new industrial fashion

Yikes, $62 for industrial space? I'm paying $23, which is only a bit over the odds here.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

People have been dreaming about $80. They are not going to get it.

There is a zoning class here called PDR, production distribution and repair, namely industrial. The developers have been packing coders and sales desks into these and charging VC-funded startups big bucks. The city, for some reason, just started cracking down on PDR misuse, telling the script kiddies to get out. That is part of the reason the lease rates have crashed.

The former Lily Drone space, similarly pimped out, is now available too. Interesting situation.

We had to sell our building (it's going to knocked down for condos) and we leased a pretty cool old place nearby for just under $13. We will have to do a lot of work on it. Everybody has a wish list, and not everybody can have all they want.

The EMI situation will be a bit better, farther from Sutro Tower.

Get 3k square feet in greater Providence for under a grand.

Who needs to be in the Bay, I'm pretty sure Rhode Island/southeastern MA has the Internet nowadays.

Four bucks a square foot seems reasonable.

Hah, I think we pay $6 SF/yr. (Location, location, location)

George H.

Providence is so cheap I should probably just rent 10k square feet of upper story industrial space and live there. Just build a secret single story ranch home inside. It's so big who would ever notice?

I think it's illegal to live there. Some of "our" space (Tri-main center) is rented to artist's, the successful ones have nice digs....

I'm getting some B&W film as cheap ND filters from a photographer down stairs, (I've got two rolls of test pieces that are too dark if anyone wants some.) These are 0.5 ND (at 795 nm) (~1/3 of the light intensity gets through.) which is (to me) surprising close to totally exposed.

George H.

But I'd have one horrible commute.

...is the sand used also for sale?

They joke that Providence is the "gayest little city in America", and it's not far off. Economically depressed not least in part due to decades of incompetent and corrupt Republican leadership which focused on giving sweetheart deals to crony contractors to build pointless projects urban renewal projects (gondola canals? really?), it does have several liberal colleges including an Ivy.

It eventually began attracting artists in the "alt" community who were fed up with paying Boston's "80% of the cost of NYC for 20% of the perks" living costs (as Americans overall seem to value the arts significantly less than a venti Frappucino), and there were hundreds of thousands of square feet of empty industrial space available basically for the asking.

Online dating and Tinder eventually came along and killed the straight "bar pickup" scene forever, but the gay community appears to still like things the "old fashioned" way and the straight nightclubs re-purposed themselves into gay clubs to cater to the new demographics, or at least gay-friendly ones. Most of the straight nightclubs I remember from ~15 years ago are gay clubs now and turning a profit.

Free market in action, I guess. Though no one has quite figured out what to do with the 30 story 1920s Art Deco skyscraper 111 Westminster St., which has been sitting vacant for several years since Bank of America moved out. It'll probably sit vacant for another few years until real estate prices rise enough to make the ~200 million renovation job to bring it up to modern fire codes (gut it down to the frame internally and rebuild) required to flip it into luxury condos worthwhile.

It is strange that the tech centers are jammed and hyper-priced, and big chunks of the USA are deserted and practically free. Apple and Google cram coders into megasites in Mountain View and bus them into/out of the bedroom community/playpen San Francisco, where they pack every seat at the bars and restaurants and raise the dBs to the pain level and beyond. And they offshore assembly and support to asia, further hollowing out the flyover territories.

An iPhone sells for, what, $500, and could be assembled in the USA for $10, but it's better to assemble it in China for $3. The profit is stashed in Ireland or Aruba. When Apple needs cash in the USA, they borrow it! It's cheaper than repatriating those couple of hundred billion stashed offshore.

A couple years ago a property anaylsis group declared this classy skyscraper to have "no financial value":

No financial value? I can afford that!

Except middle-class Americans have their retirement accounts tied up in mutual funds that invest heavily in Apple, Foxconn, etc.

They're gonna be none-too-pleased if and when the gizmo companies pull manufacturing out of China and their accounts hit the dumpster.

I'm also not sure that the margins are quite that large. I think it'd probably cost more like $50 to assemble an iPhone in the US currently. YMMV.

At least Apple seems to be spending less on advertising these days. They recently renovated the store near me and after it was done they didn't even bother with a sign, not even the Apple logo.

It's like they're saying "Hey you sheep, you know what we got in here don't even try to pretend. Come on in and slurp it up"

Some do. About half the population has no retirement assets but Social Security. The poor unemployed uneducated unstylish flyover folks don't have financial advisors and 401Ks.

Sounds high to me. A pick-and-place runs as fast in Michigan as it does in Shanghai.

I don't blame Apple for playing the game by the rules to win. The rules make hiring Americans too expensive, and keeping the profits in the USA too expensive. The next innovation is mandatory paid family leave, paid by the employers of course. Robots and Maylasians don't get family leave.

A liberal would argue that it's hopeless to try to beat the Chinese and Malaysians at their own game at the moment, but that happy workers make productive workers, and investing in happy employees is a solid investment in the future.

Malaysian wage slaves tend to make somewhat grudging workers, and when they realize they slaved their asses off for a notion of middle-class American prosperity neither their employers or nation were truly in any position to provide, well, that's the kind of pissed-offedness that topples governments.

You say Apple is playing the (Chinese) game to win, I would argue that many Asian nations _believe_ they're playing the game to "win", but are going to f*ck themselves in the long run, not least of which through poisoning their own food, water, and air.

They have cheap labor, but as Conservatives are often fond of pointing out to their East Coast neighbors, we have all the food.

In the meanwhile, one can lay the blame where one wants for globalization on whatever party one wants (it's probably also in large part simply a natural consequence of advancing technology), but I think DT is going to have a tough go of it turning the clocks back; they likely don't move easy in that direction. Adapt or perish.

This just in:

Apple's been going on about flipping to Intel for the next gen of iPhones forever and a day now too, but so far it ain't happened. I believe it when I see it.

Who buys a $500 phone anyway? Why does it cost that much? Probably to fund Apple's obscenely sized new "campus", I guess. It looks like the employee fitness center alone is going to have more square footage than Fairchild's entire US headquarters.

In business like life, humility often equals longevity.

co-CA/

is

This has been discussed by the Freakonomics guy - Steven Levitt - and the a dvantage of tech centres is that you have a whole lot of services that you can visit and talk to. when I was living in Nijmegen the nearest jobbing co il winder was 40 minutes drive away. In Cambridge UK I could have ridden to the nearest one on my bicycle a whole lot quicker.

In Cambridge the nearest place that could "electroplate" a layer of nickel and PTFE(Teflon) onto a sliding plate was in Leeds (two hours drive away), but Cambridge was only 150,000 people. Route 128 and Silicon Valley should be able to do better.

Malaysia may be a bad example - their government doesn't seem to be well ru n.

Singapore started off as cheap labour place, but invested a lot in educatin g their work-force, with the explicit idea of having a more productive work ers whose services they could sell a lot more expensively.

China seems to be following the same route. The official ideology may be di fferent, but the practical moves seems to be much the same, give or take th e rather dramatic difference in scale.

Pretty much all Asian nations know that they are playing catch-up, as Japan did quite a while ago. You can grow your economy very quickly when all you need to do is copy what has been worked out earlier. Part of that process involves avoiding the kind of pollution problems that Japan and the US befo re them ran into. Once somebody else has run into a particular problem it's easier to recognise when it shows up in your back-yard, and there will be some known solutions. Having the administrative expertise to see the soluti ons get applied, rather than bribed out of the way is part of the catch-up process.

Global warming is going to put a dent in that.

Putting the genie back in the bottle is difficult. The US had a period of i ncreasing income equality, and 99% of the population would like another one , sooner rather than later. That's what the people who voted for Donald Tru mp thought that they were voting for - they aren't going to be happy with w hat he can deliver.