The frustration of trying to invest in my hometown - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53473239 <comment><USER2> Reading these threads, it's always frustrating to see people insist that it can't be because of race. "There must be a logical, mathematical reason for this!"

As a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10KSB program, one of the most shocking things I found amongst my cohort was how many of the black small business owners were struggling with credit and financing. It didn't make any sense when we discussed their business.

Often times, their companies were in better financial situations than my own, yet, whereas I was fairly easily able to secure low-interest LOCs and credit lines, they were stuck with high-interest consumer cards, or worse.

This made their businesses inherently more fragile than mine, as the interest payments alone were eating into what would have been otherwise healthy margins.

There is often no logical, mathematical reason.

There is just new racism justified by the lasting impact of old racism, and sometimes it's not even that:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/business/paycheck- protect...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/business/paycheck-protection- program-bias.html)

<comment><USER3> Check out the area where he wants the bank to "invest."

608 19th street Ensley. Look on Google Streetview and Google Earth.

Roofs have collapsed. Half the windows around there are smashed. A few large holes in walls.

What would you value buildings in that area at?

<comment><USER4> Where did you get the exact addresses of the buildings he wanted to invest in?

<comment><USER5> The pictures and then you can verify he owns it through county records:

[https://eringcapture.jccal.org/caportal/CA_PropertyTaxParcel...](https://eringcapture.jccal.org/caportal/CA_PropertyTaxParcelInfo.aspx?ParcelNo=22%2000%2031%203%20018%20003.000%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20&TaxYear=2020)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recently led an $80mm mixed use investment in a 10 derelict properties in an offbeat part of Memphis next to a few large government housing projects. Some takeaways reading the article. Banks are not the problem; banks are just doing their jobs by trying to make securable loans. Appraisals aren't the problem; appraisers are hired and paid to be non-creative and non-biased they assign a value to property. If a group of properties were acquired for next-to-nothing because they've been vacant for a decade, it's tough to assign more than a pittance because there is simply no value comps. The market agrees with the banks and the appraisers, hence not enough people have attempted to concurrently try to develop in Ensley, thus there's not enough value.

What succeeded for us in Memphis is threefold: 1) proximity to jobs, 2) group buy-in of participation into the vision, and 3) some very wealthy investors who believe in the vision.

I've toured Ensley, I looked at buying that mid rise in the back of the article's picture, and it's a neat place. It has the fabric of old small towns that used to thrive. However, I don't think Ensley has any proximity for high quality jobs or prospects for job growth, so that's probably square one for Ensley. Historically, this has been "the creatives" who need cheap space but also like to buy expensive lattes And generate a micro economy, but in our case in Memphis, a bank wanted to move its headquarters into the neighborhood, alongside several smaller businesses.

Modern day construction is extremely expensive and complicated, to the point that acquisition price in cheap parts of town are a rounding error on the project budget. You need to find a way to guarantee that rents will be sufficient for the long haul, and if you believe banks and appraisals are being short sighted (and they always are..) then you have to provide that guaranty yourself by setting aside a pile of cash or stock to secure the debt.

I could write for days on this topic, more than happy to continue discussion offline or elsewhere

<comment><USER7> You say banks are just doing their job. But you also admit that they're short sighted. Doesn't that suggeat that they're _not_ fulfilling the role that we need them to fulfil in society. I don't want to live in a society where you can only take on a project like this if you are wealthy or have a wealthy backer. Do you?

<comment><USER6> Banks job is to get money out there door and get it back with interest as agreed in loan documents. When I say short sighted, I intended to convey a lack of imagination for the future. Banks are asking, "how does this debt get serviced day1? Day30? Day365? What could interrupt those payments into the future? They do not buy into "but imagine what this will look like in 5 years!" that isn't their job, that's the investor's job.

As for the wealthy gate keeper fulfilling a role in society: Well, generally yes I support that with the caveat that HNWI s are required for an $80mm risky investment, but not for a neighborhood coffee shop investment or for a business owner moving their business into Ensley, creating jobs in Ensley. But there must be people with money making decisions against the risk, and that's important. Here's why: why invest in Ensley vs the same investment in the middle of nowhere, Alabama? Why shouldn't the US Government (the ultimate wealthy gatekeeper) invest in a bespoke vision for a large luxury mixed use community in the middle of miles of farmland? Because the investment doesn't work, a total waste of money! The Ensley investment, as proposed, is an investment that doesn't work. Capital is limited, capital flows to the highest risk adjusted returns, blah blah blah, and there are similarly dilapidated parts of Birmingham AL that have received massive investment because those investments DO work. Investors are investing in those parts of town instead. It's a sliding scale balancing opportunities, risk, time and effort, and investing in an unproven area is risky proposition and someone needs to step forward to personally take on the unmarketable risk. For someone who knows what they are doing, there is tremendous opportunity for value. That's what my company does.

There may be a path forward for Ensley, and I suggest starting with direct job creation, not finishing out a dilapidated building and hoping someone shows up to pay rent. If this person from the article wants to invest in Ensley, starting very small could be a ticket, building a case for investing in Ensley, and then convincing others to come along side, but there must be a leader taking a load of the initial risk, as well as ongoing risks, and those risks are great.

I should also mention, real estate development in general is incredibly complicated, risky, and difficult, even when the odds are in your favor starting out. Just getting the building open to public (Fire and life safety regs) is a major challenge, let alone ever making a return on investment. We typically receive plenty of rejections for loan proposals for development deals, or offers with onerous terms that are intended as a "nice way of saying no".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This could be a chicken and egg problem, too.

Banks lend on statistics, just as insurance companies have rates based upon the same. And insurance companies, for the most part, can assign rates based upon _average_ accident rates, for identifiable traits.

Like one's sex. Or where they live (a common way to get statistics without 'race/colour').

So what do I mean by the chicken and the egg, here?

Well, imagine that black landowners go bankrupt more often. And sadly, this could be because black landowners go bankrupt more often!

If a specific statistical classification indicates more bankruptcy, then it becomes true. For example, bank $a is bold enough to lend to someone whom they view as, statistically, more likely to fail. Then.. a few years later?

That person needs a fiscal injection. Were that person not black, it would be _easier_ to get funding at a time of need. However, since that person is?

Well, then they get more denials, go bankrupt, and add to the proof that "statistically, more black people go bankrupt". Or as the banks are likely doing it, "the area where people live in".

In other words, unless you can make EVERYONE, 100% not deny based upon an statistical models? Race/gender/sexual orientation/sex/where they live, etc, etc? Anyone, like bank $a lending outside of those models, will be lending to people less able to find additional assistance when/if the time comes.

Chicken and egg. It's not right, but I view this a little bit like certain regulations, where corporations can't compete against other corporations which 'cut corners', so we have to mandate all corps behave in a certain manner to level the playing field.

<comment><USER9> There is no 'chicken and egg' problem. Banks don't use race as criteria for loans, just as auto insurance companies don't use race as criteria for setting rates.

I also find perspectives like yours very perplexing. Debt is not charity. It is not charitable to provide debt to someone who cannot afford it. Not for the debtor, nor the lender. I've seen people suffer for years drowning in debt they could not afford. I've seen people with mortgages (variable rates in foreign currency) that went underwater when the rates and currency exchange shifted the wrong way. Bankruptcy is an incredibly painful process to go through as well. Debt is not charity.

Banks also do not _just_ give out big loans (no matter what your credit score is) unless there is collateral. It is clear as day, that the bank valued the collateral to be low or inconsequential (i.e. judged one property at land- value at $1/sqft and $0 for the building). So there was no collateral for those loans, because redevelopment of those properties was expensive, with lots of risk. Why do you think it hasn't happened yet? Why do you think these properties were standing there rotting away? Why didn't anybody take a flyer on those, given how inexpensive these properties probably are? Because there are major risks associated with redevelopment. In our city, a property, seemingly in a prime location, stood abandoned for years .. turns out, the property was cheap, the land was cheap, the environmental cleanup necessary for redevelopment, was not.

>Were that person not black, it would be easier to get funding at a time of need

Says who!? Have you actually tried? Our company was only extended a line of credit years after we were in business, and it was collateralized against purchase orders and revenue (and we had to provide lots of documentation to prove those). Banks do not want to give out loans with even a little bit of risk associated. They are not like venture capital firms and haven't been for a long time.

<comment><USER10> > Banks don't use race as criteria for loans, just as auto insurance companies > don't use race as criteria for setting rates.

If this article is correct, then this claim is wrong. Banks may not _directly_ use race as a criteria, but the claim is that they use race as a criteria for _property value_ , and then use property value as a criteria for loans:

> _Five of his properties were in a decent state of repair and some had > sitting tenants, while three needed a complete refurbishment. ...One bank > finally sent someone on location to assess his properties 12 weeks later. > They valued the buildings at zero dollars and just over a dollar per square > foot for the land only. As the rules for most banks say a property must be > valued at a minimum of $50,000 (£39,000) to get a line of credit against it, > his case was shut._

Counting a building with active tenants paying rent as being valued at $0 is ridiculous.

<comment><USER9> >Banks may not directly use race as a criteria, but the claim is that they use race as a criteria for property value, and then use property value as a criteria for loans ...

You have to do the leg-work to show that Banks have a policy that is in intent racist because every policy you can ever think of will have a differential impact on any group you create - because groups will never be perfectly uniform.

>Counting a building with active tenants paying rent as being valued at $0 is ridiculous.

Not necessarily.

This is why these articles are so terrible. They didn't do investigative journalism. They didn't do the legwork. I can tell you right now, there is a reason why it is valued at $0 - we just didn't get that reason because the journalist is lazy.

<comment><USER11> Redlining is a real practice done by banks and credit issuers that use race criteria based on where you live to discriminate against people of color.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining)

<comment><USER12> Redlining ended over fifty years ago. Pick a different bugaboo.

<comment><USER11> According to this article, it hasn't. Provide contradictory evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Proper valuation of real estate takes into account the future: usually 15+ years of rental income, maintenance cost, interest on loans, vacancies and churn, the development of surrounding areas in that period and then as a clincher: the future value that the building can be sold for. The underlying principle of any valuation is that there is "At Least One" potential buyer. That makes valuation of real estate an art. Say in a downturn when nobody is buying, the value is suddenly non existent. Valuers have solved that by the "At Least One" criterium: you just value in the fiction that there is always a buyer. I've been involved in several dozen valuations from a risk management perspective and that is the one thing that stuck by me. The downside risk of no liquidity is not in the valuation.

What does this lead to? A value of zero in case of tenants is highly unlikely unless there are some large cost are modelled. If there are a lot of vacant properties with zero current value, that might lead to all values being depressed. If in the set are buildings with high future maintenance cost modelled, the value of the set could become zero.

Perhaps the bank didn't want the risk of all eight properties at the same time and he should have moved step by step: first buy and redevelop the buildings with tenants, only then to expand and get leverage while building on an existing portfolio. That is the way real estate fortunes are made where I live. Get a building, make condos, fill them, show a positive cashflow and add leverage. Rinse and repeat. With rental income in 5%+ and interest moving to 1% it has been a few lucky decades for those involved.

The statistics mentioned between loaning in white and black communities are quite stark. However, to give some more perspective from the lender. A low interest rate signals even smaller risk appetite for the lender. If there ever was room for defaults in portfolios, there is none at interest rates < 1%. It just kills your business to have any one customer fail on payments or worse needing auctioning off. I guess he could easily get crowdsourcing or private investment at 25% of needed capital with his story if he did 75% downpayment at 4%. But that would kill his part of the business case. I would agree that this risk management view could blow up inherent biases in the way valuation work.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Financial reparations to African American communities are key, argues Prof > Baradaran

This seems obvious and fair. Blacks have never been given a fair chance in America.

> In 1863, when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, black > Americans owned less than 1% of US total wealth. Nearly 160 years later, > this number has barely budged.

Just setting slaves free did not, in any way, put them on equal footing with the rest of the population, and they are still mostly in the hole today that they were then, through mostly no fault of their own.

Yet it is my impression that most white Americans, across the political spectrum, are repelled by this idea. There seems to be a widespread, though usually not so bluntly stated, sentiment, that blacks are to blame for their own problems. And not much recognition of how utterly disenfranchised, and frankly destroyed, this people were during slavery, and that this has effects generations later.

<comment><USER15> You might be right about the "most" qualifier (although I hope you're not) but have you been paying attention to the protests and media/editorial coverage of the black lives matter movement? It seems many white people are finally starting to grasp the idea that black people have always been severely disadvantaged in this country. A good example is the popularity of the "white fragility" concept and a broader effort to call out racism when it happens instead of worrying about the egos and shame of those accused.

Of course, there's also a lot of white people (conservatives, mostly) offended by this notion who are pushing back heavily. There's also obviously the issue that the majority of police in certain areas are particularly fragile and defensive when accused of being racists.

Two sides to the issue n all that.

<comment><USER14> I partly base the 'most' part on seeing how widespread the idea is here on HN, which I generally consider to consist of reasonable, and mostly liberal leaning, white people.

Honestly, though the BLM movement is a nice gesture, it seems mostly prompted by the string of high-profile police brutality cases, and limited to that. I haven't seen a real agenda of change beyond that, like, for example, the suggestion of reparations, or other significant economic initiatives.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I agree that it's not nearly enough yet. The level of support for defunding police to fund social programs was surprising to me but of course our presidential candidate doesn't seem to be on board so that's not great.

But yeah, there's been a substantial increase in conservative viewpoints here lately. Not that they're all racist, but I see a lot more racist dog whistling here than I used to. It's really unfortunate because it means anything politically charged tend to get flagged really quickly. I do appreciate seeing it in a way as it keeps me aware of just how popular those viewpoints are even among some otherwise talented people. But it does shut down a lot of productive discussion as well.

Strange times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> He bought eight buildings, then didn't have enough left to redevelop any of them?

While it sucks if you can't get a loan, maybe you should have tried this with one property before trying to do it with 8 at the same time...

<comment><USER17> In fairness to him, all the buildings are part of a complex, so buying the entire set for redevelopment would normally make sense.

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-86.8954494,58m/data...](https://email@example.com,-86.8954494,58m/data=!3m1!1e3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How much did he pay to buy those buildings in cash? That seems like key information to allow readers to draw conclusions.

What was the market value for them?

<comment><USER18> I was curious too, so quickly checked on Zillow. In this neighborhood, the land is up for sale at ~$1/sqft[0] which is what the bank estimated. Many homes in the range of $30-50k, but the article says his properties are 100 years old and half are not inhabited, so the cost might be near the lower bound.

[0] [https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2121-Avenue-I-0-Birmingha...](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2121-Avenue-I-0-Birmingham- AL-35218/2103491102_zpid/)

<comment><USER17> A landmark "historic" building in downtown Ensley is an abandoned hazard.

[https://bhamnow.com/2020/04/23/ensleys-ramsay-mccormack- buil...](https://bhamnow.com/2020/04/23/ensleys-ramsay-mccormack-building-to- be-demolished-and-redeveloped/)

And it turns out that his properties are close to this large abandoned one.

[https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2020/04/johnson-with- rams...](https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2020/04/johnson-with-ramsay- mccormack-20-finally-happening-will-businesses-come-to-west-birmingham.html)

I found another article where at least one building is described as held together by decay.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-13/why- it-s-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-13/why-it-s-so-hard- to-invest-in-black-neighborhoods)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is just depressing to read these comments. Most of these are arguing that it is not a good investment for the banks to invest in a high crime rate area. Well if it is not the banks, who else? If it is nobody, are these areas condemned to be in this state forever? It just shows how broken the American society and psyche has become. I am sure even if the local, state or federal government try to make the same "bad" investment, the same people will come out demanding that tax dollars be spent elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's also been said that zero-interest rates has led to an economy awash in dumb money looking for a place to invest:

[https://themargins.substack.com/p/zirp-explains-the- world](https://themargins.substack.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world)

> Treasury investors shift to corporate debt. Public equity hedge funds shift > to late-stage private equity. Late-stage private equity shifts to mid-stage, > mid-stage to early stage. Seed rounds become bigger. Angel investors become > a thing. Unicorns, unicorns, and more unicorns. Ashton Kutcher.

> And that's how we end up where we are. In the past, if somewhat risky > corporate debt got you 10%. It now gets you 7% (I'm making up numbers here) > so you start taking meetings with late-stage growth companies. The Saudi SWF > wants to modernize their economy, but they are also looking to achieve > returns once found in public equities, so they have to get creative. > Blackrock gets jealous of KKR who gets jealous of a16z who gets jealous of > YC. There is just so much money looking to do so many new, riskier things.

> And again, that's exactly how it's supposed to work. Cutting interest rates > spurs demand and risk-taking.

> When that much money finds its way into places not used to that much money, > weird things happen. It's how we got to Community-Adjusted EBITDA and sleep > economies. You don't create a ridesharing service, but a service that oddly > loses money on every ride with a promise to figure out some future business > [Tough, but fair -Can]. The distortions live at the valuation level, but > also the communications and expectations level. Things just get weird.

In which case, why opt for risky profit-less startups, and not attempts to revitalize local communities? It's almost as if these cost-benefit analyses are skewed with built-in cultural biases and expectations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm deeply sorry to hear that he's great endeavor to do well by doing good is being blocked. This is not an apology to the systematic racism that prevents the entreprenur Brian Rice to get a loan. He's right to make his personal struggle known and try to improve the system. This said and given I'm a single founder of a boostrapped startup:

is there anyway he could bootstrap his project and do that in a smaller scale without funding?

As I said before it's terrible to force him to do so, but at least if he does bootstrap and succeed and many do the same one day some of them will be banks/VC and will remember the inequality they suffered and they will not push it further to others.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's especially frustrating when you see how banks will fund SBA projects for fad businesses like cupcake bakeries that are unlikely to be in business in 5 years. By then, the bank has made its profit and can dump the loan on the government.

<comment><USER22> Why is this frustrating? The banks make a profit this way, just like you described. They are not public services. Banks that operate with alleged "systemic racism" are bound to lose out on profits to banks that don't, therefore the case for it isn't very strong in this situation.

<comment><USER23> _They are not public services._

And yet the public does bail them out which suggests a symbiotic relationship with the economy and that banks have some responsibility to the greater whole.

<comment><USER22> > _yet the public does bail them out_

Involuntarily, due to corruption of public officials. Don't read too much into it.

There have been some attempts to run banks in an "altruistic" manner. I don't know of a successful one, just failures.

<comment><USER24> > Involuntarily, due to corruption of public officials. Don't read too much > into it.

Haha! "Please disregard any obvious counterexamples to my broken ideology."

<comment><USER22> The "counterexample" is an interpretation of events based on wishful thinking, I was stating known facts. How is governments saving banks proof of their higher purpose or morals? Saving them saved a few rich clients and shareholders while distorting the market by rewarding badly managed banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some context: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining)

</comment><comment><USER26> The title is misleading at best. He wants the banks to invest in his buildings. Which they don't want to because they don't see it as profitable.

"You don't want to give me money? RACISM!" \- USA 2020

<comment><USER27> He doesn't want them to invest, he wants a collateralized loan.

<comment><USER28> Unfortunately those cool old buildings are horrible collateral. If he fails the bank simply cannot recover its costs. And he will fail because if the buildings can even be legally rehabbed it will take years and at least a million dollars or so just to get the doors open.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The way the US property market works just completely blows my mind. Even with federal regulation there is a lot of racism inherently built into the system. Cities drain money from predominantly black neighborhoods by not repairing or updating infrastructure. Banks drain money from those neighborhoods by denying loans and undervaluing property. No surprise the buyer got an appraisal of $0.

<comment><USER30> It's not racism unless you subscribe to highly inclusive definitions of racism. It's just that government is mostly made up of people who are upper middle class or higher and government reflects their values so development they consider "nice" is facilitated and regulatory roadblocks are added to development they are suspect of.

If you told HN that some random dude buying a bunch of dilapidated buildings and make them into apartments and commercial real estate people would basically assume you're dealing with a slum lord. These are the kinds of assumptions that government codifies. They don't care that you're black or brown or white. You're just a name on a form to them. What they care about is that your proposed development meets X, Y and Z which triggers scrutiny A B and C (which was all originally passed to curtail slum lords back when the municipality got rich on a boom of local industry 0-70yr ago and could afford to drive them out).

And of course the bank knows all this and they figure that into their calculations when they're deciding whether or not to lend to you and what interest rate you'll get.

<comment><USER29> > government is mostly made up of people who are upper middle class or higher

Go to your city hall or their website and see if they have an organizational chart. For some of us one thing will overwhelmingly stick out. For others it's just business as usual.

> the municipality got rich on a boom of local industry 0-70yr ago and could > afford to drive them out

This did not happen. Local industry collapsed and ushered in slumlords. City living has only started trending up within the last 2 decades.

Banks still rely on an outdated, and I would say racist, method of property valuation called "comps". The value of the property around you determines the value of the property you are buying. If you are trying to rehabilitate a distressed neighborhood you can't use that method. You'll end up with situations like this. Needing hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans meanwhile the buildings around you are valued at $0.

Of course you don't have to take my word for it. HUD has a whole enforcement arm targeting racial discrimination in banking [0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining#Court_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining#Court_system)

<comment><USER5> >Go to your city hall or their website and see if they have an organizational chart. For some of us one thing will overwhelmingly stick out. For others it's just business as usual.

I assume you mean that they're all white. Which isn't true at all. Birmingham, as an example, has had black mayors for 40+ years now. Most of the cities in the south are like that. Whites fled to the surrounding suburbs leaving political power to the Blacks that remained.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> When he says "historic", the bank thinks "decrepit." Unless they building is the Empire State Building, age hurts value.

Seriously, the fact that he had the cash to buy the buildings but needs a line of credit against them to develop them tells me that the value of the buildings was quite low to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER31> Doesn't this represent a huge potential financial opportunity to whoever can figure out how to properly recognize the value in these places/owners? What's stopping some forward looking bank from doing so?

<comment><USER32> What if the banks have properly recognised the value?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Check out the buildings he owns and the neighbourhood he is in on Google Earth and Google Streetview.

One address is 608 19th street Ensley.

He is surrounded by buildings which are abandoned and the roofs have caved in. Half the windows in the area are smashed. Saw a few crumbling walls.

Those building aren't worth anything.

</comment><comment><USER33> Well guys I did some work in a insurance company a few years ago. From my experience, the issue here is not that the guy is black, the issue is the location where the business are to be open. The banks and insurance companies will evaluate the risk of lending money more than twice for business in those high crime areas.

Just take a look at the news in the Minneapolis protests and the amount of black owned business burn to the ground on those areas. After events like this most banks will be reluctant to invest money there, is not so complicated.

[https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/al/birmingham/crime](https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/al/birmingham/crime)

</comment><comment><USER34> Tech isn't really a solution to this problem, but maybe some outside of the box thinking could setup a newer framework that would help.

If private lending doesn't want to back this project, even if there isn't 'strong competition' (at least 5 lenders willing to accept the land within a city as collateral), then the government (whichever layer values the land the highest) should be willing to be a buyer at that value and that should be the collateral for a loan at median market rate.

Automating that process and making it easier for consumers to check that data is a natural fit for tech.

</comment><comment><USER28> Sadly, these buildings just aren't good investments, and he's not a good investor. Buildings that old are subject to all kinds of safety regulations, and Birmingham is not an easy town to work through that kind of thing. No one in the city is going to stick their neck out to cut through decades of regulations only to lose their job when there's a fire or collapse. Any new owner will be tied up in red tape and rehab requirements that would dwarf the value of the buildings themselves. It's likely that feasibility studies, inspections (and reinspections), and permits alone would cost more than the buildings. They also tend to take months and even years to get through.

I'm a successful real estate investor and while I absolutely love old downtown areas like that, and would love to revitalize them myself, I couldn't even talk my wife into one of those properties, much less eight for which I had no budget. The numbers just don't pencil out.

Racism has nothing to do with it. In fact, banks love to make loans to women and minority business owners. But there are some risks that would be irresponsible, and this is a textbook example of a loan that's likely to default, leaving the banks with costs they couldn't possibly recover.

Just to make sure this post gets flagged to extinction, I'd like to suggest to anyone sure that this is a case of racism and not pragmatism put together an investment group and help out.

<comment><USER35> Racism has nothing and everything to do with it. The word 'racism' has several very different meanings, depending on which dialect of English you speak.

* In my hometown, racism would have nothing to do with it. The math doesn't work out for the investment, he was denied, case closed.

* In my current town, racism has everything to do with it. We've set up structural barriers to success, which correlate strongly with race. We have a moral duty to remove those barriers.

The difference comes down to different definitions of the word 'racism.'

It's not a question of precision either. Just as the same sound might mean something different in Italian than in English, the same word will mean something different in Seattle than in Alabama. The differences tend to be more subtle, so people don't recognize that they're talking about completely different things. That goes for a lot of words ("white supremacy" especially).

The high-level problem, though, is if we did invest in lower-income communities in the way the author describes, we'd be wealthier as a nation as a whole. Individual investments might not come out ahead (so private banks wouldn't necessarily want to finance that), but the net wealth generated in the community would more than make up for the new risk. If the federal government ran banks, even human element aside and just looking at likely expected impact on taxes, those loans would make sense. That's a problem it makes sense to fix. And the article gets back into reparations. Even if we did come out behind, morally, those risks would probably make sense too -- the multiplier of a loan like this which might be defaulted on is far greater than hand-outs. If nothing else, we've improved a few buildings and a community. But I don't think we would come out behind. Even back-of-the-envelope numbers place us well ahead.

<comment><USER28> Nothing stopping you from such investments.

I put my money where my mouth is.

<comment><USER35> Something is stopping me. If your analysis is correct, I'd lose money.

Given you reading comprehension skills, though, I'm beginning to question your analysis. If you can't understand a 6-paragraph post, I can't imagine why you'd be qualified to analyze ROI for an investment.

Go back and re-read what I wrote a few times until you understand it, and then we can talk.

<comment><USER28> Good for you. It's always, always smart to question any analysis. Your writing isn't interesting enough for me to spend anymore time on that post, however. My sincere best wishes on your journeys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If you want a happy version of this try -

Apple TV's "Home" S01E02, Chicago

The show is more about artistically showing peoples Home's physically and _spiritually_ for lack of a better word, not figures, but you can see the money it would take in Theaster Gates's project.

If you can't see the money it would take, jump to something generic with $ like Grand Designs.

</comment><comment><USER37> If a building has tenants it's straightforward to value it, no need for comps or sqft calculations.

<comment><USER38> How long are those tenants planning to stay?

<comment><USER37> Check their leases, apply a vacancy rate of 5%-15% depending on history or estimation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hate these kinds of articles. There are thousands of reasons why this gentleman was denied a loan for redevelopment of these properties, and it is just taken as a truism that it must be racism. The article doesn't even attempt to justify this view, and simply expects the reader to take it at face-value.

This is serious stuff. If there is institutional racism, then we need to stamp it out. You cannot be frivolous with these accusations. And the problem with this case, there's nothing you can do. You can't even inundate the bank with calls to stop their racism, because they didn't even bother doing any investigative reporting to see if the bank is following some sort of stated or unstated racist policy - so you have no facts to stand on. The article doesn't say it, but it is clear as day that there is a lot of risk in redevelopment of these properties. For one thing, nobody has done it yet. There is a reason why these properties are abandoned and nobody took a flyer on their redevelopment. Maybe it is oversight by existing real estate developers, but maybe they know something you don't. Locally, there is a building, in a prime location, that has stood abandoned for years - turns out though the building and land is cheaper, redevelopment would mean doing an environmental cleanup that was ostensibly cost-prohibitive. The city didn't even want to reposes it even though they could (the property owned lots of bank taxes).

It's irresponsible journalism to do this.

>Properties in black areas are priced 23% lower than in white areas, says Andre Perry

As always, whenever a line like this is presented, the reader is invited to assume that the reason for that is racism. Is that true though? I have no doubt that this fact is true as stated, but no effort has been done to explain 'why' this fact is. It could be the case that banks are racist (and even in that case, there are multitude of modalities for racism so you still need to do the legwork), but it could be a thousand other reasons. And it is important to know.

>They compared my eight historic properties to farmland 14 or so miles away, and they compared my buildings to an abandoned car wash.

I mean, yes, I believe it. Banks are weird like this. They are banks. They don't understand the nuances of the business you're in. My farmer friend got denied a loan (and even used farm collateral) for replacement of a machine to aide in drainage tiling because it wasn't deemed a farm-centric operation by the Farm Credit bank (or something like that). To be fair, he did use the tile machine to contract out the service as a side-gig but that's a distinction without meaning. Farmers always have side-hussles that fund farm operations.

>JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the US, launched its Advancing Black Pathways programme just over a year ago.

I don't know anything about the program, but if it is debt-based (as opposed to investment for equity), then I have mixed feelings, because debt is the fastest way for a new business to go underwater. Starting a business is hard enough, and when you have debt hanging over you, it makes it so much harder to survive because business is cyclic - you have bad quarters and good quarters, and debt will inflate a bad quarter and put a damper on the good quarters.

<comment><AUTHOR> > debt is the fastest way for a new business to go underwater. Starting a > business is hard enough, and when you have debt hanging over you, it makes > it so much harder to survive because business is cyclic - you have bad > quarters and good quarters, and debt will inflate a bad quarter and put a > damper on the good quarters.

Meanwhile in startups:

[https://www.lightercapital.com/blog/startups-turn-to-non- dil...](https://www.lightercapital.com/blog/startups-turn-to-non-dilutive- debt-capital-for-growth/)

<comment><USER9> Oh man - good luck to them. And if they think debt isn't dilutive, they should just wait and see what happens when their runway runs out from underneath them (and it will because startups and startup founders are terrible at estimating revenue) and they can't pay back the note.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Would be great if all that "funding" that the banks send to the activist BLM organization be rather sent/loaned to individuals such as this one to actually develop and promote neighborhoods that needs some personal love and actually foster the change that we all want to see.</comment>


Multi-core HTTP Server with Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/07/multicore_http_server_with_nodejs.html

<comment><USER2> >> "While single-process performance is quite good, eventually one CPU is not going to be enough;"

Every article on this sort of thing seems to just gloss over this part. Why isn't one CPU enough? What is using it? Serving static files certainly won't. Doing simple things won't...

Does anyone have any use cases / experience for when this was the case? :/

edit: Fine downmodding fanboys. I get it. Use whatever you like. Meh

<comment><AUTHOR> Since Node.js is still fairly new technology people are starting out with 'hello world' examples such as static file servers. Obviously specialised servers like Traffic Server or nginx handle these cases faster.

That said Node is a programming environment so the question is, when on a multi-core machine (which all DC machines are) how can we scale to use all the cores so we can do much harder stuff.

What about a node system to deal with 100k concurrent long-poll connections? When some of those are active they could be really active, requiring all the cores, etc. There are lots of scenarios in which more compute power is useful.

<comment><USER2> I agree there's cases where more CPU power is useful, but I'm just not sure it's a good idea to firstly assume you need it before it's an issue, and secondly to split the whole thing (networking IO) over multiple cores, rather than just shell out the CPU heavy stuff to multi-cores.

Networking IO isn't CPU heavy. There's no reason to increase complexity and slow throughput in the hope that more CPUs will help...

<comment><USER3> Part of node.js's appeal comes from writing all the server code within Javascript, even when it'd be more efficient breaking pieces out into separate programs. In that case, worrying about CPU usage for the server itself makes some sense.

Not saying I agree with the design choices (I'm more of a multiple language / "hard and soft layers" person, and I don't care for Javascript), but I think that's the reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "However, rather than accepting connections using this socket, it is passed off to some number of child processes using net.Stream.write() (under the covers this uses sendmsg(2) and FDs are delivered using recvmsg(2)). Each of these processes in turn inserts the received file descriptor into its event loop and accepts incoming connections as they become available. The OS kernel itself is responsible for load balancing connections across processes."

Racing (ie thread-safe) accept() is a really good way to improve server throughput. Epoll is also awesome for being thread-safe.

</comment><comment><USER5> From the day node.js was released you could run multiple instances on different ports and stick a load balancer in front of it. Even now, I think that is a healthier option than baking the number of processes into the script itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Doing it using Node allows you to use application logic to balance rather than just raw traffic.

This entirely depends on the use cases you have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why are they using multiple processes rather than multiple worker threads? IPC is much costlier than using shared memory, even if it's just passing the initial state.

<comment><USER7> Multiprocess is going to be more robust against failures, for one. While it is a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, I thought Chrome had shown pretty conclusively the benefits of adoption multi-process over multi-threaded

<comment><USER6> I don't think there is a browser that uses a full thread-per-tab model, so there's really nothing to compare it against. The problem with other browsers is that slow JS or in some cases flash in one tab will slow down other tabs.

Also, the tabs in a browser running many sites are much closer to traditional use of processes. Web application servers running the same codebase on each request seem like a better fit for threads. For one thing, the security model for the two uses of JS are very different.

As for robustness, if doing X will cause a crash and your code does X, then you will just have a bunch of crashing processes rather than just one. How is that better? Wouldn't the real solution be to either stop doing X or fix X so that it doesn't cause a crash?

<comment><USER7> <i>As for robustness, if doing X will cause a crash and your code does X, then you will just have a bunch of crashing processes rather than just one. How is that better? Wouldn't the real solution be to either stop doing X or fix X so that it doesn't cause a crash?</i>

Sure, but bug-free code doesn't exist and not all crashes happen 100% of the time. If you have a difficult to track down crash bug that happens for some mysterious reason once every 100,000 requests... Would you rather have that resulting in the entire server blowing up or one request-session blowing up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this tremendously inefficient compared to just running Apache, nginx or whatever floats your boat? Both of them thread perfectly across SMP systems. While it's an interesting implementation, I completely fail to see the point of even using it. Does anyone have any sane usage scenarios they could share?

<comment><USER9> Node.js lets you write server applications in a server container that can handle tens of thousands of concurrent connections in a loosely typed language like Javascript which lets you code faster. It uses the same design as Nginx which is why it can handle so many connections without a huge amount of memory or CPU usage.

If you were to do this on Nginx you'd have to write the module in C.

You can't do it on Apache because of Apache's multi-process/thread model.

The fact that you can write a web server in a few lines of easy to understand and maintain Javascript that can handle over 10,000 concurrent connections without breaking a sweat is a breakthrough.

Node.js may do for server applications what Perl did for the Web in the 90's.

<comment><USER10>
      > If you were to do this on nginx you'd have to write the
      > module in C.

You can write a module to glue nginx and V8. Many people've done it. It takes less than 400 lines of code and a lot of it is nginx typical module code. (The problem is more about the lack of nginx online help, perhaps.)

      > The fact that you can write a web server in a few lines of easy to
      > understand and maintain Javascript that can handle over 10,000
      > concurrent connections without breaking a sweat is a
      > breakthrough.

Yes. But the big performance issue still is hitting the database and disks. There's no point in having a super fast web server if the DB is dog slow like the vast majority of databases out there. Including the NoSQL bunch. They are not fixing the issue of latency vs. scalability vs. reliability. For that they need to address many uncomfortable problems of current hardware architectures. This is the elephant in the room.

<comment><USER11> Well, at least it's an elephant we're all talking about a lot. It's not as if anyone's ignoring that.

If your DB is dog slow, you can still handle wildly high concurrency with node. It's just that the user will feel the slowness, and your DB will struggle. But at least your server won't be unable to serve requests while it's waiting for IO.

Of _course_ it's still on the developer to architect their system for success. Node just takes one unnecessary bottleneck out of the equation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why not nginx? ^_^

It is so inadequate to use things like JVM or V8 to serve static content.

Btw, is there any cool-web-server project for Flash - yet another artificial blob (or to be more correct - tumour) in an OS? ^_^

And of course there should be some dynamic web server written on PHP! (yes, you can run it standalone)</comment>


Images reveal fate of Schapperali lander - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37788444 <comment><AUTHOR> Not too surprising it did not land gracefully which is really too bad. The landing system was well designed to adapt to changing conditions as they were detected. I hope their next attempt is the one that is an unqualified success.

I like that on the map the landing point seems to correspond with the location of the Opportunity rover. Made me think of this xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/1504/](https://xkcd.com/1504/)</comment>


Ask HN: Contracting firms in SF/BayArea? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I've been trying to find contracting gigs but haven't had much luck lately (been mainly looking via my network, meetups, and a few startup message boards). I've been considering reaching out to firms that place candidates into contracting gigs.
With that in mind, does anybody have experience with these sort of firms? If so, would you recommend it? Also, any recommendations on firms would be appreciated.
Background on myself: BS/MS in CS (MS thesis in computer vision). Was a Data Engineer at AdTech company for 4 years (a lot of AWS/Hadoop/Spark/Scala/Python).
thank you! <comment><USER2> In addition to the listings from YC-funded companies under "jobs" in the top menu, there's also a set of monthly submissions from the automated "whoishiring" HN user:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring)

See the "submissions" link on the above page. The most recent are:

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2015) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9996333](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9996333)

Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2015) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9996334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9996334)

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2015) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9996335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9996335)

The "hiring" and "freelance" submissions might have some useful leads for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! Really appreciate it!</comment></comment>


What patent attorneys think startups should know about the new patent laws? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.expertbids.com/2011/11/17/ask-the-experts-what-should-business-owners-know-about-the-new-patent-law/

<comment><USER2> Three out of three patent attorneys consulted for this article Like the New Patent Laws! Wow, they must be Grrrr-eat! Ask an IP lawyer, ask early, ask often. This new law is good for lawyers, I see.</comment>


What Snowden really revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/what-snowden-really-revealed-20131228113515573236.html <comment><USER2> I think this was well written and I enjoyed reading it.

It brought some interesting information to my attention that I was not aware of (e.g. the porn habit blackmail scheme) - there have been so many articles about the leaks that despite them being important to me, I've made a conscious decision not to read them all.

I really like the quote (that I can't find a source on) that he "defected from the American government to the American people."

Edward Snowden is one of my heroes. This is something I find that I don't say very lightly or very often about anybody.

<comment><USER3> Using your powers to acquire sensitive information in order to blackmail political opponents is certainly nothing new - just ask J. Edgar Hoover.

<comment><USER4> Is there something special about "newness" when determining what our response should be to a particular "bad thing" (generically: evil)?

It almost seems like posts like yours–something tptacek is perhaps the master of–are saying, perhaps subtly or even inadvertently, "this evil is not new, and therefore _you should not oppose it_ ".

My take is this: just because some humans who were born before me were unable to recognize, or if they were, oppose, a particular bad thing makes no difference whatsoever. There is no statute of limitations on opposing evil and doing good. Wrongs can—and should—be corrected no matter how much time has passed since the discovery and the subsequent correction.

<comment><USER5> > It almost seems like posts like yours–something tptacek is perhaps the > master of–are saying, perhaps subtly or even inadvertently, "this evil is > not new, and therefore you should not oppose it".

While I can't speak for Sharlin or tptacek, when I point out that things have happened before, my intent is to prompt people to stop being merely outraged. It is all very nice to say that wrongs should be corrected, but it is entirely useless to waste that outrage on complaining at a local watering hole.

Articles and comments like this have, at best, some vague hope that Congresspersons will notice and wish to pander to those particular constituents by authoring a bill. What kind of lackluster plan is that? Near as I can tell, most people are outraged because it makes them feel like they are similar to the other outraged persons and, action proving truth more than word, entirely disinterested in changing the status quo.

<comment><USER6> Speaking of history... I notice a great deal of arm-chair anger all around me combined with a strong lack of faith that anything can change. Most of my friends, even those with some political engagement, consider things like protests (peaceful or otherwise) completely ineffective and keep any kind of moral change limited to their personal lives. Do you have an idea of how common this kind of situation has been in the past? Is it a natural step in a growing anger, or is our situation somewhat special?

Slavoj Zizek seems to mention this issue in some form or other quite often. He argues, as far as I understand, that a big difference between 'us' and previous generations is that we seem to both disapprove _and_ accept the status quo to an unprecedented degree. I've also heard others claim that we are a 'silent generation' that just kind of tries to be different in the private sphere, and leave it at that.

I don't know if this is true, but I do know we often consider our situation unique when even a cursory look at history shows that it isn't.

<comment><USER5> It's really hard to accurately gauge this kind of thing. If you go too far in the past, then the percentage of literate people drops too fast for us to have first-hand accounts of what people really thought of their contemporary policies. The accounts we have available are accounts from those who were affluent enough to bother with literacy: precisely the groups that would contest the power of the state. If you stick to the last few centuries, you simply don't have enough data.

I'm a liberal, which to me, includes being a meliorist. This means, roughly, that I believe that things get better, and that this is especially true over the long run. I think that the present day society is better than those in the past. So that's the context in which I say, "Yes, we can do something."

The silence of our generation comes, in part, from our multiculturality. Too many of "us" feel like we're irreconcilably different. Race, sex, industry, level of education, socioeconomic status, etc.: we see more ways in which we're different than in which we're the same. So we retreat behind facades of private domains, where the differences can be muted by not seeing them, and in a vicious cycle, reinforces our inability to come out into the public sphere and engage. We spend our days traveling from our private homes, along roadways where our interactions with others involve cursing and frustration, to private businesses, and so many of us need to be back home to sleep soon afterwards for another day of work. If your neighbor went on strike, would you even know or care?

I realize I didn't really answer the question, but I don't really have an answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At this point, it may well be impossible to shut down the NSA. I imagine every opposing politician gets visited by some agent at some point, showing him records of his own wrongdoings.

Imagine every politician ever be forced to choose between the end of his career and opposing the NSA. How can we get out of this mess?

<comment><USER8> The idea of shutting down the NSA is destructive: their charter is to listen to foreign traffic, and to secure domestic traffic. That's what they kick ass at. That their abilities got co-opted for unapproved purposes was NOT the NSA's doing. The problem came from outside the NSA, and was likely out of their control.

<comment><USER9> Actually, no. Snowden was the only one willing to sacrifice anything to reveal the truth to the public - and he wasn't even an official NSA employee. We can gnash our teeth and pull our hair about how the agency was "co-opted" but the fact remains that precisely _zero_ of the NSA's ~40,000 employees stepped forward with anything like this. So what can we infer from this? Many things, of course, but that the organization was whole-sale "co-opted" is rather a stretch. 40k people doing something horrible for 12 _years_ and a trickle of ineffective attempts to do something...

There is, perhaps, a more "innocent" explanation - or at least one that reflects better on the rank-and-file at the NSA: that it took someone like Snowden, not just idealistic and willing to sacrifice, but his intelligence and unique collection of technical skills, to make something like this happen. The NSA is a frightening adversary, the best funded, best equipped, most sophisticated intel organization on the planet. One could be forgiven for thinking twice before burning them... But is that fear enough to keep 40k people quiet for 12 years?! I'd say that we can only infer that the rank-and- file are massively in favor of the steps the NSA is taking, and probably mostly for noble reasons of wanting to "protect" us all. And what we can infer from that is that clearly the NSA selects for loyalty over principle, every time. Well, maybe they failed that once.

The thing that really bothers me is that it's such an inevitably fail-prone approach to protection, as it requires massive numbers of people to keep a secret in perpetuity. And now the big reveal: it has materially damaged us all. American technological trustworthiness is (rightly) at an all time low. My only hope is that this failure has been dramatic, so memorable, so horrible, that it will spur all computer technologists to learn more about security, the details of cryptography and random number generation, and to stop assuming that US authorities will show anything like common sense when it comes to restraining themselves and their power. They are drunk with it, self- righteously drunk with it, and we must work to take that power away in every possible way: politically, technologically, and indeed, philosophically. I mention philosophy last, but it's really the most important: are we a nation of principles, or are we a nation that takes shortcuts, sacrificing principle for pride of protection? In addition to testing for technological prowess, we need to test our intelligence staffers for high ethical intelligence: they need to be willing and able to rebel against illegal orders just as Snowden has done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What Snowden _really_ revealed is that the goal of the terrorists has been achieved. The 2996 souls who lost the lives on 9/11 were unfortunate collateral damage.

The hysteria since and "hollowing out of our democracy" is the goal of a terrorist.

This is not to say things weren't peachy before the attack, but the US has lost so much moral standing, respect & power since due to our government's actions.

We should have kept calm and carried on, we did the complete opposite.

<comment><USER11> > The hysteria since and "hollowing out of our democracy" is the goal of a > terrorist.

Exactly! "we will not allow this enemy to win the war by changing our way of life or restricting our freedoms" \- George W. Bush (9/12/01)

It's a pity he (and/or Obama) didn't actually follow through with that promise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder, at what point would NSA start manufacturing threats. It seems like clear progression of their behavior. Because you can't constantly cry wolf, you have to fight a straw-wolf from time to time.

<comment><USER13> They have FBI doing that for them, and ATF [1], and who knows who else. I think many of these agencies are starting to ask for funding specifically for these sort of "operations", where they not only try and convince people to commit crimes, but give them all the funding and resources they need to commit them, too.

We've gotten to the point where the government has to manufacture or invent crimes in order to arrest people. Even the War on Drugs isn't enough for them anymore. They need more. I'm actually really curious what will happen when the War on Drugs will end. Because that would leave a huge hole in their plan to criminalize just about everyone.

Will they start sending SWAT teams to people's homes for pirating movies? Will they start arrest people on the street for pissing them off somehow? I don't know, but I'm really curious what would happen. I certainly don't expect them to just lay back and ease up on the arrests, if the War on Drug is over.

[1] [http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/atf-uses- ro...](http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/atf-uses-rogue- tactics-in-storefront-stings-across-the-nation-b99146765z1-234916641.html)

<comment><USER14> > _Will they start sending SWAT teams to people 's homes for pirating > movies..._

This _happens_ already.

When government institutions aren't victimizing everyday people for engaging in nonviolent behavior, such as duplicating ones and zeroes, they're not growing. Paychecks aren't increasing. Power isn't consolidating. Terrorizing modern humans is often par for the course to any indoctrinated group/cult. It's easy to be trained and then divided against an enemy. Breaking down Grandma's door over a Britney Spears album, threats and extortion of exorbitant fees over crap people wouldn't otherwise purchase, at 250000x per unit, locking people into cages for consenting behavior like the trade and intake of chemicals, and on: power a mafia and warlords can only dream about. Corporate law won thanks to an oligarchical system of government.

The only temporary hope for pawns being victimized is when SWAT/militia shoot only the family dog but not other members of the family.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hey I'm as big of a hair-on-fire guy as the next guy, but this is getting too much.

A bit of context. Please.

The U.S. has always overreacted to existential threats. In fact, that's the way the system is designed. If it has to fail, it fails towards a dictatorial president and overbearing laws -- which are removed by a frequently-elected and truly representative Congress as soon as the threat is gone. We've been going along like this for 240 years or so. There is nothing new about the abuse of power or removal of freedoms (unfortunately).

So what's changed? First, internet companies are tracking every freaking thing you do online. They figured out that the average Joe will give up his privacy for free email, and they're having a field day with it.

Governments trump companies, and since the data is already collected, every government on the planet is wanting a piece of that action.

Second, there is no ever-changing Congress looking to score points with the folks back home. Instead, there's a static political system that fears looking bad -- and it's grown a perpetual fear machine built up around terror that can make it look really bad.

Folks do this issue a great disservice when they focus only on the U.S., or only on the NSA. Look guys, if the U.S. and the NSA disappeared tomorrow, you'd have the same problems you have now -- you just wouldn't know so much about them. This has nothing specifically to do with them. (I'm not making excuses, only pleading for context).

The tech community brought this on themselves. We are the people to blame. The trade-off of tracking data for free stuff was too good to be true. In fact, instead of the tracking data being almost worthless to the average citizen, as it turns out this data is much too valuable to give up under any circumstances, at least in the aggregate. Until that leaky bucket is fixed somehow, nothing changes.

<comment><USER16> There's a big difference between my agreement with a private company which allows me to use their webmail service in exchange for scraping my data for ad use and agents of the state watching everything I do with the expectation that this data will be used to harass, fine, detain, prosecute, or execute me or my family. The distinction here is that state entities are granted authority to do things no corporation can.

TL;DR - Google doesn't use this data to kill people or rig elections.

<comment><USER15> No, but once the instrumentation is in place to collect it, by Google or anybody else, it's fair game for various governments to use it to do just that.

What would the alternative be? To have Google et al be above the law?

You can't have it both ways. If you give up your data, you give up your data. You can't just give it up for special purposes. You don't get to choose. (And neither does Google or whoever is on the other end of the transaction)

You could even take all government influence out of it and still have problems. Companies could just buy up each other, pay for illegal data transfers, and so on. That's kinda the point here. A tiny little piece of data like my email to Aunt Claire this morning is almost completely worthless. Almost. But zillions of pieces, accumulating day-by-day? The value, in both monetary and intelligence terms, just keeps going up. Every day the economics of getting that data, by hook or crook, changes in favor of it being lost. And once it's lost, in most cases it's lost forever. There's no "going back" to having the data private again. That's an unsustainable system.

<comment><USER17> The spying goes far beyond webmail. Most people haven't agreed to have their phone calls tapped, or backdoors put into networking hardware and encryption standards.

<comment><USER15> My comment wasn't specifically about Google or webmail. That was simply an example. It's the principle of trading private information to another service in return for something that doesn't scale. Whether it's software, network infrastructure, web apps, etc -- the specific type of trade or vendor involved is not the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed" \-- Preamble of the declaration of independence

It is going to be very difficult to motivate people to change something... until a big part of population is starving I believe...

</comment><comment><USER19> This is one of the clearest explanations of the situation that I have read.

</comment><comment><USER20> > We have sacrificed our freedoms and morals in order to make war on those > abroad

There are unperceivable powers that be. Possibly and even likely without what we consider morals. Bear with me. When you had enough wealth and can own or have anything, what's next? It's human nature.

<comment><USER7> The thing is, I don't think _we_ have sacrificed anything. No one ever gave the NSA explicit authority to do the things it does. It's just that they did do them snyway.

<comment><USER21> "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing"

<comment><USER22> Seems to me this problem can be solved by turning to our founding fathers advice as well. For starters, abolish the production of porn and the other filth that Muslims hate us for. Then, if that doesn't work. Drop a few nuclear bombs on the Middle East. Turn the whole area into a parking lot. This could be accomplished in two months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What's wrong with this logic is the presumption that the intelligence community would share any effective results of their work with the public. That would be just plain stupid. Rather than an endless argument over disclosing and justifying results, it is far simpler to simply say there aren't any. Yeah, image takes a hit but those people are much less concerned with image than with doing what they have been chartered to do.

Anyone to whom any of this (other than the capabilities) comes as any surprise at all is naive indeed and probably has no memory of the hostile spy era that spawned and justified it.

</comment><comment><USER24> The article is hosted on the same site that cooperates with terrorists, regardless how you feel about Snowden, pro or con: [http://www.aim.org/aim- column/al-jazeera-still-promoting-gun...](http://www.aim.org/aim-column/al- jazeera-still-promoting-gun-violence-and-terrorism/)

<comment><USER25> If you are concerned with that then you should be just as concerned that the USG was providing arms to Syrian "rebels" and weapons to Mexican drug cartels in only the most recent examples of supportin terrorism.

The USG is basically a terrorist incubation machine.</comment></comment>


PeekPop: 3D Touch on older iOS devices - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/marmelroy/PeekPop <comment><USER2> pretty neat hack

</comment><comment><USER3> anything like this for Android?

<comment><AUTHOR> As this uses touch radius to simulate 3d touch. I think it should be easy to port to Android.

There is this too: [https://github.com/lambdacomplete/3d_force_touch_android_bar...](https://github.com/lambdacomplete/3d_force_touch_android_barometer)</comment></comment>


The 8th DO for SaaS startups - Stay on top of your KPIs - <AUTHOR> http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-8th-do-for-saas-startups-stay-on.html

<comment><USER2> Timing couldn't be better, I just happen to be putting together a metrics board for my start-up.</comment>


Ring has given 400+ police departments access to doorbell cameras - <AUTHOR> https://m.sfgate.com/news/article/Doorbell-camera-firm-Ring-has-partnered-with-400-14383981.php <comment><USER2> So the police requests access to the footage for a specific time, the homeowner has to agree to it, and then Amazon/Ring hands it over? If the homeowner declines, then the neighbor agrees, the police can still (most likely) see what they were trying to see. This has got some creepy implications that basically means the more of these Ring cameras are out there, the more power the police has in terms of surveillance. The homeowner's permission is completely useless since there are likely other homeowners in the area that will agree.

<comment><USER3> Or the police request access, the homeowner denies it, the police get a search warrant for certain data on Ring's servers, Ring provides it without comment.

Everyone's happy! The homeowner has preserved their privacy by smugly clicking "no", the police are browsing all the footage from the camera anyway. Job well done.

<comment><USER4> If a judge approves a search warrant, what's the issue? Your constitutional rights are not being infringed. I am afraid of the police (or CIA, etc) acting illegally but if the judiciary I'm probably ok with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the problem with this new wave of devices that only work when connected to the manufacturer's cloud service. There needs to be more focus on devices and software that allow you to run completely independently of the manufacturer's servers. The Home Assistant project has been a blessing in this area, but many devices either lack support or must have custom firmware to work in an "offline" mode.

</comment><comment><USER6> I see nothing wrong with this.

People have no right to get mad that a law enforcement agency wants the video that may have captured a crime, of a product that is marketed to help the consumer catch people in the act of a crime that records everyone that passes in front of it without their permission. It's not like you go to your neighbors and say "please sign this release so I can record you if you cross in front of my camera".

</comment><comment><USER7> Like a lot of these IOT things, this is "not your doorbell", it's just a doorbell you get the privilege of using.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd be curious as to whether it loses ring some sales.</comment>


The Consumerization of IT: The Biggest Trend in Your Career and Business - <AUTHOR> http://comparz.com/blog/entry/the-consumerization-of-it-the-biggest-trend-in-your-career-and-your-business-1

<comment><USER2> The Consumerization of IT brings many opportunities for startups that have to seduce the consumers in order to get access the businesses. It's "Saas 2.0".

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if it's SaaS 2.0, or just the reality of what SaaS provides the worker/business owner. It's good for both the company and that startup selling to the company, but there is a lot of education needed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Do You Relax? - <AUTHOR> Background:
35+, married, no kid but may have one this/next year.
Career wise, I'm not completely satisfactory with what I have now (Data analyst). Salary is OK but I prefer more technical work as talking to other people over and over is not my expertise and takes too much of my energy away. Plus the hours is demanding, usually 50 hours per week.
So here is the situation that keeps me from relaxation: I need to learn new skills to transfer to more technical positions, but I'm not sure which one so I kind of spent a lot of time learning skills superficially and never go deep enough to make an impact (on reality or on CV). This brings a lot of anxiety and I simply cannot enjoy a good session of games or watch some movies. Every time I try to play a game or watch a movie, the thought of "you should learn skills instead of wasting time" comes up and fucks up everything.
In summary, being anxious so that I do not have patience on my study or relaxation. I don't even play games anymore, just watch longplays.
I'm wondering how do you guys deal with these emotions? <comment><USER2> Take comfort in knowing that whatever "skills" you acquire now means nothing to an employer (perhaps yours) who can readily find them in far younger and cheaper recent grads who are much better trained in said skills. So kick back, relax, and play yo games. Anxiety is only justified if you can do something about it, which at 35+ with kid in the forecast, you cannot.

<comment><USER3> Brutal but real once you hit 45 it's really harsh the unemployment system also gets hard to use because nobody wants you it assumes a lack of age discrimination and also assumes the economy is always strong plus they haven't raised the ceiling for EDD since 1976 so there is a lot to be worried about if you're over the age of 22 these days .

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder how other people deal with difficult situations like this (laid off at 45)...must be pretty tough to them. I'm not particularly worried about the finance because we have ourselves covered and do not have needs of luxury. What I really fear is the lack of interesting work to do from now on.

This is part of the reason that I need to find something that I can relax on and maybe grow a hobby out of it.

I have been teaching myself programming these days but the job is very demanding so I don't have much brain power left except for weekends.

Maybe I should regularly work out to increase energy level and go from there instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Might not be a popular answer among common folk on HN, but for me, once a week I go to a shooting range and practice with my handgun.

I'm improving a skill, I have to be focused since I'm dealing with a firearm and most importantly I absolutely must relax AND focus in order to actually shoot accurately.

Occasionally I'll go on a "members night" when other members at the range will bring rare or automatic (properly licensed) firearms to let others shoot. Some have very cool historical attributes or uniquely engineered features. Many members are also in software dev as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Honestly, learning new skills _is_ what I do to relax.

1\. Find something that sparks your interest; could be anything at all. For example, I constantly read HN, hackaday, etc. when I'm bored.

2\. Duplicate it and perfect it. That LED cube you saw on hackaday, that X11 tutorial, that Arduino controlled coffeepot, whatever. These examples belie my interests, but you get the idea. Tip: start with something simple; it's always harder than it looks and in surprising ways.

3\. Then wait for the magic. Inexplicably, that new skill you are growing will become surprisingly useful for some completely unpredictable, unconnected activity. Ah, you don't really need an LED cube, but maybe now you know how to make a better baby monitor with that Arduino.

4\. Repeat, until you don't have time to be anxious or bored. Eventually, it can grow into a career or a lifelong interest.

Doing something concrete with your hands relieves stress. Learning relieves stress. Having kids puts everything in perspective. These are all positive, constructive things.

Watching TV and gaming, not so much. When I do too much of these, it makes me feel very much as the OP seems to feel.'

 __Don 't __learn new skills to progress in your career. Learn them to relax and to grow. Learn to measure yourself by your progress on these self-imposed challenges. And the career will take care of itself.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm lucky enough to find cooking enjoyable and relaxing. It's something you have to do every day, so getting good at it has turned that hour-ish slot every evening into a fun and relaxing experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah this could be both relaxing and rewarding if you are into it. Did you pick it up from childhood or got the click later?

<comment><USER6> Much later. Actually only recently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good luck, I'll probably never pick it up but I appreciate that you share the exp.

<comment><USER7> Start small! Boil some rice, make a protein salad (eggs, chicken + olives + lettuce etc), scramble a few eggs. Good luck to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Out of the mind and into the body: exercise, yoga, dance, slacklining, cooking, hiking in nature. Sex is great, too :)

Take your friends/kids to the beach and jump in the waves.

</comment><comment><USER9> Flying RC helicopters.

Just got back into it after a 10+ year absence for almost the exact same reasons as you -- relax, get my mind off shit.

It's stressful as hell (in a good way) but you will clear your mind of everything once you're in the air (no time to think about work when you're trying not to nose dive $1000 into the ground).

oh, and the usual stuff: cooking, riding motorcycles, fishing...

</comment><comment><USER10> Pipe Tobacco and a Book, or praying.</comment>


The concept of work/life balance is toxic to your personal progress - <AUTHOR> http://danieltenner.com/2014/11/19/work-and-life-balance-and-imbalance/

<comment><USER2> I really enjoyed the line, "Don't let old assumptions determine how you live your life today".</comment>