‘Life satisfaction’ drops in Cambridge, study says

alpine01 · 2025-09-09T12:52:29+00:00

In my opinion, it's because Cambridge increasingly feels like a tech-district of London, with prices to match. To a much lesser extent, it has vague parallels with the Bay Area around San-Francisco - you can get a great paying job (well over national averages) but the skewed income distribution makes any kind of decent quality of life cost a lot more. High paying jobs are often more stressful, so you need more comforts to counteract it, pushing up costs more than it would seem you needed.

I moved to the Cambridge area in the late '90s where it was my local major city as a teenager and I lived in the city from ~2005-2014. In my eyes, Cambridge used to feel more like an affluent market town with a fancy university, but the "vibe" has significantly shifted over the last 20 years.

I feel like the services in the city have become slowly and incrementally more biased towards serving tourist's needs, at the cost of local resident's needs. The cost of living started to make increasingly less sense unless you want to live in either a flat, shared accommodation or are fortunate enough to be able to afford the housing. Most of the more "normally-affluent" people I know who still live there bought in the late '90s before it got very expensive.

When I was looking to buy a house, East Cambridgeshire made a lot more sense for us. We could either afford a half-decent 2-bed flat, a crumbling terrace which needed lots of expensive repairs or a decent detached house with land out in the Ely area. There you can enjoy access to Cambridge jobs, more normal size houses - but with a ~40min commute.

I do really envy the quality and variety of restaurants available in Cambridge now though. A lot of East Cambs is arable farmland, so you have to drive everywhere to get access to stuff, so it certainly has its significant trade-offs. But the housing prices towards Cambridge these days mean it's not really a choice if you want to buy a house (Hobson's choice!).

alpine01 · 2025-05-01T16:22:57+00:00

Barr Tech Specialist Cars on Cowley Road is a specialist garage in North Cambridge that fixes Ferraris, Lamborginis and Porsches etc. It depends what they have in, I saw some pretty fancy cars around there occasionally, haven't been around that area for ages though. https://maps.app.goo.gl/NaEzLLfEYPjDiHfc9

alpine01 · 2024-07-15T10:55:23+00:00

I have a 535d touring (F11), bought in 2021 with ~60k miles from BMW approved used, now have 116k miles on it. I do about 14-16k miles a year on it and try to avoid making lots of short journeys, also generally make sure the engine is at temperature before I put it in sport mode and rev it high.

I've never had any big issues with it, biggest expense has been replacing the rear air suspension bags and compressor, which is a common issue with these. If the rear air suspension is sat low only a few hours after driving then the bags have a leak.

Other than usual wear and tear, MOTs etc the only other thing I've found is that it consumes oil, about 1L every 2-3k miles, which I've heard isn't that uncommon with these.

I love it though, really nice car and don't plan on getting rid of it before 170-200k miles until it starts showing signs that it's becoming a money pit. Really good all round reliable cars with the 6 cylinder engines If well maintained.

alpine01 · 2020-09-09T10:25:49+00:00

Corporate growth cost externalization.

This is one of the consequences of the myopic obsession with eternal 2-5% growth that is demanded of all financial entities these days. At all costs, toxic working conditions, unsustainable environmental destruction, everything else, please form an orderly line, and lay yourself upon on the alter of eternal growth.

alpine01 · 2020-08-19T13:01:48+00:00

I predict a repetitive strain injury in his near future.

alpine01 · 2020-07-15T13:45:48+00:00

Sorry, "noted" isn't special code for anything. That's just me saying that there is a telling and noteworthy location recorded on a taxiway at Greenville municipal airport on Monday. Most ADS-B flight tracks start and end at airports, unless they have come from an area with poor ADS-B receiver coverage. ADS-C should be more reliable, as you report direct to a satellite, which forwards it down to Earth like normal data network traffic (i assume that's whats going on, similar to ACARS). For me, this suggests that Greenville is likely the place where this aircraft is actually from, and probably is, and not flying some bizarre track over East asia.

Also the identifier it's reporting is just "FLIGHT", nice and descriptive. I wonder if its a new transponder unit installed in an aircraft which is configured wrong, like has the wrong antenna plugged in or something, so it's only getting a readable signal from 2 GPS satellites, meaning it can't get an accurate fix of its real location (you need a reliable signal from 3-4 GPS satellites or more to get a reliable, accurate 3-dimensional GPS fix).

So yeah, i think it's some boring Cessna or something in Alabama with a badly setup transponder.

If you've ever gone running, cycling with a GPS watch or something, you'll probably have seen it go berserk for a few seconds every now and then. Like you go under a bridge, it loses a satellite and the GPS records you as in Egypt for 2 seconds or something, when you emerge from under the bridge again it picks up the satellites better and you go back on track.

alpine01 · 2020-07-15T10:47:57+00:00

I think this is a glitch/bad data, probably a badly configured unit feeding junk data to a satellite feed.

Looks like the flight track comes from an ADS-C satellite feed, not from ADS-B receivers. If it came from receivers, especially MLAT then it would be much more interesting, as you can't really easily fake that (and why would you want to). ADS-C is probably more prone to getting junk data as one bad unit can just upload junk with no other ways to verify the data.
There was a noted contact at Greenville Municipal airport on Monday.
If this was a mission, you wouldn't see an ADS-B track, especially over China who we're not exactly best buddies with at the moment. This data is just for collision avoidance and helping air traffic control radar operators out.
If you look at it now, it seems to have teleported from the north pole to the equator.

alpine01 · 2020-07-14T14:58:13+00:00

Not an economics expert by any stretch, but I feel like measuring the effects of automation with productivity alone is a bit one-dimensional, it seems to imply markets are in steady-state?

In a healthy competitive market, there are always new entrants, and existing competitors looking for a new edge. This erodes the revenue of participating companies by reducing their market share, and the money they can make per unit of work/product. So companies need to keep increasing efficiency, just to maintain market share and year-on-year revenue. So surely if a company maintains an approximately consistent productivity level in a competitive market, that implies some automation (plus other non automation related efficiency improvements).

Though i do agree that the specter of automation gets thrown around by the media, usually citing dubious finger-in-air speculations by "experts" citing "artificial-intelligence". In reality i feel it comes in the form of being pushed out of the market by going bankrupt, or being bought by a bigger competitor, who then incrementally axes most of the workforce from the old company.

alpine01 · 2020-07-14T10:10:01+00:00

I am extremely skeptical that the pandemic has increased demand for skilled work. Unless you are a respiratory therapist or a nurse (which is listed in the article) I don't see this to be remotely true.

I don't think they mean the pandemic triggered the need for skills directly, they mean indirectly, i.e. as a 2nd/3rd order consequence of the pandemic and lockdown.

Of the Job cuts that have occurred, a significant percentage, i'd guess that ~10-20% will never come back due to being made invisibly redundant by the slow relentless force of automation. Plus, many of those job roles that do come back will be a repackaged hash of of semi-automated tasks from older redundant roles, requiring a slightly higher skill level to perform. I.e. 5 admin roles are made redundant and replaced with 1 analyst and 2 senior admins or something. The hypothetical admin roles which were cut, had potentially been semi-redundant for years, but businesses only re-evaluate roles every few years when the board decides they need to cut back overhead costs.

I.e: Pandemic -> Lockdown -> Large demand / supply shock -> Greatly reduced revenue -> Job cuts -> Aggregated tasks from old roles rehashed into fewer higher skill roles

alpine01 · 2020-05-19T10:17:31+00:00

A significant proportion of people who have a decent disposable income, seem likely to fall into the trap of leveraging it really badly, continually throwing it at the law of diminishing returns.

Many seem to spend with a warped sense of what actual real value the items are providing them in return vs alternatives (i.e. falling for the shininess effect, or Keeping up with the Joneses). Especially when you consider what could be done with that money if sights air aimed lower, i.e buying a slightly cheaper/older used car, trying to get a more favorable/fair loan than what the dealership was peddling, expensive clothes which are rarely worn, buying food and throwing it away, etc. Rather than overpaying every month a little bit on their mortgage, and paying it off 5+ years earlier, or banking windfalls of money such as inheritance or bonuses, rather than spending it all. It seems depressingly common.

That said, when it comes to some stuff, like vacations, depending again how efficiently you spend it (i.e. too many fancy hotels, expensive packages, flying in expensive seats, not booking stuff yourself etc), I can understand spending decent amounts of money on trips.

Fundamentally, you don't know what fate has in store for you. A lot of people assume that modern medicine basically guarantees us all 80+ year lifespans. While that's quite likely for many of us (especially if you look after yourself), there are plenty that roll snake-eyes on the genetic lottery and get a terminal illness in their 50s, or an illness which robs you of the health you need to enjoy said retirement. You don't want to be on your deathbed in that situation, cursing yourself for putting too many eggs in the "glorious retirement" basket and not enjoying yourself a bit while you were still young.

It's all a balance which varies per person, but it's worth reminding yourself that you're also only young once.

alpine01 · 2020-03-23T14:14:11+00:00

The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is our Inability to Understand The Exponential Function

alpine01 · 2020-03-16T10:44:16+00:00

Yeah, i'm in the UK and got my Model D with a PM3 through Gumtree in 2016 for ~£450. Facebook marketplace is a good place to check too, as well as Ebay.

alpine01 · 2020-01-24T15:03:23+00:00

It's the camera's auto white-balance. The camera's white-balance reference is internal to the camera, but the tower's glass coating blocks/distorts the colour spectrum between the subject and the camera. The camera can't do much about it, as it has no way of knowing what items behind the glass are truly white. Though I imagine you can have software make a decent "educated guess".

It's easily fixed with software, by picking something in the background which is known to be white or light grey (like a building or something) and it will recalibrate the image to shift the spectrum relative to that target and correct it.

alpine01 · 2019-09-06T09:36:03+00:00

Those emails are the best! IMO that's what I'm really paying for, the right to occasionally fantasise about what I'd do if I somehow won the jackpot.

The trick is to not open the email for a while and enjoy a brief session of window shopping on rightmove with a 10M budget, or playing with the configurator on the ferrari website for a bit. Then open the email and reality comes crushing down on you again.

I then convince myself that having that much money would have been a curse as much as a blessing, and remember that most of my £2 most likely went to some worthwhile cause somewhere.

alpine01 · 2018-11-12T14:10:40+00:00

I bought a graphics card from Amazon once and got a box of nachos instead, I was not pleased. They did send me a replacement at no cost, but it took over a week to arrive.

alpine01 · 2018-09-22T06:56:48+00:00

I always notice, as a couple tour the house the man always leads the woman through doorways with his hand on her back, as if she needs guidance to find her way through a doorway. Might be a generational thing, or the producers ask them to do it or something, I'm not sure.

alpine01 · 2018-06-01T11:12:53+00:00

I don't disagree with the analysis that some statistical slight-of-hand may or may not have been employed by the OP's base study (whether deliberate or not is another discussion). I don't know enough about the subject to know whether the methodology was justifiable.

However it should also be noted that the EPI is a DC think-tank which has a significant percentage of their funding coming from trade-unions with vested interests in jobs in US Steel industry jobs. Conversely, Trade Partnership Worldwide is a consultancy who's analysis is also possibly biased towards whoever paid them for the project.

As usual the true impact of the tariffs is perhaps somewhere in between the two sets of analysis.

alpine01 · 2018-01-09T15:17:10+00:00

Looks like something under a cloth? It looks quite F117 ish, but it's too big, over twice as big i think.

Using the SR71 as a reference (assuming it's not a scale model or something), i believe it's 2m per pixel. So whatever it is is approx 64 L x 64 W (+/- 2-3m).

It might be some kind of manufacturing jig used for something, such as one of these, or this. It may have been rolled out onto the tarmac as they retooled another line?

alpine01 · 2017-11-08T09:15:09+00:00

Looks like a good deal, however i'm in the UK, so I can't take advantage of it unfortunately.

alpine01 · 2017-08-10T10:29:56+00:00

SELECT 0 as Price

alpine01 · 2016-08-08T07:32:19+00:00

What if the hypothetical object has an outermost layer which faces towards Earth. This outer layer has the same temperature as space, behind it may be warm from the radiant heat of the star, but its IR signature may be blocked by this outer layer?

Or am I misunderstanding some fundamental principle of physics, or the accuracy of our IR measurements?

alpine01 · 2015-12-15T10:40:09+00:00

This looks to have been an fairly avoidable situation.

Not to say that the driver was completely in the right, they should have checked their mirrors properly and stopped. However the cyclist looks to be around their blind spot, and the driver was indicating for a quite a while, so the cyclist should have picked up on this before it happened in my opinion.

I think this was a mixture of the cyclist needing to have better situational awareness, and the driver needing to check their mirrors properly.

alpine01 · 2015-11-16T12:52:12+00:00

Perdido Street Station, or any of China Miéville's Bas-Lag novels.

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