This! Right to the point.

I think Texas got this right. Higher property taxes are assessed every year on the current property value. This has the positive effect to keep the real estate market within reason. Home owners have no incentive to see their taxes explode, unless they plan to sell and move.

CA is a mess! And don't get me started on the fact that property taxes pay for public schools, so if I buy a property today say at $1M whereas my neighbor bought 10y ago and payed $100k guess who is paying the most to finance schools ? It is utterly unfair!

Hence, after almost a decade in SF, I and my finally finally moved on, I kept my job and bought a nice, modern, luxury house in Austin! I and my family are super happy now.

I voted democrats my entire life, I have now realized how wrong I was! SF and CA turned me into a republican! And that's what I vote now.

> I think Texas got this right. Higher property taxes are assessed every year on the current property value. This has the positive effect to keep the real estate market within reason. Home owners have no incentive to see their taxes explode, unless they plan to sell and move.

And yet density is anathema, single family home zoning is everywhere, and new development construction happens on the edges, and traffic and cost gets worse every year. Just a little more slowly than in the current CA bubble. But make the TX bubble hotter, and watch the prices then!

Republicans who haven't yet had to deal with the same level of bubble-driven rapid inequality growth don't have some better policies in mind - they just haven't hit the breaking point yet. I'm sure things will get there in another decade or two, but I guess perpetually running away from self-induced problems is a pretty good strategy for folks with the money.

every smart person i know in SF is moving to Austin and they all hate the CA dems now.

Still, I am sure Zurich wouldn't even come close to the number of opportunities one get in SV.

My LinkedIn account is always flooded by recruiters. That gives engineers leverage to seek new and better opportunities all the time.

Plus networking is also a big one.

Unless you get a job at Google/Oracle and planning on retiring there, SV wins hands down.

The language barrier is also a no go along with cost of living.

If I could, I'd leave tomorrow, but, besides tech, there is another unique aspect of Bay Area: the Biotech scene.

My wife works in Biotech and the only other alternative for us would be the Boston area. But, after running some numbers pro/cons, the Bay Area wins.

So we are stuck here ... for now.

Depends - Boston can be cheaper if you don't have a big commute and the public transportation can help. Source: I've lived in both.

Yeah I looked into home prices rent/buy. True that you can find something _cheaper_ but not cheap/good enough to justify the lower salary and less tech opportunities. I came to the conclusion that Boston is just as expensive as SF but with less opportunities.

Philly is supposed to have an _ok_ biotech scene, so I hear.

You can work in biotech in any city on the west coast

The weather is also overrated. SF weather in particular is boring and sucks!

The weather in SF is boring. Seasons are much better. I like cold winter, fall, warm spring and hot summers.

Had terrible experience with AirBnB support. I had to reach out to them on Twitter and eventually someone got back to me!

You would expect their site to have a clear link to support. Good luck with that.

Yeah, nowadays it seems like twitter is the most reliable way to get in touch with support for medium/big companies. Especially if you publicly shame them...

Clearly a project built for the sole purpose of getting a promotion and then move on. I wonder why would they ever even consider building this thing oO.

fake it until you make it

> if you have years or decades of experience you should have a large network of colleagues

yes, but more often than not, those colleagues best interest is not YOU but their employee referral :) .

At least in my experience, they often try to oversell the company they work at, as the best place to work, trying to get you to join, even if they know it is crap.

I do my own research and always take "ex-colleagues" advises with a grain of salt, basically I mainly trust my judgement, balance sheets for public companies and buzz around like glassdoor, blind, etc .. :)

Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air (really excellent book, although a little dated now) discusses this:

https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_169.shtml

Thus waste storage engineers need to make a plan to secure high-level waste for about 1000 years. Is this a difficult problem? 1000 years is certainly a long time compared with the lifetimes of governments and countries! But the volumes are so small, I feel nuclear waste is only a minor worry, compared with all the other forms of waste we are inflicting on future generations. At 25 ml per year, a lifetime’s worth of high-level nuclear waste would amount to less than 2 litres. Even when we multiply by 60 million people, the lifetime volume of nuclear waste doesn’t sound unmanageable: 105 000 cubic metres. That’s the same volume as 35 olympic swimming pools. If this waste were put in a layer one metre deep, it would occupy just one tenth of a square kilometre.

in the US No one wants to live near the hidsiously environmentally unsafe fly ash tips from the 120'ish million tons produced yearly by coal power plants either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash and they were told to get stuffed basically.

Waste storage is a technical non-issue (Yucca Mountain). It is a political one.

We dump it in concrete barrels somewhere deep inside our planet's crust. In 1000 years from now we take it out and send it to the sun.