I work with high-profile editorial and art staff. They need those quotes! They're often great at knowing how to insert them themselves, but others need that short cut. As it is, the quotes are hidden at `Opt + [` and `Opt + Shift + [` on my machine (Canadian English layout). [Oh, the war stories I have trying to sanitize text for moving from platform to platform...]

We're not the only ones using keyboards anymore, and we're in the minority of those who do!

Oh God yes! You get an obscure syntax error and it really isn't obvious what the problem is. It would be useful if syntax highlighting marked smart quotes (outside of strings) with a bright red background or something.

> AMD has been doing great work over the past few years

Yes - thus "MS's fortunes" is also tied to AMD.

> but they've traditionally been a much smaller outfit

Tradition isn't really the key here. Intel does explore more markets and holds much more market share (specifically desktop and laptop PCs) right now. AMD has been steadily growing in the desktop/laptop space, aside from their semi-custom (console) business, and they have made meaningful strides in performance and efficiency that at least keep Windows (and thus Microsoft) in the game now that Apple Silicon M1 has brought Macs to the table as competitive performers.

But - I'm less convinced Microsoft has to copy Apple and design efficient ARM chips in-house in order to remain competitive, at least in the PC business. I think we'll see some shifts in market share from Windows to MacOS, initially in laptops, and the rest will remain to be seen, but Apple should certainly become competitive in other PC areas as they roll out their new lines of CPUs. There are plenty of areas where AMD's performance CPUs remain very competitive, and Windows is still the preferred "mainstream" and "gamer" platform.

Yep, that's the punch line

I have a friend from France who has a successful career in software (making good money in the United States).

His parents are kind of disappointed in my friend, though, because they don't believe his career is a "real job" (like a lawyer, doctor, financier etc.).

I think this is a contributing factor to why people leave. "Software Engineer", for all our quibbles over what it means, is comparatively well-respected and well-compensated job in the US. People want to live and work where their skills are valued.

Also the co-founder of Docker (lots of French people at Docker too, from what I know).

It's something I never understood.

Worked along folks from EPFL, the X and Poly. What they told me about their startup ecosystem back home was unbelievable. And compensation was a joke too.

Are French folks... aware their smartest are in California?

Isn’t Miami literally sinking into the ocean (unlike Silicon Valley which is figuratively gone Atlantis) ?

Boise is booming but more focused toward retirees than young families. Miami and Austin seem to have a larger influx of all types.

If you stay in downtown SF in a "YIMBY"/new construction building, there's no rent control and the prices are astronomical. $3900ish for the cheapest studio in some buildings.

One way that other states have done it more intelligently is to allow people to stay in their homes as long as they want, and not paying the proper tax bill. When they die/sell, that $ liability gets deducted from their house sale price.

The bad features and bad side effects are the point, avoiding forcing people on limited incomes out of their homes was a convenient leverage point that could be much better served by more targeted policy.

Like, for one, if that was actually your policy goal, the policy would only apply to primary residences, not all real property.

> That's under 3% inflation which is a not breathtaking.

Perhaps it is better to say that I am caught off-guard by the power of compound interest.

> The Fed targets 2%, which helps avoid deflationary spirals and helps both stability and lowers unemployment, two of their mandates.

I am generally skeptical of the Fed, but that's an entirely different discussion, so I'll just nod my head and move along.

> Wages have surpassed inflation in just about every income bracket for the past 100 years. And when you factor in total remuneration, returns to workers are even higher. Here's 50+ years of data [1]

That is good to see, thanks!

> No one in their right mind holds cash savings for 35 years. It's a ludicrously long time to simply hold your savings in a cash pile.

True, but people do usually place their money in a savings account. And while in theory the interest from the savings account should exceed inflation, it seems to me the mere fact of inflation means that people who have primarily cash savings are needlessly penalized.

But while it is absurd to store you money in a coffee can in the shed for 30+ years, I'm not sure it should be.

> Wages have surpassed inflation in just about every income bracket for the past 100 years. And when you factor in total remuneration, returns to workers are even higher. Here's 50+ years of data [1]

> [1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44705.pdf

This document is 47 pages long. Can you cite the page or section you're referring to?

Being rotten, never stopped anyone.

The biggest problem is that money can get easily into China, but not so easily out of it.

Regardless of your opinion on Chinese politics (or your opinion on California politics for that matter), Shenzhen is absolutely blowing up. Just talking with random tech and startup people there, you feel an energy and optimism that is hard to find in the bay area these days. As a non-Chinese citizen, investing in property there feels a bit too risky for my appetite, but I certainly would not bet against it.

And the states are not?

But the total import of China in 2019 is $2.09 trillion. Which is 5 times the surplus you mentioned.

If your think that surplus is a lot, then 5 times that is definitely not "they don't import much"

>That is one hell of a presumption. Did I offend you?

I'm not offended. You've stated how surprised you are about several thing that someone having studied such things would have seen. I didn't mean to offend - but to point out that if you have not studied them, it's not unreasonable to assume those who have worked on them for a lifetime have some knowledge about them you may not.

Did you study them?

>This is a complete non-sequitor. It's physics envy and posturing nonsense.

No, it's putting some context. If you've studied some complex field in depth, you know how detailed and useful the knowledge is, and that it's generally opaque to those who have not put the time in.

>The successes of physics and medicine have no bearing on whether mainstream economics is a complete crock.

Yes, they do, since all rely on the same processes to weed out error over time.

>In the soft sciences like economics, the expert doesn't necessarily bring more to the table than the reasonably well-read layman.

Wow. Ok, now I am sure you have not studied them at any academic or professional level, and I see why you're so mad and believe such fringe things about money. Having met enough people like you that are sure you or people like you bring as much to an econ discussion as experts despite what you've written here is the epitome of Dunning Krueger. And that I did mean directly. I never understand why people that know a lot about some area of knowledge assume they are expert level proficient in others without putting equivalent time in.

Have a nice day.

This is hogwash, and a lie mostly propagated by blue check journo twitter. Remember, twitter is not representative of anything even close to consensus political opinion. It's mostly an echo chamber for elites patting themselves on the back for their "correct" opinions https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/twitt...

That may contribute to affordability but if supply was constrained to stop it reaching demand prices would have risen, tiny apartments or no. See San Francisco where glorified closets are a lot more expensive than in Tokyo. Prices haven’t risen in Tokyo because supply has risen. They have in many, many cities all over the Anglosphere. That’s a policy choice. Not a law of nature.

That's the compromise you have to make to live in the biggest city in the world (metro population: 37 million people).

It's nice that those are legal, yes, but the price per square foot is a good deal cheaper than SF too.

Even hotel rooms are in Tokyo are tiny compared with US hotel rooms.

Talking about the size of living space in a discussion of free marking housing costs is irrelevant. The only fact that matters is cost per unit area, the free market will decide how much area people are willing to pay for (assuming, of course, that there is a free market that is able to construct smaller or larger living spaces. Japan has one of these, whereas the United States typically does not thanks to most municipalities' zoning law)

In Tokyo, land is extraordinarily expensive but living space is only ordinarily expensive (and not nearly as expensive as many US cities). As a consequence, a quick google search[0] suggests that a new single family home in Tokyo's 23 wards will cost you $600,000 with about 1051 square feet of living space, or roughly $600 per square foot, and in the distant suburbs (with long train commutes, an hour minimum but maybe 90 minutes or more to shinjuku. would be fine for a remote worker though) you can get a house for around $400,000 although this article regrettably does not mention if these houses are the same size on average or not (so $400 per square foot or less, not quite sure).

In terms of the urban form of the streetscape, expensive land coupled with the fact that you can legally subdivide your land, means that houses are very crammed together with almost no space in between in major cities, and especially in Tokyo. That said it's a free market - there are larger lots you can buy, and if you really want a big property I'm sure you could buy neighboring lots and combine them somehow (demolition of existing properties is normal anyways - if you really want a buffer from your neighbors, build a house that's smaller than your lot size!). In contrast, most municipalities in the US mandate a certain space between houses and/or require getting special zoning board approval to subdivide your lot, which means that there's essentially a "minimum" lot size, which turns into a minimum house cost of (minimum lot size * land price).

Additionally there will always be concerns about standard of living. IMO Japanese homes are, in some ways better, but in many ways worse, standard of living than American homes. For example, my impression is that the HVAC situation is typically much worse than the standard american home (although where I live in boston the "AC" is usually nonexistant since most homes are 100+ years old, but atleast the heating is good). On the other hand, Japanese bathrooms are a godsend, if you haven't experienced it you don't know. The biggest concern to me is the sound insulation, which can be poor in many cheap wood-framed Japanese homes (true in many cheap new construction American homes too, as well as some older American constructions. It always depends I suppose! But atleast in sprawling american suburbs you don't hear your neighbor as often through those walls because houses are spread out enough.)

Finally, as a note, while all the above is talking about Tokyo and it's suburbs, there are other big booming cities in Japan (Osaka is popular) which are often 30% or more cheaper but with many of the same big-city amenities like transit, walkability, restaurants and culture, and so on. In terms of price, Tokyo really is like the NYC of Japan, but it's actually affordable for the average family, albeit with either a small home or a long commute.

TL;DR : in Tokyo, land is really expensive, living space is moderately expensive, the free market has converged to fairly small living spaces relative to the US. In the rest of Japan (and distant suburbs to Tokyo), land is moderately expensive and living space is fairly cheap.

[0] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/how-much-does-it-cost...

Addendum: to someone interested in suburban/rural housing in Japan, there's a youtube channel TokyoLlama with a series on his purchasing one of those abandoned houses in a distant tokyo suburb, about 50 minutes out of the city by train. It's an old, beautiful, artisan wood house. At some point in the series he covers all the costs associated with buying the house, as well as various costs and effort to renovate it and make it livable.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/TokyoLlama/videos

Quite. So increase supply. Build, build, build.

Building is very much regulated in Tokyo and throughout Japan. Just pointing out that unaffordable housing is a policy choice, not a law of nature.

I sometimes feel we're not living in the fully realized cyberpunk dystopia we were promised without a bunch of ramshackle buildings piled on top of each other and stolen data flowing through it all.

Shinkansen (bullet train) commuting is a marginal phenomenon, with a few thousands doing it in a metropolis of 20M+. Highly reliable commuter railways with cheap express services are the backbone (and genesis) of Tokyo's sprawl.

> Thus you lose the benefit of being in the city (close to work, close to friends, close to cultural offerings, close to shops, close to ...)

This is the “Brooklyn is boring” problem. It’s temporary. The old city centre (Manhattan) is unlikely to decline rapidly in relative importance but cultural and economic life will happily extend itself from central areas to less central ones given the population and the money to make it worthwhile. Good transport links help enormously too.

Yes, though there is still room in the Tokyo metro area for even more growth, both vertically and horizontally. Even though Japan's population is declining, Tokyo Prefecture and its neighboring prefectures were still growing pre-pandemic (although I remember reading that since the COVID-19 pandemic struck there's a growing interest in living in more rural parts of Japan.) Regarding horizontal growth, there is still plenty of agricultural land in the Chiba and Ibaraki prefectures east of Tokyo that can be developed. In fact, when I take the Narita Express from the Narita International Airport to Tokyo, I pass by plenty of agricultural areas before reaching the easternmost fringes of the Tokyo metro area's urban sprawl. Another area where urban sprawl could occur is the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture just south of Mt. Fuji, where the beach resort town of Atami is located.

Regarding horizontal growth, there are plenty of places in the Tokyo metro area being redeveloped horizontally, such as the Musashi-Kosugi area of Kawasaki, which is just a 20 minute train ride on regular commuter trains like the Tokyu Toyoko Line and the JR Shonan-Shinjuku Line to Shibuya, a major hub in Tokyo. Over the past 15 years there has been a lot of development of high-rise residences in the area. Futako-tamagawa is another area of Tokyo that has seen much horizontal growth, starting with the Rise shopping center and nearby high-rise residences that opened around 2011. Rakuten moved its headquarters from Shinagawa to Futako-tamagawa sometime in the late 2010s, which has further boosted the desirability of Futako-tamagawa and neighboring areas such as Mizonokuchi just across the river in Kawasaki.

Disclaimer: I live near Silicon Valley but I travel to Japan roughly once every other year.