As of this moment 100% of comments have to do with “I guess other people have a lot of money”. Very weird thing to be concerned about.
Personally I didn’t care about the eclipse until recently. Then I realized then when the next one happens in North America, my son will be in his 20s and I will be in my 60s. I got the idea that it will be cool to (G-d willing) see that one together and remember how we saw this one together 20 years earlier.
It happened to be that we had family we can stay with in the path of totality but even if it cost me an extra few hundred to do this, I would find it a good use of funds.
A couple of other things the people commenting about people having a lot of money might be overlooking:
1. My guess is that a lot of the people are treating this as a vacation and the money for it comes from foregoing some other vacation trip that they would have taken this year.
2. It doesn't have to be expensive to see an eclipse. My trip to see the 2017 US eclipse had these costs:
• $50 for a place to stay for the day of the eclipse and the day before.
It was at a farm where the farmer had converted one big field into an overnight parking area for people who were going to sleep in their cars, an adjacent big field into a place for people who wanted to park and set up tents to sleep in, and another adjacent field into a place for food and souvenir vendors and entertainers. They had set up a ton of portable toilets in all three of those areas, and had shuttle buses running a loop through all three areas.
The $50 was for a spot in the "sleep in your car" field.
• Whatever it cost to operate my car for the ~600 mile round trip.
• Maybe $10 for a small PC case fan, which I connected to a small solar panel I already had. I could then put the solar panel on the car roof, open a car window just enough to wedge the fan in, and have a nice breeze in the car. (The 2017 eclipse was in August and temperatures were expected to be in the mid-80℉ to 90℉ range where I saw it).
I try. But seriously, it's a very weird reaction. For example, a lot of content on here is about people nerding out on something deep - how would you feel if everyone started responding "I guess people have a lot of free time..."
Yes it's implied that people will spend time and money differently than how you would. So what?
There is so much excess money floating in the economy at the moment. Its insane.
People emboldened by market and housing gains have to been spending ridiculous amounts of money like there is no tomorrow. Layoffs have been limited to tech.
Controlling inflation will hopefully be the main discussion around the next election, I am tired of watching the political theater around small side-issues and then paying $8 for milk and $6 for peanut butter. Why is our labor becoming worth less in real goods? Why is life expectancy decreasing? Can politicians address issues that affect every single person every day?
I make good money in tech but it still feels like more than 4k/mo (in California) is what you need just to cover rent and basics (car, internet, phone, groceries, etc.). I have no idea how people working minimum wage jobs are surviving.
> Controlling inflation will hopefully be the main discussion around the next election
You're conflating inflation with market gouging. Why would your local grocery store drop the price of milk? What's the incentive? You probably haven't stopped buying milk, I bet none of your neighbors have stopped buying milk. In most of the country you have at most 2 grocery chains that are probably mega-chains, and they have no incentive to compete with each other.
What you're seeing at this point isn't inflation, it's market gouging and unless you're onboard with the government either breaking up these oligopoly's or setting market prices, nobody running for office is going to be able to "fix it".
A "free market" cannot function without competition and we've spent the last 50+ years allowing and encouraging market consolidation. The results are as expected
The definition of inflation is "a general increase in prices"; it doesn't matter why that's happening. Do you think that stores weren't trying to sell products for the highest-possible price previously?
Price-gouging is not what we're seeing here - there's no supply constraint. What we're seeing is just the market price.
That might be more true in some markets, but grocery stores are competitive, low margin businesses. There are lots of farms, too, and food comes from all over the world.
As we saw during the pandemic and with the start of the war in Ukraine, price increases often come after major supply disruptions or sudden increases in demand. Markets often don’t do well at adjusting after big surprises. There can be multi-year lags.
A supply constraint means there's an inability to bring sufficient new stocks of the product to the market. Think: N95 masks during Covid, or gasoline in the run-up to a hurricane.
Selling toilet paper for $15 a roll when shelves are empty is price-gouging, selling eggs for 5% more than last year isn't.
We were not supposed to have the market consolidation that we've had. The FTC has been asleep at the wheel, probably because it's members are investing in companies that they are hoping to be bought out by Kraft, Nestle, Pepsi, etc...
The article says that negative real wage growth is what's making people unhappy, not inflation; much of it is spent discussing that deflation is actually a problem.
In areas of Canada (Toronto and Vancouver vicinities), housing prices were increasing at $80k per MONTH. To only have your house increase by 50-150k over 4-6 years would be better than even the podunk unincorporated villages hours from any economic centre.
Appreciate the context. But the figures I quoted are huge sums for the average working person round here (we're closer to a "podunk village" than e.g. Toronto + Vancouver metro areas), as I'm sure $80k/month is to Canadians. They represent real problems for most people who live here. They can't be dismissed because a large metro area in Canada has seen even higher inflated prices
> People emboldened by market and housing gains have to been spending ridiculous amounts of money like there is no tomorrow
what are you basing this claim on? the fact that airbnb bookings are up for a rare celestial event?
here is where all of my ridiculous amounts of money is going towards: $6/gal gas in california, ever-increasing property taxes, ever-increasing insurance premiums, $399 "surgery" charges at an ENT simply because they looked up my nose for half a second, insanely expensive annual car registration charges, etc.
Seriously. For all we know, these are relatively local people who had to settle for this cheap "vacation" instead of a more expensive/longer trip further away...
Relatively few people own stocks & home ownership has tapered off & isn't back to its pre pandemic highs... Maybe these things show the people that were doing well are still doing well, but we knew that already.
A word in support of this
I've also seen a pretty stunning lack of empathy from tech workers who unquestionably have it better than almost any other working class (non-owner/shareholder) groups.
I'm not saying that its great that tech workers are being laid off, but I get the schadenfreude other would have after a decade of being told that the solution to their problems is to "skill up" and learn to code.
The real problem is of course the system that prioritizes wealth flowing from workers to owners and we should all be aligned in this.
Oh I agree, but for a lot of people techies are part of the problem itself. Gentrification is real, and the companies themselves are not seen as helpful either. And when techies do donate, they're often to pie in the sky stuff like AI alignment , or the giant long now clock , that comes off as out of touch at best.
I know for a fact that there's plenty of kind empathetic tech workers but I'm sure there are kind lawyers too and they don't have a lovely broad strokes reputation either
I love the lack of sympathy for tech workers across North America or perhaps even globally, when tech hub salaries still don’t allow tech workers to even have a middle class lifestyle. Very few people I know get paid enough to buy a starter home within 2 or 3 hours of where they work. I get paid more than my non tech peers yet still functionally have less spending power than a 25 year old from 30 years ago, despite being a fair bit older than 25
In theory, those homes should start going down in value once people start selling because you can buy less home for a $2,000 per month mortgage payment. The market's weird right now because a lot of people with low interest rates can't afford to sell and buy something comparable.
Yup. Homeowners in the first world need to start to feel some serious tax pain, which should go directly to building as much housing as fast as humanly possible. And screw crying about home devaluation. You making a handy profit when you switch houses in a decade does not trump the basic need for people to have housing.
People have been saying similar about the cars purchased in 2021 because they sell for well above asking. As 36-month leases start coming due the prices of those cars is normalizing back to where it should be.
All of the boomers that refuse to downsize and plan to die in their homes are going to do the same with the housing market, but in a more spectacular fashion that causes the market to crash.
On the boomer front, it's hard to say because it'll play out over 20 years, and there's a genuine supply shortage. There's also a chance a lot of their kids take the house over and sell something less desirable.
> I love the lack of sympathy for tech workers across North America or perhaps even globally, when tech hub salaries still don’t allow tech workers to even have a middle class lifestyle
Do you have empathy for IBs, PEs, and other members of High Finance? The difference in TC between High Finance and the equivalent roles in Tech are not that significant.
Goldman Sach's IB Analysts starting salaries at the SF office were $90k with minimal bonuses in 2020. These same people could have worked at Google or Microsoft (and most of them legitimately had that option)
The overlap between Big Finance and Big Tech is massive, just like the overlap between random engineer and random corpdev drone in Dallas or KC.
>Goldman Sach's IB Analysts starting salaries at the SF office were $90k with minimal bonuses in 2020. These same people could have worked at Google or Microsoft (and most of them legitimately had that option)
When I graduated from Columbia in 1999, I interviewed and got offers at various tech startups, but entry-level jobs on the "PM track" for those without a CS/engineering degree didn't formally exist at the likes of Microsoft or Yahoo as far as I know. I had a technical background, but was almost entirely self-taught, and had no interest in writing code for money anyway. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027171>
Of my offers I chose Goldman, where I worked with tech companies. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735>
My GS starting salary was 40K. During that first year, because of the dotcom bubble, Goldman raised the salary to $55/65/75K for first/second/third-year analysts, and my end-of-year bonus in 2000 was close to 100% of salary. Then the full effect of the recession/market crash hit and the 2001 bonus was, well, much smaller.
The bonus plays a massive role in Analyst compensation, and during 2020-present, the bonus was slashed severely due to a lack of late stage dealflow.
The work hours at GS and JPM were still as crappy as before, but the bonuses were trash when factoring stock and bonus compensation their peers were getting.
A bunch of my mentees made the switch to PM, SWE, VC analyst, or Founding explicitly because of that.
With that said, I think most people recognize that there are some jobs where the goal is to make maximal money first, morals second. Like, oil executives for example I think most people would agree don't have the benefit of the doubt that they were just trying to make an honest living.
Its a sliding scale, and for some people I think 'tech bros' end up on the greedy / immoral side. I know that for me at least, anytime I'm outside of a tech hub, the response to saying that I'm a software developer is often 'oh . . .'
In my short lifetime computer nerds have gone from losers worth making fun of, to rockstars making gobs of cash, to villains ruining whatever place they live or hobby they take up. Pretty wild.
> I get paid more than my non tech peers yet still functionally have less spending power than a 25 year old from 30 years ago
This seems like some non-generic case specific to your situation and not representative of the average experience.
The median income in 1994 for over-25-year-olds (men only!) was $25,465 [0], women was less than half of that. Let's go with the figure for men for the sake of discussion.
$25,465 in 1994 is the buying power of $55k today [1]. $55k is the 56th percentile [2], so right where we'd expect it to be.
---
1994: median home price $142,200 [3], interest rate 30-year fixed: 8.38% [4]
Principal balance $113,760 @ 8.38%, payment (P&I): $865, or 3.4% of annual income
---
2024: median home price $384,500 [5], interest rate 30-year fixed: 7% [6]
Principal balance $307,600 @ 7%, payment (P&I): $2,046, 3.7% of annual income
---
Opinion incoming: I think there are 2 things that make 'today' seem more expensive than 'back then': implacable consumerism, and the natural change of places over time (ie, gentrification & co).
w/r/t consumerism, the load on both 'necessary' and discretionary spending has increased big-time - people were not generally paying for broadband, smartphones, gaming consoles, home espresso machines, soundbars, portable speakers, media players, printers/copiers/scanners, I could go on forever. Look around you and count how many things straight-up didn't exist in 1994 (or were reserved for the ultrawealthy or for business). We could do without them today, but it would feel really bad, as if we're not participating in society or making use of its advancement.
w/r/t gentrification, many places today are more desirable than they used to be, and their increase in price is a function of demand rather than of inflation, so it feels like the economics of living got away from people who weren't already bought in. But it's not that "everything" got so much more expensive, it's that, for example, Akron OH used to be more expensive than San Jose (!!) because farming was the center of industry. Now the world changed and what used to be a pretty rural town full of fruit trees is the most expensive metro in the country. It's not because "houses got more expensive" per se, it's that the world changed.
I'm Canadian for what it's worth. My mother who had a GED was able to purchase a house by my age. I can't purchase a house anywhere in southern Ontario at the moment. This fact is echoed across the majority of the country. My brother had to move to northern Alberta to be able to afford a house that had enough capacity for his family. And that naturally also changed the availability of social and job options
I dunno what qualifies as south ON, but I see 144 houses for sale from $50-300 CAD south of Huntsville.
Your point however is (less charitably) put as "I can't purchase a house where I want the house to be, with the specs that I want", which is different than not being able to afford any house anywhere.
My parents also purchased a house with modest income when I was young. But it had fraying electrical (knob & tube!), peeling paint, 1 bathroom, no A/C, a wood-burning fireplace for heat, and was 45 minutes from where they had rented/liked to live. The place had its charms, they put sweat equity into it for many years, and I think of it fondly - but it was still a huge compromise, and by today's strict lending standards was probably not even able to be financed based on hazards alone. I am sure they would have preferred to purchase a house with bay windows overlooking the ocean like they had been renting, but they could afford something that was inland and needed a lot of work. I do not think they were unique in this way - I wager a lot of 'my parents bought a house in the 80s, dad was an artisanal pencil sharpener and mom was a ferret breeder' stories are actually more like this one.
My point is, I am by default unconvinced when an otherwise seemingly successful person says they can't afford to buy, even in an expensive place like Toronto or SF. As far as I can tell it just means they haven't lowered their standards enough yet. I have compromised on every home I've bought; in fact I entered the market a lot later than I should have because as a first-timer I wasn't ready to compromise enough. That probably cost me half a mill in appreciation over the years.
Huntsville is a 2 and a half hour commute to my in person job, limiting me to only remote work(there’s not exactly a booming tech economy in Huntsville). I would have to commute 5 hours a day to live in Huntsville.
I had family members who bought in “mixed income” neighborhoods in Toronto where you’d have broken piping, excessive mold in the attic, and meth heads ringing your doorbell at 2am to see if anyone’s home so they could break in. That 2 bedroom bungalow is selling for around 850k.
On top of all this houses even in Huntsville regularly close for between 50-200k over asking depending on location and the insanity of the buyer
No offense but based on this conversation I get the impression that you don’t really have enough context to comment on at the very least cost of housing in Canada.
I literally meant south of huntsville as in, draw an E-W line on the map at huntsville, and look everywhere south that's still within ontario.
2.5 hour commute sucks and wouldn't be long-term sustainable, but if it's what you'd have to do to get into housing it's something to consider. I know; that was my commute when I bought my first place in the bay area. I did it long enough to build equity & sweat equity, then used the profit to buy closer to work.
Considering it's a literal once-in-a-lifetime experience for many people, and the scientific nature of said experience, I assumed people would be a little more open-minded.
Some things in life are worth paying for. Seeing an eclipse in totality is one of (many) of them
I don't understand the efforts I'm seeing people in Boston go to. We'll see it 94% obscured, meanwhile people are taking days off work and spending $$ to get to 99.9%. Then again I've never been a vacation person.
Here's an explanation for it – https://xkcd.com/2914/. If you are not in the path of totality you aren't really seeing "the eclipse". The difference between 20% or 50% or even 90% covered is very minor.
Are you sure people did that to get to 99.9%? I hope anyone who was willing to get to 99.9% from Boston would go the extra mile (or ~10 miles, in fact).
FWIW, I flew into Boston from California and drove north to the center line of the path of totality.
Personally I didn’t care about the eclipse until recently. Then I realized then when the next one happens in North America, my son will be in his 20s and I will be in my 60s. I got the idea that it will be cool to (G-d willing) see that one together and remember how we saw this one together 20 years earlier.
It happened to be that we had family we can stay with in the path of totality but even if it cost me an extra few hundred to do this, I would find it a good use of funds.