nshelly

While I think the US has massive cost overruns compared to other developed nations, and this fact makes a huge selling point to the public on a need for political reform, I think we should compare smaller projects to explain why. Let's compare one cost and time to fix a street light, or a train carriage in London, Paris, Seattle and NYC. Or even building a public playground. This would probably explain in detail how the cost of labor, planning parts, etc is so much more in parts of the US than overseas. Until US cities can do projects that are small than unfortunately it can't expect the public to really want to fund these larger, much more expensive projects.

Unlikely. Humans are always adverse to strange cultures and people. For sure, it's going to be tough. Tough for people who crave stability and status quo, and much tougher for those who have to leave their homes and communities where they grew up and face hostile regimes.

Humans have solved many seemingly intractable problems related to economic growth on the local and national level, such as smog, acid rain and the pollution of water sources. And at least have indefinitely delayed many man-made problems on the global level, like a thermonuclear war and racially-defined empires.

Will we have to adapt and possibly vacate large parts of the world? Yes. Will we have to look into hydroponics for seafood and other luxuries we have today? Possibly. But let's not give up hope. Negativity can lead to lack of action and there are millions, if not billions of lives at stake, and those of endangered species or large mammals for those who think there are already too many humans on this planet already. Canada, Alaska and land in developed countries in northern climates are well-positioned for climate change relative to other parts of the world. Maybe we could look at protecting vast swathes of open land, such as the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge or parkland in the western United States. There's incremental things everyone can do that make a huge difference.

There's actually a proposal for a ballot measure next year to end Prop 13 for commercial properties -- definitely a start. It would bring $11 billion in revenue every year.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essentia...

And House rules give the top positions based on seniority, so states are incentivized to gerrymander to protect their senior representatives. We need to change Congressional rules in that regard as well. Due to top-two, California lost a 40-year incumbent in Fremont who was fifth in seniority in the 435-member House. Sometimes California takes it on the chin with its referendum when doing things that are against its current best interests but provide a useful experiment and forcing function.

A 40-year incumbent in Fremont actually lost to a younger candidate who seemed less controversial. In a primary, the younger / newer candidate may not have won due to lower turnout. Of course, the incumbent was 5th in seniority in the 435-member House, so California is hurt in that way due to House rules, which perversely, favor long-rooted incumbency and states with strong gerrymandering.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2012/11/...

Largely agree. Part of the problem is the murkiness in which wealthy, private universities operate. We need much more transparency to justify institutions like Stanford to continue receiving a taxpayer subsidy of $63,000 per student compared to only $10,000 at UC-Berkeley and $4,000 at CSU-Fullerton [1]. Where is the federal grant money going and how is it divvied up? Maybe a graduate degree in dentistry provides a greater public good, even if there isn't a lot of ongoing research funding in that field. Here are some suggestions:

- A publicly searchable database, showing projects that derive as a result of public grants.

- Non-profit universities disclose administrative and faculty salaries like the UC and other states systems do, even if anonymized.

- Provide an explanation of why the size of their student bodies have stayed the same over the years while their endowments and operating income have ballooned, assuming their mission is to provide education as a public good [2].

[1] http://nexusresearch.org/

[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/harv...

Because they want to receive the full $80k from the grant - often federal - and pay the student $25-30k. The right answer is to fix the accounting measures. For a PhD student primarily doing research which benefits the university and grantor, and taking no or few classes, why are they paying tuition? If it’s for facilities or university staff salaries, then just send the full grant to the university directly, and let the university pay the students whatever both parties see as fair.

I would also suggest finding a quiet, dark place near your house where you can go on a walk with your infant. As I walked around the neighborhood, she went from refershed by the air, to a bit annoyed that she wasn't able to move around much - I'm sure some neighbors heard protest crying - to dazed and then resigned to close the eyes. I got upwards of 10,000 steps every night just walking around with her, and learned a lot about myself from trying to get her to fall asleep -- pre-bedtime quiet activities, orange/dim lighting, 62-68 degrees and keeping a very dark bedroom. Also, having someone nearby can also help, possibly singing quietly or giving a gentle massage, which can lower cortisol levels. Breastfeeding has also helped us a lot, something as a father you can't do, but a warm bottle can help. Bouncing on yoga balls also worked for us (I went to a hotel's gym just for the ball once). It gets much better though, brave it out for the first year if you can! My 13-month old daughter now goes into the bed on her own when she gets tired and sleeps for long stretches on her own.

It's increasingly common for financially well-off people to marry other financially well-off people, perhaps contributing to income inequality. So, if you both share parenting duties (1-3 hours a day of individual work plus daytime child care, and being flexible with night time duties), it's doable if one of you has a high-paying steady job and the other is taking on more risk. In fact, with marginal tax rates in CA and NY approaching 50% it might actually be more efficient for one spouse to receive compensation through building equity.

Alternatively saving a lot of money before you have kids and living frugally by working in a lower cost metro area or renting outside of SF/Palo Alto can work. It's obviously a risk so you and your family has to be on board.

There's an older fellow named Wade who runs a place called "Print Scan Duplicate" in Richmond, CA. He scanned in about 4000 pages for me and it was a little over $300 because there were a ton of staples to remove, about 800 were in color, and he created PDF files based on groupings. https://www.printscanduplicate.com/pricing

Agree. This is really inexcusable. I just had my college and high school papers and letters digitized at 4 cents a page (8 cents a page if the machine detects writing on the other side). Ironically it’s a place in East Bay that’s receiving a lot of business due to the fires. The standard industry grade machines can scan 60 pages per minute and provide basic OCR. Higher power machines can apparently do 600 pages per minute. So, a box of papers containing about 2500 pages would be $100 and take a professional 45 minutes. It’s too bad this wasn’t digitized and put online or in a museum, like the ones Wells Fargo have in their major flagship bank locations. I guess banks want to show a 100-year history whereas it’s not a selling point for tech.

> Tragedy for the tourists

San Francisco will always be a distinctive and attractive place, with or without density. And by building more housing and improving transit, it will become less distinctive in negative ways (homelessness for one). NYC has multiple tourist attractions that have almost 3 times as visitors as those in San Francisco.[1]

> tragedy for the wildlife

It is a tragedy for the wildlife worldwide for people who work in cities to have to spend countless hours commuting and expending carbon emissions.

True, rich land-owners may have to pay more tax and some may see slightly lower appreciation rates, but many other rich people and almost all poor and middle class will benefit. No doubt someone of it is "self-inflicted" at the state-level (Prop 13 for one, and "environmental" approvals used to drag down new development), but there are actionable ways to fix some of this -- passing sales tax, easing rigid zoning laws, and using new funds for transit measures like Measure M in Los Angeles, and Measure B in San Jose.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_attractions_in_the_Uni...

Also, as our nation's metro areas become more dense, we need to make sure we have train connections that are co-located. For example, Pleasanton ACE and Pleasanton BART, or in San Francisco Caltrain and Muni/BART, which they are doing with the multi-year Downtown Extension project. These little things make a huge difference. Commuters eliminate an additional connection and get a small walk in.

Diesel trains will eventually be replaced as well and then we can begin inlining but we should at least plan cities and stations to make public transit easier.

Superpower only in the sense that Canada could become an influential, outward-facing country like Norway, Switzerland or Singapore with their high qualities of life and host to the headquarters of non-governmental organizations. I would also add that with climate change and global unrest throughout the world, Canada is well positioned geographically. With regard to being a place for the world's most ambitious in entertainment, sports or business, it's unclear if Canada will challenge any major country in our lifetimes.

On the cumulative salary of $1.8m over three years he's looking at an effective rate of around 35%. But he definitely won't lose half of his pension to taxes. That's one of the main advantages is that is spread out over a number of years. The NFL, with all its faults in neglecting players health, was wise to set players up with pensions.

Interesting point. The same could be said about K-12 education (in the US), where it's funded by local communities through property taxes but the grads often pick up and move to cities like NYC and SF. However, providing a differing education to those who are gifted has low marginal costs - AP teachers are paid the same amount, and teachers will often take less pay to work with motivated students. Obviously, students (and adults) who fall from the cracks may become dependent on the local communities, so there is high ROI for the taxpayer there as well.

Broadly speaking and if it can be done effectively, funding education on a higher municipal level makes more sense as it's less likely recipients will take their education elsewhere.

I believe that's the crux of Khosla's defense and why he is holding out. He seeks an eminent domain payment from the public -- $30 million -- to have access to Martins Beach via his property. It's unclear if this "principle" of requiring eminent domain for easements is consistent with the Coastal Act of 1976.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Vinod-Khosla-wants-30-...

Agreed, there could be people outside of the top 5% who have loan payments, and those from families earning more than $200,000 who decided not to pay the full amount.

With this pledge, maybe MIT can bump up the free tuition level for those from families earning under $80,000 to $125,000 like at Stanford. The number is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the sliding window of tuition rate. After all for well-endowed, prestigious schools, tuition is unhinged from services received / amount of spending per student.

I think this would work, but university prestige is often based on scarcity so few universities do. This is the same reason that Harvard has almost the same number of undergrads as they did 50 years ago, despite an endowment 20x the size.

72% of MIT undergraduates complete their degree with no student debt [1] and the rest are from families in the top 1-5% of income [2]. Thus, if directed at financial aid, this pledge would only help those from high-income families. If the pledge were used to give a stipend, could MIT attract more low-income students to apply and accept their offers?

Giving students from high income families a tuition discount likely won't change their decision to attend, hence price discrimination. To maximize charitable impact with respect to financial aid, it could be argued that instead the funding should go toward other schools so that these all-star, low-income undergrads have more opportunities closer to home.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

> I got to a B2 proficiency level in around a year and to C1/C2 within a year of that

Congrats! This is no small achievement for a language not widely spoken outside of Europe. I went on a summer language immersion to Germany (living with a host family) and began picking up the language that way, in addition to listening to DW, radio, sports matches, etc. to get to that level. While I've only lived a small time in German-speaking countries, it's served me well with the some great conversations and connections at cultural and engineering-related events around the world, making life that much richer.

Anyways, sounds like linguistics might be your thing -- I'm sure you'll be successful at whatever route you go down.

Yes, exactly. Learning a foreign language not widely spoken outside of Europe, while also taking college-level math and science courses is a high barrier to entry. This is the primary reason Germany is able to pull this off. If a high-quality college education were free in an English-speaking country, say Australia, there would be a lot more international students willing and able to enroll there. After graduating, you could take the degree and move anywhere in the English-speaking world (work visa permitting). In Germany at least, they assume because you achieved a high proficiency in German there's high likelihood you'll stay and work there for at least a few years after graduation. In a way, this is also true of the job market -- if you're able to get a job in Germany, or Italy, Sweden etc, anywhere where the language is not used widely outside of that country, then you have proved your qualifications and dedication to the country enough to warrant a work visa.

Also many Ivy Plus schools offer free tuition to international students who qualify for need-based aid. US taxpayers subsidize these schools indirectly through the tax-exempt endowments, corporate income and federal grant money.

Founders choosing to live outside the biggest metro areas (e.g. NYC, SF Bay Area, LA) are often more "control-motivated" as opposed to "wealth-motivated" [1], and thus bootstrap their companies longer while keeping more equity. Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, etc took more rounds of financing. If you go one step further, in small businesses in rural areas the founders have almost 100% equity.

[1] N. Wasserman. The Founder's Dilemmas. 2012.

Agreed, as most of the buildings have great insulation or double-pane windows. Though during the summer, just don't have an open window facing a major inclined street like Universitätstrasse with constant tram and vehicle noise, and high revs up the hills (this is a major problem in SF, except many buildings are thinner and less updated). In Switzerland, one issue is the older churches ringing their bells every 15 minutes 24/7. The Swiss Noise Council is trying to limit the bell-tolling to day-time hours. http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/for-whom-toll-the-bells-_church-...

Same claim can be made about land appreciation in major metropolitan areas (e.g. NYC, SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc). We need to figure out how to balance out gains in this recovery.

I think Gates meant this more as a thought experiment, since he can't seriously think we can define a "robot." We need to find ways to cope with the speed of automation, by finding more revenue for putting displaced people back to work. How can we get the labor participation rate (62% and dropping) back to the pre-recession levels, as we fight both aging and automation.

Probably the late 19th-century, when Stanford, MIT and Caltech were founded. They are all now competitors to Harvard.

"Good" universities benefit from outsized tax-sheltered endowments, which can be spent on anything from rock climbing walls, employee perks and bonuses, restaurants, accommodation to land acquisition. Let's do another experiment, what if Harvard's $36 billion endowment was swapped with that of a less prestigious university in a major city, say Seattle University (SU). With now an almost $2 billion in annual expenditure, SU could hire some great faculty, and invest heavily in R&D. Meanwhile, Harvard would need to rely on huge tuition increases (via student loans), equaling $160k a year per student, as each student currently indirectly receives an additional $100k per year in endowment spending, and minimal financial aid. Maybe some wealthy alumni could try and prop it up, but I think it would take less than a generation for Harvard's prestige to sag, and SU's to soar.

I'd also recommend joining the efforts to put "split roll" (removing the Prop 13 restrictions for commercial property) on the ballot in 2020. The biggest turnouts are in presidential election years and there should be an electrified voter base then. Zoning is often favored by well-heeled incumbents, many who get a free ride on new homeowners, and with a stable tax base cities can begin to invest again in more infrastructure, schools, parks, etc.

https://www.facebook.com/MakeItFairCA/videos/164108883947055...

Definitely agree that other places are more affordable, especially if you bring a nest egg from working a few years in an expensive Metro area like NYC, SF etc.

But the 80s and 90s -- through the first Dotcom crash -- were also a different era. The Economist considered the US the #1 country to be born in 1988, and only #16 in 2013. This is reflected in the fall in the number of good middle-class jobs, housing affordability, health care costs, traffic and infrastructure, and overall declining quality of factors.