Yeah, annoyingly I used to lightly rest my fingers on the brightness/escape function keys, so now every once in a while I won't pay attention and the screen is now either full blast or off >:-[
Do you have a source for your "SF collects $2800 per month per household in taxes" number?
This Quora answer[1] suggests it's more like $3300/person/yr. The 2010 Census says SF has 345,811 households, or about 2.35 people per household. So $3300 * 2.35 / 12 =~ $650/mo/household in SF.
OK, I finally did what I think is the real, updated math:
According to [1] from 2018, "Roughly
half of the budget consists of self-supporting
activities at the City’s Enterprise departments"
So that leaves $5.5B in General Fund taxes.
According to [2], in 2017 SF had 884,363 residents with 13.4% under 18, so 765,858 adult residents.
$5.5B divided over 765,858 taxpaying adults is $7,181/adult/yr, or just under $600/mo.
You can roll that up into households if you want, but it feels more illustrative to have the number be per taxpaying adult IMO. Having said that, I'll buy your $1,400/household/month number as being basically about right.
I don't disagree with your point about high taxes, but I did want to actually see what the accurate numbers were. Thanks for the interesting discussion.
I'm in LA so I ran the numbers down here for comparison... We turn out to tax at $262/adult/mo, so SF's effective city tax rate is about 2.3x vs Los Angeles.
> You can roll that up into households if you want, but it feels more illustrative to have the number be per taxpaying adult IMO. Having said that, I'll buy your $1,400/household/month number as being basically about right.
My initial comparison was about rent, so household is what I wanted to compare to. When you get a studio apartment for 2000U$S, the state gets 1400U$S. And because they do not raise 1400U$S through property taxes, they are skimming you somewhere else, by taxes that affect your income in unclear ways (business taxes, sales taxes, etc).
A landlord outside of san francisco, renting out that studio aprt, pays a fraction of the taxes that household consumes.
I'm not sure I know too many 2.3 person households that are in a studio apartment, though. Also above we counted adults vs everyone so the numbers are a bit high for the full household - SF turns out to be more like $1200/household/mo.
Looking again at averages [1], we have average SF rent in 2018 at $3787, so taxes account for roughly 1/3 (32%) of the rent cost.
And let's also compare LA at 2.83 persons/household [2] and $2371 in avg rent [3], so tax per household is $583, or about 25% of rent.
I was just curious to compare that - although you are right that property tax is only $1.7B of SF's $5.5B General Fund revenue [4]. It turns out that most of the rest are Business Taxes and "Other Local Taxes", which look like maybe Transfer Tax is a big piece?
...but if your argument is that SF taxes things other than property tax to raise most of their tax revenue, you are correct, but total business taxes are only $880M, or averaging about $26K/yr.
If you look at an average Starbucks, they're pulling in $880K/yr gross or $200K net [5], so business taxes end up at ~3% of gross, plus SF sales tax of 8.5% means you're paying 11.5% or $0.69 on your $6 cuppa joe.
Expensive, yes - but probably not the major reason rents are high. The rent costs on a 1500sf Starbucks might be as high as $80/sqft/yr = $120,000 - 4.6x the impact that SF business taxes have.
So as far as the numbers go, it looks like supply and demand pushing rental prices up are the primary cost drivers in SF, not any sort of "hidden" SF taxes.
My brother actually has a company called OnSightEyes.com which uses a smartphone-powered device to measure prescriptions. Their model is to show up at companies and run diagnostics for their employees which are then covered by insurance.
They still need an optometrist on-site, and they have a bunch of sample frames you can try on and order right there, and/or have sets you like sent directly to you to try on later so your partner can weigh in / you can take you time, etc.
Glasses take about a week once ordered and are typically priced such that they're fully covered by insurance. I felt like they were comparable to Warby Parker quality as well.
I was a guinea pig to give them feedback and it was VERY slick - I feel like it took only a few minutes. Way better than the A/B optometrist process and opaque and expensive frame / coatings upsell.
Anyways, apologies for sounding like infomercial - it's just they do a really good job with an upgrade on the kind of device you're talking about so I figured I'd share exactly how it works.
I feel like their main limitation is finding optometrists in new cities who are willing to "try something new" to run diagnosis events - who unsurprisingly tend to be younger doctors less invested in the legacy diagnosis model.
GrapheneDB (Neo4j) on Heroku here - relatively small scale project so far (1000's of users) but very easy to use, no problems, great support. If your problem space is a graph, using a graph will make your life easy once you get over the GraphQL learning curve.
We're on Rails and so use the Neo4j.rb gem which has been around for quite a while and also has a ton of work and support around it. The Ruby DSL for it makes it as easy as you would expect in Rails for most basic relationships and queries, and you can access more advanced features or drop into GraphQL as needed.
For our use case, a graph DB was definitely easier than trying to manage relationships and categories in a relational DB but it will definitely depend on your use case. Good luck!
I used the same technologies, but neo4jrb did have a few rough spots. The change from v7 to v8 was a large, breaking change, and I ran into a number of (minor) compatibility issues with other libraries.
As you say, the appropriate use of a graph database is highly situational. I certainly would not advise doing so without a great deal of careful consideration. However, I tend to doubt whether any amount of consideration would be sufficient; it may be that the most reliable way to determine whether a graph database is the best solution is to try it and see. At least, I was never really able to stop wondering whether I might be able to do things just as easily using Postgres; I would defer to those with more experience, however.
Seems plausible. 1000mi of mostly rural interstate highways (how NJ gets its goods from points west), plus nuclear weapons development, testing, and disposal are popular enough with the NM locals, as are anti-poverty programs, but yank the federal funding, and the locals would be far less friendly to NJ telling NM to supply or pay for these things on its own.
New Mexico may be a bit of an outlier since they aren't deep red like some other western states? I would certainly say that New Jersey is bribing e.g. Montana, North Dakota, etc. If the residents of those states had their way, the Department of Interior would be run differently, entitlements would be lower, Israel wouldn't get so much support, etc.
The red states are not a monolith. You might get a majority of support for some entitlements in Georgia or West Virginia. You won't get that in Wyoming or the Dakotas. Maybe those aren't the entitlements you're talking about, though. This "right people" entitlement: which one is that? Which entitlement goes to white males but not minority females? If you mean some boondoggle for rich people, I already mentioned the military and Drug War spending upthread. Besmirching all entitlements by association with that crap would be dishonest.
Do you think some kind of bidding or voting on the maximum donation amounts involved would make sense?
Ie, cities each vote on what they think a "proper" maximum reward would be, then set it at the average.
Relatedly, I'm not sure why a supermajority of cities agreeing to limit gifts would be generally in their best interests:
1. Lower status ("less popular") cities gain more donations via rewards
2. I would guess status/popularity probably follows a power curve
3. Therefore the long tail cities are able to flatten the distribution curve by bidding their way up
4. If they went back to a level playing field, they would drop back down the curve, likely losing the (smaller but nonzero) overall financial boost gained after bidding
Basically: if I am a small city with few "natural" benefactors, I can bid my way up the curve (admittedly depending on the elasticity of "demand") such that I gain more from more donations than I lose in larger rewards.
...unless the market today just drives everyone to offer the maximum reward?
Super interesting though, thank you for sharing this!
But isn't the IRS knocking in a few years better than the IRS knocking THIS year?
IANAL (or a CPA), but it seems like a good-faith attempt to invest in an OZ should not incur penalties later. Disclaimer: you are taking about the IRS, so logic/fairness may not apply.
Also: why would personal investment be against the spirit of the OZ legislation? It seems to focus on getting the property developed, not why it is developed.
> But isn't the IRS knocking in a few years better than the IRS knocking THIS year?
There's a 3rd option: How about the IRS knocking never? I say that in jest as I know you have a 1:3 chance in getting audited just through the normal course of business. I suppose it depends on your risk tolerance.
Well... you can still execute the OR essentially via BFS vs DFS... Spend some "cycles" or steps executing one path, then the other, then keep alternating. Eventually you will hit the termination (if it exists).
Or essentially, you can always simulate parallel algorithms on sequential hardware.
Of course you are correct if the sequential OR is executed naively :-)
...or if you force side-effect free short-circuiting within the sequential OR execution. But then it wouldn't really the same OR (as in the parallel case), now would it?
For some reason I am able to understand single-DA better as:
1. All students are sequentially ranked via lottery
2. You walk down the list, and each student gets their pick of schools with remaining spaces open
Side note, but it also seems IMO that "fairness" could improve if your lottery position is impacted by your past academic performance. Then the better student you have been, the more chance you have of being higher in the lottery order to select a school.
And similar in the debate over which voting system is best, there is also something to be said for preferring that the system being used is easily understandable and feeling fair to the individual, even in the case where it is (slightly) less fair in the aggregate.
Then you have the added bonus of fewer annoyed parents suing you, and only the mathematician parents will complain =)
And then if you also add in the idea of academic performance playing a role, parents can rationalize their situation as having been under their control all along - if their child had performed better, they would have had the ability to choose earlier in the list.
Of course, this is all assuming you believe that grades should convey some preferential status. But if you don't believe that, then why have grades at all?
