The maps we use to navigate have come a long way in a short time. Since the ’90s we’ve gone from glove boxes stuffed with paper maps to floorboards littered with Mapquest printouts to mindlessly obeying Siri or her nameless Google counterpart.
The maps behind those voices are packed with far more data than most people realize. On a recent visit to Mountain View, I got a peek at how the Google Maps team assembles their maps and refines them with a combination of algorithms and meticulous manual labor – an effort they call Ground Truth. The project launched in 2008, but it was mostly kept under wraps until just a couple years ago. It continues to grow, now covering 51 countries, and algorithms are playing a bigger role in extracting information from satellite, aerial, and Street View imagery.
This would have been complete science fiction only very recently.
People talk about how great things were 20-30 years ago. I look at things like this and say to those people, you are full of s—
In about 5-10 years, we’ll probably have self-driving cars too.
Thirty years ago I could have bought a beautiful waterfront house in my suburb for $100K. The same house would now cost >$5million. Now the traffic is 10x as bad and a large part of the neighborhood is tacky high rise apartments filled with the nouveau riche. Luckily Google Maps makes it all seem worthwhile./sarc
Technically, all that is a result of people from 30 years ago thinking below the waist.
gan17,
Just to nit pick… The baby boomers are turning ~65 now. Subsequent generations have had significantly fewer kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers
Still, I like your premise. I did some searching and found this:
http://observationsandnotes.blogspot.com/2011/07/housing-prices-inf…
On the whole, housing prices have grown just slightly over base inflation, 20% more than one century ago. That’s less than I would have guessed. Of course the inflation is what’s killing us, I think most in the middle class are loosing ground (yes that’s a pun).
http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/inflation/inflatio…
Edited 2014-12-09 05:37 UTC
So you are saying that houses went from 100K to 5000K in 30 years? That would be a 163K increase per year. That is a pretty good investment.
….or your numbers are completely made up and adjusted for inflation (your salary is different from 30 years ago as well) the price increase would be significant but nowhere close to 50x
avgalen,
To be fair, unclefester was referring to waterfront properties. Here on long island these properties went from being farmland to summer homes for the wealthy. For several decades this gave LI landowners a tremendous boost in wealth. On the other hand, the opportunities for growth are much worse than they used to be. There’s no “buy cheap, sell high” properties any more, it’s “buy high, and hope to sell higher”.
I have a friend from university who inherited two properties and stands to inherit another (it helps not having siblings and cousins). One is a waterfront property likely worth $1.5M. Frankly he could not have afforded it through his job, and he wants to sell because of the annual property taxes:
http://longisland.blockshopper.com/taxes/by_city/east_hampton/neigh…
$19,379.38
Forget about paying the mortgage, the tax bill makes me cringe.
Edit:
The owner of the highest taxed east hampton property in this dataset pays $163,265.80/yr. You can see the aerial photos.
http://longisland.blockshopper.com/property/47-24-01-005-000-0003-0…
Edited 2014-12-09 17:44 UTC
I live in Brisbane Australia. We’ve had a huge economic boom over the past 35 years. Houses in the inner suburbs have risen by 10x the rate of inflation over the past 30 years. Tiny wooden “shacks”(like those $1 houses in Detroit) in my suburb cost >$600K. Multimillion dollar houses are being demolished to build apartment blocks. Houses on the riverfront are at least $5million.
This one sold for $14million recently.
http://www.couriermail.com.au/realestate/news/gina-rinehart-pays-br…
It really is a question of your value.
The goods and services of the industrial age dramatically improved your life. Things like running water, supermarkets, roads, electricity…
People literally and continue to uproot themselves from rural life to get these things. Life is really hard without them.
The problem comes in the information age where the things we gave up don’t really seem to be offset by benefits.
Yay, we have Google maps, iphones, laptops… all amazing. But would you really uproot yourself to get these things? Not most people.
Most of us would take fewer work hours, more time with the family, less expensive housing, home cooked meals… than these things.
In the big picture, we ask ourselves, what have we gained? And I do shake my head. It’s one of the reasons it is so hard to get economic growth. Most of the things produced today are considered good to get if you have spare money.
Disclaimer. Yes I know many of the things we have 30 years ago might have been unsustainable or whatever. There are reasons for everything. But they were lost.
The goods and services of the industrial age dramatically improved your life. Things like running water, supermarkets, roads, electricity…
We had all those things 30 years ago. In fact we had all of them (except supermarkets) in the late 1800s.
The Romans had roads, sewage, central heating and running water in their houses over 2000 years ago.
The only huge change in the past 50 years has been related to electronics and computing. Virtually everything else has just be an incremental improvement on existing technology.
Can’t say I agree. There isn’t anything futuristic about what Google is doing. To say Google Maps `would have been complete science fiction only very recently` makes me question how much you keep up with technology news.
It’s an impressive undertaking based on scale & scope, but total sci-fi in very recent times? Not by a long shot.
I’ve driven thousands of kilometres relying on nothing but road signs. I didn’t get lost.
Same here. Ironically, the last time I used Google Maps it gave me directions to take a bridge that was removed years ago.
[oops]
Edited 2014-12-11 00:55 UTC