Saudi crown prince heads to White House and Silicon Valley

WASHINGTON — Promoting the image of a new Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman arrives Monday in Washington on a cross-country trip to court government officials, Silicon Valley technology companies, investors and one of his biggest fans: President Donald Trump.

He is a prince on a mission and in a hurry.

The 32-year-old heir to the Saudi throne already has curried favor with the Trump administration, winning over the president and his family, and played a key role in restoring the desert kingdom to favored-ally status after years of tension under President Barack Obama.

The prince will meet with Trump at the White House Tuesday and then is expected to travel over the next two weeks to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston and Houston, where he will confer with oil and energy executives.

Via St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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Featured Image: Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince and Minister of Defense Mohammed bin Salman (right) meets with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter as Carter arrives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Apr. 19, 2016. Carter is visiting Saudi Arabia to help accelerate the lasting defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and participate in the U.S. Gulf Cooperation Council defense meeting. (Photo by Senior Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz)(Released) (James N. Mattis/Flickr)

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Silicon Valley Obscenity - 1 In 4 People Are "Food Insecure"

In the years since the first dot-com bubble burst, Silicon Valley has become emblematic of the intensifying wealth inequality that’s making life increasingly unaffordable for millions of working- and middle-class Americans.

And while the unprecedented wealth creation in the region has helped enrich hundreds of thousands of tech workers and entrepreneurs, virtually everybody else in the region – from college students to the cafeteria workers and janitors who service the headquarters of storied tech firms like Google and Facebook – has suffered from rising rents and a cost of living that’s far outstripped wage inflation.

Now, a study has found that more than one in four Silicon Valley residents is food insecure – meaning they go without at least one meal or rely on food pantries due to lack of financial resources, according to researchers at the Second Harvest food bank.

Using hundreds of community interviews and data modeling, a new study suggests that 26.8% of the population – almost 720,000 people – meet this ignominious designation. Furthermore, nearly a quarter are families with children.

“We call it the Silicon Valley paradox,” says Steve Brennan, the food bank’s marketing director. “As the economy gets better we seem to be serving more people.” Since the recession, Second Harvest has seen demand spike by 46%.

The Guardian interviewed local residents who qualify as food insecure for a story about the worsening wealth gap in one of the wealthiest regions in the US.

Karla Peralta is surrounded by food. As a line cook in Facebook’s cafeteria, she spends her days preparing free meals for the tech firm’s staff. She’s worked in kitchens for most of her 30 years in the US, building a life in Silicon Valley as a single mother raising two daughters.

 

But at home, food is a different story. The region’s soaring rents and high cost-of-living means that even with a full-time job, putting food on the table hasn’t been simple. Over the years she has struggled to afford groceries – at one point feeding her family of three with food stamps that amounted to $75 a week, about half what the government describes as a “thrifty” food budget. “I was thinking, when am I going to get through this?” she said.

 

In a region famed for its foodie culture, where the well-heeled can dine on gold-flecked steaks, $500 tasting menus and $29 loaves of bread, hunger is alarmingly widespread, according to a new study shared exclusively with the Guardian.

According to the Guardian, the food bank is literally at the center of the Silicon Valley boom – both literally and figuratively. It sits just half a mile from Cisco’s headquarters and counts Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg among its major donors. But the need it serves is exacerbated by this industry’s wealth; as high-paying tech firms move in, the cost of living rises for everyone else.

As we’ve pointed out, faced with some of the most expensive rental housing in the nation, some Bay Area residents are feeling priced out and are seeking low-cost alternatives like living in their cars, or commuting nearly two hours to work each way.

All of this is happening as the Nasdaq – which includes many of the tech behemoths like Facebook, Google and Apple that are based in the region – reached an all-time high above 7,000 on Monday.

Food insecurity often accompanies other poverty indicators, such as homelessness. San Jose, Silicon Valley’s largest city, had a homeless population of more than 4,000 people during a recent count.

For workers like Karla Peralta – the Facebook cafeteria worker who shared the story of her daily struggles with the Guardian – there’s a stark division between well-heeled salaried tech workers at Facebook, and others like herself who work under contract.

What’s worse, many workers like Peralta are finding themselves mired in an uncomfortable gray area: they make too much to qualify for government assistance, but not enough to get by.

These days Peralta earns too much to qualify for food stamps, but not enough not to worry. She pays $2,000 a month – or three-quarters of her paycheck – to rent the small apartment she shares with her youngest daughter. “Even just the two of us, it’s still a struggle.” So once a month, she picks up supplies at the food bank to supplement what she buys at the store.

 

She isn’t one to complain, but acknowledges the vast gulf between the needs of Facebook employees and contract workers such as herself. “The first thing they do [for Facebook employees] is buy you an iPhone and an Apple computer, and all these other benefits,” she laughs. “It’s like, wow."

Second Harvest is the only food bank serving Silicon Valley. It’s also one of the largest in the country. In any given month, it provides meals for 257,000 people. It served 66 million pounds of food last year. When the Guardian visited its cavernous, 75,000 square foot main warehouse space, boxes of produce stretched to the ceiling. Strip lights illuminated crates of cucumbers and pallets of sweet potatoes with a chilly glow. Volunteers in PayPal T-shirts packed cabbages and apples that arrived in boxes as big as paddling pools, while in the walk-in freezer turkeys waited to defrost.

To Silicon Valley’s wealthy tech workers, the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of working poor in the region are often invisible.

“Often we think of somebody visibly hungry, the traditional homeless person,” Brennan said. “But this study is putting light on the non-traditional homeless: people living in their car or a garage, working people who have to choose between rent and food, people without access to a kitchen."

He added, “you’re not thinking when you pick up your shirts from dry cleaning, or getting your landscaping done, or going to a restaurant, or getting your child cared for, ‘is that person hungry?’ It’s very easy to assume they are fine."

The cost of housing is one of the biggest contributor to inequality – and the main reason many workers in the region are forced to go hungry. In Santa Clara County, the median price of a family home has reached a new high of $1.125 million, while the supply of homes continues to shrink. A family of four earning less than $85,000 is now considered low income. Meanwhile, the median income in the US is less than $60,000.

These realities mean food insecurity cuts across lines of race, age and employment status.

Minority communities in the Bay Area have been hit the hardest.

The Latino community is “passing through a hard time”, says Vicky Avila-Medrano, a food connection specialist. She runs a program that sends current and former food bank users out into the community, which has been disproportionately affected by the cost-of-living crisis.

 

“Here in Silicon Valley, we have a big problem. This is a beautiful place to live for people in the tech industry, but we are not working in that industry."

Of course, the problems posed by rising rents aren’t unique to the San Francisco Bay Area. As we noted back in October, rental costs growing faster than disposable income for 22 consecutive months. In September, rent ate up more disposable income than at any prior time in history.

All of this underscores the hypocrisy of the ultra-liberal Bay Area. While well-heeled tech workers spurn anybody who disagrees with their narrow-minded worldview in the name of progress, many of these same workers drift through their daily routines largely ignorant of the dire circumstances of the people who handle their dry cleaning and prepare their food.

Google famously fired former engineer James Damore for publishing an open letter pointing out flaws in the company’s diversity hiring program.

Meanwhile, the more than 10,000 employees who work at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. are some of the biggest contributors to wealth inequality in the region.

While we"re sure the Bay Area"s insistence on social equality in the workplace is well intentioned, progress won"t feed the working poor.

Silicon Valley’s ‘Working Homeless’ Shows How Hard Life Is In “Democrat’s Paradise”

Silicon Valley is the home to tech giants like Facebook, Apple, and Google. It’s also home to a surging working homeless population who live in dilapidated RV’s, tents, and their own cars, all thanks to the policies Democrats love to implement.

The surging number of those working in Silicon Valley and still unable to afford adequate housing should be a warning about big government, but it sure doesn’t seem like anyone is taking notice as their taxes continue to rise. As governments creep toward socialism though, poverty becomes the norm, not the exception. Silicon Valley has the highest median income in the nation. But a soaring tax burden and expensive regulations have caused housing prices to increase which has also caused homelessness to surge.

More than 10,000 people were living without shelter across San Jose and Santa Clara Counties on any given night in 2016, though that figure is probably low. Thanks to big government, the cost of living is not low. An influx of tech workers along with decades of under-building (thanks again to the regulations of big government) has created a historic homelessness in the Bay Area.

The governments in California continue to attempt to control deadly Hepatitis A outbreaks caused by a booming homeless population and usually do so by taking even more from those who actually work. The cycle will continue: socialists governments will put a cheap band-aid on the gaping wound they created themselves.

Rather than freeing poor people from dependence on benefactors and bosses, they merely transfer the dependence to the state, leaving the least politically connected people at the mercy of the political process. – FEE

The one thing government has are programs to help those in poverty. But those have proven ineffective. And the one thing that will work is the very thing government refuses to do: Climb off the backs of those they pretend they want to help.

Progressives routinely deplore the “affordable housing crisis” in American cities. But it is the very laws that Progressives favor—land-use policies, zoning codes, and building codes—that ratchet up housing costs, stand in the way of alternative housing options, and confine poor people to ghetto neighborhoods. Historically, when they have been free to do so, poor people have happily disregarded the ideals of political humanitarians and found their own ways to cut housing costs, even in bustling cities with tight housing markets.  – FEE

Imagine just how much more money the working poor would have if the big government in California wasn’t stealing over half their income to implement the very rules and laws that continue to make “scraping by” even more expensive.

“Homeless Explosion”: Tech Boom, Surging Rents Creating Homeless Crisis On America’s West Coast

This report was originally published by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge

America’s liberal left coast states count themselves among the most adamant supporters of controversial pieces of legislation intended to support low-income families. From their stunningly high income tax rates to their $15 minimum wage mandates, states like California and Washington are leading the charge on implementing Bernie’s socialist agenda.

Of course, some of the biggest advocates of that socialist agenda are the billionaire leaders of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies…which is precisely why it’s so ironic that it’s the “tech boom” being enjoyed by those billionaires that has resulted in surging housing prices and what SFGate described earlier today as a “homeless explosion pushing West Coast cities to the brink.”

Housing prices are soaring here thanks to the tech industry, but the boom comes with a consequence: A surge in homelessness marked by 400 unauthorized tent camps in parks, under bridges, on freeway medians and along busy sidewalks. The liberal city is trying to figure out what to do.

“I’ve got economically zero unemployment in my city, and I’ve got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can’t afford housing,” said Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien. “There’s nowhere for these folks to move to.”

That struggle is not Seattle’s alone. A homeless crisis is rocking the entire West Coast, pushing abject poverty into the open like never before.

Nationally, homelessness has been trending down, partly because governments and nonprofit groups have gotten better at moving people into housing. That’s true in many West Coast cities, too, but the flow the other direction is even faster.

“So everybody who was just hanging on because they had cheap rent, they’re losing that … and they wind up outside,” said Margaret King, director of housing programs for the nonprofit DESC in Seattle. “It’s just exploded.”

According to stats gathered by the Associated Press, some 168,000 people in California, Oregon and Washington count themselves among the growing tally of homeless folks who can’t afford housing.

—Official counts taken earlier this year in California, Oregon and Washington show 168,000 homeless people in the three states, according to an AP tally of every jurisdiction in those states that reports homeless numbers to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That is 19,000 more than were counted in 2015, although the numbers may not be directly comparable because of factors ranging from the weather to new counting methods.

—During the same period, the number of unsheltered people in the three states climbed 18 percent to 105,000.

—Rising rents are the main culprit. The median one-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area is more expensive than it is in the New York City metro area, for instance.

—Since 2015, at least 10 cities or municipal regions in California, Oregon and Washington have declared emergencies due to the rise of homelessness, a designation usually reserved for natural disasters.

Of course, when home prices double in a matter of just a few years and are seemingly just as volatile as a tech stock circa March 2000, you know there’s a problem.

Meanwhile, as we pointed out a few weeks ago (see: San Diego’s Deadly Hepatitis A Outbreak Turns “Statewide Epidemic” As “Outbreak Could Last Years”), the homeless crisis in California has resulted in an alarming hepatitis A outbreak that started in San Diego and is now on the verge of reaching statewide epidemic status as cases have spread through homeless tent cities all the way north to Sacramento.

California’s outbreak of hepatitis A, already the nation’s second largest in the last 20 years, could continue for many months, even years, health officials said Thursday.

At least 569 people have been infected and 17 have died of the virus since November in San Diego, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles counties, where local outbreaks have been declared.

Dr. Monique Foster, a medical epidemiologist with the Division of Viral Hepatitis at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters Thursday that California’s outbreak could linger even with the right prevention efforts.

“It’s not unusual for them to last quite some time — usually over a year, one to two years,” Foster said.

Of course, as SFGate points out, local governments on the West Coast are responding to the crisis in the best way they know how, namely by raising taxes…

All along the West Coast, local governments are scrambling for answers — and taxpayers are footing the bill.

Voters have approved more than $8 billion in spending since 2015 on affordable housing and other anti-homelessness programs, mostly as tax increases. Los Angeles voters, for example, approved $1.2 billion to build 10,000 units of affordable housing to address a homeless population that’s reached 34,000 people within city limits.

…which should only serve to accelerate the number of businesses relocating to Texas.

Facebook Employee Lives Out Of Car, Can't Afford Housing

Google employees aren’t the only tech workers struggling to afford Silicon Valley rents. One (alleged) Facebook employee recently confessed to a local TV station that she cannot afford the Bay Area’s $2,000 a month rents, forcing her to live out of her car. Unique Parsha, the employee in question, opened up about her situation to local Fox affiliate KTVU, hoping to start “a real dialogue about the high cost of living in the Silicon Valley” (although as readers will quickly realize, there is a very real chance that either KTVU, or everyone else has been part of an elaborate trolling scheme).

“Parsha"s nickname is "Pinky"- she has pink hair, a pink car, and even a pink dog. But she says, things aren"t always as rosy as they appear.

Parsha says, "I tell people all the time, stop looking at what somebody got and what you see on the outside".

On the outside, Parsha is a model Facebook worker, who runs a non-profit in her spare time. But she"s been living out of her car since April.”

Well, at least we now know why Americans spent so much money on RVs in the first quarter, it was the biggest source of GDP growth in the first three months of 2017.

Parsha says her coworkers would be “shocked” to discover her living situation. However, her student loans and medical debt have made paying for an apartment impossible. Rents in the Bay Area have risen too quickly, while wages for technology workers have failed to keep up, she said.

When she’s desperate for a good night’s sleep, Parsha spends the night at a hotel.

“Parsha decided that now is the time to start talking about her situation, in the hopes of opening a real dialogue about the high cost of living in the Silicon Valley. "I think that companies need to look at the salaries. Are we paying employees enough to survive?"

Tonight, Parsha broke down, renting a hotel room so she can get a real night"s sleep.”

Allegedly, Parsha has been "working at Facebook for only two months" but she says she’s already contemplating taking a second job. KTVU didn’t disclose her title, the nature of her work at Facebook, or the model and make of her vehicle.

“She says she"s trying to stay positive and that a home is just around the corner - and the security that comes with it.”

While liberals have dismissed President Trump’s calls to restrict the number of H1-B visas supplied to American tech firms as xenophobic, even the New York Times admits that many tech firms abuse the program to help keep labor costs low. More than any other industry in the US, tech companies depend on the 85,000 H1-B visas awarded by the US government every year.

Tech companies say there’s a shortage of American workers with the skills necessary to do the work. What they really mean is that there’s a shortage of American workers willing to work for the wages being offered. Parsha’s case is one such example.

America’s tech companies have demonstrated that they’re willing to do almost anything to keep wages low, even if it means engaging in blatantly anti-competitive practices. Back in 2015, Amazon, Apple and a few other tech companies agreed to pay nearly half a billion dollars to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the companies colluded to leep wages low by creating “no poach” lists of senior engineers.

Luckily for the remaining members of San Francisco’s long-suffering middle class who’ve managed to hang on despite spending well over half their income on rent, relief may be on its way in the form of an incipient housing bust. Data released by the Federal Housing Agency show that, after five years of posting some of the highest YoY pricing growth of any market in the country, single-family home prices in San Francisco and San Mateo counties dropped 2.5% YoY in Q1 2017, making it the worst-performing market of the 100 largest US metropolitan areas.

Even Google Employees Can No Longer Afford Housing In San Francisco

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the new Google modular home

Every now and then a story appears in the national media that causes a lightbulb to start flashing incessantly in my head. For me, such a story came to my attention today and relates to how Google is manufacturing housing for some of its employees due to the ridiculous cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here’s a summary from The Verge:

Google’s employees can’t find affordable housing in Silicon Valley, so the company is investing in modular homes that’ll serve as short-term housing for them. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has ordered 300 units from a startup called Factory OS, which specializes in modular homes. The deal reportedly costs between $25 and $30 million.

Modular homes are completely built in a factory and assembled like puzzle pieces onsite. This method of construction can reduce the cost of construction by 20 to 50 percent, the Journal reports. These apartments can also be put up more quickly to address dire housing needs. In one case the Journal cites, tenants saved $700 a month because of reduced construction costs.

Earlier this year, CNBC published a piece that detailed the difficulty tech companies have in trying to convince possible employees to move to San Francisco, especially when they live abroad. In response, some startups are establishing offices in other cities, like Chicago and Seattle. The other option is to out-tech the housing crisis, as Google appears to be doing with its modular home investment.

First, let’s get a couple of things out of the way. Yes, I understand that San Francisco is one of the most expensive places to live in the world, and yes, I get that nobody is forcing anyone to work for Google or live there. Yes, I understand that this is probably intended for entry level employees. Yes, I understand that revolutionary new ways of building homes using technology is the future, and the ability for such techniques to reduce costs is a positive thing. Yes, I understand all of that, yet I still think this development is a  sign we are getting closer to some sort of breaking point.

The middle class in America has been getting squeezed for a long time, and the societal, political and ethical ramifications of this development cannot be overstated. In fact, I’ve been so concerned about the U.S. transformation into a neo-feualism serf economy, I’ve dedicated much of the last decade to writing and warning about it. What’s going on will Google employees unable to afford housing is a sign that this corrupt, fraud economy is now starting to affect even the fortunate amongst us.

Google is one of the most successful companies the world has ever seen, and if its employees are struggling to find a place to live (I don’t care what city it is), something’s really not working. To me, this is a clear glitch in the matrix. A sign that some sort of reckoning is near. How that reckoning manifests I have no idea, but most companies don’t have the luxury of just buying homes to put their employees in. If this is happening to Google, consider it some sort of canary in the coal-mine.

The entire economic system is a rent-seeking, corrupt scam in which financial oligarchs and assorted other parasites suck more and more life out of the economy until it breaks completely. The fact that Google employees are now feeling the repercussions of this, tells you all you need to know. Even a terribly corrupt system can continue until it consumes itself. It is now consuming itself.

Criminal Minds

One of my simple pleasures in life is reading the Daily Post, which is Palo Alto"s own little daily newspaper. It"s a morning tradition for me to walk the dogs, grab the (free) paper from a newstand, and read it during my pre-dawn breakfast.

On yesterday"s paper, this photo and caption on the front page caught my eye:

As I"ve said in posts before, it baffles me that criminals still pull stuff like this, since in our highly-surveyed society, there is going to be a high-quality color photo of you for all to see, whether you rob a bank or steal packages off someone"s porch.

Anyway, sure enough, here is this item from the paper the very next day:

So apparently this criminal genius stole cash from a bank and, using the spanking new $100 bills, went on a little shopping spree. And for those of you not as well-acquainted with downtown Palo Alto as I am, allow me to illustrate the vast distance separating (1) the bank he just robbed and (2) the shoe store at which he made the aforementioned purchase.

Yep. It"s one whole block away.

So my message to the petty thieves out there who happen to read my little financial blog: just don"t bother. Or, better yet, how about make an inquiries at any of the dozens upon dozens of businesses downtown with signs that are just BEGGING for help in their kitchens, stockrooms, or delivery vehicles? There is a TON of work available out there, and being a complete dumbshit like the fellow above, and being thrown in jail for a few years, is just fuckin" retarded.

Silicon Valley 'Tech-Slaves' Forced To Live In Their Cars

Faced with some of the most expensive rental housing in the nation, some Bay Area residents are feeling priced out and are seeking low-cost alternatives.

As the Nasdaq soars to record highs on the back of Silicon Valley"s hub of computer and technology companies, some people are even turning to cars, vans and RVs for housing...

NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Joanne Elgart Jennings exposes the stunning reality hiding just behind the facade of America"s unicorn factory...

Signs That The Silicon Valley Tech Bubble Is About To Burst

18 months ago there was a seemingly limitless number of Silicon Valley future billionaires buying up multi-million dollar homes and renting out lavish pads.  But if demand for excessively priced real estate is any indication of the health of Silicon Valley"s tech industry then all the venture capitalists who have tripped over themselves to invest in the next "decacorn", or startups worth $10s of billions pre-IPO despite burning billions of cash quarterly, should be getting pretty worried right about now.

As the following chart from Zillow points out, home prices in San Francisco stalled about a year ago and rents have followed a similar path.

But home prices aren"t the only thing stalling, according to a note from The Guardian, resumes are also starting to flood into Silicon Valley headhunters from recently unemployed software engineers who were let go after their companies failed to attract its required latest round of financing at a ridiculous valuation.

“We’re starting to get a lot of résumés from [software engineers at] companies where the business model isn’t working and they can’t get funding, so they are closing down or cutting back,” said Mark Dinan, a software recruiter based in the Bay Area, who keeps track of companies’ hirings and firings.

These startups are running out of money because VCs are being more discerning about where they place their money, making fewer, bigger bets.

“The number of investments [in the private market] has fallen by about a third, but the amount of capital is around the same,” said Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist at Redpoint, adding that some of the “fast money” from hedge funds and mutual funds had shifted away from the sector.

“It’s been happening for a couple of years. It’s not as easy to raise capital and VCs are demanding better terms,” added Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business.

Despite the meteoric rise in the stock market over the past several years, venture capitalists have been forced to pull back on new investments partly because of a slowdown in companies going public. Last year was the slowest for US IPOs since the recession, with the amount raised by technology companies falling 60% from 2015.

Meanwhile, if SNAP"s IPO is any indicator of how other potential tech IPOs might be expected to perform, then we wouldn"t hold out hope for public investors to save the venture market from their valuation sins.

But, a series of “down rounds” – when a company raises funds by selling shares that are valued lower than the last time they raised funds, leading its overall valuation to fall – may imply that there just isn"t a healthy backlog of companies that are IPO-worthy. CB Insights has tracked more than 100 of these down rounds and exits since 2015, including software company Zenefits, mobile app Foursquare and online music streaming service Rdio.

“It used to be that 95% of [investment] rounds were up, now 20% are down,” Tunguz said.

Then there are the so-called “decacorns” – unicorn startups valued at tens of billions of dollars – such as Airbnb, Uber and Palantir – which some believe are overvalued, but it’s hard to tell until they go public and are forced to reveal details of their underlying finances.

Ride-sharing app Uber, for example, has raised more than $16bn and is valued at more than $69bn. That’s more than automotive giants such as General Motors and Ford, despite the company losing $2.2bn last year.

“The interesting question with Uber is how long they can keep as a private company. They are raising capital like a public company without any of the disclosure and consequences of being a public company,” said Damodaran, who believes the company’s value is overinflated and it’s really worth $23bn.

So, how does this moment compare with the time leading up to the dotcom crash?  Here is the take of one Silicon Valley software recruiter:

“I got here in 97 and it was like it is now – incredibly packed, impossible to commute, high apartment costs,” Dinan said.

"We’re seeing overvalued companies, funded based on hopes and dreams and aspirations and not good business models. Companies counting users and eyeballs rather than profits. There are a lot of similarities.”

Another echo of the dotcom era is what Dinan calls “bad habits” such as the allegations of sexual harassment at Uber and human resources startup Zenefits cheating on mandatory compliance training.

“There was a lot of crazy behaviour in the late 1990s, including sexual harassment. It’s a result of there not being discipline,” Dinan said.

“The [dotcom crash] happened very suddenly and without any warning,” Damodaran said. “When it does happen everyone says they saw it coming. If you saw it coming then why didn’t you get out of it?”

Well, when all else fails there"s always the "negging" option to drive valuation...

Preppers Stuck In Cities: Elite Chartering “Getaway Boats in Case of Manhattan Emergency”

There is an inherent dilemma for most of the people living in cities.

Even those who are aware of the extremely fragile fabric of society are often stuck living urban lives. Perhaps they plan to retire to a country abode, or construct a hideaway to escape to if the need ever arises, but for now, they are stuck in the city making a living.

This is true even for the rich, but now, they have a back-up plan.

The biggest of American cities, and one of the most gridlocked, is New York City, with Manhattan and Long Island both isolated islands – trapped during emergencies from the rest of the world.

That’s why those with means, and forethought, are now chartering emergency charters to get out of the city – probably a good idea, especially if the helicopter is out of your price range.

via NY Post:

“A lot of people don’t want to wait on a line to get on a ferry, and they don’t want to worry about walking off of Manhattan, as people had to do in the past,” [Chris Dowhie, co-owner of Plan B Marine] told The Post.“They know a boat is the fastest way, and we take the worry out of maintaining and preparing and always readying your vessel,” he added.

Not only does the company promise a speedy getaway, it plans individual evacuation routes for each person, depending on their personal needs.

[…]

“You don’t have a captain. You have to drive this boat yourself,” Dowhie told The Post, adding that in a crisis, people are more concerned with helping their own families than maneuvering someone else’s escape vehicle.

[…]

The unique evacuation service costs an annual fee of $90,000 and is catered toward wealthy individuals and corporations who don’t have time to mastermind their own escape.

Clients access the boats with an individual punch-in number, and should they need to abandon it at any time, Dowhie’s company will locate it.

Interesting concept, and the fact that this has become a business model is also telling of the times.

Estimates have placed evacuation from major coastal cities at more than 24 hours:

Estimated evacuation times during major emergencies.

For Long Island, where millions of New Yorkers live, it would be 20-29 hours to get off the island – during that time, people will lose their patience, run out of gas, become hungry, be denied access to medications and drugs, need emergency services, resort to crime, etc.

The one percenters have long been serious about their prepping, for they know too well about the very real dangers being constructed, and the house of cards that is ever poised to collapse.

There has been a steady rise in the upper class investment into underground bunker communities – typically decked out with furnishings and amenities that nearly compare with above-ground living.

They have also been the high profile investors buying up getaway farms in places like New Zealand or South America, and hedging with mountain retreats and fortified safe rooms.

While the amount of money they are spending remains mostly pocket change the biggest players, it represents a serious consideration of the high risk for social disruption, chaos and mega-disasters, such as the collapse of the power grid.

The good news is that while the rich may indeed be living the high life, with escape hatches built in, there are many steps that the average, and more modest, individual can also take to increase your chances of survival during modest times.

When it comes to elite prepping, you have to always ask yourself: ‘Do they know something that I don’t know?‘

Considering their access to power, and their insider vision of human affairs, the chances are very good that they may.

Boats and hideaway properties can be arranged at lower prices as well, or DIY. If you’re not on an island, there are likely some back roads that can save your life, and keep you out of the major chaos. Plan your escape route, with several alternate routes, that avoid the major intersections with highways, bridges and other points at which the majority of traffic is forced to flow, at a slow, grinding and dangerous pace.

Safe rooms can been adapted to almost any space, and for relatively little money, and fortifications can be retrofitted where ever you need them. Just food for thought, better now than too late.

Something big is coming.

Read more:

The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster

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Dramatic Drone Footage Shows Extent Of San Jose Flooding

While the series of major storms hitting California have begun to subside, residents of San Jose are being warned to keep away from affected homes until water levels decrease to a safe level. Flash floods along the west coast of the US have seen thousands of people forced to leave their homes and a state of emergency declared by California governor Jerry Brown. The majority of mandatory evacuation orders have now been downgraded for areas including Sutter County around the Oroville Dam Spillway, which sparked panic one week ago when it threatened to collapse during the floods.

However, San Jose, the 10th largest city in the US, remains one of the most substantial urban regions affected, with 14,000 resident evacuated and more than 36,000 homes estimated to be hit by floodwater, reports the San Francisco Gate.

To get a sense of the water damage, the following drone footage shows the extent of the flooding in San Jose.

Drone video captures the extensive flooding in San Jose, California https://t.co/GvlUjn7RQY pic.twitter.com/eJqttWdRKn

— CNN (@CNN) February 23, 2017

City Mayor Sam Liccardo has admitted failures in the official response to the storm crisis. “If the first time that a resident is aware that they need to get out of a home is when they see a firefighter in a boat, then clearly something went wrong,” Mayor Sam Liccardo said, report KQED News. “We are assessing what it is that led to that failure.”

The reason for the city"s dire predicament is that over the last two weeks, heavy rains pushed water levels at Santa Clara County’s largest reservoir into the danger zone. That happened over the weekend, sending massive amounts of water into the Coyote Creek, which runs through the heart of San Jose. By Tuesday, the creek was overflowing at numerous locations, inundating neighborhoods, flooding hundreds of homes and forcing the frantic evacuations of more than 14,000 residents, who remained out of their homes Wednesday, the LA Times reported.

The worst flooding to hit Silicon Valley in a century left San Jose reeling and residents angry about why they were not given more warning that a disaster was imminent. Even city officials on Wednesday conceded they were caught off guard by the severity of the flooding and vowed a full investigation into what went wrong.

Floodwater surrounds homes in San Jose on Wednesday

Late Wednesday, Assistant City Manager Dave Sykes said officials had learned that the information they had on the capacity of Coyote Creek channel was not accurate. He also said the city was working with the Santa Clara Valley Water District to determine whether debris caused blockages that contributed to flooding.

Neighbors talk in front of their homes, which were inundated after Coyote Creek overflowed

“The creek spilled over the banks faster and higher than anybody expected,” said city spokesman David Vossbrink.

Ricardo Juarez, who has lived in this house for six years, works to free his van Wednesday

Officials said that on Thursday they would focus on assessing the damage and getting residents back home.

Homes and cars are swamped on Wednesday in San Jose

The approximately 14,000 people under mandatory evacuations hailed mostly from central San Jose. Evacuation advisories were also issued to 36,000 residents in a zone that covered a business and industrial area along a roughly seven-mile stretch of Coyote Creek.

Floodwaters surround a play structure in San Jose

By Wednesday evening, city officials had lifted some mandatory evacuations for homes north of Interstate 280. They also revised the number of residents impacted by evacuation advisories down to 22,000.

Cars are covered by floodwater on Wednesday. The Coyote Creek crested to 13.6 feet at a river gauge point on Tuesday

“We haven’t really had anything quite like this before,” Vossbrink said.

Rescuers in chest-deep water steer boats carrying dozens of people, some with babies and pets

Meanwhile, the local government of San Jose has issued an emergency alert declaring that while flood water is creeping back, residents should not return to their homes until authorities deem it safe to do so. The notice informs people to be wary of live electrical units in flooded buildings and structurally unsound walls.

Rescuers travel by boat through a flooded neighborhood looking for stranded residents in San Jose.

The good news, according to a San Jose emergency alert, is that the “water is beginning to subside, however, levels are still high. Many areas are still unsafe to access. The City continues to send in teams to assess damage and determine when it is safe for residents to return to their homes.”

Cars are submerged in a flooded neighborhood in San Jose.

“Flood water and homes, cars, and belongings that have been flooded should be treated as contaminated.” Evacuation notices are still in place in the Oakland and Rock Springs Area of San Jose. A map of the areas still out of bounds for people has been listed on the San Jose government website.  Meanwhile, homes to the south of the city near Lexington Reservoir and Anderson Lake remain in flood danger zones.

For the next few days, California will be dry. But according to weather reports by the United States Geological Survey the rain respite will last until Sunday, when another “storm system is predicted to bring 1-3 inches of rain to the regions on Sunday.”

Elite Are Prepping For a Collapse: “A World That’s Becoming Increasingly Unstable”

This article was written by Michael Snyder and originally published at his Economic Collapse blog.

Editor’s Comment: There is little doubt that the world is becoming quite unstable. What remains arguable is whether or not we’ve reached a tipping point from which things cannot return to normal. The start of the Trump presidency has been marked by sharp divisions, protests, anger and political turmoil that has gripped headlines and brought anger to a fever pitch. Economically, the  flashpoint for crisis is just around the corner, and could hit home at literally any point.

While things may continue to appear normal, the fabric of society is extremely vulnerable, and those with the means and advanced effort to prepare for the collapse are doing so. Things are incredibly delicate and the number of viable potential threats and catastrophic emergencies is many fold. Perhaps the fact that things have remained stable for this long is a piece of great fortune and a source of false security. Do what you can and get ready, because there is no guarantee that the future will take care of you and yours.

Now It Is The Elite That Are Feverishly ‘Prepping’ For The Collapse Of Society

by Michael Snyder

Once upon a time, “prepping” was something that was considered to be on “the lunatic fringe” of society. But in 2017, wealthy elitists are actually the most hardcore preppers of all. This is particularly true in places such as Silicon Valley, where a whole host of young tech moguls are putting a tremendous amount of time, effort and money into preparing for apocalyptic scenarios. So while interest in prepping among the general population has fallen extremely low right now, the election of Donald Trump has given liberal wealthy elitists even more urgency to prepare for what they believe is a very uncertain future.

In the January 30th, 2017 edition of the New Yorker, reporter Evan Osnos has done an extraordinary job of profiling these wealthy elitists that are “getting ready for the crackup of civilization”. One of the people that he interviewed was Steve Huffman, the young co-founder and CEO of Reddit…

Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate’s Web site as a prank. He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”

According to the article, Huffman estimates that “fifty-plus percent” of his elite friends in Silicon Valley have some form of “apocalypse insurance”. Needless to say, that number would be far higher than for the general population as a whole.

Another tech mogul that was interviewed by Osnos for the story was former Facebook product manager Antonio García Martínez…

Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

As you can see, a lot of these liberal elitists are actually secretly stashing away lots of guns and ammunition.

So don’t believe everything that you read about them being “anti-gun”.

Other big names in Silicon Valley have decided that having a property on the other side of the planet is the best form of “apocalypse insurance”. The following comes from a story about Paypal founder Peter Thiel in the New York Times…

Mr. Thiel’s admiration for New Zealand is longstanding. “Utopia,” he once called it. He has an investment firm in the country that has put millions into local start-ups. He also owns lavish properties there, which his Silicon Valley friends hope to fly to in the event of a worldwide pandemic.

And of course Thiel is far from alone. So many wealthy individuals are buying up property in New Zealand these days that it is actually becoming a significant political issue over there. In fact, it is being reported that foreigners purchased an astounding 3500 square kilometers during the first ten months of 2016…

Statistics showed foreigners had bought over 3500 square kilometers of New Zealand in the first ten months of 2016, which is over four times as much as they did in the same period in 2010.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman told The New Yorker that New Zealand had become the hot topic among Silicon Valley leaders lately.

“Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.”

Hoffman estimated that over half of the Silicon Valley insiders were into preparedness – especially since anti-elite sentiment has risen around the globe in recent years. It was intensified by events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, he added.

So are these wealthy elitists ahead of the curve, or are they just being paranoid?

Only time will tell, but they didn’t become exceedingly wealthy in the first place by being stupid.

As I discussed yesterday on The Most Important News, there are certainly reasons to be optimistic now that Donald Trump has become president, but there are also lots of reasons to be prepping harder than ever.

We should be hopeful for the future and working for a better tomorrow, but we also need to understand that we live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable.

And most of us think that it is just common sense to purchase insurance for our homes, our cars, our health, our lives and so many other things, and yet most of the population is completely unprepared for a major catastrophic event.

It is a good thing to have balance in life. My wife and I are very proud preppers, and there won’t ever be a time when we aren’t prepping.

But we also live our lives without any fear. We know that the world is going to get crazier and crazier, but we do not believe that it is a time to dig a hole and try to hide from the world.

Rather, now is a time to rise up and become the people that we were created to be.

This year my wife and I are going to be taking on some new adventures, and these new adventures are going to give us a bigger voice than ever before.

Someone once told me that life is like a coin. You can spend it any way that you want, but you can only spend it once.

We don’t want to spend our lives paying bills and killing time.

Instead, we want to do all that we can to make a difference and to change the world.

So unlike these wealthy elitists, let us not be in fear of what is coming. There is no other time in history that I would have rather lived than right here and right now, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

This article was written by Michael Snyder and originally published at his Economic Collapse blog.