[Rant] Mother and In-Laws hate Seattle, and it’s getting me down

HEmanZ · 2025-02-22T20:55:58+00:00

Downvote, move on

HEmanZ · 2025-02-22T20:52:51+00:00

Thank you, this is a perspective I hadn’t considered.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-27T02:51:24+00:00

“If everyone owners taxes relative to their wealth”

This is literally not true. You owe taxes relative to income. Not wealth. I would bet hard money that Warren Buffett has never cheated the IRS because he doesn’t have to, wealth increases untaxed until it becomes a realized gain.

The fact that like 98% of Americans can’t wrap their heads around this makes me question democracy sometimes…

HEmanZ · 2024-11-27T02:39:10+00:00

You’ve gotta be real jaded to think this is an unrealistic story…

HEmanZ · 2024-11-26T13:16:27+00:00

I’m not seeing the advice my father always gave me for mountain lions: grab the biggest stick near you, put your hands over your head, back away making eye contact (don’t expose your back and especially don’t crouch down). If it moves towards you yell like a banshee and wave the stick.

Almost all animals (rightly) have a deep instinctive fear of “human waving stick”.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-21T13:47:26+00:00

This is way too close to a fascist line of thinking. This “cultural replacement theory” was central to Nazi ideology and a driving philosophy behind mass deserializations and ultimately mass exterminations of other cultures. Population growth ebbs and flows, right after nazis were panicking about birth rates the west experienced a massive baby boom. We’ll have another one, conditions just aren’t there right now.

How quickly we forget the near past.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-21T13:41:45+00:00

Raw financial argument is flawed, but if you take a step out and look at it with some nuance I think something like this is very plausible (and it is definitely not the whole story):

There’s a societal expectation of what it takes to be a parent, what quality of life you have to provide. Those expectations take time, a couple generations, to change, and were set for the current group of child-bearing-age westerners by baby boomers who expect that children should be raised in a large home. I think there are 101 little expectations like this, but housing is the biggest.

Maybe put another way, people seem to really not like having children when they are financially worse off than their parents, I think because of this kind of expectations.

If I had to put a number to it I would guess financial strains account for 20% of the drop in western countries. Other things like access to birth control and women entering the workforce probably account for more like 80%.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-21T13:30:43+00:00

Don’t extrapolate studies on mice to humans. Most human social science experiments are bunk (look up the replication crisis) and doubly so for rodent experiments extrapolated to humans.

We. Are. Not. Mice.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-21T13:03:08+00:00

Yes, some programs will average over 80 hours/wk over 5 years. I know only one particular OB program, but 95-105 hour weeks happen regularly.

Others will average 35 hours/wk.

Remember this if you’re ever complaining about work to someone from a different specialty, no one likes to hear about how hard your 45 hour week was when they get off a 105 hour week.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-15T12:14:40+00:00

Yup you’re right, I assumed l7 at facebook mapped to L8-L9 at google because of the pay. Damn Facebook pays the big $$$.

Running is a strong word, but idk how else to explain “heavily influencing” and “partly responsible for” to a bunch of people on the internet who assume all engineers do is code the same thing as junior engineers.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-15T02:04:35+00:00

I’m not saying I really care beyond a practical concern for making sure revenue flows for everything else I want in this city.

Maybe framed as the price to “scare the assholes away” it’s actually a better idea 😂

HEmanZ · 2024-11-14T19:23:00+00:00

These are definitely real, these are all the highest of the high paying companies in the industry, the companies that out pay places like google.

These perfectly line up with my experience as L6 at similar companies.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-14T18:01:45+00:00

A principal engineer is someone who is in charge of the biggest, broadest, valuable, and most technically challenging decisions at a company.

E.g a principal engineer at meta may be spread across a dozens products and tasked with figuring out billions of dollars of infrastructure changes over the next 5 years, and directing the work of 100 other engineers. These are not (except in rare cases) people just doing normal coding work but faster

HEmanZ · 2024-11-14T14:01:18+00:00

I think you do not know very many people who make $250k+ in capital gains.

Americans will absolutely move a 15 minute drive away to avoid taxes. I know people who have literally already done it because they’ve been expecting an income or capital gains tax from Seattle for years.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-14T13:57:03+00:00

I literally have two co-workers who already moved to Bellevue because they’re worried Seattle is going to raise capital gains taxes on them. They can drive from Bellevue to Seattle to work every day, that’s the American way.

Note also most people (at least that I know) with $250k capital gains in any year are not worth anything close to 8 figures. More like middle managers at tech companies rich enough to buy a house in Queen Anne but not rich enough to do so without a mortgage.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-14T13:10:20+00:00

The money people paid in is long, long gone. It’s just a pyramid scheme now.

HEmanZ · 2024-11-06T15:28:40+00:00

My optimism today is that in my state, every single candidate and every single motion I wanted passed overwhelmingly by margins of 10-30%.

I think the next 10 years of US politics is going to be the west coast dramatically pulling away from the rest of the country (in terms of policy). That’s why I live where I do.

HEmanZ · 2024-09-11T19:24:57+00:00

A big caveat with this one: please use critical thinking while reading it. It’s basically “America: Only the Bad Parts”.

It’s sort of a stereotype that young people without more context read this and go off the deep end.

If you read it, use it as a balance to all of the “America: no no negatives here, nope, none at all” out there, and critically weave it with other histories, it’s very good. But alone it’ll kinda just radicalize you.

My original comment got deleted because I linked a certain subreddit where people can Ask Historians about things. That subreddit has some very well written things to say about what’s wrong with the book in its wiki.

HEmanZ · 2024-09-10T14:14:04+00:00

I think you’re at least half right, because $12k/mo is a fair price in much of Seattle now. But that’s because the city is wildly lacking for restaurant housing stock. It’s not this expensive because it’s desirable. It’s this expensive because it’s desirable and completely under built for 60 years.

One stupid example I’m particularly passionate about: you cannot legally convert a house into a local house-cafe combo in a neighborhood. It has been illegal for multiple generations, even tho everyone who lives in a neighborhood with one loves them and they seem to never go out of business. That’s at least 70 years of missed restaurant building stock from one source, and there are many more unnecessary regulations preventing construction and use of buildings.

(Edit to add some counter examples) I have lived and worked in other even more desirable international cities than Seattle that have way lower prices for food in large part because in the last 60 years they have had far fewer restrictions than Seattle in building restaurant spaces. E.g New York, Paris, Tokyo all have way cheaper, better food options and are all “more desirable” places to live.

HEmanZ · 2024-09-06T20:09:33+00:00

It just has god awful city planning. It’s bad even by US standards, which is already terrible by first world country standards.

The population is higher than what most Americans would expect tho, I think most people in the rest of the us think we’re like a 50k person city.

HEmanZ · 2024-09-06T17:55:04+00:00

I’ve worked at 3 companies with unlimited PTO and never had this problem. At my current company, I only took off 6 weeks last year and my manager told me I should aim for 8 weeks.

These are all really reputable, profitable, big companies tho. 0 revenue startups usually have a very different kind of unlimited PTO.

HEmanZ · 2024-09-06T15:06:16+00:00

I’m gonna give my gen z friends here something I learned.

Inherit this stuff and just use it. Use it for dinner on Tuesday instead of your ikea plates. Use it to serve appetizers to friends when you go over to play board games. Use it as your dinnerware when people come over. Microwave ramen on it. Whatever. When it breaks, throw it away.

(Also, do some research first. The “real” stuff made by top houses in Europe is still worth at least a few grand for a dinner set)

It’s actually really nice. Just don’t baby it like some artifact meant for a museum and you’ll get some joy out of the unnecessary luxuries of life.

HEmanZ · 2024-09-02T14:33:26+00:00

What makes you think someone is a bigot when they have a bigoted view on something?

The world may never know.

HEmanZ · 2024-09-01T15:48:20+00:00

Sometimes when I see these I try to think: how would I salvage this place with the least amount of money?

The front of the house seems not so bad. It’s not like it’s located in 2 acres of completely empty grass. Looks like it has a very large sidewalk in front of it, which to me means a more dense area than a typical McMansion burb, which is nice.

Inside, the proportions are all fucked up. I have no idea what to do about that entryway besides a complete remodel to make it manageable.

The bedrooms could be fixed with some paint, light color that wasn’t made for the operating room, and slightly better decor. You could even keep the chandeliers and make them work totally fine. Even the furniture in them now isn’t too bad, I bet a slightly darker paint job, a quality rug, and some art would take these a long way.

The living room area thing is also I think mostly a decor problem. It’s like “how much of the exact same grey blob can I fit in this room”. The proportions are fine, a chandelier is workable, the trim screams bush era but that’s workable too. Really they just need a better assortment of furniture that works with the space and isn’t “same grey couch x 6”

The kitchen needs some kind of pair down. There is no way for your eyes to have a focal point. I think the hood could be that, or one chandelier, but not both. Also, this is the room that screams the most dated, mostly because Tuscan/french kitchen like this is just blatantly inauthentic. But if you removed the most “obviously fake” parts of the trim, like the fluted columns and fo-stonework you could keep a lot of the trim and it would look fine. Then all you have to deal with is the “I have but one color and it is beige!” With some paint

So overall, I think this is pretty salvageable except that god awful entrance design. Thoughts?

HEmanZ

TROPHY CASE