I get this comment a lot. I agree that it makes sense to compare also local salaries to see which city is the cheapest one to live in as an employee.
However, Expatistan is not about finding cheap cities to work in. It's about comparing cost-of-living, independently of your income. Expats are usually not linked to average local salaries in any meaningful way, anyway.
While actual salary might not be interesting, how much taxes will affect your gross income is. Tax rules are often very convulted. If you collected gross salary and received salary after taxes numbers, that'd be a great resource. I've moved abroad and all you get usually is vague statements about tax pressure (ie. asking a range of people you get wildly different answers). Often this is related to your income level in non-obvious ways as well. A table for each city with mapping from gross income -> income after tax would be very helpful.
At the moment I have no plans to open the data completely.
I do sometimes share the data with particular projects or developers on a case-by-case basis. If you are thinking about using the data for something interesting, you can contact me through the website.
This will result in people attempting to outcompete his site using functionally the same business model and UX but superior SEO. c.f. StackOverflow clones.
I would love to see businesses charging different prices to customers to offset global inequalities.
A simple and easy, but far from perfect, way to do this is to tie pricing to the location of the customer. E.g. 'download this book and pay as much as you pay for an espresso in your hometown.'
Yes, currently we have only one accommodation type.
We started collecting prices for different ones a while ago. We are now reaching the point where we already have enough data to include the new types of housing in the public index.
Yes, there are a number of international institutions collecting this data, and almost every single national statistical office collect price data regularly. Sadly, they tend not to make the raw data available.
>Yes, there are a number of international institutions collecting this data, and almost every single national statistical office collect price data regularly. Sadly, they tend not to make the raw data available.
And so you start up a project to change that....and then don't make the raw data available? I'm confused.
Thank you for the site. My friends are like a little ex-pat community, using your site often to compare cities and figure out where to move next. I really like how easy is to compare the cost of living and make a decision based on data, rather than anecdotal evidence.
That's a nasty error. Mountain View is stored internally as "Mountain View, California" and therefore the usual form of Mountain View does not match. Moreover, this error also shows that at least in this case partial matches are not recognized properly, as they should.
Needless to say, both issues are now on my list, and I'll fix them as soon as I can (I'm now on my "day job", expatistan.com is a side project).
In the meantime, as a workaround you can still use the site if you start typing 'Mountain View' and wait the two seconds that it takes the autocomplete to suggest the city. Then click on the suggestion and you should be set. Alternatively, you can just use this url the first time, and then change the second city on the boxes at the top right:
I can find at least 4 paragraphs directly related to the title, explaining why the author considers this is not a case of a "rogue trader" but of a "rogue industry". That's about 25% of the article devoted exactly to what the title says (the rest of the article giving useful background for the author point in this 4 paragraphs).
Yes but instead of addressing this specific case, the author spends his time ranting and waving his hands around about the industry in general. Hell, I already knew all of that. I clicked on the article because I expected something about this particular case.
If that's not deceiving, then anybody can write an article about just about anything. Just move to the general case, throw in a lot of invective, and dance a bit. You could write stuff like this on an assembly line.
I'll put this a different way: this is an editorial piece. As such, it's a nice one. I liked it. But it's not a news article, which was what I was expecting. It just takes a news article and sticks it on top of some pre-canned outrage.
I'll put this a different way: this is an editorial piece. As such, it's a nice one. I liked it. But it's not a news article, which was what I was expecting.
You were expecting a news article from something with a title ending in the words "My Ass"?
I read informative articles on HN everyday that have "ass" "fuck" "shit" or something like that in them. It's a very popular pattern for article titles. I guess we like it?
Any more I just ignore that kind of language -- I don't think you can tell anything from it.
What was I expecting? A logical teardown of the facts of the case, with a new conclusion the MSM had missed. Perhaps a smoking gun. I love irreverent authors who poke through stuff we already know and find new stuff. People who hack news stories. I've seen quite a few articles with profanity in the title where I came away going "wow! Very cool analysis"
> I read informative articles on HN everyday that have "ass" "fuck" "shit" or something like that in them. It's a very popular pattern for article titles. I guess we like it?
Not me. I feel that they contribute to the atmosphere in a negative way. The problem is that you can't dismiss these articles out of hand, they sometimes contain valuable insight. That doesn't mean they are to be liked for their titles. I'd prefer to see that as an 'in spite of'.
With less than an hour of work, I bet you can modify the script to make exactly what you want. Actually, it seems that most of Boomerang's functionalities could be substituted for free with a couple of Google Apps Scripts.
However, Expatistan is not about finding cheap cities to work in. It's about comparing cost-of-living, independently of your income. Expats are usually not linked to average local salaries in any meaningful way, anyway.
I explain it much better in the website: http://www.expatistan.com/faq#average-salary