Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate
"why you wouldn't want to buy some Lettuce off Amazon"
I get it out of the garden. Yet again I have a glut of it...
32776 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"when the mass evictions and foreclosures start,"
If people are being evicted or foreclosed because they can't afford rent or payments because of COVID 19 where do the landlords and lenders think they're going to get new tenants and buyers once the limited amount of slack has been taken out of the market? From other people who also can't afford rent or payments because of COVID 19?
Those who are able to afford to rent or buy will be in the driving seat. They'll be able to drive property prices down.
Landlords and lenders would be far better off, assuming the tenants/borrowers have been OK before, coming to arrangements and being prepared to write off some lost income.
"If rent dropped to say mid 90s levels and they've bought or refinanced a building in the past 25 years they are still going to be in trouble."
Whatever they do some of them are going to be in trouble. Call it overshoot, call it a property bubble, whatever. It's taken this to start bringing home to people what should have been obvious for years now - the growth of big cities has exceeded rational limits. Their time has gone.
"Fewer people will want to live in the big cities if they're working from home and commute time is no longer a factor. You can live just about anywhere so long as you have decent broadband."
Not everyone will be working from home. Mixing residential and business would make it easier for those whose employers are dedicated to presenteeism to avoid commutes.
AFAICS the growth of cities has been in overshoot for a good while now. Simply getting people into work in big cities has been a major headache for years, not helped, at least in the UK for town planning policies which, for more or less the whole of the post-war period, have been dedicated to separating residential end working zones. Just to add insult to injury for those condemned to long commutes, they were then blamed for causing congestion.
It's time to rethink. Don't build more offices in cities. Look at the possibility of shared work spaces in the peripheral towns. Move as many of those who continue to work in cities and are prepared to live there into converted ex-offices. And accept that even then there will be redundant space there.
"some people simply don't have the space to be able to do that"
Enforced home working is serving to demonstrate a bigger issue: that the big office in the big city isn't necessary for any business that doesn't have a vested interest in big city property and services. A more practical idea might be the provision of shared workspaces or smaller offices closer to where employees live.
I hope that at some point, for instance, it might dawn on banks that they could start opening small offices in small towns and villages where employees who live locally could work instead of commuting into big cities to expensive offices. They could then cut down on that city office space and - who knows - they could actually open part of those small offices to offer a service to the public. It could even be competitive in helping them to attract more customers.
"Added to which, many jobs simply cannot be done remotely."
This is true. After all I spent half my working as a lab. scientist. But the other half was spent working in IT where one of the major challenges has the hell of the open plan office and a good deal of it could have been done using my own equipment at home.
I often agree with Bob but usually give up under the barrage of caps lock.
However you've triggered me now. The lady in question was a talker. On the phone. Incessantly. In an open office. In the next pig-pen. And despite working for a phone company hadn't realised that with a phone you can talk to people a long way away without shouting.
Sometimes that, getting it in the media or emailing CEO* is the only way to get things done. With automated systems - including those with call centre drones in the loop - things aretoo often handled by repeatedly retrying what's failed. Surprise, surprise, the same thing happens again. Publicity is a way of breaking out of that loop to get the problem escalated.
* Yes, it can work, been on both ends of that although it might only apply to some companies.
"That worked very well up until my particular section of IT ended up under Marketing, the Head got my number and I ended up getting a call a scant two weeks later while I was on holiday to try and clear up one of their messes."
There are times when the pain of changing a number is worth it. Or have separate work and life numbers and leave the life number at home when you're on holiday.
"The practice of threatening people who make responsible disclosures of security cockups has long passed out of the IT industry in favour of bug bounty schemes and proper pentesting; perhaps other industries are still playing catchup."
Well it has in those parts of it that actually take protections of customer data seriously as opposed to just stringing together some words they'd heard.
I can't see that amount being justified by the IP nor any tangible assets they may have for a US operation. It can only be justified by the user base and the prospects for growing it further. But there's no guarantee that a use base can be retained let alone grown as MySpace demonstrated years ago. Somehow I can't see Oracle managing anything in a manner that keeps the user base regarding it as cool.
All of which prompts the thought of where do Social Networks go in the future? There seems to be a generational issue. A new cohort of prospective users is likely to reject the network their elders are using simply because that's what their elders are using, even if that means their elder siblings. Could the future be the ability to pop up new ones every few years? Could social network servers become commodity software? I rather suspect you could even cobble up something to get a new network off the ground out of a selection of NextCloud modules and some UI bells and whistles. SNaaS? SNSPs?
"Yeah, her slate will never be wiped clean. This will follow her at IBM for the term of her employment."
By court order the judgement is added to her file. Any future manager will have to take account of it because any future tribunal will. And better not lose it from the file because a tribunal will take a dim view of that.