> Many Americans — especially 30-somethings who remain employed — are ditching their tiny rental apartments in hip districts of expensive cities and moving to buy houses in more affordable cities or the burbs...

I suppose I fall into this category but even houses in the burbs seem more expensive than they should be. I’m specifically looking at up and coming towns, not any random burb but buying a house that’s literally 2-3X what it sold for 3-5 years ago is hard to justify. I really want to finally purchase something but I’m worried the market will fall out from under itself in a year or two after COVID financial aftermath settles down and I end up way underwater.

EDIT: typo

I was thinking that the high-end vacation towns of the affluent would be a pretty good investment bet, because even when remote work isn't popular there still is high end demand for vacationers. Think places like Jackson Hole, Aspen, Maui, Nantucket, Newport RI, Hilton Head, Scottsdale, etc... could see places like that retaining their value no matter what happens.

Some of those places you listed crashed hard after 2008 and others didn’t. I think there are trends in vacation destinations that can cause speculation. Also, many of the the buyers are leveraging wealth from equities that is more variable than the salaries the average homeowner uses. If there’s a prolonged stock market drop during a recession, many may be forced to liquidate when buyers are fewer and poorer (you’d prefer not to sell anything in a downturn, but the vacation home might be the first to go). I saw people take huge losses on vacation properties after 2008.

Lots of cities in the southeast are still undervalued IMO. I'm a North Carolinian, and there's been no shortage of northern transplants over the years. Charlotte and Raleigh have grown like crazy, and show no sign of stopping. Tons of young people moving here despite the well-deserved reputation of this area being pretty boring. I guess boring is a plus these days. West coasters largely haven't caught on, but I don't think the migrations will stop, especially with COVID.

Charlotte and Raleigh are fairly safe bets, but Winston-Salem seems like it might be on a similar path (but much earlier on in that path if so).

I moved west to avoid the bizarre laws that are common in the south -- weird restrictions on arbitrary divisions of product, state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, laws demanding that schools teach creationism, and so forth. When I lived in Fayetteville, you could buy beer at a grocery store, but liquor was only for sale by the state government. I bought a house once that required a lot of legal fees and paperwork to have a covenant removed from the property prohibiting its sale to black people. All these little quality of life setbacks added up to a real desire to get out of the south as soon as my military work was done.

I'm just not sure the allure is there, depending on which of these issues actually affects you.

Fayetteville is just awful - would never recommend that place to anyone.

I moved west for a while too. Eventually moved back to NC though. Most quirks that came from being in the south just didn't outweigh the positives in my case. ABC stores are weird, but the selection and prices are usually decent at least. I certainly never experienced anyone teaching creationism in Charlotte-Meck schools. Racial covenants are also something I've never had a friend or family member experience in Charlotte - though maybe it's because I'm from North Charlotte so most of the homes there are new construction or considered gentrified. I have read about racial covenants and redlining every where though - and Seattle certainly felt far more segregated than Charlotte and Raleigh did in that regard.

I will concede though - that gay marriage amendment that passed a few years back, was extremely disheartening and certainly did play a role in my temporary abandonment of my home state. Notably, all the big cities and every area that had a university voted against it. But still, I was aghast that the bill passed at all. I'm very glad that SCOTUS stepped in and that's not an issue any more.

It's not for everyone, and I'd even say that Fayetteville is not for anyone... but there are real reasons the metropolitan areas have grown like crazy. Charlotte and Raleigh now have something like 60% of residents being people who were not born in NC. It's probably just weather, house prices and jobs - but if somebody just wanted to live somewhere affordable that was going to go up in value - you could probably do a lot worse.

Not sure but I do know that when I first found out Goodreads was owned by Amazon I was very surprised and began to look at Goodreads (perhaps unfairly?) under a very different light. I was suddenly underwhelmed with what it was.

I remember thinking surely someone like Amazon could build something better than this. Not sure what I suddenly expected it to be, exactly, but it just felt like the whole UX was something from a decade ago.

Sure it’s great for keeping track of books I’ve read and whatnot but I’ve tried to use it to dig deep and find new authors and books similar to my tastes but didn’t find a lot of success.

In the music world I’ve had a ton of success finding new artists on Spotify’s “Fans also like” section. And I can keep following one artist to another to another. Books are obviously different in that it takes quite a bit longer to learn whether or not you like a new author than it does to listen to a new artist’s top few tracks, but still...after trying a few new authors and books, I never found that magical recommendation engine I was hoping for.

quick poll: do the people of HN prefer resources like this in video format or written formats like blogs or actual docs? i’ve personally found it difficult to self-learn from YouTube videos so if you prefer that, what about it do you like?

Both have their places.

For me I'd rather have a good speaker talk and walk through the subject matter than read about. As I can process audio faster than text.

The other side to this is that blog posts are full of people that don't write well or who are optimizing for search engines. An extreme version of this is cooking recipe posts, but I've seen tech articles that are moving this direction.

I personal prefer reading docs/books/blogs in that order.

I also occasionally watch some live programming videos casually when I'm not focusing on anything and I've learned some things that way. For example, if they do something differently than I would have it's cool to see how it works and why they choose to do it that way.

If I'm just interested in something, Youtube/video formats are great. If I am an intermediate/advance user of a technology, I want docs and API references that I can search around on from time to time when using the technology.

Video for getting started on a new topic, text for everything else. I find text guides hard to follow without a strong foundation.

I’ve always wondered if, hypothetically, someone as huge in China as Apple takes a stance and publicly criticizes the CCP, and the CCP do completely block access to the market, how does CCP explain to their people they suddenly won’t be able to get Apple products anymore? Would that actually happen? What are China’s options? Can they seize factories, take over, and keep shipping like nothing’s wrong? Do they let Apple stay but make it hurt financially?

When you have total control of the media(social/traditional), you can spread your narrative easily. I would assume it would look something like, "Look at the company aiding secessionists in HK and helping them". There is no way this narrative gets countered there.

I don't think they will seize factories, as it just means every foreign company would look to exit. They will probably simply not allow them to sell their products in mainland and not give them any concessions.

Easy, just like "This Chinese Corporation is Spying on you with 5G Networks"