pbuzbee

The goal of hybrid models is to have people in the office when they need to collaborate, then work from wherever for individual work. But it seems like this will be hard to pull off.

If everyone is in the office on different days, then of course you lose the benefits of in-person collaboration. But if everyone is in the office on the same days, then it's harder to meet with people because their schedules might be full or you might not have enough rooms for all the meetings. Sure, you can try to align schedules by related teams, but it will be hard to get perfectly.

I agree. The big appeal of remote work for me personally is the option to move somewhere that I can afford. A hybrid approach doesn't offer that.

It is a little condescending, but I think it serves the purpose of illustrating the divide the author feels between himself and his peers. It's hard to relate when one side sees work as time spent purely for money, and another sees work as a source of satisfaction.

Sounds like OP's spouse was the tipping point. If they stayed on the same page, I wonder if things would've gone differently (ignoring the medical issues which aren't trivial, of course).

The OP seems content to live a life without work. For him, by far the main reason to work was for income. If you don't want to work, then why keep doing so when you no longer need income to fuel your lifestyle? Obviously people are different here, and many (esp. on HN) derive other values from work.

The wrench comes when you're surrounded by people who aren't on the same page. Like OP pointed out, you become more disconnected as you both can't relate to the other's chosen lifestyle. OP sees their peers' lifestyles as consumption-focused. And I'd bet those friends couldn't relate to OP either.

OP's spouse probably felt caught in the middle between freedom and social inclusion. If you can't relate to your peers, early retirement could feel more like stagnation than freedom. Social inclusion is a hard thing to give up.

Since you seem to think Prop 13 is beneficial, I'd be curious to hear your ideas on reforming property taxes! What would you keep or change?

No, it's definitely not. Thus why Prop 13 is referred to as the third rail of CA politics :)

I wouldn't call it "destroying communities through eviction", but I do agree that cramming everyone into the same small set of places is its own harmful issue and should be reconsidered as well.

In the case of HCOL places like the Bay Area, yes, perhaps they should move somewhere cheaper. The money they would make from selling their house gives them a lot of options.

As it is today, young families are the ones buying in far out places like Tracy, Stockton, etc., and they still might pay higher property taxes than a retiree in the heart of the Bay Area. It seems backwards to me to have an incentive structure that keeps the labor force farther from work than retirees.

I feel that the solution to the issue you raise is to reform property tax in CA, not to stick with Prop 13.

Prop 13 definitely doesn't benefit people who don't own real estate because property owners have an incentive not to sell: they can keep their lower tax rate and their expensive home! This restricts supply and raises property prices.

I feel the issue is that the governments are primarily protecting property owners, which are not all of the city's residents. Property owners may prefer the status quo, but there's still an effect on the citizens who rent, which shouldn't be disregarded.

Cool to see this on HN! I worked for Prof. Smith (quoted in the article) as an undergrad. TGFs also emit beams of electrons. One of my projects was investigating whether we can detect these beams of electrons bouncing back and forth along Earth's magnetic field lines.

I do this too: I prep my taxes in both TurboTax and in CK, make sure they agree, then submit in CK for free.

Almost a year in, it seems like there isn't a clear consensus in whether or not we (as a whole) are more productive when working distributed. If there isn't a clear winner, I would hope that companies would err on the side of improving employee well-being by providing flexibility.

At the individual level, productivity in office VS at home varies depending on your personal circumstances, preferences, and role. I hope larger companies realize that a one-size-fits-all policy isn't the best solution.

Instead, I'd like them to allow individual teams to decide what options they want to allow within the team (full-time in office, work from home N days/week, full-time remote, etc.) Then the team can develop norms and processes for work and communication that make sense.

Wouldn't a cable that's thousands of feet long be prohibitively heavy?

I would love smartphone postprocessing over DSLR raw images.

I feel that phones usually make better decisions for contrast, white balance, exposure than DSLRs do. With a DSLR, reaching the same finished product usually requires a ton of manual work editing photos.

Of course, the DSLR has far better detail on the pixel level, and if you need to zoom in at all, it wins in a landslide. I wish I could combine the strengths of both platforms.

Counterpoint: Google confirmed recently that it's still planning to bring its workers back to the office regularly: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/google-delays-...

This site offers visualizations of air quality over time: https://www.epa.gov/outdoor-air-quality-data/air-data-multiy...

I've noticed this as well. If upper management isn't interested in working remote, it's going to be a struggle for ICs to get large companies to embrace it long-term. I see the acceptance of remote work by large companies as something that's going to decay post-COVID until we're back to where we were before.

Do you have any insight into why people want the house to remain in the family? Is it to preserve their legacy, or something else?

Yes, exactly. A $1M mortgage is about $5k/month. Paying that means sacrificing other uses of money like retirement, child's college savings, vacations, etc.

And, as you pointed out, we would be in deep trouble if our income took a hit, or if housing prices tumble. If you buy into the high housing costs, you really need them to continue. It's a bad cycle.

The cost of homeownership is a huge factor for me.

When I started working in 2014, I figured I would need to save around $150k for a down payment because the median home price in Santa Clara county was around $800k. Now the median price is around $1.4M [1], so I'd need around $250k.

The growth in home prices has roughly matched my ability to save for a home, so almost seven years later I'm not any closer than I was in 2014.

I feel like my options are (A) live in an apartment forever, (B) hellish commute, or (C) leave. With starting a family on the horizon, Option C looks better every day.

[1] https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/santa-clara-home-...

I think people got consumeables (nuts, beer, wine, chocolates), media like books/movies, and a few practical things (e.g. my wife got a soil moisture tester because she's getting into gardening).

I agree that a lot of items aren't great at the $20 price point, but a family could pick any limit that makes sense for them. For us, we don't need many material items, so the lower limit seemed reasonable.

Personally, I enjoyed it because it felt like a shift away from the material value and towards thinking about what the person would actually enjoy.

This is a good idea. A "white elephant" gift exchange is another alternative, though with gifts that are desirable and not just amusing.

Last year, the adults in my immediate family put a limit on how much we'd spend on each other for Christmas. I think we picked around $20/person, when in the past we probably spent $75-100.

This has been good for us, mainly because it lowers the pressure of gift exchanges. There's a big difference between giving (and getting) an unwanted $10 item compared to an unwanted $50 item. The limit removes emphasis from the material value of the item and puts it more on the thought behind the gift.

Generally, I think gift-giving culture in the US is out of control and largely doesn't benefit the giver nor the recipient.

Couldn't it play out the other way? As case numbers drop, people think that the vaccination isn't necessary anymore?

I don't think there's a one-sized-fits-all solution. Tree comments do solve many issues with linear threads, but they do introduce their own issues, especially when paired with voting. Many cases do work better for tree-style comments, but there are cases that work better for linear threads.

Any thread where the discussion isn't expected to splinter into subtopics, and the newest posts have more value than the 'best' post.

One example might be a non-trivial tech support problem, where forum members work together to solve an issue. As the user tries solutions and posts their progress, the initial post isn't as valuable as the latest one. Other examples would include threads with real-time reactions to events, like a sporting event or political debate, or threads that are longer-running, like telling a story that unfolds over time.

I feel like Reddit has replaced many niche forums, for better and worse.

On the plus side, Reddit has a low bar to entry. It's super easy to find or create a forum for a topic. You don't need to create a new account, and you can view threads from across your interests in a single view if you want.

On the other side, Reddit has many issues:

- Tree-style comments are not the best format for every type of discussion.

- Upvoting encourages content that gets votes: groupthink opinions, short funny quips, generic memes, etc. These can bury deeper discussion or dissenting views.

- Reddit as a whole has its own culture. If you don't like Reddit's culture, it's unavoidable.

- The visual focus of Reddit's recent redesign means that many hobby subreddits turn into posts showing off gear instead of discussion.

- Aggressive moderation on some subs makes it hard to post. Posts might be deleted for arbitrary reasons. Sometimes questions are sent to a generic 'Ask a Question' thread, which isn't great for finding questions later via search.

- Your post history is public across the site, which carries privacy risks.

In my case, we found that getting married changed the way that we view our relationship.

We had already been together for over 10 years, but getting married was a commitment to each other that we'll try our hardest to make things work. It adds another layer of stability which is important for planning kids, careers, finances, and so forth. We can make choices as though our relationship will still exist X years down the line -- this isn't necessarily true, of course, but in the medium-term it becomes a reasonable assumption.

It also brought us closer. Mutually agreeing to be each other's life partners is a big step. I don't have to worry that my partner is going to choose their career over me or vice-versa. We've both decided to put our relationship first, which causes a subtle-but-important shift in your relationship.

This is a major problem the US is going to have to figure out. How do you get anything done in the legislature when one party has the incentive and ability to stop everything?