The bridge flyover reminds me of SimCopter, some of us like retro gaming and don't mind a little jankiness. Especially since this can give you a convenient base to work with.
Exactly, interest rates must come down due to the government debt burden. This debt burden creates a strong incentive to force rates to zero, but we have to pretend the Federal Reserve is independent.
Separately, I think Jerome Powell is one of the worst Fed chairs as he is most (but not exclusively) responsible for what happened to the housing market by creating a lock-in effect and focusing on their CPI basket.
I don't understand the cost either, apparently it only costs around a billion dollars to build a skyscraper? The Burj Khalifa only cost one and a half billion dollars when completed in 2010. I don't know that there's criminal activity here, but the cost of this is rather surprising to me. I knew the Federal Reserve was being renovated, but I thought it was something closer to a hundred million dollars.
The Bay Area companies have been driving the economy forward for several decades now, it's been economically dominant since the mid 1990s. Consider more 'recent' companies like Google, Facebook, and older companies like PayPal and eBay. We already had the dotcom bubble pop, but that was more akin to a bump in the road.
It's not the overall metro area GDP itself but rather per capita, the people in the Bay Area are simply much wealthier and higher income. This is also true in the Puget Sound region, but not to the same extent. This difference in population is why they don't have an interest in a Zohran of sorts. State run grocery stores and public transit are really not a concern to most people as their lifestyle is much different.
The Bay Area is far wealthier and much more economically relevant than NYC. NYC has a very large low income population. NYC doesn't have nearly as strong of an economy, financial services and trading firms are increasingly leaving. Whereas the Bay Area, particularly the peninsula, is home to the companies shaping the future like OpenAI and Nvidia along with a huge number of quality startups.
There's no shortage of 'talent' in the US, particularly Amazon tier L4/L5 talent. Also, it was always less expensive to hire offshore regardless of H1B fees.
A PhD in CS is a waste of time in the vast majority of cases. If you're good you can join FAANG out of undergrad and you'll earn well over a million dollars pre-tax by the time the PhD would be finished.