This is similar to (if not the same as?) the concept of "Trading up the chain" [1], whereby someone writes or plants a story in a smaller or less reputable medium with the hopes of getting it quoted and provided legitmacy by a more credible outlet. Ryan Holiday's book Trust Me I'm Lying talks about using this extensively, especially around some of the marketing he did with American Apparel and Tucker Max.
You start to see it everywhere once you know how to spot it, and it's (not surprisingly) extremely common to find in outlets that rely heavily on cranking out as many posts per hour as possible but someone still have brand equity (Forbes, Business Insider, Fast Company, any random crappy popular LinkedIn blog).
Deadspin's motto was "Sports news without access, favor or discretion". Unlike traditional media that essentially acts as mouthpieces for the teams that they cover (think of any press conference and the kinds of questions being asked, and the types of response they're designed to elicit), they used their status as outsiders to look at sports with a critical lens, and hold people in power in sports to account.
This didn't mean they hated sports though - you could tell from most of their reporting, especially by the OGs(Will Leitch, Drew Magary, Tim Burke etc), that they LOVED sports and wanted the people and teams involved to just be better. They also broke a lot of bonkers stories like the Manti Te'o scandal (highly recommend reading their report on it)[1] that no one in traditional media did a good job of interrograting or digging into.
The site still exists, but if you read it now you won't see this kind of reporting. It all changed about two years when they were bought by private equity (G/O I wanna say) who attempted to exercise control over their editorial, resulting in a mass resignation. Many of the old writers started Defector (https://defector.com/), which writes in the same spirit.
> It all changed about two years when they were bought by private equity (G/O I wanna say) who attempted to exercise control over their editorial, resulting in a mass resignation. Many of the old writers started Defector (https://defector.com/), which writes in the same spirit.
This really was one of the most fascinating journalism stories in recent years. There was this well respected and financially successful media company, in an industry in which most outlets are struggling. But management had no idea what made that company successful and was seemingly on a mission to kill what made it unique. Eventually management got so bad that the entire staff resigned over the course of a few days. Dozens of people quit their job in a shrinking industry in which any journalism job can be your last. Then after a year of many of the journalists bouncing between freelancing gigs, most of that staff is able to band together to create a new company. This time it is a workers collective in which the journalists are not just employees, but also owners. The new company is almost immediately a success, continues to grow in size, and build on the legacy of the original site. I have never seen anything like that before.
A similar story played out in Jalopnik, an automotive blog with a similar irreverent outsider ethos under the same Gawker Media Group umbrella as Deadspin. Many writers came and went, including a group that started The Autopian (https://www.theautopian.com/) which reminds me of a Jalopnik before the buyout.
I'd argue the main cause of this is the REALTORs/real estate boards/MLS system that stonewalls any attempts at making real estate information publicly available precisely because the size of their paycheques relies on this information remaining hidden from the public. The conflict of interest beggars belief, but it's allowed to remain, among other reasons, since it also tends to benefit political parties courting votes from homeowners who see their home values continue to rise.
All of this though (ending blind bidding, making buy and sell data publicly available, etc.) is just using a bucket to bail out the Titanic since the system is designed to have prices continuously rise since Canadians are in house debt up to their eyeballs and have no idea how else to actually save for the long term and any party that actually changed this would likely never get voted into power again, if they even continued to exist.
What's stopping Canada from increasing its housing stock? Surely Canada has plenty of space for its 30M citizens, right? (Yes, I understand that much of the territory is uninhabitable, but even still...).
38 million, with an annual immigration target of over 400k, plus foreign students, temporary visas, etc. New construction simply isn't keeping up with demand. Politicians have tried to solve this from the supply side for decades, but many of the issues like zoning are in provincial and municipal jurisdiction, where the incentive is to keep prices high and homeowners happy.
So the federal government refuses to address the demand side of the equation (very high immigration rate) while the the provinces and municipalities block increases in supply. The natural result? Runaway price increases, and the rest of Canada's economy becoming uncompetitive because employees can't find a house within a 2 hour commute for under $1MM in the GTA.
Regulations...
Most land is off limits. Were I live the land is ’protected’ for agricultural use even though it is marginal at best and most farms doesn’t use the land.
In my case it killed my agribusiness project because the amount of work, the delays and the risks where too much to bear.
We can no longer build what we used to build in the 60’s and 70’s because of the regulations in spite of the technology being much better.
There is plenty of housing for plenty of people in most parts of North America. The 'problem' is that what people _want_ is cheap housing in urban centers, a.k.a cool spots. Because that doesn't exist, we claim to have a housing shortage.
In Ontario it's not just urban centers. Prices are going up almost everywhere. Towns with a grocery store and Tim Hortons are seeing prices explode.
One problem in Canadian provinces is your taxes remain the same regardless of where you live, but if you need access to healthcare or education, then you have to live near a major city. Particularly if you want quality healthcare.
In fact the cost of living goes up if you're a rural inhabitant in most of Ontario. Electricity is more expensive, heating is expensive, etc.
You portray it as being some capricious choice by entitled brats, but ignore that there's economic and efficiency advantages for society to have more centrally located workforce and services.
Strange argument to switch to. If your day to day life is better because you live near where you eat and work and obtain healthcare and what not, isn't sort of hard to argue against? Where's the downside to this efficiency? It looks to me like an entirely win-win situation for the individual and society. Sometimes efficiency translates directly into resiliency. In your argument, proximity and density makes urban populations easier and cheaper to deliver to.
I think that used to be the case and I would have argued as such as early as 2018 w.r.t NIMBY and San Francisco but I think it's becoming less true. Now sure you can buy a trailer in the middle of nowhere in the Nevada desert, but what were previously considered "cheap" houses in places like Des Moines are increasing substantially in price, and that's not just the cool spots either. You might say "Well just rent then" but rent is going up too.
With that being said, naturally homes near economic activity should be more expensive. It's more expensive and always will be to live near Google's HQ in Mountain View than it will be to live in Grand Rapids, Michigan or Toledo, Ohio. That's just economic physics. It's ok, normal, natural, acceptable, and economically good. And these homes are only going to get more expensive over time as energy costs increase (EVs won't save us), road maintenance costs increase (already far out of control), and people move to live in more walkable areas. But as these costs increase, people who were expecting that it would be cheap to live in the suburbs are surprised because energy costs and moving far away just won't save them anymore like it did in the past (oh I'll live here and just have a 40 mile commute) - hence it appears that we have a housing shortage when in reality the costs are more reflective of economic reality and were artificially cheap. New housing won't help here because even if we could build more faster we'd still be building it in an economically handicapped way and rely on traveling far distances in cars and on highways, which just will not work when we can't pump cheap oil out of the ground.
You have two options. The first option is dense skyscrapers. But those aren't going to be efficient enough in places unconstrained by geography. They also have maintenance issues and it'll be too expensive to keep them going in the future with much higher energy costs. The second option is medium-density mixed-use development. Think the beautiful streets with brick single family homes next to townhouses and 2 story apartments with a cafe or an office at the bottom, bikes, walking, and street cars or other similar efficient transit. These you can repair yourself and the maintenance is much lower on the long-run and they don't rely on cheap oil to be livable.
But we'll keep building skyscrapers and suburbs (I didn't mention these as an option because they aren't) and the prices will just keep going up.
I don't really disagree with your larger point, but I can't help but explore this nit because it seems interesting. I don't think anyone is arguing that EVs will markedly reduce energy prices; however, there is an argument that renewables will decrease energy prices by virtue of being cheaper per unit power. Of course, it will take at least a decade before renewable energy isn't supply-constrained, so I don't think anyone is expecting this to happen soon, and moreover I've heard counter-arguments that the figures associated with renewable energy aren't including the storage costs which would be required to make renewable energy suitable for base load generation or the costs to decommission/recycle hazardous solar panels and fiberglass wind turbine blades--maybe there will be a ~10 year window during which the supply of renewable energy meets/exceeds demand but before the recycling/decommissioning costs kick in en force? :)
Oh yea I definitely think EVs are the future and to the extent that we have vehicles, in the majority of cases they should be EV. I guess what I'd say here is that even at a reduced cost (which is arguable) for a "commute" (self-driving, etc.) you aren't going to get EVs cheap enough to offset b/c the very act of driving 10, 20, 40, miles to a job or driving a mile down the road to the grocery store is just incomparable to just better design. If your grocery store is within a half mile and you can walk or bike there, EVs could never compete. So it's kind of like we're improving the technology of something we shouldn't be doing, versus just not doing that thing.
If I had to completely armchair it here, if you looked at total impact to society, the environment, car accidents, you name it something like a gallon of gas in the US should really be about $20-$30/gallon but it feels like it's expensive at $5 b/c we're so used to the low prices. We are probably experiencing these costs through inflation and things like housing prices.
Renewables (should) drop overall energy costs by virtue of capturing natural movements (I'd throw nuclear in renewable as well IMO but I understand why you wouldn't) but people are going to focus on kWh being expensive because they're used to extremely cheap gasoline. I guess in other words renewables on paper will be more expensive "at the pump" but externality cost to society will be lower. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future as more EVs come online that energy costs to charge even at home are approximate to gasoline.
> If I had to completely armchair it here, if you looked at total impact to society, the environment, car accidents, you name it something like a gallon of gas in the US should really be about $20-$30/gallon but it feels like it's expensive at $5 b/c we're so used to the low prices
Price per gallon is probably the wrong unit. You probably want $/mile. Car accidents get priced in via insurance. Environment isn't priced in at all in the US, though a carbon tax could change that if there was any political appetite for it. EVs already significantly reduce fuel and maintenance costs even though ICE cars enjoy a "carbon subsidy" (i.e., pollution isn't priced into the cost of gas).
> people are going to focus on kWh being expensive because they're used to extremely cheap gasoline
Electricity is already much less expensive than gasoline. The current US-average gas price is $4.10/gallon and a 30mpg car will cost over $0.13/mile. The current US-average electricity price is $0.14/kwh--with ballpark 85% charge efficiency (not all energy drawn from the grid makes it into the battery) and 300wh/mile, an EV will cost less than $0.05/mile. EV fuel costs are just over a third of those of ICE vehicles.
> Electricity is already much less expensive than gasoline.
How I'd phrase that is: "Electricity is currently much less expensive than gasoline "at the pump". What I think is likely to occur is that as we switch over to EVs (I own one btw if that helps here) there will be continued pure electricity demand which is going to cause prices to go up and up. Everything runs on electricity, and soon cars will too. So I think the kWh price is going to go up, and be measured and scrutinized much more (you can make an app to calculate this, not so much with gasoline easily) and it'll be more measurable. But gasoline costs just aren't "counted" in the same way. So eventually it'll cost, idk, $20 to go 300 miles and people will think that it's expensive because you could do it with gas much cheaper in the past, but the problem with that comparison is you wouldn't have accounted for the externalities so you're not really getting true costs. I hope that makes sense where I was going with that.
I agree $/mile is the right unit, I was just thinking about how to isolate true gas cost versus true kWh rate in some way. I personally pay closer to the $.05 kWh rate at home, but I see peak rates in California hitting $.4/kWh and all I see is the writing on the wall for the rest of the country.
If I had to summarize:
We live in an era of extremely cheap energy. It may go on for another 50-100 years, who knows. Maybe it goes on forever. But it won't be from fossil fuels. And if energy becomes much more expensive and we haven't designed cities and transit for optimizing cheap/efficient energy costs we're beyond screwed. Relating it back to housing, I think it makes sense the housing is getting much more expensive and that this phenomenon is more than just "living somewhere cool" and part of the reason that people want to live in these "cool" places is exactly because the implicit energy costs are less. You don't have to drive to a coffee shop. You walk.
I guess one good thing about America is we have all of these navigable waterways so we won't have big food shortages as distribution costs can remain reasonable, at least in the mid west and the east.
-edit-
One startup idea I have is a way to truly measure your total energy expenditure. Right now I just get a bill in the mail and figure that it makes sense because it's sooooo cheap to run all of this stuff. What happens once energy becomes 5x more expensive? Well, I want to know how much it really costs me to run dual monitors. Maybe it's an extra $50/year I don't want to spend (just a contrived example).
Agreed that increased electrification of previously fossil fueled applications will create upward pressure on prices, as will the decomissioning of fossil fuel power plants. However, this will eventually stabilize as we (1) increase renewable capacity and (2) increase our efficiency (American energy consumption is decreasing gradually as we improve efficiency).
It is worth noting that unlike some other energy sectors, unit costs of storage and renewable continue to trend down aggressively.
It’s still not quite so cheap that recycling it makes no economic sense, so if it is possible a way will be figured out sooner or later. (Metal is recyclable because recycling it requires so much less energy than producing it; plastic is super cheap and so is basically never recycled.)
We do in fact have an affordability crisis in Canada. I bought a home in a small town outside Toronto (too far to be a commuter town) in 2017 for $425000, and sold it in 2020.
We're friends with the people that bought it from us and on the same street in that same small town in Ontario, houses are going for $1M+ now. This is not entitled millenials wanting to live in Vancouver. This is the place where things are supposed to be affordable. This is exactly the sort of place where Boomers love to tell us to go live if we can't afford the city.
Housing is cheaper if you are willing to relocate to e.g. Swift Current, Saskatchewan where a 2-bedroom home with 900 square feet will cost you $175000, but of course there are very few jobs in a small town of 15000 people that's 3 hours away from the nearest big city and the unemployment rate is among the highest in the province.
Just to add to this, we live in a town of ~50k people about 2 hours out of Toronto, and house prices are up 20% yearly since before COVID. 2-3 bedroom houses, are brushing up against $1million this year.
Not as bad as other parts of Canada to be sure, but most people living here have manufacturing jobs or are in the military. I don't see how this is sustainable, since there's nothing for rich people to do here.
Very ordinary detached family homes in decent shape pretty much anywhere in Ontario are near a million dollars or more. If people could buy a family home for vaguely affordable prices in even the most remote parts of the province, people would flock there. There's plenty of land, but getting permission to build anything in much of Canada is a difficult and slow process, even in remote areas.
I don’t know that people want to live where the jobs are necessarily (although it helps for ease of switching jobs). Personally I think the move to remote work was very overhyped during the pandemic, but it is having an impact on the housing market of smaller areas.
People want to live where the amenities are, and all other things being equal more population can support more diverse sets of amenities. E.g. you need enough gay people in a town to support a regularly open gay bar, and generally speaking people want to have a choice of bars for going out.
I live in a rural area with a small local town about an hour outside of Ottawa. Lots of rural houses are going up, as the hour drive is okay for the occasional commute. Nothing is being built in the town (which currently has about 350 dwellings). The problem? There is no local water / sewage system, and quite a few of the wells in town get contaminated with e-coli on a regular basis. Nobody wants to build a new subdivision in the town because it doesn't have the basic infrastructure need to support development.
The worst part of this is that the town has the money in the bank to build the water and sewage system. There's upwards of $8 million earmarked for the project. However, each homeowner is going to be responsible for $30k in hookup costs, and the town will have to shell out $500,000 per year to operate the new water system. Since it's a low income area, the >50% property tax increase needed to run the system won't fly, and neither will the hook-up costs. Instead, all the new builds are focused in rural areas where there is no infrastructure needed or in the larger towns / cities where costs are significantly higher but deemed to be an acceptable risk by developers.
The trend in the last couple years has been the reverse of that, but it'll be interesting to see if that continues now that the most of the pandemic restrictions are over.
I'm not in Canada, but I am in the NYC region, and your comment is absurd. Assuming you want to live in a safe area, but not live inside the 5 city boros, you're looking at 1MM for a house, and an hour+ commute.
There’s certainly an element of ignorance in their comment, but there’s also some truth.
I am originally from a rural area in the Midwest USA. I know a statistically significant number of people from high school and college who purposely moved to bigger cities because of “the culture” or “there’s so much more to do.” They are right. I live in a much bigger city now for those exact reasons, but the demand justifiably has resulted in wildly more expensive houses. I could buy a modest house in my hometown for $85k right now. That same house where I currently live would easily be selling for $300-350k. You make more money here, but not by much.
We need to work on improving our housing density issues, but there’s an undeniable element of “I don’t want to live there” going on.
Nothing is better than sprawling outwards. Most of the white collar jobs can be done remotely , so commute is not needed. Most of groceries and other stuff can be delivered. A truck doing 100 deliveries is surely less traffic than everyone going to the supermarkets. And most importantly with sprawling outwards citizens can enjoy the outdoors and take care of their health. And even more importantly high density of population leads to increased crime , encourage homelessness and provide all sorts of administrative nightmares.I would say we have reached a technological inflection point where we at at last free to spread out and yet stay connected. Let us embrace it. This is the future. This is the way.
Service availability decreases with population density, and relying on subsidized last mile delivery for the economic elite is not a sustainable model for an entire society. The road network alone is a funding quagmire, to say nothing of hiding the infrastructure burdens of servicing sprawl into the eldritch horror that is the municipal bond market.
> Service availability decreases with population density, and relying on subsidized last mile delivery for the economic elite is not a sustainable model for an entire society.
I don't think this is strictly true. I don't like the model, but big box stores seem pretty sustainable (everyone drives to a distribution center for their goods). An actual last mile distribution system (a la Amazon) also appears to work pretty well. Neither of these are exclusively available to the economic elite.
> The road network alone is a funding quagmire, to say nothing of hiding the infrastructure burdens of servicing sprawl into the eldritch horror that is the municipal bond market.
I don't doubt that infrastructure costs decrease with density, but density doesn't keep urban municipalities from building infrastructure that they can't afford to maintain any more than other places. Quality of governance and density are almost certainly independent variables.
Service availability decreasing with population density is still old school thought. Rapid advances in technology over the years enable stretching infrastructure outwards. Who knows someday we may be extending our infrastructures to cover the whole globe and even to outer space. It is not subsidized and it is certainly not for the elite only. It is more about human aspiration. As a species we can look towards piling on top of each other or we can choose to expand and live a quality life according to one’s own aspiration. Look at the big picture.
> A truck doing 100 deliveries is surely less traffic than everyone going to the supermarkets. And most importantly with sprawling outwards citizens can enjoy the outdoors and take care of their health.
No, the lowest traffic solution is having the smallest number of trucks that are needed to serve local markets that a relatively high volume of people can access via walking, biking or mass transit. All that walking, very healthy.
Further, why should city dwellers subsidize this expansion? Surely these far flung communities won't have sufficient revenue to support the infrastructure needed to make all that work.
City dwellers are not subsidizing anybody. In fact there are certain things the government does for the common good. Like protecting border or extending healthcare. It is the kind of civic planning that determines if a community will be able to support ordinary human aspirations like living a comfortable life in a spread out space or a community is going to pile like ants on top of each other. Of course certain people in the top (elite?) may actually love the second option and would love to see people stuffed in small apartments and live life like mechanical robots so that they can enjoy their life in Malibu beach houses.
The government pays for those things with money generated in the cities. We need rural communities to grow food, but most rural and suburban communities in the US do not generate enough revenue through taxes to support themselves without federal assistance. Sometimes it is worth doing, but the cities make the money that pay for it. So again, why should we subsidize lower density that requires more subsidy and more energy to support? Our existing cities could be redesigned to be more human friendly and higher capacity - if we are going to spend federal dollars, thats where they need to go.
Entitled, huh? I don’t see what entitles you to any particular mode of living, but its your ethos.
Suburbs may be the majority (I have no idea if thats true), but that doesn’t make them self-sustaining. They only exist because cities paid for highways, water, and power infrastructure to make it all possible (and continue to fund their maintenance) - exponentially moreso the further west you go.
Nope I don’t agree. Cities have morphed into Subarus in the 1950s and since then they have been the source of more influence and revenue generation at least in NA.
City dwellers already subsidize rural living through taxes. On the federal level, more rural states are subsidized by more urban ones, paying more per capita and receiving less per capita. Similar things happen at the state level, but the numbers are a bit harder to track down.
The decreased density of sprawl causes the maintenance of infrastructure such as roads, electricity and water to often need to be essentially subsidized by higher density areas. For example, in suburbs with culs-de-sac, taxpayers fund the streets (in perpetuity as they must be maintained) but the vast majority get no utility from them. To your example of a truck doing deliveries, if it did those same deliveries in a more dense area it would obviously travel a smaller distance. IMO sprawl also makes life more difficult and more dangerous for those without cars.
I cannot imagine ordering fruits and vegetables online: how do you assure its quality without actually looking at them? I always prefer picking these myself, so yes, maybe it is a good idea to offer better transportation means to those who prefer to do in person grocery.
I too wonder about the sustainability of the Mexico City paradigm. When land becomes precious, we re-pave and re-evaluate. In Japan (On the island of Japan), space is precious, if you are going to build it, it better last, and it better make sense to keep around. Until we reach a limit on land area, it seems that slime-mold-esque endless sprawl is somewhat inevitable. I do wish the opposite, that we would heed the lesson before driving off the proverbial cliff.
Increasing housing stock doesn't imply sprawling outwards (e.g., replace a detached house with an apartment/condo complex), and anyway housing stock is probably a negligible contributor to climate change and habitat destruction (presumably forestry, agriculture, heavy industry, fossil fuel energy, etc are far larger culprits).
Your last line is pretty much my exact opinion. I'm an idiot, but I struggle to see how significant taxes (and I mean SIGNIFICANT - something like having all rental income and cap gains on secondary residences taxed at the highest rate ~54%) in these cases wouldn't have extremely broad appeal. Make the sector unappealing as an investment class and you should stop seeing unfettered speculation. The idea of housing being an investment in general is warped.
The principal residence tax exemption is also a joke but I also understand it's political suicide to try and get rid of it and at this point, since so many people have their life savings tied up in real estate, you'd probably be causing more problems by removing it.
Rent control doesn't work because of liquidity preference. Rental income must exceed the liquidity premium of land or else it will be kept empty. Liquidity preference is effectively the concept that people prefer keeping assets exchangeable for other assets.
For real estate this means keeping the property ready to sell at any time. It is easier to exchange an empty apartment and even easier to exchange an empty plot than a rented out apartment.
The downsides of renting out, i.e. the inability of being able to quickly sell the property must be compensated and that compensation is part of your rent. If you cap rent, that compensation will be insufficient to "bait" the property owner into renting his property out. They would rather keep it liquid and wait for a better offer. To keep it simple, the owner has options, the renter doesn't, so the renter must go out of his way to attract the owner's attention by paying higher rent than if he had outright owned the property himself.
Eliminating the liquidity preference of land would require all land to be leased or a sufficiently high tax on owned land (so that waiting and doing nothing has opportunity costs).
> I'm an idiot, but I struggle to see how significant taxes in these cases wouldn't have extremely broad appeal.
It would have broad appeal, but not to the developers etc. that are buying 10K plates at fundraising dinners ...
> The principal residence tax exemption is also a joke
The problem is that without that exemption, you literally can't afford to move. The 6% "tax" for real estate fees are already painful if you are trying to move to a house of the same value in another city, but if 40-50% of your sale value was considered a capital gain ...
The real problem is people "moving into" rentals for 6 months and then declaring that their principle residence and selling the property. Once you start renting it should be forever be a business property.
The CRA is fairly particular[0] about income from the sale of a property. They want to know, for example, how long it has been your primary residence and if it was rented before then, what was the appraised value. You will end up paying capital gains on the delta. So, if you've been renting out a property, move in to it for 6 months and then sell you'll be paying capital gains on everything but the last 6 months. The only time that works out is with a sudden spike in values.
[0] source: an accountant I know that wants to stay in good standing with the CRA :-)
The point is that you have changed your principle residence to the new property and, hence, it is not taxed on sale.
"When you change your principal residence to an income producing property, such as a rental or business property, you can make an election not to be considered as having started to use your principal residence as a rental or business property. This means you do not have to report any capital gain when you change its use. "
The scenario allowed in your reference is not the same. The original scenario was a rental/income property declare principle (for some short period of time) for the purpose of shielding capital gains whereas the exemption you reference is a principle residence allowed to be used for rental/income. Note that you cannot declare another property as principle while you're renting out your homebase. I expect it is meant for cases where you might take a job transfer for a period of time.
One state (North Carolina) does do something very similar, that keeps this kind of harassment largely in check [1]. By ensuring that all fines and forfeitures paid in a county must be used for that county's public schooling, they've essentially eliminated the incentive for cops to paper as many cars as they can.
ETA: This doesn't completely solve the problem, as the federal government provides some air cover to keep screwing people over, but it does do _something_
1Password recently did this with their $200MM Series A raise in 2019. Dave Teare talks about taking the majority of the money raised off the table when he spoke with DHH on an episode of the Rework podcast -https://www.rework.fm/venture-capital-and-control-with-david...
Yes it would. If you fail to put up a fence around your yard, that doesn’t mean I’m authorized to walk in and steal your garden gnomes. Sure, it would be ideal if authorization were enforced with technical barriers, but just because a computer system thinks someone is authorized to access data doesn’t mean they have the legal authority to do so.
Let’s say I own a company like Shopify. I have an agreement with my customers: I won’t use consumers’ personal details for anything other than processing orders. Sure, I have the technical authority to poke around in the database if I so desire. I could technically take all that data and sell it to the highest bidder. That doesn’t mean I’m legally or procedurally authorized to do so.
Employees have procedures they are expected to follow. Many employees have significant permissions to access data. It’s unreasonable to bar all employees from accessing sensitive data at a technical level; people need to be able to fix problems when things go wrong. If a group of developers conspire to push malicious or faulty changes to production, including the developers who are supposed to be reviewing code and preventing such things from happening, that doesn’t change the fact that they are not authorized to exfiltrate data.
You can go online and buy a set of keys used by first responders. For $25, you can get into just about any commercial building. Are you authorized to actually use those keys on someone else’s property? Not without a contract, but that doesn’t mean there’s a technical barrier in place.
Let’s talk about Shopify’s datacenters! They probably colocate or use a cloud service or whatever. Ultimately, data is stored in datacenters. Someone like Deviant Ollam will have no trouble waltzing right in the front door. He might already have the keys. Or maybe he colocates at the same datacenter, getting him a good chunk of the way there. Is he legally authorized to access customer data, despite having the tools at his disposal to access it with minimal difficulty and likely no digital hackery? No, he is not.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. You make several excellent points which I really appreciate!
> It’s unreasonable to bar all employees from accessing sensitive data at a technical level
This is the heart of the confusion. Sensitive data must be locked down (e.g., encrypted) and access tightly controlled so only employees with a legitimate purpose have read access. Since this is a "technical" solution to the problem, I would label the original data breach a "technical" vulnerability.
On the hand, the "developers conspire to push malicious or faulty changes to production" scenario is not a technical vulnerability; it falls into the category of deceit/fraud à la social engineering. Of course there are technical means you could try to foil exfiltration, but generally this sort of attack is prevented by non-technical means e.g. code review.
Absolutely fair to ask. It would be shocking if they don't provide one, to the point that I wouldn't trust that company with anything in the future and would likely file a chargeback to get the refund.
The fact that there are now dozens of services that exist to provide you with a burner CC number in order to sign up for these trials indicate that almost nobody actually wants to provide a credit card number for a trial. It's also just ridiculously user-hostile with very little proof that it results in higher customer activation compared to a trial that doesn't require a credit card.
