It use to be build a great game with mass appeal and profit. Now its just how small can we make it and how much DLC can we sell to a small subset of people to equal profit.

I'd happily pay a huge premium for a gyroscoped dish, that monthly cost tho....

In 07 I was very young and worried about the economy; when expressing my concerns to an older coworker said "dont ever worry, we've always been and always will be in demand". He was right. I jumped ship 3 times during the last recession, all with big bumps in pay. I've never worried about finding work, so much so that if pressed I know I can secure 2-3 offers after a week of looking

But to answer your direct question I think its three fold:

* No one wants a junior in production so unless you're well established and can burden the cost of one good luck getting in

* The educational path is very informal and unless you're going for this type of work specifically you're not learning what you need to be

* Most SWE's dont make good devops (sorry thats a fact no offense meant to anyone)

They did however correctly identify the fact Jenkins is pretty much the holy grail of targets for bad actors and hackers. Failing to identify this has caused more then fair share of known hacks (to not Jenkins specifically but any build/automation system that has the required insane levels of access).

A strict VPN locked down and for external ingress access of automated actions a restrictive proxy sitting on the edge significantly lowers the attack surface. Operationally also much cheaper to maintain.

They ended up classifying me as a "contractor" working under one of their existing agency relationships but aside from who signed my paycheck there was no distinction

All Biden's administration is doing here is ungumming people who were eligible years ago. This is cleanup from the prior administration

when in reality: hes done jack shit except what already is suppose to happen!

I promise you biden's PR group is the force behind these articles.

I don't think you realize how self defeating and ineffective it is to find every tiny reason to deflect blame from "your team". Saying that "actually.... Biden couldn't do it because of some officials in the DoE and totally couldn't have known that this was possible when he made the promise, oops!" is such a cop out. It's obvious that the Biden team knew exactly how the DoE worked, and if x or y promise is feasible or not.

working american's are still getting shit on; american's are still being disenfranchised of their votes.

and none of his action are helping the very real situation of income inequality.

and I'm still waiting for him to actually deliver on campaign promises.

Likewise if you dont know who you're bidding against, how do you even know the bidder is even real (foreign or not)? Transparency is good thing.

While there may be some "scarcity" not having full transparency and realtors not in alignment with their own clients needs is a step in the right direction.

(I use scare quotes here because while I know we're not building enough but the current market has a fair share of retail speculation, institutional investors inflating prices, and homes held as purely places to mark money(non-owner occupied). Scarcity is real and building does need to happen, but thats slow and expensive. Millions of homes are kept empty or as poor speculative investments and thats a problem)

Of course not, and I didn't say that I'm completely against reforming the real estate industry and the bidding process. But it won't fix expensive housing.

It's all bullsh*t if it doesn't address scarcity. In 2016 we had had 10 years of 2% population growth in Vancouver and 1.2% housing stock growth and we wanted to blame foreign investors, so we enacted the foreign-buyers tax. That was going to fix high housing prices.

In 2017 we all got angry about dirty money and our casinos being used as money-laundromats so we commissioned the German report to detail what was going on and surely that would show that real estate was expensive because of money-laundering. It said prices might have gone up by 6% because of money-laundering. So that's 6% of 400%.

In 2021 we started talking about investors driving up the cost of housing, ignoring the fact that investors typically become landlords and in cities with rental vacancy rates hovering around 1% (Vancouver's was 0.4% in 2017!!!), that sounds like a good thing.

It's all bullsh*t and it's all a distraction that let's us ignore scarcity. I've decided that no matter how justified that housing reform is (ie open-bidding), I refuse to support it before we deal with scarcity because we'll deal with open-bidding and then say, "Ok ... let's see where we are in 3 years time now that we've fixed that!"

Deal with scarcity or f*ck off with talk about housing prices. Don't expect me to validate your cognitive dissonance.

I can't do it because it's illegal, that's why. And I would have to go to city council to have them change the law (rezone the land). And the neighbors will campaign against me and argue against density. I own the land - I paid good money for it and it's mine in every sense of the word, but the neighbors will argue that their preferences and whims outweigh both my property rights and the rights of other Canadians to have a home.

But even if it were, it wouldn't solve the real problem in these north american cities, which is the "missing middle".

The model of small area of highly dense towers aimed at 20-something urbanites with no kids surrounded by spaced out single family homes with a yard is just fundamentally unworkable at any real scale.

If Vancouver wants to solve it's problem and not become a suburban/exurban sprawl (typical failure mode these days in north american growth) it's going to have to build a whole bunch of mid density housing near to downtown, and it's mostly going to have to build that on top of areas that are currently full of single family detached. This is not going to make current denizens of those "nice neighbourhoods" happy, naturally.

Once you leave the penninsula, though, it's surrounded by a lot of suburban sprawl, with small pockets of density around the SkyTrain stations. Unlike most North American cities, though, at least it has those pockets of density!

If I understand "the pennisula" correctly, you are referring to something like 1/10th of the city proper (not the greater area, just the city of Vanc.). It is mostly zoned appropriately; outside of that it's a mess.

Everything in grey and yellow is part of the problem mentioned above.

They're not happy with megatowers. They're ok with missing middle (townhouses).

There is a whole stretch of roads being bought out and converted to missing middle that leads to downtown. (Oak, Cambie).

Is it the case there that people are ok/happy with mid rise places along busy corridors only , but want to maintain SFD on all the side streets? That really doesn’t work either , it’s just people making a noise etc. barrier on “their” neighborhood…

> I’ve seen zoning fights about even duplexes, let alone anything bigger - not sure if Vancouver is more accepting of that than other places .

Nobody has any issues with duplexes and townhouses.

It's a bunch of patch up jobs really.

I do agree that they should just bulldoze and start developing around Skytrain stations first. That way they have a starting point to sprawl a bit. It should be a give and take from both sides: govt and nimby. Govt needs to give nimby something to keep them happy (sad but what can you do) while telling them to F off when it comes to building towers around skytrain (first).

This outside competition detaches local prices from the local economy. Likewise the speculation sets an anchor(comp) for neighboring homes when they go to sell. One investor overpaying by say 100K.. well now next month if Average Joe wants to sell he can now ask the same or more. Rinse and repeat just a few times and you get to where we are today.

<sigh>

As long as we have folks buying with the intention of parking money or using homes as an "investment" you're going to have competition with much deeper pockets

Why do you think foreign investors want to overpay for a Vancouver Special? And what do they do with it once they buy it?

Do they live in it? If so, what you're upset about is population growth. Sounds like scarcity!

Do they rent it out? If so, that's a social good in a city with a 1% rental vacancy rate and sky-high rents are as bad as high housing prices. Sacrificing the rental market to save home-buyers sounds like scarcity!

Do those foreign investors leave the house empty? Who cares if we can just build more? And we know (https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2022/02/14/unoccupied-c...) that Vancouver doesn't seem to have more empty homes than most cities it's size. But of course we can't "just build more". Scarcity!

The truth is that we've seen developers market condo pre-sales in China playing-up the region's dysfunctions - pointing out our 2% population growth rate and the difficulty in building new housing. Investors come to Vancouver because they know the game is rigged - they know that housing prices are mostly one-sided and hedged by political interference. Canada's real estate is "too-big-to-fail" and is mostly up-side.

Don't talk to me about housing prices unless you deal with scarcity.

I'll note here that there is a legitimate complaint to vacant housing. Some expensive city infrastructure like transit is supported by people-density rather than house-density, so a community of empty homes doesn't justify a subway line in the way that a bustling, lived-in community would.

Municipal funding that comes from the provincial level is also supported implicitly by income and sales (value-added) taxes rather than property taxes, so empty homes can easily create an imbalance of cost and revenue. The same also goes for cases of alleged tax evasion, where one globe-trotting patriarch supports their live-in family without declaring and paying Canadian taxes on income as a resident.

I used to live in Yaletown (Vancouver) and the building I lived in was this very tall, maybe 35 story two tower block which only had two elevators. It took me about 6 months to realize that I never saw anybody else in the building. There were only 3 occupied apartments on my floor (I think there were 8 units per floor). I was told the building was designed to be a "piggy bank in the sky" and that low occupancy was in the design.

This is just an anecdote, but I was under the impression low occupancy is an issue in Vancouver so much so that they tried to pass laws regarding empty homes.

you've literally just responded to a post demonstrating that this is not the case, please don't just do template rants off keywords

The only loss when building more dense housing in urban areas is the existing owners whose views are blocked. Otherwise it seems to generally increase the tax base, support more businesses (when mixed-use housing is built), and increase renter mobility.

It is a lot about more supply (and less price increase, or even decrease). Not about views being blocked. People who own homes feel the need to defend the price of their prized asset, for which they have used their life savings plus leverage. The system is designed to perpetuate itsself

That is not an accurate summary. Earlier...

Either we limit Canada's crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year) or we build more homes which is mostly gated by illiberal zoning laws passed by municipalities. But both of these policies are very popular so you'll be swimming upstream, politically

I completely agree with you - housing prices are high, mechanically, because of scarcity. But scarcity exists because voters like high housing prices. The truth is that most Canadians own property and are perfectly happy with their $1-3 million in equity. And regardless of their stated preferences for affordable housing, the revealed preference for scarcity and expensive housing is clear.

All I want is to shut down people looking for someone to validate their cognitive dissonance.

I mean, I think hanging 30% of your population out to dry is a bad idea, but I can't argue that this isn't a tyranny of the majority situation (or maybe tyranny of those in power, of which I expect closer to 100% are property owners).

So you, the realtor, will sell every house you got anyway, so why not bump the price while you're at it?

Can all affect what you would select, not just the price.

Its a poor sales person that thinks, "I might not sell one this month..." Not with that attitude.

They all follow interoperability standards that have been around decades and that customers have come to expect as normal. Vendor lockin here isn't an "innovation" customers want

The thing is that it's not about what you think the product should be, because the product won't morph itself into your desire. Just because there are 100 variations of the same monitor out there are all behave nearly the same (And might as well be condensed into 1 version with 2 bezel color options) doesn't mean that that is all there is to it.

The ECU in your car uses the same SoC as the ECU in a truck. But that doesn't make your car a truck, or a truck your car. Just because there are technical similarities doesn't mean that therefore the products must be the same. If a manufacturer decides to focus on some form or function and simply not make other forms or other functions, that simply means that what you wanted and what the product is do not match, and therefore you should either not buy the product, or adjust your wishes. Since the latter isn't really required, not buying the product, but buying a different product instead seems to make the most sense to me.

Trying to make yourself the center of the universe and complaining that 'they should have made what I wanted' neither helps you nor does it help interaction with other people. Pick the product that you want instead.

This is a monitor and I want it to work as a MONITOR where is the rocket science here ? I don't think I could see someone defending Linux exclusive monitors, then why are some people defending apple's inability to make a monitor this expensive behave as such ?

Trying to dilute what a thing actually is makes no sense, especially if you're essentially then trying to boil it down to the $100 category of computer monitors for home web browsing usage.

Technically a display panel, row and column drivers, a tcon and an interface buffer is "a monitor" too. So is a CRT. And a DLP screen. But they are not the same thing and are not useful in the same scenarios.

> Trying to dilute what a thing actually is makes no sense, especially if you're essentially then trying to boil it down to the $100 category of computer monitors for home web browsing usage.

Are you saying that this is a super duper monitor that no casual should use, or that this is an all-in-one PC?