created cross-platform app development platforms. Then I can improve the number of Windows Phone apps pretty quickly. I may not get apps optimized for my platform, but at least I'd have something, and then I could offer additional incentives for optimization. That's what Amazon is doing with the Fire phone and developer credits.
Xamarin would be one example, and PhoneGap (or whatever it's called now) can probably be made far nicer and faster. Last year Microsoft did announce a partnership with Corona, but as far as I know nothing has come of it yet in terms of a public release of the SDK: http://coronalabs.com/blog/2013/10/29/windows-phone-8-and-wi...
There's a big difference between accidentally traveling back in time with only your laptop + dev environment while you're typing at Starbucks and intentionally doing it.
If accidental, I don't think the cached text or HTML contents of my MacBook's filesystem would be that terribly helpful in predicting the future (though having modern source code would be interesting, and of course there's the hardware itself). My own knowledge of the last few decades would likely be more useful.
If intentional and I have some time to prepare, then I can show up with Wikipedia, stock prices, racing results (Back to the Future got this right), scientific papers, etc. Wikipedia compressed is only ~9GB as of Feb 2014. Perhaps then find some relatives and convince them I'm legit.
To offer proof of time travel, describe future events and publish the uuencoded checksums-with-nonce in an NYT classified ad in advance. Both checksums and uuencoding existed in the 1980s and they certainly could have existed on the Unix boxes of the 1970s (maybe they did). Signing with a private key would work after 1976 in the public literature, or 1973 for GCHQ, but would probably be a bit too obscure for easy verification for another decade or so, barring disruption of the timestream.
Can the same not be said about virtually every prominent politician or bureaucrat around the world? I spent a decade in DC and can think of precious few cases where this is not true.
I've known Julian since the 1990s. While he and I likely still have the same policy disagreements we argued about back then, I'd say the world would be a better place if we had more people like him and fewer of our current crop of politicians and bureaucrats in power.
Put another way, I'm not as interested in complaints about someone's personality ("he's so self-centered!" "manipulative!") as I am in the public policy work they do. That's where you might find some room for criticism here.
If anything, that Lawfare post punctuates how the courts have been ineffective in curtailing NSA even before the Clapper decision, and how Congress has expanded surveillance. Excerpts:
"in its first-ever decision in In re Sealed Case, the FISA Court of Review held that such legislation [Patriot Act] did not itself violate the Fourth Amendment..."
"Congress in the FAA (building on the Protect America Act of 2007) specifically authorized programmatic warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance in a manner almost guaranteed to sweep up a substantial volume of communications involving U.S. persons..."
Nice try, though. Still waiting for that list of successful court challenges that reined in the NSA. :)
http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/foreign.shtml "An immigrant may make a [political] contribution if he or she has a 'green card' indicating his or her lawful admittance for permanent residence in the United States."
The real way to do it, which I've written about occasionally for the last decade, is to identify the worst surveillance offenders of each major party. Narrow down the list to ones who are electorally vulnerable (this excludes Feinstein, for instance). You'll need to spend millions of dollars on ads reminding voters how thoroughly the incumbent disrespects the Constitution. Also encourage contributions to the incumbent's challenger. Only do this where you're likely to win. Committee chairmen would be ideal. Be thoroughly non-partisan and focused only on surveillance.
Once you do that, and have a Cantor-like upset against the pro-surveillance, anti-privacy incumbent, suddenly privacy will be taken far more seriously on Capitol Hill. Politicians will respond better to this than a useless $1,000 PAC contribution.
Sure, a rank-and-file cop stalking an ex-girlfriend by looking up her whereabouts in a law enforcement database may occasionally get disciplined. I'm talking about people with "director" or "section chief" or "attorney general" somewhere in their title.
EFF, and to a lesser extent the ACLU, has been doing this for over 20 years.
>more of ordinary people who understand that these kinds of reforms need to happen, but aren't interested in being a member of such an organization.
You don't need to be a member of EFF to sign up for their alerts.
Can you list these "successful court challenges" that have taken place in open court in the last generation? Say, 30 years?
You're not talking about the Sixth Circuit decision in 2007 tossing out the attempt to challenge NSA warrantless surveillance, I take it? :)
Edit: Or the 9th Circuit affirming the dismissal of another case in June 2013. Or the Supreme Court in February 2013 holding plaintiffs did not have standing to sue the NSA. Or EFF's Jewel case, which is ongoing six years later without resolution. Or the Supreme Court in November 2013 rejecting EPIC's mandamus petition in NSA lawsuit. Etc.
That is, at least until the Woz-edition Apple IIgs came along a few years later!
Like someone else in this discussion, I don't know how my life would have turned out if it weren't for the Apple IIe/IIgs. I likely wouldn't have learned how to program, wouldn't have been exposed to those early glimmerings of hacker culture, wouldn't have gone into technology journalism, and wouldn't have left technology journalism to found http://recent.io/. On the downside, unlearning the bad habits of Applesoft BASIC is a life's work! :)