An annual salary of $120,000 would sound like a pretty good deal anywhere around the world.

But that may not always be the case in Silicon Valley, where soaring rent prices and its brutal cost of living make $120,000 look almost average — even though it's more than double the US median household income.

We went through a Quora thread started by an engineer who claims to be making $120,000 a year in the San Francisco Bay Area to see what people think about that pay.

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The post was started by an engineer who claims to have a $120,000-a-year salary with 0.1% equity in the startup he or she is working for. The person has a master's in computer science and a year of relevant working experience. He/she wants to know if the salary's good enough to live a comfortable life in the Bay Area.

First things first, the after-tax, take-home salary would be approximately in the range of $6,000 to $6,500 a month.

"So let’s do something super rough here: $10k/m pretax. Assume 30% gone for taxes. Assume some 401k/IRA type savings, let’s say 5% pretax (this is up to you). So expect to take home 65% of your 10k. So $6500/m." — Devesh Khanal

That sounds about in-line with the salary of other starting engineer positions in the Bay Area.

"As a starter salary, that seems in line with what I’ve heard / signed off on as a hiring manager. Don’t expect to live large with that kind of money in the Bay Area, this place is becoming ludicrously expensive much faster than you can get raises." — Luca Candela

We learn a lot from our dads — even if that wasn't their intention — and there are some lessons that stick with a person for a lifetime.

My dad, for example, taught me the valuable life skill of completing my tax return by hand — something that I have not done since high school. But still, you never know.

When the robots inevitably rise up and humans are forced to take them out with an electromagnetic pulse that destroys our technological infrastructure, I'll still be able to file my taxes. Because, as we know, there's nothing certain in life but death and taxes ... and robot uprisings.

In honor of the men who put the father in Father's Day, I asked my colleagues to share lessons from their own dads that have stayed with them throughout the years. Some are touching and others completely useless, but overall they go to show just how influential dads are in their kids' lives.

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Always dress for the weather

This might sound minor, but my dad taught me to always dress for the weather.

When I was in high school, I'd try to sneak out of the house wearing a Hollister mini-skirt (ladies, you know) for football games in chilly mid-fall weather. When my dad caught me, he'd force me to change — or at least, bring a coat. After groans of annoyance, I almost never regretted having another layer.

In New York City, fashion sometimes trumps function. But when the forecast shows rain, I wear rain boots. In winter, my full-length down parka keeps me toasty while other people shiver in leather jackets.

Back in the day, my worst fear was looking frumpy. Today, however, I mostly hear, "Wow, you're so smart for wearing that."

Thanks for keeping me warmer, dryer, and, thus, happier, Dad.

—Christina Sterbenz, Business Insider weekend editor

Be the friend people lean on

My dad and I are very similar, which is not for our own good sometimes. But he always has my back and says he's "in my corner," and that is a notion I try to live by. I try to be the friend people lean on. I try to be the person for others that my dad is for me — well, at least half that person because my dad is pretty amazing.

—Meryl Gottlieb, Business Insider entertainment intern

Everything you say has a consequence

One of the things my dad told me that seems to have stuck is, "Everything you say has a consequence, whether good or bad." This has helped me think before I open my mouth. But sometimes the thinking goes wrong, too!

—Anonymous

Vacation isn't cheap — particularly if you're traveling to Cape Cod, a popular East Coast vacation spot that also happens to be one of the most expensive US summer destinations.

But when you're a regular, you eventually find the freebies, bargains, and things worth spending money on.

My family has been going to Cape Cod since 1952, when my great-great-grandmother Lyla Flagler retired in Falmouth. She was the town's oldest citizen when she died at 101, and it was her hope that my family would continue coming out to the Cape.

We've been doing just that, spending summertime in Cotuit, Massachusetts, since before I can remember.

I rounded up 13 affordable places on the Cape that I think are must-see's. While this is far from a comprehensive list, it's a good starting point based on the 23 summers I've spent there.

Spend a summer evening eating Crackerjacks and hot dogs at the ballpark. Cape Cod has a highly competitive collegiate summer league, and games are played nearly every night from June to August. We root for the Cotuit Kettleers, but there are nine other teams scattered across the Cape. The best part about summer baseball on the Cape: Admission is free!

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Check out the full 2016 schedule.

Stop by the legendary Four Seas Ice Cream in Centerville for a pint of ice cream (by far the best deal at only $5!) and side of the rich hot fudge. It's a cash-only joint, but there's an ATM in the parking lot. If that doesn't satisfy your sweet tooth, head over to the 1856 Country Store, a penny candy spot right around the corner.

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Check out the full list of Four Seas flavors (I recommend peppermint stick).

Take a day trip to Provincetown, a town at the very tip of Cape Cod. The water is gorgeous, the narrow, cobble-stoned streets are lively, and restaurant options are endless. If you're up for an adventure, you can always catch a whale watching boat and spend a few hours scouring the sea for marine life.

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Learn more about whale watching in Provincetown here and here.

Making time for a solid arm workout isn't always easy, especially if you're in need of weights and other equipment.

But when you're on the road or have a few minutes to spare between events, it can be nice to have some quick, virtually equipment-free arm workouts up your sleeve.

To help us out, we asked New York University physical-therapy professor Marilyn Moffat, who also wrote the book "Age Defying Fitness," for some of her favorite arm workouts that don't require weights.

Here are the nine she gave us, including modifications to help you personalize your workout. Feel free to mix and match, or just do one exercise on its own. Repeat or hold each exercise until it gets to be too much, building up at your own pace. And remember: If you have any unusual pain or problems with the exercises, stop doing them and consult a physical therapist.

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Exercise #1: The dreaded plank. Keeping your arms directly under your shoulders, hold this pose for at least 30 seconds, until it gets to be too much.

Something to keep in mind while in these poses: To better distribute your weight, spread your fingers as wide as possible. You should be able to feel the difference along your arms.

For a modification, try putting your forearms on the ground. You'll still feel the stretch along your arms (not to mention torso and legs).

There's evidence that tripping on magic mushrooms could actually free the mind.

Several small studies have linked the psychoactive ingredient in shrooms (which are illegal) with several purported health benefits, including the potential to help relieve anxiety and depression.

But, as with any drug, shrooms also come with risks. And because they're classified as Schedule 1— meaning they have "no accepted medical use" — it's been pretty tough for scientists to tease out exactly what they can and can't do.

Here are a few of the ways we know shrooms can affect your brain and body:

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Shrooms can make you feel good.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, magic mushrooms can lead to feelings of relaxation that are similar to the effects of low doses of marijuana.

Like other hallucinogenic drugs, such as LSD or peyote, shrooms are thought to produce most of their effects by acting on neural highways in the brain that use the neurotransmitter serotonin, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. More specifically, magic mushrooms affect the brain's prefrontal cortex, part of the brain that regulates abstract thinking, thought analysis, and plays a key role in mood and perception. 

They can also make you hallucinate.

Many users describe things like seeing sounds or hearing colors. A 2014 study was one of the first to attribute this effect to the way psilocybin affects communication across brain networks.

In people injected with 2 milligrams of the drug, researchers saw new, stronger activity across several regions of the brain that normally rarely or never engage in such "cross-talk." To visualize what they were seeing in the people given the drug (as opposed to those given a placebo), the researchers created the representation above.

These hallucinations may be key to understanding how shrooms could help ease depression.

Imperial College London neuroscientist David Nutt, who authored a 2012 study on psilocybin, also found changes in the brain activity patterns of people on the drug. While some areas became more pronounced, others were muted — including in a region of the brain thought to play a role in maintaining our sense of self.

In depressed people, Nutt believes, the connections between brain circuits in this sense-of-self region are too strong. "People who get into depressive thinking, their brains are overconnected," Nutt told Psychology Today. But loosening those connections and creating new ones, the thinking goes, could provide intense relief.

Original story here: This is why San Francisco's insane housing market has hit the crisis point

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Every pair of jeans has a tiny pocket in the front right pocket. Why? What is it for? Where does it originate? We found out!

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It has long been thought that the amount of time spent in different stages of sleep was responsible for how well people were able to remember things.

But a new study done by researchers at the University of California and University of Padua shows that we may have been missing something.  

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) appears to be a key player in the brain’s ability to perform memory consolidation during sleep.

ANS is made of three parts. The sympathetic system is responsible for the body’s “fight or flight” reaction, the parasympathetic system controls the body during rest with functions like heart rate and temperature, and the enteric system controls how your gut works.

This new study, the first of its kind, suggests that the central nervous system and ANS communicate with each other. They also think that dynamics of REM (rapid eye movement sleep, when most dreams occur) combined with increased parasympathetic activity promote creative associative memory processing.

The researchers used heart rate variation during REM to predict memory performance and found that no enhancement of memory while awake meant that the specific effects of ANS were associated with sleep-related consolidation of memory.

ANS was found to be an important predictor of associative processing in the brain. It showed a dissociation between time spent in REM sleep and brain activity, leading researchers to believe that REM may be dose-dependent and that too much of it can disrupt memory performance.

Counterintuitively, they actually found that subjects with higher levels of REM sleep had a higher rate of forgetfulness.   

But REM sleep still proves to be an important factor in memory consolidation and creativity. REM facilitates schema disintegration, meaning that subjects were able to break up associations of words they previously thought of and come up with new combinations.

REM was found to allow individuals to make connections between disparate ideas, which is the definition of creativity. This, combined with vagal activity (from stimulation of a cranial nerve) may lead to optimal brain state and enhance plasticity (adaptability of the brain), which was measured by heart rate variation. They also found a constant dialogue between cardiac and central brain structures via vagal stimulation were responsible for cognitive and emotional processing. 

Increases in overall ANS activity and REM sleep proved to be the two main components of memory consolidation during sleep. As it's starting to turn out, like most functions of the body, memory is a lot more complicated than anyone originally expected. 

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When you're cooking, it's often a tricky balance between making sure your meat doesn't get too tough and your veggies don't get too soft as you run around the kitchen in those last minutes of food preparation.

But there's one type of food that appears to be resilient to becoming overcooked: the mushroom.

To test it out, Dan Souza, the executive editor of "Cook's Science" at America's Test Kitchen, pitted a piece of portobello mushroom against pieces of zucchini and beef tenderloin.

He steamed all three of them over 40 minutes. Every five minutes, Souza pulled out the three foods and ran it through a texture analyze, which measures how much force it would take bite into that particular food. 

At five minutes, all three seemed to be roughly at the same point of tenderness. 

But by the end of the 40 minutes, the results looked drastically different.

The meat had become very tough, while the zucchini became mushy. In comparison, the mushroom got a little tough, but not by much.

Here's why

It all has to do with the mushroom's cell walls. They have a polymer (a large molecular structure) called chitin.

"Unlike the protein in meat and the pectin in vegetables, chitin is very heat stable," Souza explained in a video on the tenderness test. 

When you cook vegetables like zucchini, the heat breaks down the pectin in the plant's cell walls. Expose it to heat too long, and you could end up with a structure-less glob. When meat gets exposed to heat, its proteins start to tense up, making it tougher and chewy. But when the chitin in mushrooms interact with heat, it doesn't make very much of a difference.

So don't be afraid to keep your mushrooms on a little longer as you frantically run around the kitchen — they can handle it.  

Watch the full experiment:

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Don't waste time, because that's "the stuff life is made of."

It was good advice when Ben Franklin said it, and it's good advice now, no matter your age.

But your 20s are a particularly crucial time in life. Many call these the "formative" years, and the habits you form can carry you through the rest of your life.

So what's the best way to spend this time?

We sifted through a number of Quora threads and TED talks to find out.

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Work on important life skills

There are a number of life skills people need to master, and your 20s is the time to start practicing. Without the pressure of parents or school to motivate you, you'll need to exercise discipline and motivate yourself to learn the essentials.

These skills can range from patience and dealing with rejection to living within your means and good table manners.

Ask yourself daily questions

Benjamin Franklin began and ended each day with a question: "What good shall I do this day?" in the morning, and "What good have I done this day?" in the evening.

In fact, many great thinkers embraced the idea of constantly questioning things.

As Albert Einstein reportedly said, "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning."

Of course, getting into the habit of self-reflection is easier said than done, as we often prefer to avoid asking ourselves the tough questions. As philosopher and psychologist John Dewey explained in his 1910 book, "How We Think," reflective thinking involves overcoming our predisposition to accept things at face value and the willingness to endure mental unrest.

But enduring this discomfort is well worth the effort, as it can result in the confidence boost necessary to perform better in our work and daily lives.

Questions could include Steve Jobs' "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"Quora user Michael Hopkins' "How are you doing?" and Quora user Soham Banerjee's "Why so serious?" 

Read

"There is nothing that will help you more than reading," says Deepak Mehta.

He suggests a wide variety of books, from young-adult fiction and law to Dickens and Tzu, to learn more about contrasting viewpoints. "Do not be afraid of coming across a convincing viewpoint that is totally antithetical to yours," he says.

Reading is also a great way to exercise your mind, says Jereme Allison, because it activates almost all areas of it. "The mind is a muscle. If you don't use it, you lose it," he says.

You probably have at least three kinds of painkillers in your bathroom medicine cabinet, but they're not all designed to treat the same types of discomfort.

While some pain relievers are great at bringing down fevers, others contain the ingredients needed to reduce the kind of painful swelling linked with muscle soreness or arthritis.

Depending on your medical history — and even what you've eaten or drunk recently — there may be certain over-the-counter medications that you should avoid altogether.

Check out this handy chart to find out which medication is best for your pain.

Please note that many of the medications below can treat all of your symptoms. This chart merely shows which drug studies suggest is best at treating which type of pain.

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Boeing 787 jets are no puny aircraft. These things haul hundreds of people for thousands of miles. So you can only imagine that this particular 787 that has been converted for private use is completely shaking up the private jet world. The jet's lavish interior was built by Kestrel Aviation Management and is being bought by HNA Aviation Group. 

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No two ways around it, San Francisco is in the midst of a housing crisis.

It's hard to find an apartment that's even approaching affordable, as the average rent for a one-bedroom is over $3,500.

It can be tempting for many to get out of that market and get into homeownership. But that's even harder, with an estimated 57% of all homes in the San Francisco Bay Area worth $1 million or more.

To get more insight into how to navigate the insane San Francisco housing market, I talked to Zephyr Real Estate's Suhl Chin, an 18-year Bay Area real estate veteran. I can vouch for Chin's bona fides — she helped me buy my first home, here in San Francisco, late last year.

Here's the current state of the San Francisco market, and how to succeed despite the hurdles this housing crisis can place in your way.

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Suhl Chin, my realtor during my own home-buying process, has been doing this since 1998 — right when the dot-com boom hit San Francisco.

The tech industry gets a lot of flak for exacerbating the housing crisis, with lots of young, well-paid people coming in and driving prices up for both rentals and home purchases. But Suhl says that neither tech boom in San Francisco has changed THAT much around here.

"The kind of properties here are very unique," Suhl says, and there's always a lot of competition for any given house — whether or not there's a tech boom.

The board of a luxury New York City apartment complex raised paws last year when it started requiring residents to test the DNA of their dogs before granting them permission to reside there.

Its reasoning was that certain dog breeds are aggressive by nature. (The complex also has a list of banned breeds, which includes Pomeranians, according to DNAinfo.)

Beyond a dog's behavior, dog DNA tests claim they can tell you everything from how big a young dog will be to whether it will be good with kids or other pets.

Having experimented with testing my own DNA, I figured it was worth a shot to find out more about my dog. Here's how it went:

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This is Izzie. When I adopted her over a decade ago, I was told she was a mixed-breed golden retriever. She was only a year old, so no one knew how big she'd get (most goldens reach their full size, about 60 lbs., around age 2) or how she'd behave in a house where she was the only pet. Our veterinarian told us she looked like a golden, so it was safe to say she was some kind of (smallish) golden retriever mutt.

Despite our worries, she stayed roughly the same size. And we stayed curious about her heritage. She's now 14 years old, and she's friendly and loyal. Most people get dog DNA tests so they can find out what kind of behavioral traits to expect: Golden retrievers tend to be loyal and good with kids, for example, while dalmatians are super active and generally make good guard dogs.

Source: American Kennel Club

When I got the chance to test her DNA, I seized it. There were several options to choose from, but I picked the Wisdom Panel DNA test developed by MARS Veterinary, the world's largest pet healthcare provider. At $84.99, the kit wasn't cheap.

.

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Living in a van— more specifically, a converted taxi cab in Long Island City, Queens that I found on Airbnb— was much harder than I imagined.

I only spent two nights 'living tiny' before I happily moved back into my overpriced Manhattan apartment with a newfound appreciation for the handful of young professionals sleeping in vans to save money ... but there was one unexpected perk: the views.

Monday's sunset temporarily painted the Manhattan skyline pink:

Here's one more, from my perspective:

Despite the sweet views, I probably won't be joining the van dwelling community anytime soon ... but major kudos to those who are making it work.

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There's a new most expensive home in San Francisco. 

Following the $3 million price cut of 2250 Vallejo, a stunning, 14,360-square-foot home on Scott Street is now the city's priciest, Curbed SF reported.

It's listed for $28.5 million — and it's easy to see why. The Italianate villa, located in the ritzy neighborhood of Pacific Heights, is stunning. Complete with a Tiffany glass skylight, five marble terraces, and coffered ceilings, this mansion combines massiveness with magnificence.  

2820 Scott Street was first listed in 2013 for $24.8 million. Now the home is priced at $28.5 million, and if you can afford it, you're guaranteed to live in style in the heart of San Francisco.

Olivia Hsu Decker of Sotheby's International Realty has the listing.

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The yellow exterior is bright and cheery.

The ornate hallways and paneled ceilings are sure to impress visitors.

Look up in awe at the Tiffany glass skylight.

The ideas that come out of a brainstorming session are only as good as the people participating, but that doesn't mean you can't make yours more productive.

On Monday, Google Apps for Work exec Veronique Lafargue outlined the basic way Googlers go about it in a piece for Fast Company.

Here are the three main phases Lafargue points to:

1. "Know the user." You have to know not just what you are trying to solve, but who you are trying to solve it for. Lafargue says this means going out into the world and talking to people about the problem.
2. "Think 10x." This popular business maxim means that you shouldn't think about how to improve something by 10%, but rather, 10 times. The example Lafargue gives is of Google's "Project Loon" internet-beaming balloons. If the problem is getting everyone on the internet, then a 10% solution would be putting in more fiber cables, but a 10x solution would be using a network of physical balloons to get to remote areas. That's basically the premise of "Project Loon."
3. "Prototype." Lafargue says that after brainstorming, you might be tempted to just schedule another brainstorming session. But at Google, they try to get a prototype out there as quickly as possible: "It doesn't have to be perfect, just a physical manifestation of an idea that's designed strictly to answer the most immediate questions and test our first assumptions about an idea that seems promising."

Read Lafargue's full post about brainstorming over at Fast Company.

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Aerie is changing the lingerie industry.

The company has been experiencing soaring sales for multiple quarters. In its most recent quarter, comparable sales skyrocketed 32%. For all of fiscal 2016, sales soared 20%.

That's no small feat. It's 2016, after all, and apparel companies are struggling. Even Victoria's Secret — the lingerie industry's behemoth that could do no wrong until recently — has been restructuring its business to keep things moving seamlessly.

It's a prime time for Aerie (No. 30 on the BI 100: The Creators) to ascend, but that doesn't seem to be what Global Brand President Jennifer Foyle has in mind.

"Retail is a tough business today, there's no doubt. What we're doing today is really special because today [it's] not just about selling product, it really isn't. It's about driving something that the customer really believes in," Foyle recently said to Business Insider.

Foyle is the woman at the helm of it all.

She spoke to Business Insider last year about the company's decision to nix Photoshop altogether in 2014.

"This non airbrushing campaign has started with just a concept — and it's turned into a movement," she said.

"It was just this creative moment with my team,' she said.

She asked the people who work with the photos what they were going to do with the photos of the models.

They told her that, "'We take them and maneuver them.' And I was like, don't do that. These girls are gorgeous. Why would you ever do that? That seems just ridiculous, I would never do that ...We realized that, why would we ever even take the time [to airbrush]? It’s a waste of time and money and these models are gorgeous."

Since Aerie abandoned Photoshop, it's seen a continual rise, and it's almost become a fixed point in a larger movement about embracing self image.

After all, there's been a lot of talk about the way that the media has changed the way it views women. From Mattel launching a curvy Barbie to Ashley Graham appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated to the ongoing and evolving discussion about the importance of plus size fashion.

Aerie has also made its own star in the form of Iskra Lawrence, who has been named Aerie's "role model." A spokes model of sorts, Lawrence is most akin to one of Victoria's Secret's Angel: She stands for everything the brand stands for. But where Victoria's Secret models stand for intense exercise and salad greens, Lawrence is a National Eating Disorder Association ambassador, imploring young women to love their bodies as they are. (Aerie has also partnered with NEDA for a campaign earlier this year).

Amid the zeitgeist surrounding body positivity, some mind call this a stunt to get traction, but Foyle says otherwise. 

"The Aerie real campaign — it's part of our DNA now," Foyle said in March.

But could it be a way to change the conversation about lingerie. After all, there's the lingerie-clad skinny elephant in the room — Victoria's Secret — but Aerie doesn't appear to want to speak to that (and, a closer look at the brand places it in line with Victoria's Secret's younger sister brand, PINK, which is extremely successful). 

For now, whatever Aerie is doing is working. Though in sheer size it has a long way to go before it usurps Victoria's Secret, it's growing at a rapid fire pace, arguably because its apparel and its messaging speaks to young women.

And the company plans on growing. RBC Capital Markets wrote in a note that parent company American Eagle anticipates Aerie sales will reach $500 million in the coming years. That's still small compared to Victoria's Secret's $6.1 billion store sales, but the rapid and swift growth is making it a viable competitor.

The biggest proof, perhaps, is the success of the #AerieREAL campaign. Tons of women have taken to Instagram, sharing their own non-Photoshopped images of themselves in Aerie bikinis, showing off their bodies — something they might not have felt comfortable doing so before — curvy, thin, or something in between. And Foyle told Business Insider in March that she receives letters from women who say they've been inspired by the brand.

After all, as Foyle told Business Insider, #AerieREAL isn't just about size.

"Girls today are more confident, and we believe that we can do all sorts of things around Aerie Real," Foyle said in March. "It doesn't have to be about body type. It's about truth and honesty and we kind of just want to spread happiness in a way."

Read more stories about the 100 business visionaries who are creating value for the world.

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NOW WATCH: This lingerie company started a movement by nixing Photoshop — hear its president say why