1. Between 2008-2019 they just didn't realize they could. I have found the years you quote to be high priced. Competition just went done in every sector I depend on. Banks, cell phone companies, cable, energy prices went up without inflation, etc.
2. The minute we started talking about inflation, every company in my life took advantage of it--overnight.
3. I'm with you on the government spending. I understood the money thrown at Covid, but that's done, and the working poor will never see those checks ever again. And I'm no fan of the Infrastructure Bill.
4. If you don't wonder why gasoline prices fluctuate by a dollar hourly at some stations, while making record profits; I don't know what to say.
5. Every large company made record profits during Covid, and we don't know why?
They didn't lower prices.
Again the $300 extra per week for unemployed people affected by Covid was a one time thing. Companies might get free money as usual, but not the little guys.
It was conservatives (Trumpy) that passed first 2 trillion stimulious package.
America has just a few badly run "socialist" programs.
I think we all have seen our homeless population get bigger each month.
Oh yea, federal government programs. Basically (Cal-fresh, and medi-cal)have gone back to make qualifying very hard.
I have found no rhyme or reason over the huge spike in gas prices other than greed.
Granted, our current president shouldn't have been so negative towards fossil fuels.
That said, he did nothing to create this particular upswing.
My local Chevron gas station 94960 has been fluctuating from $5.50 to 6.40 every other day since Ukraine was invaded.
These oils companies, along with so many other companies, raised prices because they thought they could get away with it. "Let's blame a war. Let's blame inflation.". Oil profits have never been higher. It just smells like cronyism.
I've always wondered why gas prices in the Bay Area are the highest in the nation. While we have huge refineries across the Richmond Bridge.
>I've always wondered why gas prices in the Bay Area are the highest in the nation
Obviously because gas tax in California is the highest in the nation, by quite a margin. CA charges an extra 62.47 cents per gallon, whereas next door Arizona only charges an extra 19 cents per gallon.
It’s OPEC not your local gas station. To be fair everybody in the chain is making lots of money, but the high prices come from sanctioning Russia and OPEC not boosting production because they like money and have limited remaining oil.
I worked at a record store in the 90's. It was right after cd's took over. I think we had 1 record in the store.
I was shocked over the amount of tranquility music we sold. Tranquility was nature sounds. I didn't know about white noise back then, but we probally had it. It was basically music produced cheaply that supposedly relazed people.
I got it. People are stressed. Did listening to calming nature sounds help me--no, but listening to AM radio on a boring station does calm me down, or keeps negative thoughts away.
My sleepy time music was Classic music. Pretty much everything.
Even then becoming a musician was as hard as becomming an artist. There was just no formula besides 1 in a million talent, like Elvis, or just sheer luck, and that meant exposure.
(I am thinking about leaving an old iphone strapped to a tree to record creek sounds tomorrow, and plop it on Spotify under "Songs to calm. Natural, and organic music."), or never leave my house and produce it digitally?)
> My sleepy time music was Classic music. Pretty much everything.
I never had luck with that to be honest.
I’ve tried all classical playlists including all “Classical for Sleep”. It’s just too emotional with a lot of peaks and crescendos. A lot of treble. Demands a lot of attention to itself.
“Sleepy” jazz on the other hand is often comforting, muted and warm.
I'm a inactive General Contractor, and union electrician.
I'm not going to read a 49 page pdf today.
There are two things that really affect supply.
1. Government regulations is number one by a huge margin. We all know what that includes; zoning, persnickety council members who literally debate where a window is placed, the wood or stucco you can use, down to hedges, and even the color of your home. Look at what Bill Mahar had to go through in order to build a shack in his backyard.
(Gavin Neusome made some great changes these last few years. They arn't being used though. Why? It's still dam expensive to build anything. I've noticed a a few well off wealthy guys in my county using ADA units to increase the sq. footage of their homes. But most folks don't have the money to build.
2. The cost of constructing is high. Every-time a new code goes into building it just adds up. And I know how most of you love these safety codes.
The problem with over coding is the law is the law.
My father once got a failed final permit on the electrical Service installation. The law states you need 30" of space around the panel. The Service was in a concrete hallway. He was failed because the panel was 29". The inspector was a childhood friend of my father. Yes--it says something about my father too?
I knew a guy whom was failed a final electrical install because he didn't have the right sticker on two of his receptacle. A sticker. He didn't even know buried in the code there was a law over a missing label. The recepticals were standard 15 amp residential recepticals.
This guy said HUD, and NAHB, are not helping the situation. He is probally right. I did look up NAHB lobby monies for 2021, and it was 3.275 million. Which doesn't seem outrageous.
If this guy's thesis is we need to encourage manufactured housing; I'm all for it. Just pay the guys a union wage.
Housing, and the way we treat our Homeless, are my two big hot buttons. If you don't have a place to sleep, and shower, you are fucked. It's not a big problem. Some "Progressive" jack ass running for something in LA wants to not give a homeless person a room. He wants to house them in army barrack style housing, and using the single room as a carrot if the poor slob is a good boy.
If a guy buys some land, let him do whatever (within reason) with it. And yes, that means putting up a tent on it if he wants.
I'm disenfranchised over our lack of homes in the right economic zones, I don't see much ever happening.
One thing Russia did right during their experiment with Communism is they built those huge concrete apartment buildings. Everyone was pretty much guaranteed a room.
We need those big buildings now. We need to have hard building codes (like foundations, roofing, mechanicals, etc. We then need the soft codes. A guy should have to rip out a Service panel over a 1" violation.
If you are ever interested in what it takes to build anything, watch the community station that plays the local town meetings. I guarantee you will want to throw the remote at the tv.
There used to be one at one of the Cow Palace parking lots in the 80's.
Even then, I was shocked at the low prices.
I stumbled on this Farmer's Market by accident.
I had this security job guarding the Cow Palace on the weekends. The insurance was less if they had a guy on the premises.
I remember seeing my boss (Bill. The nicest boss I ever had. Never forget this huge man walking towards me on a Sunday in complete darkness besides the emergency lights crying while holding a dead cat. He loved the abandoned cats that neighbors left on the property. The higher ups authorized poisoning the cats. I could feel his pain. When I saw the bait traps I disposed of the poison. I was the only one there during the day so I got no reprimands. I thought I'm fired, while carting my huge box of fruits/veggies, and honey, but he didn't care.
Since that day of shopping at that Farmer's market I was ruined I guess? Everone I have been to since was overpriced.
(Here's something to think about. There is a tiny model of the Cow Palace buried below the auditorium floor. Only a few people knew about it then. It was left there by the architects. I had keys to most rooms, and did my fair share of exploring. Seeing that model of the Cow Palace was something out of a Twillight Zone episode. They even put in tiny cars in the parking lots. It was all dusty, but an exact model of the Cow Palace in Daly City.)
Their screwdrivers arn't as good as Snapon, but neither do they cost a fortune.
My standard commercial job tooling was a side cutter (Klein, or whatever I had at the time), a slotted screwdriver, wire stripper, and drywall knife.
I kept my tools in one pocket of my overalls. I learned pretty quick, I didn't need a bunch of tools to do most run of the mill office wiring.
My "Kleins" were used as a hammer.
Most union electricians really didn't even talk about the brand. They just used their tools.
(Tooling has gotten very good these days though. My days of paying more for a name brand in hand tools are over. I got one, actually two complaints while working on PacPell park. An architect complained to my shop boss over my use of the word "Dykes". My nippers were called dykes by my father, and it stuck with me. The architect thought I was referring to her when I said, "Where are my dykes? He told her that is what some guys we call their side cutters, and everything was fine. The second complain was never tied to me, but I was the one urinating in the finished locker rooms. We were suspose to use the porta potties, but they were always far away, and smelled. Oh yea, my initials are on the top of every locker. I put my initials on the pressed wood before the Cherry laminate went on. When there's a remodel, and those lockers are torn out, they will see my initials. Why? I was bored one morning.)
The watch industry used to vet repair Watch Repair shops on the guise of "Quality Assurance". They would require Watchmakers buy their expensive cleaning machines, and a bunch of other pricy tooling, and requirements; in order to procure parts. 90% of watchmakers couldn't get a parts accout, and the watch companies loved it. it meant more after sales/warranty business.
This was because they didn't want to sell parts to anyone. They wanted to do the repairs
For a few years, certain Watchmakers kept up with the demands from Rolex, and The Swatch Group.
We were just happy to be able to get parts.
About 15 years ago the watch companies just decided not to sell parts to anyone.
That whole Vertical Intregtation consumer ripoff.
I am very leary of any company that wants to vet their repair shops for anything, other than maybe medical equipment.
They will supply the schematics, but they don't want to make it easy.
It is not them though, they clearly just follow rules here that they have to obey. But I think it is a great idea to compare it with the watch market - independent repair shops there have neven seen like a bad idea, and the schematics are pretty much always open - in that the movement is just there, accessible - and the watches are copyable. Which happens a lot though - might not be the most convincing argument if that were the fear.
I know a few people whom keep up on tech trends, even though it has nothing to do with their job.
I follow programming trends, basically through HN, and self study. (I have wasted a lot of money on programming/Computing books.), and I'm basically a Jack of all Trades in life.
I'm a mechanic certain years. I'm a contractor certain years. I'm a Electrician when I am very low on money. I'm a Watchmaker whenever someone asks me what I do. (I hate that last sociatial question. When did it become copacetic to ask for job status, and finances. I guess it came with the Selfie. (I didn't use a question mark on purpose. Too disenfranchised today to care.)
I do miss the days before relying on bloated JS libraries.
I miss the LAMP days for my personal websites.
There was a free server I used to use, but forget it's name.
It allowed full domain names without their branding. Like mysite.com, instead of mysite.com.branding.
I know Git, Google, and Amazon offer a free page, but I just don't like learning their way of putting up a site.
As you can by my verbage, I'm not a professional.
But for some reason I try to stay current on certain aspects of this industry.
> I'm a Watchmaker whenever someone asks me what I do. (I hate that last sociatial question. When did it become copacetic to ask for job status, and finances. I guess it came with the Selfie.
It significantly predates the selfie. Tyler Durden mocked the question in Fight Club before smart phones existed, and it was already very old then. I'd bet money you could find films and books in the '50s that document that question (I think I know of a novel that does, but I'd have to double-check to be sure). I bet the only reason it'd be harder to find in 18th and 19th century literature is that so much of that was by and for aristocrats. Pre-industrial-revolution, perhaps it was an uncommon question.
It makes sense in a world where most people spend the best 40+ hours of their week working a job for wages, lose another 5-10 good hours to commuting to that job, and the rest of their waking time is spent desperately catching up on neglected housework and recovering from that 40 hours. It's only outliers who are bugged by the question, or see it as presumptuous. These outliers usually have settled for a lot less than most people are willing to (materially, and maybe family-wise—this'd be your Tyler Durdens, your actually-poor-and-not-just-slumming-it bohemian sorts or members of Fussell's "Class X"), or else have found themselves in a situation where they're much richer than most people but don't have to work all that hard for it (some of the Fussellian upper-middle, especially later in their careers, plus your usual trust-fund kids).
I have no qualms on the salary. I would love an extra $15 a day for food.
The size of the classes at Berkeley has always had me scratching my head for decades now.
"I found it really difficult to balance CS61A (a massive class of 2000) with CS169A (still a fairly large class of 350), since 169A required a fair bit of work in writing quizzes/exams (5 quizzes, 1 exam), grading open-ended homework assignments, and staff management."
I knew people who went to Berkeley years ago, and was shocked at the class sizes.
I've worked with Berkeley grads, and besides constantly signaling they went to Berkeley; I wasen't impressed with their abilities. (That goes for all the fancy schools though? All the ones we are suspose to be wowed by.)
Then again some of the guys I worked with whom really impressed me were college dropouts, or mainly self taught.
Doing programming as a job has little overlap with what is learned at university. You don’t need a degree to be a coder. It is effectively a proof of work.
A “problem” in the 90s is going to uni was rarer and so I felt a bit arrogant that I was going.
One if the best at your school doesn’t mean one of the best at uni though! And I realised while I like maths, it is the maths you can visualize. My favourite was calculus and learning about limits! Just imagine it getting smaller right. But then it got more and more abstract. I lost the love of studying it and the intuition.
So in a nutshell I am saying Dunning-Kruger. But I could have been just a good coder if I got a job with other coders to learn the craft and nothing beyond 0-16 yo learning. I would have self taught stuff to the same difficulty as the 16-21 yo learning but on applied topics. Learning Windows internals for example or Linux - depending on where the job took me.
2. The minute we started talking about inflation, every company in my life took advantage of it--overnight.
3. I'm with you on the government spending. I understood the money thrown at Covid, but that's done, and the working poor will never see those checks ever again. And I'm no fan of the Infrastructure Bill.
4. If you don't wonder why gasoline prices fluctuate by a dollar hourly at some stations, while making record profits; I don't know what to say.
5. Every large company made record profits during Covid, and we don't know why? They didn't lower prices.
Again the $300 extra per week for unemployed people affected by Covid was a one time thing. Companies might get free money as usual, but not the little guys.
It was conservatives (Trumpy) that passed first 2 trillion stimulious package.
America has just a few badly run "socialist" programs.
I think we all have seen our homeless population get bigger each month.
Oh yea, federal government programs. Basically (Cal-fresh, and medi-cal)have gone back to make qualifying very hard.