Reserving 1% because I'd strike "lesser technical" from your final sentence. The misleading quote is simply not correct. It is misleading because it's not true. It says Confluence hosted in the cloud is not vulnerable. False statement that can mislead anyone regardless of how technical they are.
They said "lesser technical people", not "less-technical people". A more technical person might not be able to read between the lines, but a better technical person should.
In Seattle I know many people who live on flat routes and don't bike. I don't think the hills are the main deterrent. Anecdotally, it sounds like fear factor (especially riding near cars) and sweat (even if office has a shower) are the big ones.
There's a lot of social pressure for women to wear makeup which is especially hard to pull off if you bike to work. A woman with tasteful makeup is perceived as more professional, even if it's just subconsciously. I'm sure there are men here who will object to that statement, but 9 times out of 10, when a guy thinks a woman is wearing "no makeup," she's actually wearing primer, foundation, concealer, mascara, eyebrow pencil, lipstick, and blush and just hasn't done anything too obvious.
Because of this illusion, women don't want to be seen bare-faced by their coworkers (because society's expectation of what a woman looks like without makeup is actually a woman wearing a lot of makeup so the real no-makeup look is shocking). Now a woman who wants to bike to work has to decide if she'll hope her makeup stays looking good after a bike ride, do her makeup twice, or go without makeup for the bike ride (and risk being seen without makeup going into the office). This doesn't bother all women, but it's no wonder that a lot of us choose not to go through this minefield of issues.
Those are the two biggest obstacles for me personally, as well. I live in Providence and it is VERY unfriendly to bikes. I routinely get honked at for going slowly (10-15 relative to what cars want, 30ish). Cars don't look out for me, there are often "bike lanes" that are really just painted pictures of bikes (wow, such safety), and there are hardly ANY other bikers. Then, I get to work and it's just a run of the mill government office, no shower, no bike room, no bike racks...
Yeah sure, but let me tell you biking from Ballard to Montlake on the Burke Gilman was awesome and easy. Now I live on Capitol Hill (Seattle) and don’t bike cause the climb is a killer.
You can bike part way and put your bike on the front of a bus to go up a big hill. You can rent ebikes for pennies to go up the hill, you can get your own ebike for 500 bucks.
All of these things apply to me too :-) I live by a big freaking hill, 300' up and whenever I ride I have to take a shower. If I had a flatter hill I'd ride my bike the 4 miles to the p&r a lot. Instead I drive my stupid car.
I’m somewhat of a risk taker. I first rode a commuter bike in DC, a slow traffic biker-friendly city. I did so for about two years. Many years before that (as a teen) I did BMX and half pipes. I’m competent on a bike.
Much of the time I spent on the bike commuting was fucking terrifying.
I would guess commuting on a bike around cars is prohibitively scary for many folks.
Don’t forget bike parking. I don’t trust locking up my bike on the street in Seattle; I’ve known people who’ve had bikes stolen out of “secured” parking rooms. And there aren’t too many places to chain a bike either.
Seattle has crap for actual bike infrastructure. We dropped some lines at random on a map with no connections, and especially no east-west routes. It's getting better but man if the Burke is still basically the only east-west MUP in the city.
There is also the time factor... I have to get my kids to school/daycare in the morning and then pick them up before 5:30 when daycare closes... I already feel squeezed by these hours at work, and having to add time to my commute is a non-starter.
Yeah. I used to commute by bike in Seattle but stopped after hamburgerizing my face trying to dodge a car coming out of a garage on the hill between 2nd and 3rd. I have plenty of coworkers with similar stories of accidents or near-misses that spooked them out of bike commuting.
I still enjoy cycling in the area in general, but downtown during rush hour is a meat grinder.
Hills might not be the only or even the main deterrent but they are definitely a deterrent in SF. In college we'd joke that someone should install a chairlift, and while I'm not sure that's the solution, I still think something similar would reduce the reliance on Ubers, Lyfts, etc.
because bicycles are fair weather solutions to transit and even then if the distance is within the rider's ability which far too many over estimate. then throw in convenience and security.
still this solution of theirs isn't really worth the money being sunk into it, there is no reason to not work along side ride sharing services to get people between their destinations and light rail or bus stops
GRM is one of many factors when analyzing investment options. Other important factors include appreciation and expenses (maintenance, property management, etc). Cap rates are a better indicator than GRM (because they include expenses) but still not comparable across asset classes due to appreciation (HCOL++) and unaccounted overhead (LCOL--).
I own both (LCOL oil region, HCOL tech region). If the numbers were equal anyone would only choose the tech region, because of urbanization and future expectations for those industries. It's the same reason P/E ratios on tech stocks are so much higher than on oil stocks. So cap rates are higher on my LCOL oil region properties (approx 6, vs 4 in the tech region). But that's just market forces. If cap rates were equal why would anybody buy in the oil region? Even if you exclude the market's predictions for the future (oil vs tech), the LCOL has additional overhead (more properties at equal value).
Reducing the conversation to cap rates and ESPECIALLY reducing the conversation to GRM - relabeling GRM to "exploitation ratio" - shows these prestigious authors (MIT & Princeton) aren't interested in answering any real questions. They're too smart to believe GRM indicates exploitation. They therefore must have an agenda.
The most interesting question raised is who funded their study, else why are they spending their time forging this narrative?
Of course they have an agenda, but I think it's much less nefarious than some think -- it's that they think housing insecurity is a major problem in the United States with knock-on effects in education, health, and household wellbeing. Of course it is a complex issue on how to address this — what mixture of regulation and free market solutions best serves people -- and I think the authors land in a position that is more in favor of regulation.
I strongly recommend Desmond's earlier book "Evicted" — houses, while assets for some, are filled with extremely real people with extremely real challenges as a result of income inequality (and, moreso, differences in household wealth). OP is totally correct in noting the importance of returns in drawing investment; OP is reminded that markets forces can yield exploitative conditions (as simple evidence, consider colonialism).
Attributing the situations in Evicted to inequality or differences in household wealth is pretty off base. It's Milwaukee, not San Francisco. Competition from wealthier households has minimal to zero weight as a factor in the price of low-end housing.
Rather, a bunch of people have incomes that are below or precariously close to the carrying and maintenance costs on the cheapest possible shelter. You can tell that this is a poverty problem and not an inequality problem because the situation is worse, not better, if everyone falls down to that level. (Example: we might be legitimately better off in a world where no one is a billionaire, because billionaires have access to outsized political power that can harm other people. Money in politics is an inequality problem. I don't think you can say we're better off in a world where no one can securely afford good housing).
And if we look at places in the world that deal more successfully with such low economic productivity, one of things you'll find is a regulatory bar for "minimum viable shelter" that's more in line with what people living there can afford.
so let me get this straight: We are saying that there are some people who are doing okay in one place, and in another place, they have poverty.
And this is not inequality?
Honestly though, its been far more clear to me living and working in a country with much better income inequality how much the state of some places having rampant poverty and other places in the same country having massive profits. It seems like a cliché to say, but how is it that in the country with the highest average salary in the world there is so much poverty?
It's because there is a much sharper distribution: the wealthy few make far far more in america than they ever do in europe, but everybody else is better off.
The sharpness of this curve is what indecates inequality to me. I'm sure there are all sorts of fancy ways economists have quantified this, along with economic mobility (also shockingly low in the supposed land where anyone can make it)
Sure, there is inequality. You can remove it by destroying all housing wealth and evicting every American every month. But that makes the situation worse, not better. So the inequality is not the interesting or problematic aspect here.
“Of course it is a complex issue on how to address this — what mixture of regulation and free market solutions best serves people -- and I think the authors land in a position that is more in favor of regulation.”
The interventions we already have are largely responsible for the problem in the first place. Governments intervene massively to increase the cost of housing as a backdoor give-away to incumbent homeowners.
Doubling down on intervention will not work because there are diametrically opposed requirements—-politicians want high and monotonically increasing home prices but low and stable rents.
Thank you for addressing my concern with the claim. My immediate thought on the article title is that low income properties come with a host of extra work and risks that "higher class" areas do not have, and the higher margin on paper is the market's reflection of this fact.
I am an aspiring real estate investor and of course have considered low income properties. The forums online are chock full of the same question and the resounding response is "Yes, on paper you can make more money, if $bad_thing doesn't happen -- e.g. $bad_thing { a, b, c, d, e ... z } happened to me or someone I know and they actually lost money over 5yr. Good luck!"
Like, how about I share a video of a hellcat 0-60 but turn down the audio to 1% and call it quiet?