On 19 May 2025, at 09:05, Rik Farrow <rik(a)rikfarrow.com> wrote: Hi Steve: Nice analysis, although I would disagree with you on one point: Cheap Real Estate? I was living near Washington DC in 1978 when a friend told me about the "Gold Coast". I asked her why they called California that, and she said because it was so expensive to live there. I moved there in 1979, and lived there until 1991, when my wife and I decided to move to a less expensive and crowded area in Arizona (Sedona). We had a family of four, plus needed extra rooms for my home office and her art studio, and have been priced out of living within a couple of hours drive of San Francisco. We really liked living there, and found people to be generally outgoing, good at communicating, cooperative but also very competitive. It was shocking to move to Arizona, with a much slower pace, but also people who were less friendly to strangers and less cooperative in general. Still, I certainly appreciated being in a place where I could hike and mountain bike, where in Marin County, north of SF, there would actually be cops with radar guns who would ticket bicyclists for coming around a corner on a dirt road faster than 5 mph! And once we had moved north of Marin, the opportunities for being alone in nature were low. The land was private and posted. So, no cheap Real Estate, not since the mid-70s. Instead, incredible home price inflation (now common where we live), and crazy-heavy traffic on top of that. Rik Farrow