You are too old if you remember.......

[kphoger]

House prices being at $170 rather than $340!

So practically the entire population of the state of Oklahoma is too old?

(Hell, when I bought my house in 2017, we were looking only at houses in the $120,000—$140,000 range, and our realtor had no problems finding plenty of them for us to look at.)

We rent.  But I just looked up our house on Zillow, and it estimates the value at $93,000.

Amazing how some people don't grasp the concept that costs of living aren't the same everywhere.

[Max Rockatansky]

House prices being at $170 rather than $340!

So practically the entire population of the state of Oklahoma is too old?

(Hell, when I bought my house in 2017, we were looking only at houses in the $120,000—$140,000 range, and our realtor had no problems finding plenty of them for us to look at.)

We rent.  But I just looked up our house on Zillow, and it estimates the value at $93,000.

Amazing how some people don't grasp the concept that costs of living aren't the same everywhere.

Our house cost $165,000 when my wife bought it 2009 in Fresno.  The Zillow value is artificially worth double that because the housing shortage in Fresno and lumber surcharge fee being applied for new home construction right now.  Either way, lots of houses are under 200k in the Central Valley and will be that way for years to come.

Amusingly I actually had a conversation with someone I used to work with in Orlando about Fresno.  She was surprised that I would move to California given the high taxes and high gas prices.  I think that I surprised her when I described the real estate market in Fresno as being more affordable than Orlando.

[1995hoo]

House prices being at $170 rather than $340!

So practically the entire population of the state of Oklahoma is too old?

(Hell, when I bought my house in 2017, we were looking only at houses in the $120,000—$140,000 range, and our realtor had no problems finding plenty of them for us to look at.)

We rent.  But I just looked up our house on Zillow, and it estimates the value at $93,000.

Amazing how some people don't grasp the concept that costs of living aren't the same everywhere.

Our house cost $165,000 when my wife bought it 2009 in Fresno.  The Zillow value is artificially worth double that because the housing shortage in Fresno and lumber surcharge fee being applied for new home construction right now.  Either way, lots of houses are under 200k in the Central Valley and will be that way for years to come.

Amusingly I actually had a conversation with someone I used to work with in Orlando about Fresno.  She was surprised that I would move to California given the high taxes and high gas prices.  I think that I surprised her when I described the real estate market in Fresno as being more affordable than Orlando.

I was kind of getting at the same point you guys are making but from the opposite point of view because of where I live. I paid $270,000 for my one-car-garage townhouse (interior unit) back in 2001. The one-car-garage interior unit directly across the street sold for $705,000 last November; that sale was part of the reason why our property assessment this year is over $650,000. My parents paid $200,000 for their single-family house on a corner lot in 1983; if my mom were to sell now, she'd easily get over a million. I know someone in Clifton Forge who lives in a comparably-sized house to my mom's (maybe a little smaller) on a larger lot; her house is assessed at $171,000.

Part of that is that this area tends not to suffer the same downturns to the same degree as other areas because the US government presence creates a higher demand for housing.

The same sort of thing can be reflected in salaries, of course, as well as in adjustments to salary like locality pay for those lines of work where that's relevant.

[Rothman]

Sold my house for $170,000 in 2020 in NY...

Although in the housing market, two years ago is a completely different world from now.

Nope.  That was late 2020 and takes into account the pandemic insanity...

...which actually furthers the point that the initial post by snowc on how prices have changed is pretty removed from reality, since my house would have sold for less.

[zachary_amaryllis]

Also...

C:\>edit autoexec.bat

Abort/Retry/Fail may well be the most ridiculous user interface decision of the 20th century, if not all time. I still barely grasp the nuance between "Abort" and "Fail". Good luck coaching Aunt Kathy through that one.

edit was good times, although it was nowhere near as powerful as the Unix editors that fill the same niche like emacs and nano. Actually, it had a lot of the same basic flaws as Notepad. But I always enjoyed using it instead of Notepad on the XP machines in high school, since editing HTML files in them made me look really wizardly. Or so 15-year-old me thought, anyway. Sadly, edit no longer exists on x86_64 versions of Windows, and apparently was removed from Windows 11 entirely.

Now if you really want a candidate for "you're too old if you remember...": using edlin. (Or Unix ed, for that matter.)

remember general failure? my father tried to convince me the military was trying to read his disks. he might be in the same branch as colonel panic...

from wikipedia:
Abort (A): Terminate the operation or program, and return to the command prompt. In hindsight, this was not a good idea as the program would not do any cleanup (such as completing writing of other files).

Retry (R): Attempt the operation again. "Retry" was what the user did if they could fix the problem by inserting a disk and closing the disk drive door. On early hardware, retrying a disk read error would sometimes be successful, but as disk drives improved, this became far less likely.

Ignore (I): Return success status to the calling program or routine, despite the failure of the operation. This could be used for disk read errors, and DOS would return whatever data was in the read buffer (which might contain some of the correct data). "Ignore" did not appear for open drives or missing disks.

Fail (F): Starting with MS-DOS/PC DOS 3.3, "Fail" returned an error code to the program, similar to a "file not found" error. The program could then gracefully recover, perhaps asking the user for a different file name. This removed the biggest problem with the prompt (which earlier was known as "Abort, Retry, Ignore?") by providing an option that did not crash the program or repeat the prompt.

[Henry]

I don't know if anyone has said this yet, but I remember having to turn the TV to channel 3 or 4 to watch a video tape or play games.

(OT: Has there ever been an area with both numbers being assigned to different stations? Probably not, because at least one channel would have to be free for those kind of things.)

[webny99]

Sold my house for $170,000 in 2020 in NY...

Although in the housing market, two years ago is a completely different world from now.

Nope.  That was late 2020 and takes into account the pandemic insanity...

...which actually furthers the point that the initial post by snowc on how prices have changed is pretty removed from reality, since my house would have sold for less.

Either way, 2020 was the only the beginning of fast-rising house prices in Upstate NY, and prices have continued to go up quickly after being largely stagnant for decades, so the price would be higher now.

Of course I'm not agreeing with snowc's original post because it's way too much of a blanket statement, but it wouldn't be a completely crazy premise with some much-needed context (region, time period, etc.)

[skluth]

That is why there were people known as "typists" back in the olden days.  They'd take your earlier, probably typed, draft with corrections written in and after extracting a few primate manipulation papers hand you back a beautifully retyped copy with all the layout issues fixed and the handwritten corrections encorporated.

It was common for college students to use typists for important papers. I had a friend type my Senior Independent Study (a computer analysis showing the month-to-month correlation of rainfall over the Lake Michigan basin to Lake Michigan levels from 1920 to 1985). I can't remember what she charged, but she gave me a discount and she was worth it. She even proofed it beforehand and caught a couple spelling and grammar errors.

[GCrites]

I don't know if anyone has said this yet, but I remember having to turn the TV to channel 3 or 4 to watch a video tape or play games.

(OT: Has there ever been an area with both numbers being assigned to different stations? Probably not, because at least one channel would have to be free for those kind of things.)

No, the FCC didn't allow that due to frequency bleed.

[1995hoo]

Sold my house for $170,000 in 2020 in NY...

Although in the housing market, two years ago is a completely different world from now.

Nope.  That was late 2020 and takes into account the pandemic insanity...

...which actually furthers the point that the initial post by snowc on how prices have changed is pretty removed from reality, since my house would have sold for less.

Either way, 2020 was the only the beginning of fast-rising house prices, and prices have continued to go up quickly after being largely stagnant for decades, so the price would be higher now.

Of course I'm not agreeing with snowc's original post because it's way too much of a blanket statement, but it wouldn't be a completely crazy premise with some much-needed context (region, time period, etc.)

The boldfaced really depends on where you live. Housing prices in my area have definitely not been "stagnant for decades." There was a brief downturn around 2008, like everywhere, but on the whole property values here have, in most parts of the area, consistently risen.

Of course there are exceptions–the neighborhood where my family lived from when I was 2 to when I was 10 saw property values rise far less sharply than many other neighborhoods in the area. I looked up the house we lived in for those years. My parents sold it in 1983; it was sold again 20 years later for a bit less than $200,000 more. That's a relatively flat appreciation for Northern Virginia. I think the biggest issue in that neighborhood was that too many of the townhouses were being used as rentals, which almost always depresses property values a bit because renters have less incentive to take care of the property and the neighborhood. Point being, real estate values are tough to figure out sometimes because so many factors go into them.

[webny99]

Sold my house for $170,000 in 2020 in NY...

Although in the housing market, two years ago is a completely different world from now.

Nope.  That was late 2020 and takes into account the pandemic insanity...

...which actually furthers the point that the initial post by snowc on how prices have changed is pretty removed from reality, since my house would have sold for less.

Either way, 2020 was the only the beginning of fast-rising house prices, and prices have continued to go up quickly after being largely stagnant for decades, so the price would be higher now.

Of course I'm not agreeing with snowc's original post because it's way too much of a blanket statement, but it wouldn't be a completely crazy premise with some much-needed context (region, time period, etc.)

The boldfaced really depends on where you live. Housing prices in my area have definitely not been "stagnant for decades." There was a brief downturn around 2008, like everywhere, but on the whole property values here have, in most parts of the area, consistently risen.

Sorry, yes - another case in point of the importance of context. I was referring to upstate NY, where that was indeed the case prior to 2019-20, and have updated my post to reflect such.

[snowc]

House prices being at $170 rather than $340!

So practically the entire population of the state of Oklahoma is too old?

(Hell, when I bought my house in 2017, we were looking only at houses in the $120,000—$140,000 range, and our realtor had no problems finding plenty of them for us to look at.)

Sorry for being evasive.
Houses typically cost $170k to buy in 2017 in NC, my area had houses in the 160s-190s and they were good quality!
Fast forward to 2022, it costs double to buy the same house in NC, whereas Rothman says, moving to NY is actually a better idea.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5190-Onondaga-Rd-Syracuse-NY-13215/55507580_zpid/
Look at this house, as RothMan said, it costs $1700 to rent a small house. 

[Max Rockatansky]

House prices being at $170 rather than $340!

So practically the entire population of the state of Oklahoma is too old?

(Hell, when I bought my house in 2017, we were looking only at houses in the $120,000—$140,000 range, and our realtor had no problems finding plenty of them for us to look at.)

We rent.  But I just looked up our house on Zillow, and it estimates the value at $93,000.

Amazing how some people don't grasp the concept that costs of living aren't the same everywhere.

Our house cost $165,000 when my wife bought it 2009 in Fresno.  The Zillow value is artificially worth double that because the housing shortage in Fresno and lumber surcharge fee being applied for new home construction right now.  Either way, lots of houses are under 200k in the Central Valley and will be that way for years to come.

Amusingly I actually had a conversation with someone I used to work with in Orlando about Fresno.  She was surprised that I would move to California given the high taxes and high gas prices.  I think that I surprised her when I described the real estate market in Fresno as being more affordable than Orlando.

I was kind of getting at the same point you guys are making but from the opposite point of view because of where I live. I paid $270,000 for my one-car-garage townhouse (interior unit) back in 2001. The one-car-garage interior unit directly across the street sold for $705,000 last November; that sale was part of the reason why our property assessment this year is over $650,000. My parents paid $200,000 for their single-family house on a corner lot in 1983; if my mom were to sell now, she'd easily get over a million. I know someone in Clifton Forge who lives in a comparably-sized house to my mom's (maybe a little smaller) on a larger lot; her house is assessed at $171,000.

Part of that is that this area tends not to suffer the same downturns to the same degree as other areas because the US government presence creates a higher demand for housing.

The same sort of thing can be reflected in salaries, of course, as well as in adjustments to salary like locality pay for those lines of work where that's relevant.

At this rate it would be worth it to cash out and leave for another state if my wife wasn't so attached to her parents.  By the time they expire we will likely be close to paying the house off.  I don't know of any other location that has four National Parks within a three hour radius so we might just end up staying.

[kphoger]

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5190-Onondaga-Rd-Syracuse-NY-13215/55507580_zpid/
Look at this house, as RothMan said, it costs $1700 to rent a small house. 

Wow, that's a big lot!  0.84ac is nothing to sneeze at.

Our house in Wichita is the same size (4 sqft smaller), and our rent is something like $750 per month.  Ours was built two years later than the Syracuse one, and the garage was converted into a third bedroom at some point.  It also has a typical 0.15ac lot size.

Of course, in Syracuse, if you narrow down the lot size to what ours is, it doesn't lower the rent very much:  this house, for example, shows $1300 per month.

[kkt]

Also...

C:\>edit autoexec.bat

Abort/Retry/Fail may well be the most ridiculous user interface decision of the 20th century, if not all time. I still barely grasp the nuance between "Abort" and "Fail". Good luck coaching Aunt Kathy through that one.

edit was good times, although it was nowhere near as powerful as the Unix editors that fill the same niche like emacs and nano. Actually, it had a lot of the same basic flaws as Notepad. But I always enjoyed using it instead of Notepad on the XP machines in high school, since editing HTML files in them made me look really wizardly. Or so 15-year-old me thought, anyway. Sadly, edit no longer exists on x86_64 versions of Windows, and apparently was removed from Windows 11 entirely.

Now if you really want a candidate for "you're too old if you remember...": using edlin. (Or Unix ed, for that matter.)

Now, Emacs did not have its origins in Unixland.  Emacs grew up as a set of Editing Macros for Teco, the line-oriented editor that was standard with a lot of DEC operating systems.  DEC's TOPS-10 was used on several student-access computers at MIT, and the students heavily modified TOPS-10 to produce ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System.  Emacs grew up on ITS, at first as screen-oriented editing and gradually adding many fancy features.  Much later it was ported to Unix, and the Teco bottom layer taken away to run on a version of LISP.

Re-implementing a small lower layer makes for a very portable product, which has allowed Emacs to be ported to widely diverse systems.

[webny99]

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5190-Onondaga-Rd-Syracuse-NY-13215/55507580_zpid/
Look at this house, as RothMan said, it costs $1700 to rent a small house. 

Wow, that's a big lot!  0.84ac is nothing to sneeze at.

Our house in Wichita is the same size (4 sqft smaller), and our rent is something like $750 per month.  Ours was built two years later than the Syracuse one, and the garage was converted into a third bedroom at some point.  It also has a typical 0.15ac lot size.

Of course, in Syracuse, if you narrow down the lot size to what ours is, it doesn't lower the rent very much:  this house, for example, shows $1300 per month.

Around here, 1/2 acre is pretty standard once you get outside of the inner city, as that first example is.

[J N Winkler]

Housing affordability is becoming more of a problem even in areas like Wichita with a long history of slow and steady appreciation in real-estate values.  For a long period of time in the 2010's, a narrow-eaves house with about 1000 SF could be purchased in good condition for about $60,000, but is now hard to find for much under $100,000.  Wide-eaves houses with about 2000 SF went for about $120,000 for much of the 2010's but now go for about $200,000.

[Rothman]

None of the discussion affects the fact that snowc was wrong.

[kkt]

That is why there were people known as "typists" back in the olden days.  They'd take your earlier, probably typed, draft with corrections written in and after extracting a few primate manipulation papers hand you back a beautifully retyped copy with all the layout issues fixed and the handwritten corrections encorporated.

It was common for college students to use typists for important papers. I had a friend type my Senior Independent Study (a computer analysis showing the month-to-month correlation of rainfall over the Lake Michigan basin to Lake Michigan levels from 1920 to 1985). I can't remember what she charged, but she gave me a discount and she was worth it. She even proofed it beforehand and caught a couple spelling and grammar errors.

My mom picked up extra money in undergrad and grad school as a typist.  But when she was doing her dissertation, she was just too busy to type her own.  Getting her post-grad school job lined up, finding a place to live there, disposing of some of her possessions and packing the rest, fighting with Kodak because of how color-shifted her photos of rocks came back, all things that would be hard to delegate, and the typing was pretty easy.

[JayhawkCO]

At this rate it would be worth it to cash out and leave for another state if my wife wasn't so attached to her parents.  By the time they expire we will likely be close to paying the house off.  I don't know of any other location that has four National Parks within a three hour radius so we might just end up staying.

We're in a somewhat of a similar situation.  I've owned my house not quite 5 years and it's gone up about $225,000 in that time.  That's great and we did a cash out refi to pay down all other debt, but even when the house is paid off (in about 14 years (refi-ed into a 15 year), none of the states I would consider moving to have much cheaper housing than Denver. Might as well just stay.

[1995hoo]

Getting back to the theme of "You are too old if you remember," a tweet from the Virginia DMV earlier this afternoon prompted me to think of two driving-related ones:

Who else here learned that (a) when you stop at a red light, you should be able to see where the car in front of yours' tires touches the pavement (though you should also pull up if needed to let someone get into the turn lane); (b) when you're changing lanes, you should check your rearview mirror and if you can see both headlights on the car in the other lane that's behind you, you have enough space to get over?

Someone on another forum once said (b) is dating yourself because that isn't taught anymore.

[Rothman]

Heard b, but not a.

[J N Winkler]

Getting back to the theme of "You are too old if you remember," a tweet from the Virginia DMV earlier this afternoon prompted me to think of two driving-related ones:

Who else here learned that (a) when you stop at a red light, you should be able to see where the car in front of yours' tires touches the pavement (though you should also pull up if needed to let someone get into the turn lane); (b) when you're changing lanes, you should check your rearview mirror and if you can see both headlights on the car in the other lane that's behind you, you have enough space to get over?

Someone on another forum once said (b) is dating yourself because that isn't taught anymore.

The variant of (b) I've heard is that a lane change should not be attempted unless the entirety of the front of the other vehicle is visible.  My driver's education instructors would probably have disagreed with (a)--we were taught the tailpipe of the vehicle in front should be visible.

[kphoger]

When my dad taught me how to drive, he told me (b) as a way of knowing when to get back over after passing someone.  I don't think I learned it in driver's ed, though.

[JayhawkCO]

I remember hearing both.  A) is common practice in a lot of places with high crime so you can get out of the way in case of a carjacking or something of the like.