electronics is fun

No, there are fancy wine bars and restaurants.

Far-out cats can't compete with Javascript coders or dual-MD households for rent.

Take a look at Zillow. Houses sell for maybe a million dollars per bedroom, way over $1K per square foot.

That's a rather gross over-simplification of some decades of political inst ability.

Chavez lead two attempted military coups in 1992, was pardoned in 1994 and elected president in 1998. He wouldn't have got in if the political and eco nomic situation hadn't been a total mess. It's unfortunate that he and his cronies weren't able to sort it out, but anybody with any sense had clearly got out years earlier, including all those who "understood oil".

Years of political instability do discourage competent people from getting involved. Donald Trump's administration illustrates the point pretty well - the instability in that situation is mostly Donald Trump's but anybody who thinks it's a good idea to work with him has a poor grasp of reality.

ote:

who make

onnected from reality. It's fundamentally very foolish.

r life expectancy living in caves to what it is today.

d. It was an incremental process, solving particular problems as well as th e current technology allowed.

ome problem, all of which add up to what we have today.

"Very great importance" implies a level of pomposity and self-importance wh ich doesn't fit the historical facts.

You already think you know so much more than you imagine you need to that a ny further education would be a waste of time. Since any further education would involve you unlearning most of the nonsensical misapprehensions which you take so much (completely unjustified) pride in having acquired, it wou ld be anything but a waste of time, but the damage it would do to your fatu ously inflated self-image makes it unlikely to happen.

Wrong. Sorry.

This is breakfast, hand-carried by air courier from Boston:

That's a lot of money for something built within an earthquake zone! I'd be inclined to buy somewhere much further inland for less money in the expectation that 25-50 years from now it would become prime beachfront property. A far more profitable investment. ;->

The Haight is fairly rocky. If you have a decent foundation, and the house is bolted down and maybe reinforced a bit, it can stand a pretty good quake. Parts of town are gooey liquifaction zones where things aren't so good.

The problem with this part of the country, and several other places, is that tech jobs keep concentrating, and paychecks are absurd, so housing costs are insane. And not much new housing is being built, especially down the peninsula around the enormous Apple and Google campuses.

Cities keep encouraging employment, I guess because they want tax revenue, but the resulting density is crazy. We need a good tech crash.

I guess all the lumbersexual coders want to live together in tiny apartments in super-dense cities. They wouldn't know which end of a chainsaw to grab.

Seems like there could be tech centers in greener, less dense places, but that's not happening. Attempts to clone Silicon Valley, silly ideas like Silicon Bayou, don't work.

be inclined to buy somewhere much further inland for less money in the expe ctation that 25-50 years from now it would become prime beachfront property . A far more profitable investment. ;-> "

Actually people used to say "If you believe that I have some oceanfront pro perty in Arizona for you cheap" and in fact there is even a song by that na me.

However thinking about it, nobody can predict exactly how much land is goin g down when the big one hits California. They know where the fault line is but that doesn't mean it is going to crack exactly right there. Nevada woul d be a better bet but not for sure.

Arizona is probably better if you have to make money, Colorado is you got m oney. Not to say there's not work there, I know a guy who does really well in IT there. Makes enough he just bought a half million buck house and his olady could afford to quit working when she had the first kid. Plus he usua lly works from home. Another generation of that family that will never see the inside of a day care center.

Having lots of different kinds of experts handy has it own economic advantages, as discussed by the Freakonomics guy.

Cities exist because of that advantage (amongst others).

A good tech crash - anything short of the end of civilisation - isn't going to make any difference to that. Housing costs could drop, but nobody would have any money to buy the empty properties, so it wouldn't actually help anybody.

UK Coders moved out to Skye and the Shetland Islands as soon as they could get fast links to the web. The cross-fertilisation you get in cities is between people who unexpectedly find that they need interdisciplinary cooperation,

In the UK Silicon Glen (outside Edinburgh) and Silicon Fen (around Cambridge) work pretty well - that's where the ARM processors came from.

A good university seems to be a necessary ingredient. Silicon Bayou (New Orleans) doesn't have one. Tulane is long established, but it's graduates are more notorious than famous - and do include John Larkin, which isn't promising.

I have always enjoyed working with physical stuff, and that is what I did for a living, working in the construction trades.

When I was young, (mostly in the 1960s), I really enjoyed electronics. Back then it was all tube equipment, or early simple transistors. I still enjoy working on that vintage stuff. But I dont care to work on modern stuff, especially if it contains IC chips. Working on that modern stuff is very frustrating to me. Generally I wont even work on the new stuff, unless it's my own and I attempt to save it. But I generally limit the amount of time I spend on it, and if I become too frustrated, I just replace it with a same or similar item, either new or used. Modern electronics are not intended to be repaired at home. It's disposible and often cheaper to just replace it.

But often the problem is a simple blown fuse, power supply diodes, or a blown filter cap. Or sometimes a broken wire or solder joint. But it the problem is a faulty IC, I generally toss it in the recycle bin after salvaging the power transformer (if there is one).

Life is too short to deal with a lot of frustration, over low cost electronics. And I have to mention that ICs should be installed in sockets, not soldered in. That is well over half the reason I dont care to work on that stuff. If tubes in vintage gear had been soldered, I may have not enjoyed working on that stuff either. Why they ever eliminated sockets, is a just plain stupidity.

I do have a late 70's vintage Altec Lansing preamp, which has a lot of simple OpAmp chips. Every IC is in a socket. I did not mind working on that, because I could swap ICs, and that preamp did have a bad IC, which I fairly easily located. That's a piece of electronics that was built properly... And OpAmps are easy to trace too. Not to mention Altec made very high end equipment.

Whoever desided to solder in IC chips should have been fired from their electronics job (or shot with a high powered rifle).

Reminds me of some item where every single socket had given up gripping the IC pins. Soldering them is also necessary for heat dissipation. But it certainly isn't done for servicing convenience.

NT

lectronics job (or shot with a high powered rifle). "

Not sure I can really agree with that. You have a point, but...

For one there is chip creep, for two there is an added level of possible fa ilure of the connections, for three there is no power dissipation. Those fi ngers that make the contacts have inductance that limits the frequencies at which they can be used. The plastic or whatever will outgas or disintegrat e by some other method over time.

Would you plug in a 4.7K resistor ? Why not ? It is not worth it and less r eliable. I think the same applies here.

For a short time I worked at a place that did warranty work on Karaoke play ers. They are enhanced DVD players actually and include a mic input. All IC , almost no discrete, but the EEPROM was in a socket. I found out why.

The data in the EEPROMS were getting corrupted for no apparent reason, then I remembered they have a mechanical power switch, and or could be turned o ff in a rack by a VJ, DJ or whatever they call them. If that power is turne d off at the wrong time, like when there is a data transfer it can be corru pt. Originally we stocked a ton of main boards, later I found out all we ne eded was the EEPROMs, then later I had them get an EEPROM copier and found EEPROMs with good data in them and transferred those data to the supposedly defective EEPROMs. It worked and I turned the job from costing $$$ in part s to NOTHING in parts.

I got injured and couldn't work and when I could again they had stopped doi ng it and it is now all done in California. That's where their "Parent" or maybe child company is, I think the stuff is built by Funai which means the y either own RSQ or will sooner or later. I've noticed that in brownwares w hen a company lets another company make its product that other company ends up owning the former company or at least its name. Regardless, that job is gone but I got a new one, and much better now.

But those EEPROMs were in a socket. WHY ? The only reason I can think of is that they expected problems.

And then, many years ago I worked on a receiver, Sherwood maybe ? A bad tra nsistor socket caused DC to blow the woofers. May have been a Sansui. But t he point is a socket got "dirty" or whatever and destroyed many other thing s. Solder is more reliable.

I'm with you, sockets are great. Tubes would have never worked without them . But they are wrong for certain applications, and with the cost of things now are not really a viable option except in certain circumstances.

Plug in sockets was a big problem on arcade video games 20+ years ago. Don't know about these days. The good sockets cost more IIRC.