Can a Free Business Rent Program Revive San Francisco’s Downtown?

The New York Times visits the downtown of one of America’s biggest tech cities to explore San Francisco’s “Vacant to Vibrant” initiative, where “city and business leaders provide free rent for up to six months” to “entrepreneurs who want to set up shop in empty spaces, many of which are on the ground floor of office buildings.”

The program also offers funding for business expenses (plus technical and business permit assistance) — and it seems to be working. One cafe went on to sign a five-year lease for a space in the financial district’s iconic One Embarcadero Center building — and the building’s landlord says the program also resulted in another three long leases. Can the progress continue?

The hope is that these pop-up operations will pay rent and sign longer leases after the free-rent period is over, and that their presence will regenerate foot traffic in the area. Some 850 entrepreneurs initially applied for a slot, and 17 businesses were chosen to occupy nine storefront spaces in the fall. Out of those businesses, seven extended their leases and now pay rent. Eleven businesses were selected in May for the program’s second cohort, which started operating their storefronts this summer…

The city’s office vacancy rate hit 33.7%, a record high, in the second quarter this year, according to JLL, a commercial real estate brokerage. That’s one of the bleakest office markets in the nation, which has an average vacancy rate of about 22%. For the moment, however, San Francisco has a silver lining in Vacant to Vibrant. Rod Diehl, the BXP executive vice president who oversees its West Coast properties, said the pop-up strategy was good not just for local business owners to test their concepts and explore growth opportunities, but also for office leasing efforts… Beyond free rent, which is typically given for three months with a possibility for another three months, Vacant to Vibrant provides up to $12,000 to the businesses to help cover insurance and other expenses. The program also offers grants up to $5,000 for building owners to cover costs for tenant improvements in the spaces as well as for other expenses like utilities…

In addition to the Vacant to Vibrant program — which received $1 million from the city initially and is set to receive another $1 million for the current fiscal year, which began July 1 — the city is directing nearly $2 million toward a similar pop-up program. This new program would help businesses occupy larger empty spaces along Powell Street, as crime and other retail pressures have driven out several retailers, including Anthropologie, Banana Republic and Crate & Barrel, in the Union Square area.
One business owner who joined “Vacant to Vibrant” in May says they haven’t decided yet whether to sign a lease. “It’s not as crowded as before the pandemic.” But according to the article, “she was hopeful that more businesses opening nearby would attract more people.”

“In addition to filling empty storefronts, the program has the opportunity to bring in a fresher and more localized downtown shopping vibe, said Laurel Arvanitidis, director for business development at San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workplace Development.”

Victor Gonzalez, an entrepreneur who founded GCS Agency to stage showings for artists, is embracing the opportunity to get a foothold downtown despite the city’s challenges. When he opened a storefront as part of the first Vacant to Vibrant cohort in the Financial District last year, he immediately knew that he wanted to stay there as long as possible. He has since signed a three-year lease. “San Francisco is no stranger to big booms and busts,” he said. “So if we’re in the midst of a bust, what’s next? It’s a boom. And I want to be positioned to be part of it.”

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Cyber-Heist of 2.9 Billion Personal Records Leads to Class Action Lawsuit

“A lawsuit has accused a Florida data broker of carelessly failing to secure billions of records of people’s private information,” reports the Register, “which was subsequently stolen from the biz and sold on an online criminal marketplace.”

California resident Christopher Hofmann filed the potential class-action complaint against Jerico Pictures, doing business as National Public Data, a Coral Springs-based firm that provides APIs so that companies can perform things like background checks on people and look up folks’ criminal records. As such National Public Data holds a lot of highly personal information, which ended up being stolen in a cyberattack. According to the suit, filed in a southern Florida federal district court, Hofmann is one of the individuals whose sensitive information was pilfered by crooks and then put up for sale for $3.5 million on an underworld forum in April.

If the thieves are to be believed, the database included 2.9 billion records on all US, Canadian, and British citizens, and included their full names, addresses, and address history going back at least three decades, social security numbers, and the names of their parents, siblings, and relatives, some of whom have been dead for nearly 20 years.

Hofmann’s lawsuit says he ‘believes that his personally identifiable information was scraped from non-public sources,” according to the article — which adds that Hofmann “claims he never provided this sensitive info to National Public Data…
“The Florida firm stands accused of negligently storing the database in a way that was accessible to the thieves, without encrypting its contents nor redacting any of the individuals’ sensitive information.”

Hofmann, on behalf of potentially millions of other plaintiffs, has asked the court to require National Public Data to destroy all personal information belonging to the class-action members and use encryption, among other data protection methods in the future…
Additionally, it seeks unspecified monetary relief for the data theft victims, including “actual, statutory, nominal, and consequential damages.”

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Trump’s Campaign ‘Says It Has Been Hacked’, Reports CNN

CNN reports:
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign said Saturday in a statement that it had been hacked.

Politico reported earlier Saturday that it had received emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s campaign operation. “These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to CNN.

Cheung pointed to a recent report published by Microsoft that said Iranian operatives had ramped up their attempts to influence and monitor the US presidential election by creating fake news outlets targeting liberal and conservative voters and by trying to hack an unnamed presidential campaign… Still, it’s not clear whether Iran was responsible for the hack. CNN has reached out to the Iranian mission to the United Nations for comment…

Politico reported it had received emails that contained internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official and a [271-page] research dossier the campaign had put together on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The dossier included what the Trump campaign identified as Vance’s potential vulnerabilities…

In 2016, days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee server.

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Terraforming Mars Could Be Easier Than Scientists Thought

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this report from Science magazine:

One of the classic tropes of science fiction is terraforming Mars: warming up our cold neighbor so it could support human civilization. The idea might not be so far-fetched, research published today in Science Advances suggests…

Samaneh Ansari [a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University and lead author on the new study] and her colleagues wanted to test the heat-trapping abilities of a substance Mars holds in abundance: dust. Martian dust is rich in iron and aluminum, which give it its characteristic red hue. But its microscopic size and roughly spherical shape are not conducive to absorbing radiation or reflecting it back to the surface. So the researchers brainstormed a different particle: using the iron and aluminum in the dust to manufacture 9-micrometer-long rods, about twice as big as a speck of martian dust and smaller than commercially available glitter. Ansari designed a simulation to test how these theoretical particles would interact with light. She found “unexpectedly huge effects” in how they absorbed infrared radiation from the surface and how they scattered that radiation back down to Mars — key factors that determine whether an aerosol particle creates a greenhouse effect.

Collaborators at the University of Chicago and the University of Central Florida then fed the particles into computer models of Mars’s climate. They examined the effect of annually injecting 2 million tons of the rods 10 to 100 meters above the surface, where they would be lofted to higher altitudes by turbulent winds and settle out of the atmosphere 10 times more slowly than natural Mars dust. Mars could warm by about 10 degreesC within a matter of months, the team found, despite requiring 5000 times less material than other proposed greenhouse gas schemes…

Still, “Increasing the temperature of the planet is just one of the things that we would need to do in order to live on Mars without any assistance,” says Juan Alday, a postdoctoral planetary science researcher at the Open University not involved with the work. For one, the amount of oxygen in Mars’s atmosphere is only 0.1%, compared with 21% on Earth. The pressure on Mars is also 150 times lower than on Earth, which would cause human blood to boil. And Mars has no ozone layer, which means there is no protection from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. What’s more, even once warmed, martian soils may still be too salty or toxic to grow crops. In other words, McInnes says, upping the temperature “isn’t some kind of magic switch” that would make Mars habitable.

That isn’t stopping Ansari and her colleagues from investigating the possibilities.

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