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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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You’re completely correct. There are exactly two places in the US where as a wealthy upper-middle class person you can live in a largely safe, urban, dense, walkable neighborhood in a major city with tons of culture, great food, art and civilization around you, excellent transport and not have to drive and they are a thin band of lower Manhattan and those gorgeous big old houses in Back Bay.

What about the white areas of Chicago's North Side? Or downtown Philly?

There are some OK streets on the near north side, but to be truly easily walkable into the Loop you need to live in the part that's almost all big apartment buildings without much character, IMHO. It's close, I wouldn't say it's bad, but it's not amazing and it doesn't feel as dense with good stuff as the above, at least in my opinion. I have a lot of time for Chicago, but it's pretty spread out and has in many cases a certain 'worse version of midtown new york' feeling.

Yeah, I'm getting to the point where I just can't stand the crushing boredom and isolation anymore even though my tech salary would take a big hit to emigrate. The stuff you listed is table stakes for living in any number of European capitals so it makes my current approach (tough it out in US HCOL to make more money but spend a lot of it on rent and cars and be miserable) feel like I'm getting scammed. Maybe I'll try it for a year and see how it goes.

Where in the US do you live?

Also ask yourself, how many American tech workers are scrambling to move to Europe, and how many European tech workers are scrambling to move to the US.

In all honesty youd have to be a fucking idiot to leave the US as a tech worker when all the programmers of the world froth at their mouths thinking of the salaries you can make.

My only other option right now without getting another job would be to move to New York City and that’s off the table for me because of the filth and disorder. So it’s either suburbs, London, or new job.

Didn't Adam Mosseri and a bunch of the other very senior Meta guys all move to London because they preferred it so much to San Francisco and NYC where they have other engineering bases? Iirc quite a few senior Google people moved to London too. As long as they can keep their US salaries tech workers very much like London in my experience.

Obviously UK pay is much lower than the US. But the previous user acknowledged this in their first post.

Thats the whole point, would they move without the same pay?

And Im not talking about seniors at Google or Meta who earn like professional athlete's. Would the average mid level programmee trade off 150k for 75k? To move from San Francisco to... London?

Im telling OP whatever he thinks hes going to get in London is probably worth much less than that sweet American salary. Hes moving out of America not Argentina.

After making a certain level of income, you should be able to just buy solutions to most problems. And on the surface OP should be able to do that.

I don't think he's a tech worker. Tech workers (well, the type who might consider moving to London) don't sweat the cost of cars; if they don't care much for cars and don't live in NYC they buy a grocery-getter or two and don't worry about cost. If they like cars they likely buy a Tesla and still don't worry about cost.

I’m a SWE making big tech rates. But I am early in my career, have a huge amount of student debt from bad decisions I made in the past, am paying a lot of rent, and kind of hate working and want to retire fast. So it’s not actually over my budget or anything but it doesn’t feel good because I’d rather invest that money to get out of the system faster than spend it on something that feels like a waste. That said the high rent is definitely more of a burden than the car expense.

Yeah, your worry about car cost is ideological, not logical. Were you to move somewhere where you could easily get by without a car, you'd find the difference in living expenses (and/or loss of salary) were greater than the cost of the car.

That seems plausible - too much demand for housing in safe, clean, walkable areas and not enough supply so the rent is through the roof.

That's a side effect of walking being slow and cramming more people in smaller areas making safety and cleanliness far more difficult.

In America, anyway. Tokyo and Vienna are doing just fine.