Can't speak from personal insight, but I recommend checking out the Tokyo Llama channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBQ3TEq5SrUuTJuMl1S_4ig (also linked elsewhere in the thread) to see what the experience of buying and fixing up an akiya is really like.
In their case, they had fairly specific location requirements and thus restricted themselves to Ibaraki prefecture. So fairly close to Tokyo (1 hour train ride I believe?), but they paid much more than $500 -- more like $20-30k if I recall. Once you go through the bureaucracy of buying it (making sure it doesn't have a tax lien, etc.), you're basically faced with a falling-down hoarder house that you have to clean out and likely tear down and rebuild completely. Theirs was also a quite large lot and a nice traditional Japanese farmhouse called a minka or kominka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minka). So, not typical of these $500 houses -- those are probably going to be further out from the cities, much smaller lots, and complete teardowns. But do expect to invest significant time and money to get it to a habitable state. And you'll likely need to speak much more than tourist Japanese to deal with the local bureaucracy and builders.
But if you're willing to put in the effort, and you do like the quiet Japanese country life as a getaway, it could well be a good investment. This is pretty much my plan for (semi-)retirement in a few years.
I doubt you'll ever come to a consensus by trying to think of pros and cons and make some kind of objective decision. Unless you're comparing languages that are very specialized for a certain domain, or obviously at opposite ends of the "abstraction continuum" (e.g., C vs. Haskell), it's going to come down to taste and the subjective preferences of the individual developers. As you've discovered, some developers want a stable, boring, mature language that doesn't get in the way of solving the problem; others like the hot new language even if they'll have to fight with the wrinkles yet to be worked out, and struggle with an ecosystem that is shifting under their feet.
Just tell them that whoever gets the prototype working first picks the tech stack.
You make good points, but I think my overall point stands: Even a $1000 genome does not provide $1000 worth of value to a healthy individual today. So there is no point in trying to make WGS broadly available, nor is there any justification for insurance companies to cover it. It would be nothing more than a form of luxury "scientific entertainment" a la 23andMe.
Also, I would challenge your suggestion that "The expansive definition of 'sequencing cost' to envelope downstream analysis and storage here is also a mistake." I would argue that it's the opposite: delivering valid and useful sequencing results to a broad population would require even more resources directed toward analyzing the results and also interpreting them for the patients.
There's no reason why we don't have sequencing for everyone at this point.
There are at least two reasons: it's still expensive, and we still don't really know what to do with it.
The "$1000 genome" is a bit of a myth, or rather PR hype from Illumina. Sure, they proved it could be done if you juke the numbers the right way. But I believe a clinical-grade whole-genome sequence still costs several times that much (see https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...). Even at $1000/genome, sequencing the entire US population would still be $330 billion, for unclear benefit.
I'd love to be corrected, but the science just isn't there to show us what to do with WGS data except in limited applications like cancer or "rare diseases". It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that sense, and it's being worked on. There are pharma companies and public consortia sequencing hundreds of thousands of genomes, and mining them alongside medical records and other phenotypic data. So the value may come eventually, but it will probably be less about preventing illness so much as curing disease in a much more targeted way. And even then, you won't need to have your whole genome sequenced just to know if you should take drug A or drug B -- a cheap targeted test will suffice.
This post doesn't say anything interesting. I don't know exactly what return to office will look like, but I know it will be whatever gives the CEO the greatest feeling of control.
Anyone else weirded out by this article being illustrated with a picture of fucking chickens in a cage? Real subtle (not subtle) message there about how CEOs (and VCs like Hunter Walk) view their employees.
CEO is concerned that senior employees won't return to the office to do the important work of mentoring juniors. Instead of incentivizing them to return, CEO threatens to convert them to contractors and take away their benefits if they don't come back to babysit the young'uns. Tries to invoke FOMO. Says remote workers will be emotionally easier to fire.
What a bizarre screed. "Baron Von Ripper-off"? Who exactly is Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post writing to? I'd be quite surprised if any of the decision makers in Japan give a flying fuck what she thinks. Most likely they are acting in their own self-interest, just like the IOC. Billions have already been spent; all the revenue from foreign spectators has already been cancelled. If the games are cancelled entirely, any chance of revenue will be destroyed, not to mention a huge loss of face.
The paternalistic tone here is also way off-base. Many Japanese are quite tired of being told what to do by Americans for the past 75+ years.
people often actually click the right buttons to start the VC even when they aren't expecting VC guests
In at least one Google building I worked in, for a while conference rooms were in such short supply that if you didn't start the VC, after a few minutes some calendar bot would decide that the room wasn't being used, remove your reservation from the room, and five minutes later someone else would show up and try to kick you out.
The actual quote is "In fact, in places where we’ve been able to reopen Google offices in a voluntary capacity, we’ve seen nearly 60% of Googlers choosing to come back to the office." That doesn't sound like surveys; I think the 60% of people came to the office once or twice interpretation is more likely.
(Also possible that the offices that were opened were more heavy on hardware / "lab" roles, so while maybe it was officially "voluntary", those people effectively had to choose between coming back to the office or doing fake / busy work at home.)
In their case, they had fairly specific location requirements and thus restricted themselves to Ibaraki prefecture. So fairly close to Tokyo (1 hour train ride I believe?), but they paid much more than $500 -- more like $20-30k if I recall. Once you go through the bureaucracy of buying it (making sure it doesn't have a tax lien, etc.), you're basically faced with a falling-down hoarder house that you have to clean out and likely tear down and rebuild completely. Theirs was also a quite large lot and a nice traditional Japanese farmhouse called a minka or kominka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minka). So, not typical of these $500 houses -- those are probably going to be further out from the cities, much smaller lots, and complete teardowns. But do expect to invest significant time and money to get it to a habitable state. And you'll likely need to speak much more than tourist Japanese to deal with the local bureaucracy and builders.
But if you're willing to put in the effort, and you do like the quiet Japanese country life as a getaway, it could well be a good investment. This is pretty much my plan for (semi-)retirement in a few years.