Does it make sense to compare an iPhone to "the average Android"? iPhones are a premium product; they're not available in the wide range of prices and qualities that Androids are. People who buy iPhones are the type of people who, if they bought an Android, would most likely buy a top-of-the-line Android at a high price. Those are the Androids we should be comparing iPhones to.
I find it hard to believe that people are choosing Apple products over competitors because of anything to do with "racial equality". Especially since most of the components are manufactured in China, therefore by buying an Apple product (or basically any other piece of modern consumer electronics), you're helping to fund a racist ethnostate that's currently committing genocide.
What has Apple done to promote racial equality beyond the same vague performative gestures as every other major Western corporation?
It's worth noting that 80% of Samsung smartphones are manufactured in Vietnam these days. Something people often forget even in today's geopolitical environment.
I wish Samsung used that fact in their marketing, I think it would really play well.
I’m curious how most Americans feel about Vietnam. Yes, it’s been 50 years, but the war was a huge part of a decade of internal turmoil and a pretty significant defeat for our military.
Samsung may feel that it’s risky to trade on that name in the U.S. market.
Most "officers on the beat" don't carry guns, but perhaps as a sorry sign of the times it is not uncommon to see officers packing what appear to be quite heavy weapons (at least to my eyes) - e.g.:
You'll see them at busy places like stations, shopping centres, airports, busy public squares etc. At least in London - perhaps not so much elsewhere. I guess half of it is deterrent & reassurance, and the other half if to stop any "active shooter" type things before they happen.
There is also SO15 which are the sort of para-military dedicated anti-terror type people who don't patrol but are stationed around the place and use motorbikes to cut through traffic and down pedestrian areas, e.g.:
I think the main difference in the UK is, when the situation deteriorates enough to require police with guns turn up, the guns aren't there for show to try and subdue/persuade you. They'll usually shoot to kill from what I've seen/read/heard.
Get outside of central London (and possibly some other big cities like Birmingham? I don't know, I never go there) and you'll never see armed police anywhere. I grew up in a small British town in the Southeast and I can't think of a single time in my entire childhood that I saw a police officer with a gun (or for that matter, anyone else with a gun) anywhere near my hometown, except perhaps for my rare visits to touristic hotspots in London. And again, it's only in central London, at least as far as I can tell. I live in non-central London now (Zone 3) and I never see armed police anywhere near where I live. Come to think of it, I rarely see any police at all around here, at least not on foot.
I can remember going on holiday to France as a kid and being unable to take my eyes off the guns I saw on the hips of French police, because it was such an unusual sight for someone born and raised in middle England.
I think in the UK we're so used to the idea of unarmed police that we forget how astonishingly unusual it is. In most countries the idea of unarmed police is unimaginable. We've really achieved something special by managing it, at least in most parts of the country most of the time.
> London is easily as expensive, if not moreso than San Francisco.
As a Londoner, I find that hard to believe. London is a huge, diverse city with many industries other than tech, and the vast majority of London's population don't make anything close to an SF tech salary. If London was as expensive as SF then I know I wouldn't be able to afford to live here.
Perhaps it is local familiary. Living in Oakland and working in San Francisco I made $175k and was able to save $4,500 per month after all of my living and familial expenses. When I’ve spoken to companies in London they seemed to max out around $100k.
Whenever I looked at apartments online trying to find an equivalent lifestyle (30 minutes door to door commute, nearby parks and restauranta, 1 br 85 m^2 with good amenities) the rent always came out about the same as what I was paying ($1,840/month).
The difference being home in Oakland My hood was mostly single family homes with yards (and a few yuppy apartment complexes like mine). In London everything within that commute range seemed to be a concrete jungle, and I couldnt figure out how to find an equivalent neighborhood withot really going far away from the tech companies.
Whenever I visit london my dollar never seemed to stretch far and food / groceries / transit felt reallly spendy.
London pubtrans is clearly better than anywhere in the USA, that goes without sayyng, but was also more expensive (if I went to the office I think I paid $4 each way for the transbay bus, with a 5-10 minute walk on each end of my commute).
It’s a great city (except for the traffic. I would be terrified to ride a bicycle there), and one of my favorite things to do in life is smoke a spliff and walk down the camden locks trail.
I was recently called by a Facebook internal recruiter that claimed (I wasn't interested, so can't verify - he might have been telling bullshit) that the relatively low level developer job he was hiring for in London had a budget of around USD $165k/year. But the London developer market has very broad salary range. It's not that many years ago I worked at companies where we hired senior developers around the GBP 40k/USD 55k mark.
The 30 minutes door to door commute is the problem if comparing, as London is huge. A 1 hour commute is closer to the norm. But a 1 hour commute on a train is very different to the same 1 hour if you're driving and can't spend a good chunk of it with your face in a book or watching Netflix or whatever.
In terms of housing, my current mortgage for a 3 bedroom terraced house with a garden in London is about USD $2k/month, but that does mean living further out from the centre than what you want.
For anyone moving to London, my tip is Croydon. It has an awful reputation which is mostly unearned (it's a very large borough, and very diverse, and it's reputation is pretty much down to scale and some small pockets of the most deprived parts of the borough), and so it's unreasonably cheap for how good transport links it has in to the centre. There are places in London I might prefer if money was no object, but money really would need to be no object, as up until maybe the 3-4 million pound range you'll get more for your money here than ost other places in town.
> But the London developer market has very broad salary range. It's not that many years ago I worked at companies where we hired senior developers around the GBP 40k/USD 55k mark.
Working in London in 2007/8 it was common for senior developers to switch to contract work since it was fairly easy to at least double your salary that way (GBP 500/600 a day was about the going rate then IIRC.) At the time I remember traveling to the US and everything seeming very cheap at the 1.90 GBP/USD exchange rates pre Brexit and financial crash...
One of the things that distorts these discussions is that it's not just SF proper that's expensive for the most part. It's also the South Bay, Marin, and even parts of the East Bay. It's hard to have a decent daily commute from anywhere that's relatively inexpensive. That's not the case with most cities where a 20-40 mile drive (or even a commuter rail) to where the jobs are (which may or may not be in the city proper) can get you into fairly reasonably-priced housing.
London also has excellent public transport. (Some Londoners might disagree, but have they ever travelled? I've never been to any other large city where it was easier to get around by train and bus.) It's very easy to live in London without needing a car, which brings the cost of living down substantially.
London is very well connected in a bunch of ways (bus, tube, ferry, overground, DLR, tram, train, boris bike...) and in the centre is a lot more walkable than you might think, to the point of not really needing any of it in certain areas.
The reason we call it shit is because (before COVID) they're pretty much all pushed beyond capacity during the commuting hours, or practically all the time between the main tourist spots. Commuting in London is a truly hellish experience.
And that includes the commuter trains that are frequently delayed or cancelled while ticket prices increase above inflation every year.
The best thing that happened from covid is skipping the commute and saving the £300 a month it took to get to the office and back.
The vast majority of SF's population don't make anything close to tech salaries either. Working at a FAANG or adjacent company in the Bay Area is roughly equivalent to working in finance in London.
But even outside of the big tech companies, wages for software engineers are relatively higher in the US than the UK (90th percentile vs 75th) and the higher paid are paid more (2.6x the median at 90th percentile vs 2.0x the median.) If you compare median salaries / rents on pre Brexit and 2008 financial crash exchange rates SF and the Bay Area come out pretty similar.
I'm applying to jobs now (in the UK) and I'm yet to speak to a single company that plans on a full return to the pre-pandemic normal. Everyone is either staying 100% remote indefinitely, or they're hoping to adopt a hybrid approach like what you describe.
It's a bad time to own city-centre commercial real estate.
For most people who have proven they can productively work remote, it's sort of a no-brainer. Even if they don't want to move to the mountains or otherwise go 100% remote, most people will at least want the flexibility to commute fewer days and spend some days at home/out-of-the-office for all sorts of reasons. (As well as more flexibility in how close they need to be to an office.)
I expect a lot of companies just don't really know how things are going to play out right now. So, unless you know that a position can be 100% remote for all time, the conservative thing to do is to basically say "You're going to have to live somewhere that allows you to commute in a couple of days a week." You don't want to put yourself in a position where you've told someone they can live anywhere in the country they want and then, in nine months, tell them "Just kidding. You need to move to London."
Notably, the market is such that a skilled candidate going in and explicitly negotiating how remote they want to be has a good shot at getting it approved. At least if aiming for e.g. 80% remote.
It's also notable that now being someone with longer experience in working remote - especially managing remote teams - has suddenly become a very valuable skill.
