It's not a crisis because there are no poignant images, there are no famous people affected, and because poverty and eviction cut to our deepest shame.

Piketty kept talking about the rentier - those whose livelihood comes from owning something and charging someone else to use it. That would be "landlords" if you aren't a French economist. Rentier made up a very large portion of the bourgeoisie in pre-revolutionary France and they make up a very large portion of the bourgeoisie in pre-postcapitalist America.

WeWork has 9 million square feet of space in NYC. 2 million of that has no one paying rent on it. That number is not going to go down anytime soon. 50% of commercial rents are in arrears across the United States.

I didn't really understand The Great Depression until I read Ken Galbraith's book. The problem was basically this: a whole bunch of people who were counting debts owed to them as assets had to write them down when they were forced to conclude they would never be paid.

Let's say you own an 10-unit apartment building. Everyone in it pays you a thousand a month. You own a ten unit apartment building because the mortgage and expenses cost you eight thousand a month. Suddenly half your tenants can't make rent. You went from making two grand a month to losing three. I'll bet you needed that grand a month; the bank was expecting six grand, the property manager was expecting a grand, the state was expecting a grand. So now the property manager is fucked. The state's fucked but it'll take them a year to 18 months to get to you. The bank is going to get something but not nearly enough so now the bank has to cover that shortfall. And we're all shining it on and pretending that cruise ships are going to make a big comback next year because the most shameful sentence in the English language is

"I can't pay my bills."

Obviously the people most fucked are the ones getting evicted. Not going to minimize that in the slightest. That is a life-changing event, and not for the better. Ignore that tragedy for a minute though and contemplate the fact that on average, pressing one eviction and all it entails through the courts runs between three and six months' worth of rent.

If you evict half your building you're in the hole for a minimum of 15 months even if you have people lined up to pay full price for the empty units. And you don't.

My wife bought this house in 2000. Our mortgage is adorable. We'll be okay. Guys next door?

...yeah.

No. You know what? No. Calling bullshit on this. The dude was "chastened" for arguing against an entire approach to technology:

$174M lessons here. We passed on Altschool multiple times, mainly because disrupting school was a terrible strategy, but also b/c founders didn’t understand #edtech is all about partnering w/existing districts, schools and educators (not just “product”)

He wasn't "bragging about not investing in a company that failed" he was celebrating the death of a bad idea that had been backed by big fucking money. goobster's comparison to Hollywood is apt - there are all sorts of abominably bad projects drifting around where the first thing you do is look and see what rich, powerful asshole is backing it - I mean obviously a movie in which a father and son speak babytalk to each other for two hours while communicating psionically to avoid a space bear is never gonna get made except when it is. And of course big backers can't steal all the good ideas from one idea to prop up another except when they do.

You know why Hollywood makes nothing but fucking superhero movies now? Because in order to get anything done you need some asshole with $150m and the only thing he's going to make is sure things so now we've got Disney which bought Marvel which will stack 27 fucking movies together to drag your ass to Avengers Endgame. Meanwhile, every decent idea anyone has ever had eats shit.

So here's Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Fucking Thiel and they've decided they're going to AynRand fucking primary school and somebody - the guy who was at the fucking Gates foundation for ten years - calls bullshit on it and you are BENDING OVER BACKWARDS to figure out a way for the blowback to be his fault.

I'ma drag thenewgreen into this because I love how offended he gets whenever I mention Theranos but you know what? Theranos happened because Elizabeth Smart grew up next door to, and played with the daughter of, Tim Draper. So she bats her eyes at Tim Draper, says that her magical bullshit patent doesn't violate the space-time continuum, and inside ten years, $700m are up in smoke. Because nobody is gonna call bullshit on Tim Draper or else they'll be punished for it and now, the entire medical technology space smells like poison.

No. The dude's future was existentially threatened for calling a spade a spade. In a space where WeWork has gone from a $57b valuation to a $10b valuation in six months only because the financial press has started going what the fuck softbank.

Sure - saying you're smart because you passed is inane. But saying certain business models deserve to fail is the sort of thing investors should be allowed to hear.

Yeah - but what I'm saying is liquidating WeWork is going to be a grindingly unsatisfying exercise. Even their S1 lists $27b in assets and $24b in liabilities and that doesn't include their $47b in leases due. They go Tango Uniform and there's $47b in leases looking for $3b in remedy of which the big stuff has already been sold off.

The fact that their core is well-protected is fundamentally irrelevant if their bank vault is empty anyway.

...which matters little as WeWork's core assets are a hole in the ground at this point.

They've even knocked $10m off the jet.

Yeah, my post reads like I don't see the WFH situation as a win/win. But I do; the company cuts costs, but the employee gets/makes more to offset their increased costs.

Shit, I took a $10k pay cut to work for a company that was a 15-minute commute away, rather than one that was an hour away. And I don't regret that decision AT ALL.

I also suspect that this could be either the beginning of a revival for WeWork, or that coworking spaces (like Office Nomads ) will finally reach their full potential.... because people will quickly need to draw a line in their lives defining their work/life balance, and the easiest way to do that is get a membership at a local coworking space. Gets you out of the house, gives you the infrastructure of printing/shipping/mail/conference rooms, and can literally be anywhere you can fit a few desks. I worked in one that was a converted barn, once, and had a membership at Office Nomads for 5 years during my entrepreneurial days.

I HAVE THOUGHTS

So "move fast and break things" has been the mantra for innovation for twenty fucking years. Twenty fucking years of trust fundies parading their societal abberance as virtue, twenty fucking years of rich twitchfucks being praised and rewarded for assuming the rules don't apply to them and being proven right. A partial list of "visionary" companies that were entirely fucking illegal yet are worth more than a billion dollars because they accumulated too much cash to shut down:

- Paypal

- Facebook

- Amazon

- Theranos

- WeWork

- Uber

These are companies that knew what they were doing was illegal, but also knew that if it was useful enough (and they were lawyered up enough) they could push through any jurisdiction that questioned their right to operate a taxi without a taxi license, their right to flaunt banking laws, their right to sublease without sublease approval. "Move fast and break things" meant "beat the law to the high ground." Because ultimately, rich people don't go to jail. They just make enough less-rich people richer to rich their way to riches.

Stockton Rush was named for two of his ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence: Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. His maternal grandfather was an oil-and-shipping tycoon. As a teen-ager, Rush became an accomplished commercial jet pilot, and he studied aerospace engineering at Princeton, where he graduated in 1984.

"His maternal grandfather was an oil-and-shipping tycoon" is shorthand for "Stockton Rush has never been a part of a household where anyone works for a living." How does "a teen-ager" become "an accomplished commercial jet pilot" considering you have to be 17 before you can even get a multi-engine rating? I'll bet it helps if Daddy has a Gulfstream and a pair of pilots who will let you hold the yoke.

These are people who have never encountered an actual, physical boundary. They're people who can buy their way out of anything and "rules" are things like "you have to wait in line" not things like, oh, acrylic.

The Titan’s viewport was made of acrylic and seven inches thick. “That’s another thing where I broke the rules,” Rush said to Pogue, the CBS News journalist. He went on to refer to a “very well-known” acrylic expert, Jerry D. Stachiw, who wrote an eleven-hundred-page manual called “Handbook of Acrylics for Submersibles, Hyperbaric Chambers, and Aquaria.” “It has safety factors that—they were so high, he didn’t call ’em safety factors. He called ’em conversion factors,” Rush said. “According to the rules,” he added, his viewport was “not allowed.”

According to the rules, Uber wasn't allowed either. And yet.

I think OceanGate, Theranos and - wait for it -

exemplify "startups" where rich trust fund dipshits discover that "the ocean" does not deal with rule-breakers the same way the Cleveland City Council does.

And I hope more of them spend their billions to disprove the laws of physics.

My wife had an office in eOffices which is basically WeWork but local and profitable. They charged more for the extras and turned a profit as a consequence.

They also owned their real estate.

And nobody thinks they're worth $80b.

It's so weird to me that a middle man's value-add can be to subtract value, yet still be valued positively.

Somehow the two words "WeWork IPO" have an ominous ring to them. What do the finance moon howlers have to say about it?

Whelp, WeWork raised another billion dollars.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wework-raises-1-billion-in-debt-from-softbank-as-revenue-doubles-1533849008

Also, they've lost $723m this year. This raises Softbank's investment to over $5b in a company that loses more than a billion dollars a year.

The filing was in December; since that article linked above, the velocity on WeWork is largely down not up.

I suspect the moon-howlers will have plenty to say as soon as the IPO actually happens, regardless of what the market does. To me it looks like everyone who has an IPO is trying to find a greater fool as fast as they can.