Posted on 08/15/2006 9:32:24 AM PDT by LouAvul
I quit smoking this year....now it's like driving 30-50 miles per day for FREE :)
I've been telecommuting for about 20 years now. I do medical transcription at home. It has its downside but overall it's great.
Couldn't pay me enough to live in a city. Pick one, any one.
Couldn't pay me enough not to live in one.
That's the 3rd or 4th time it's done the same thing in the last year.....no elections then.
I think it's tied to supply.
There's a natural born revulsion in Americans to paying over $3 a gallon, so when it gets there, they deploy a little reported strategy. They don't drive as much in some way shape or form. That increases supply, and that lowers price. Then they start driving more at the lower price, and that decreases supply, prices go up, and ... a cycle.
I think what will happen will be this:
A) Public Transportation will get a higher priority in the public's mind and thusly in budgets.
B) There may be some residential movement from suburbs to city cores (but I think this is overstated)
C) Businesses will rethink having their offices in the suburbs, which they originally did to escape the cost of City Center office space... but with more of the workforce dependent on public transportation they will have to pay higher salaries or not be able to attract folks like they once did, and move back to the city cores.
D) The Suburb to Suburb commuting that many folks do will die a slow death, and city cores will rise in demand and popularity.
This all is contingent on high oil prices for a very extended period of time, say 5 or more years to really start any meaningful and noticeable movements... $3 a gallon likely won't cause too much movement... but if Gas gets to a very high level and stays there (which I honestly don't see happening short of all out open warfare engulfing the entire middle east, but who knows.) You will see city core become THE destination spot, and burb office parks falling into neglect and disrepair, and as jobs and offices move back to the city core, public transportation will be high priorities for suburbs, and to a certain amount relocation closer to them will occur. But I see more of a build up of basically neglected public transit, more than a death of suburbs should gas prices go and stay very high for a very long time.
basically you will see a population movement similar to what it was prior to the rise of the automobile. Suburbs with good public transportation to the city cores will be in demand.. those without will fall in value and do everything in their power to be added to the routes.
Only if China stops sucking up gas on the international market.
China is a supply issue.
ONe of the Saudis, I think, said recently that they could pump twice as much oil and it wouldn't help the US because we wouldn't have the refining capacity to process it.
Interesting comment.
Queueing theory applies. China's need for oil will only grow and destablize prices even more.
There's a political side to China that will impact its growing demand for oil.
Centralized government is easier to maintain if one controls the media...the flow of information.
Transportation is a form of media. A command economy with a huge population will find it in its best interest to control "too much" traveling about.
that's just it
Housing costs are not just high in NYC, but astronomical
And the schools really suck, unless you happy to be the district for the handful of decent schools (very expensive housing). Or you shell out 30K a year for private school.(15K for pre-K)
It is safer to live here, and you know see the recent college graduates/hipsters moving out to Queens and Brooklyn. However, even some of these outlying areas are not very well served by mass transit, Red Hook Brooklyn is a perfect example. It's a half hour bus ride to the nearest subway, and then another 45 min commute if you want to get to midtown.
Two bucks will get you around, hell I bike around and skip the hell of the subway altogether. But the cost of living is through the roof. Even in the outer Brooklyn, Queens areas.
I've outsourced all over the world for many years at many companies, and have several independent experiences with Indian outsourcing. Ignoring the cultural problems -- they have some cultural attributes that make them pathological to work with from an American standpoint -- they are not particularly skilled or deep compared to anyone else, and have noticeably inferior average skill to some other countries you can outsource to. As a result, Indians are used primarily when quality does not matter but cost does.
If you need quality development work or technically sophisticated development work, the Anglosphere and Europe are still the best choices, and there is no cost savings to be had in that area unless you outsource to Eastern Europe. And there are some other different strengths between Europe and North America as well. European developers tend to be very good at strictly nailing a specification down the last dotted 'i' and crossed 't' in a way that North Americans do not. North American developers still seem to consistently generate some of the most creative and interesting engineering designs to solve complex problems.
Where you outsource (or if you outsource) depends very much on the type of development and primary development goals. There is still plenty of development work that is best done in North America. The impedance mismatch with Indians is so high that it is usually no cheaper than moving development to flyover country in the US in the final calculus. And in fact, that is where most of our development work is going these days.
The outsourcing to India fad is over. Anyone with real experience outsourcing is well aware of the cost-benefit analysis involved, and for the majority of development there are far better options.
They can't ship Rolls Royces, Mercedes and Italian sports cars to China fast enough.
But the oil isn't going into private cars. It's going into construction, petro-chemicals/products, etc. etc. And their demand will only increase.
I don't think $70+ per barrel is sustainable long term because there are already cheaper alternatives. It's just the inertia of our capital investments which keeps us locked in for a few years. Currently it is much cheaper to run a car on natural gas. It's just the cost of conversion is only worth it if we know oil will stay long term above $70.
A command economy cannot long survive if freedom breaks out.
Something will have to give.
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