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Trump-Linked Insurance Startup Tells Members That Obamacare Is OK For Now

Josh Kushner speaks onstage at the Wall Street Journal Magazine's “Innovator Of The Year” Awards 2013.

Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images

The election seemingly made life complicated for Oscar Health. The insurance startup’s business model is based on the Affordable Care Act that President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to repeal. Yet one of its founders is the brother of Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Peter Thiel, another Trump adviser, is an investor.

Oscar hasn’t said much about the ACA since November. But on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the New York startup published a blog post that sought to reassure members that their ACA coverage would remain intact for now. It also noted it’s seen a spike in members researching birth control — which many women fear may no longer be covered if Congressional Republicans succeed in repealing the health care law.

In the post, which was previewed by BuzzFeed News and published on Oscar’s website Thursday evening, Dr. Harry Ritter, vice president of care delivery, wrote that searches for birth control on the site’s internal search engine for care options, known as the Care Router, were “up 300%.” This figure refers to the number of search queries over the first two weeks of January versus the last two weeks of December, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

Ritter noted that Oscar covers a variety of FDA-approved birth control methods, from diaphragms to pills and IUDs, and urged members to consult their doctor. “If you need help finding one in Oscar’s network, do a search and filter based on your preferences,” he wrote, adding, “Or just call your Oscar concierge, and we’ll help you find someone great.”

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President-elect Donald Trump, with his wife Ivanka on November 18, 2016.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Ritter also wrote, “Our plans cover birth control benefits in compliance with the Affordable Care Act. To date, there have been no changes that impact your 2017 coverage. If any legal changes impact you, we will be in touch to make sure you have all the facts and understand your options.”

Prior to Thursday, Oscar’s last blog post was Nov. 17, in which its co-founders both lamented the health care law’s flaws and praised the law for allowing the business to get started.

The increased interest in birth control isn’t surprising. Since the election, other online startups that prescribe and ship birth control have seen a flurry of sign-ups as they fielded concerns from female customers.

Oscar Health

But Oscar — which serves people who became eligible for insurance under the ACA — isn’t your average health care network.

Joshua Kushner co-founded the startup in 2012; his brother, Jared, is Trump’s son-in-law and newly appointed White House senior adviser. Oscar, which was most recently valued at $2.7 billion, has backing from a venture capital firm led by Thiel — who is also a member of Trump’s transition team. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans have actively been moving to repeal the ACA. And Tom Price, Trump’s health secretary pick, both supports the repeal and opposes the law’s requirement that insurers cover birth control at no cost to customers.

Publicly at least, Oscar executives don’t see any reason to be concerned. Chief policy and strategy officer Joel Klein told Backchannel this month that the Kushner coverage is an “amusing media story” and that “what happens on health care is going to happen.” Oscar executives have said that starting in the first quarter of 2017, they plan to start selling to  small companies in addition to individuals.

Oscar serves 135,000 members across New York, Long Island, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Orange County, San Antonio, and Dallas.

Quelle: <a href="Trump-Linked Insurance Startup Tells Members That Obamacare Is OK For Now“>BuzzFeed

Viral WhatsApp Hoaxes Are India’s Own Fake News Crisis

Akash Iyer / Via BuzzFeed India

At 8 PM on November 8, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi unexpectedly banned 86% of the country’s legal tender from circulation. The goal was to wipe out “black money”&#x200A;—&x200A;a term used in India for cash that’s stashed outside the banking system to evade taxes. Old notes of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 would no longer be legal. Instead, the government would issue new, redesigned Rs. 2,000 notes.

Hours after the Prime Ministerial bombshell, the rumors started flying fast and thick over WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned instant messaging app used by more than 160 million Indians: the new notes would include an embedded GPS chip that would allow the government to track down hoarders.

Twitter: @Nisha__Hindu

Soon a video purporting to show one of these GPS notes being tracked on Google Maps went viral on WhatsApp, and then Facebook. And &x200A;less than 24 hours after the rumor started&x200A;, &x200A;Zee News, a leading Hindi television news channel, ran a 90-second report about the high-tech note, leading the country’s reserve bank to finally debunk it.

The United States is currently experiencing a fake news crisis – bogus news articles disguised to look like real ones to mislead people, influence public opinion, and/or to simply use their massive reach to reap advertising profits. These operations are sophisticated, data-driven and highly targeted. But in countries like India where internet penetration and literacy still lag far behind the US, misinformation tends to have a more grassroots quality. Twitter is a fertile ground for all kinds of rumor mongering, but with just over 30 million users in the country, its impact is limited.

“Our problem is WhatsApp, because it’s fast, simple, and much more intimate compared to Facebook.”

The primary vector for the spread of misinformation in India is WhatApp. The instant messenger is fast, free, and runs on nearly all of India’s 300 million smartphones. It’s also encrypted end-to-end, which means it’s nearly impossible to track what flows through it. Its real-world ramifications, nonetheless, can be brutal.

In November, WhatsApp rumors of a salt shortage sparked panic in at least four Indian states and caused stampedes outside grocery shops as people rushed to stock up. The government eventually debunked the rumours – but not before a woman died.

A Different Kind of Fake News

India’s misinformation problem predates the internet. In the early ‘90s, rabble-rousers in northern India trying to stir up tensions in Hindu and Muslim communities would mass-produce cassette recordings full of fake gunfire, screams, and chants of “Allah-ho-Akbar,” and then play them in car stereos at full volume in the dead of the night to incite communal violence.

And once the internet and social media came to the country, hoaxes took on a life of their own. In 2008, Pepsi was forced to publicly rebut a video that claimed that its Indian subsidiary manufactured Kurkure — Indian Cheetos — out of plastic. A few years later, makers of Frooti, a popular mango drink, started offering guided tours of their facilities after a rumour about the beverage containing HIV-positive blood went viral. In 2015, Mumbai’s police commissioner set up a hotline for anxious parents and urged people to ignore WhatsApp rumors, which claimed that gangs of women were kidnapping school children.

“I think it’s unfair to draw a direct parallel between the kind of organized fake news industry we saw in the lead up to the US elections and what happens in India,” said the social media strategist of a prominent political party in Delhi who did not wish to be named. “Our problem is WhatsApp, because it’s fast, simple, and much more intimate compared to Facebook. There’s more incentive for perpetrators of misinformation in India to distribute it over WhatsApp than Facebook because the chances of having real-world impact through WhatsApp are higher.”

What is also a disincentive is how little average revenue each Indian user generates for Facebook annually, despite the fact that the country is Facebook’s largest market outside the United States. According to the company’s own numbers, each user in the Asia-Pacific region generates less than $8 annually compared to a US user who generates $62. That makes India a less attractive target for people like teens in Macedonia, for instance, who earned thousands of dollars in advertising revenue peddling pro-Trump fake stories on Facebook to millions of Americans.

A Nationalist Wave

“There&#039;s been a sharp increase in WhatsApp forwards that are just propaganda.”

In 2014, Narendra Modi, a right-wing politician known for his close ties to Hindu supremacist group RSS, won by a landslide to become the Prime Minister of India. Like Trump, Modi is a polarizing figure – and his rise to power birthed thousands of social media trolls and organized misinformation campaigns.

“Everything changed,” said author Rupa Gulab, who is an outspoken Modi critic. “The hoaxes that went viral a few years before were just silly, but with Modi and his fanatics, there’s been a sharp increase in the amount of WhatsApp forwards you receive that are just propaganda.”

The build-up started while Modi was still campaigning in 2014. In January of that year, a quote about Modi attributed to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange went viral on Twitter, WhatsApp, and Facebook, boosted by shares from members of Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Twitter: @mrsgandhi

WikiLeaks denied the quote.

Twitter: @wikileaks

That didn’t stop the wave of Modi-related forwards on WhatsApp.

In October 2015, a photo of Modi sweeping the floor “during an RSS rally in 1988”&x200A; — &x200A;an attempt to highlight the Prime Minister’s humble roots &x200A;— &x200A;blew up. Later it became clear the image was Photoshopped.

A photo of Prime Minister Modi sweeping the floor “during an RSS rally in 1988” (left) was found to be Photoshopped from the original picture (right) in 2015.

Last year, India’s Press Information Bureau, an agency that manages government communication with the media, was left red-faced after it published a Photoshopped picture of the Prime Minister looking out on a flooded town in the flood-hit state of Tamil Nadu via its official Twitter handle. A new hashtag PhotoshopSarkar&x200A;—&x200A;Photoshop Government&x200A;—&x200A;was born.

Twitter: @SusegadGoan

And in August, Modi himself had to debunk a viral story that claimed that he had urged citizens to boycott Chinese-made firecrackers.

Twitter: @pmoindia

More recently, in a thread that went viral, Twitter user @samjawed65 deconstructed how an uncorroborated pro-government report in a mainstream Indian publication ended up in an aggregation echo chamber with half a dozen other media outlets re-reporting it, until the Huffington Post finally debunked it as fake news.

A recently published book details how the BJP deliberately created abusive social media campaigns using both WhatsApp and Twitter to troll prominent Indians and spread lies.

“[It’s clear] how seriously the political Hindu Right in India takes the online space as an ideological battlefield,” Rohit Chopra, a media studies professor at Santa Clara University who is working on a book about Hindu nationalism and new media, told BuzzFeed News. “They have invested money in it, they have mechanisms for flooding platforms like Twitter with messages either promoting their view or attacking contrary views, and they seem to employ a significant number of people in different capacities to manage this space.”

Krishna Prasad, former editor-in-chief of Indian news weekly Outlook, agrees. Once, Prasad recalls, a social media strategist asked him during a meeting with BJP politicians, “What have you gotten to trend on Twitter today?” “There are clearly people in India’s political parties buying hashtags and trying to influence trending topics,” he told BuzzFeed News.

“Individuals trying to influence trending topics are considered spammers and may have their accounts temporarily or permanently suspended,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, and pointed to Twitter’s page that outlines rules for trending topics.

Dark Social

In November, local newspapers reported that a doctor in the eastern state of Bihar had died of a cardiac arrest after income tax officials raided his house and seized illegal currency – except it wasn’t true. The rumors had first spread on WhatsApp before trickling up to the local media that ran the story without verification. Eventually, the doctor had to call a press conference to declare he was still alive and there had be no raid.

WhatsApp groups are the connective tissue that bind most Indians.

India is the number one market for WhatsApp in the world. The instant messenger is the most popular messaging platform that connects everyone from school friends to India’s bureaucrats. WhatsApp groups are the connective tissue that bind most Indians — but they are also notorious for being hotbeds of spammy forwards and hoaxes.

“Most Indians belong to tight-knight groups on WhatsApp such as a friends group and a family group,” said Harsh Taneja, an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism whose research focuses on audience behaviour and internet use. “But digital networks like WhatsApp are designed to connect us tightly with groups of acquittances too, who we may not otherwise have interacted with frequently.”

These “weak ties”, as Taneja calls them, are the reason why information spreads rapidly on closed networks like WhatsApp. “Most misinformation that originates within WhatsApp finds its way through this tight-knit network of weak ties,” Taneja said. But it’s tough to analyze WhatsApp. The messaging platform is encrypted end-to-end with no API, algorithms, or trending topics&x200A; – which means that it’s virtually impossible to track exactly how content spreads through it.

A spokesperson at the Hindu Sena, a Hindu nationalist party that celebrated Donald Trump’s victory in Delhi in December, told BuzzFeed News that he is a part of more than 50 right-wing WhatsApp groups, and sends “thousands of WhatsApp forwards around the country every day.”

Last year, police in different Indian states arrested half a dozen admins of WhatsApp groups, charging them with the crime of spreading misleading information, even though an admin has no control over what other members post in a group they belong to.

“We need to ask tough questions of Facebook, Twitter and Google in an Indian context.”

Other times, Indian authorities have resorted the using the bluntest weapon possible: turning off mobile internet entirely. In the first nine months of 2016, the Indian government turned off the internet 22 times in various parts of the country – including a four-month stretch in violence-ridden Kashmir – simply to prevent rumors from spreading over WhatsApp.

“We need to ask tough questions of Facebook, Twitter and Google in an Indian context, just like they are being brought to book in America,” said Prasad. “In a country like India that is so diverse and culturally different from the US, these companies cannot get away with saying that we are just platforms any longer.”

Facebook declined to comment on WhatsApp in the context of fake news. A Facebook spokesperson instead directed BuzzFeed News to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s post on the topic. “We’ve made significant progress,” it says. “But there is more work to be done.”

Quelle: <a href="Viral WhatsApp Hoaxes Are India’s Own Fake News Crisis“>BuzzFeed

Twitter Built An Instant Messenger Product But Killed It

Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images

Twitter spent more than a year developing an instant messaging app for emerging markets, but killed the product without launching it, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Built at Twitter’s Indian engineering center in Bengaluru, the standalone messaging app — which blended tweets and instant messages in a single interface — was conceived as a sort of new user on-ramp to Twitter proper. But the company killed it in September when it shut down its India engineering center.

Sources familiar with the messaging app’s development told BuzzFeed News that Twitter intended to identify “influencers” around certain topics&#x200A;—&x200A;let’s say news or politics or sports&x200A;—&x200A;and encourage them to create groups of interest within the app.

Not only could users chat among themselves in these groups, they could also subscribe them to relevant Twitter accounts whose tweets would be pulled in automatically into these groups — functionality that’s similar to what’s already possible in Slack channels.

“Twitter didn’t have that many active users in India,” one source who worked on the app’s development told BuzzFeed News. “So the idea was that if enough people used the instant messaging app, we could expose a lot of people to tweets without them even going to Twitter in the first place. Eventually, we hoped they would see the value of signing up for Twitter and directly following as many people as they wanted.”

Twitter refused to reveal the number of active users in India, but according to app analytics provider App Annie, the company had around 31 million monthly active users in the country on both Android and iPhone in November 2016.

The reason Twitter focused on instant messaging was simple&x200A;—&x200A;it was a concept that almost all users in emerging markets were already familiar with.

“Look, as a product, Twitter isn’t easy to figure out for most people,” said another source who directly worked on the app and said that none of his peers on Twitter’s engineering team in India were active Twitter users before they joined the company. “Everyone around us was hooked to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and I think internally, there was some concern about how much people were engaging with those platforms versus ours. So instant messaging seemed like a natural choice to build something around.”

A project lead in Twitter’s Bengaluru office oversaw the instant messaging project but checked in frequently with a manager based in San Francisco for feedback, said the source.

The project, however, was ultimately killed since the versions of the app that Twitter tested out with users anonymously didn’t get good feedback. “It didn’t test out so well in the market surveys that we did with college students,” said the source. “And I think that’s one of the reasons why Twitter decided to shelve it.”

The app was killed in September after more than a year of development. Three weeks later, as a part of what Twitter described as a “normal business review” the company laid off its entire Bengaluru staff of 20 including nine software engineers. It also shut down its India engineering center, born out of the company’s $30 million acquisition of Indian startup ZipDial in January last year.

The move came a little more than a month before Twitter announced with its third quarter results that it would lay off 350 people — 9% of its global workforce — to cut costs. According to BuzzFeed News’ sources, even before Twitter made the layoffs official, the company’s focus had moved from user growth to revenue, and non-performing features and experiments&x200A;—&x200A;like the instant messaging app&x200A;—&x200A;were axed first.

Twitter declined comment on the messaging app, but a high-level source at Twitter India confirmed its development and fate. “We took a bet with this product but it didn’t work out,” the source, who requested anonymity, told BuzzFeed News. “After Twitter’s third quarter results, the company focused more on profitability versus growth, and that’s the reason why this app was put on the back-burner.”

“My personal opinion is that if Twitter’s stock hadn’t been falling like a stone, we could have got something else to work on, instead of being laid off like we were,” said another source. “Product testing happens all the time in tech companies and if something doesn’t work, generally, you move to the next iteration or the next thing. You don’t get fired.”

The objective of Twitter’s Indian engineering center was to build products for emerging markets, but multiple sources told BuzzFeed News that the instant messaging app was the only project that Twitter’s Indian engineering team worked on before being laid off.

“We briefly worked on Twitter Lite, a low-bandwidth version of Twitter for slow networks and cheap phones,” said a source. “But it was never released and we don’t know what happened to it.”

It’s worth noting that Twitter added some instant messaging features like read receipts, typing indicators and previews of web links to Direct Messages in the same month it killed off this messaging app.

Twitter’s India operations have been on shaky ground since last month. Less than a week after the company announced its global layoffs at the end of October, its India head, Rishi Jaitley, quit after a four-year stint. Just a couple of days later, Parminder Singh, Twitter’s managing director for Southeast Asia resigned too.

Both Jaitley and Singh came to Twitter from Google. Twitter closed offices in Germany and the Netherlands as part of the October layoffs, but according to Recode, most offices in Asia are still open.

When asked if emerging markets like India aren&#039;t a priority for Twitter anymore, the high-level source said they wouldn&039;t go as far as to say that.

“However, there is a growing concern within the company that we shouldn&039;t shut down,” they said. “The priority now is to make money. We can revisit this app in the future if we think it&039;s sustainable once again. Let&039;s just say our ambitions have been tempered.”

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Built An Instant Messenger Product But Killed It“>BuzzFeed

Uber Pushes Hard To Influence Policy In Emerging Markets Because It Can Afford To

Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO and co-founder of Ola, poses in front of an Ola cab in Mumbai on March 3, 2015.

Shailesh Andrade / Reuters

For the last few weeks, anytime people launched the Uber app on their smartphones in Mumbai&#x200A;—&x200A;India’s financial capital located in the western state of Maharashtra and one of Uber’s most important markets in the world&x200A;—&x200A;they were blasted with a full-screen notification.

It urged them to sign a petition to protest against new rules that the government of Maharashtra had proposed last month for ride-hailing apps like Uber. If passed, read Uber’s warning darkly, these new rules would “mean the end of the Uber you know today.” In contrast, Uber&#039;s homegrown Indian rival Ola, which counts Mumbai among its top three markets in India, didn’t seem to do much besides send suggestions about the proposed rules to the government.

Screengrab / Via Uber

The rules, prescribed in a soporific 14-page draft, seek to regulate taxi apps like Uber and its homegrown Indian rival, Ola, to placate local taxi drivers in Mumbai who have seen business nosedive ever since the two competing companies entered the the city. It’s a story that has played out hundreds of times around the world ever since Uber,&x200A; &x200A;valued at $68 billion&x200A;, charged into 73 countries in just a few years.

The Maharashtra government’s new rules, however, threaten to fundamentally change how ride-hailing apps work in Mumbai. They ban surge-pricing in favor of a government-mandated fare cap, make it mandatory for thousands of drivers to buy cars with more expensive, higher-capacity engines, and, finally, require drivers to pay the government up to Rs. 2.61 lakh (about $3,000) for a permit before they can sign up to drive with an aggregator, depending on what kind of vehicle they own. The companies themselves will also need to pay Rs. 50 lakh (about $75,000) for every 1,000 cars registered on their platforms.

What was just as interesting as the proposed rules, however, was how the two companies reacted to them. Both companies want the same thing: to coax local and federal authorities to step into a brave new world and revise India’s archaic transportation laws. But while Uber went all out and asked its riders to rally around its cause, Ola barely flinched.

“Look, honestly, we don’t follow a global template like the one they [Uber] have, where if there’s something that’s not favorable to you, you create a public petition,” an Ola employee who wished to remain anonymous told BuzzFeed News.

Uber, of course, is no stranger to hostile policies or less-than-friendly governments. The company has plenty of experience muscling its way into even the toughest markets by playing fast and loose with the rules, then relying on its customers to put political pressure on those who would seek to regulate it out. While this strategy fails on occasion, as it did in Austin Texas, it’s worked in a number of places in the United States, including Las Vegas, where it faced exceptionally strong opposition both from the local governments and cab companies. And its in-app petition, like the one it just showed users in Mumbai, is a well-worn template it uses globally each time it needs to rally public support (Support Uber London&033; Keep Uber in PA&033; Keep Chicago Uber&033;).

“We think the proposed rules not only create a barrier for entry for our driver partners to get on to our platform, but they also make our service less reliable for consumers,” Shailesh Sawlani, Uber’s General Manager in Mumbai who recently appealed to customers to support the company on Uber’s India blog, told BuzzFeed News.

Uber can afford to cry foul, whereas Ola needs to be a lot more cautious.

In the weeks leading up to the Maharashtra government’s November 5 deadline for sending feedback about the new rules, Uber sent a letter to the state’s Chief Minister (India’s Governor equivalent) Devendra Fadnavis. The company wrote that while it agreed that existing taxi drivers were feeling the pressure from ride-hailing services, “the answer is to level the playing field by reducing today’s burdensome regulations&x200A;—&x200A;not to introduce rules that will be bad for riders, drivers and Maharashtra.” Uber’s India head, Amit Jain, also made an impassioned pitch for deregulating India’s app-based transport industry at a panel discussion. In the end, more than 100,000 people had signed Uber’s petition.

Meanwhile, Ola didn’t ask users in Mumbai to sign a petition each time they launched its app, nor did the company say anything to the press besides issuing a statement on November 5 summing up the problems it had with the government’s proposed rules&x200A;— including&x200A; the ban on surge-pricing, the choice of car, and the exorbitant permits — which were the same complaints that Uber had.

“We think that besides the few things that we have issues with, the government’s proposed policy is actually forward-looking and inclusive,” Pranay Jivrajka, Ola’s Chief Operating Officer, told BuzzFeed News. “The rules the government has proposed are just a draft, which means that they are willing to listen to you and understand you, so we think that working with them closely is the simplest way to get what we want… At some point, we are confident that the government will come up with a solution that’s fair to everyone. That doesn’t mean you start opposing them and collecting petitions from your users.”

The difference in the two companies&039; stances isn&039;t entirely surprising. “Uber has tons of global experience dealing with tough laws and authorities who lack regulatory imagination, so they can afford to take a long-term, more principled stand on regulations that directly affect their business in a strategic market like India,” a Mumbai public policy official who did not wish to be named told BuzzFeed News. “On the other hand, Ola chooses to focuses on more immediate problems like not getting hit with huge permit fees to stay in the market.”

In other words, Uber can afford to cry foul, whereas Ola needs to be a lot more cautious. “If Ola’s business gets affected or shut down in India, they have nowhere else to turn to because they don’t have a global footprint like Uber,” said the official.

According to a report by The Ken (paywall), both Uber and Ola have been ramping up their public policy departments for the last few years, but Uber spends twice as much on lobbying in India as Ola does. (Uber spends a lot on lobbying in the US, too.) Among other things, this includes surge-free rides for Indian government officials, and junkets for Indian politicians to Uber’s San Francisco campus.

“I don’t really see a moral or a principled problem with Uber’s approach,” said Pavan Srinath, head of strategy and programs at the influential Bengaluru-based public policy think tank, the Takshashila Institution. “India’s local transport systems like taxis and autorickshaws are very, very entrenched, more so than in any other country, and Uber decided to take them head on. So they’re doing what they have to do to survive.”

Quelle: <a href="Uber Pushes Hard To Influence Policy In Emerging Markets Because It Can Afford To“>BuzzFeed

Even Techies Can’t Afford San Francisco Anymore

Flickr / HJL

On Wednesday, Kate Vershov Downing, a corporate lawyer for an enterprise cloud company called ServiceNow, resigned from the Palo Alto Planning and Transport Commission. The reason, she said, was that she and her husband — a software engineer — could no longer afford to live there.

“We rent our current home with another couple for $6200 a month,” Downing wrote in a post on Medium. “If we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That’s $146,127 per year&#x200A;—&x200A;an entire professional’s income before taxes. This is unaffordable.”

Like dozens of her friends have already done, Downing will be relocating outside of the Bay Area — a financial decision a new report says is becoming a trend.

“Twenty six percent of software engineers in San Francisco are searching for jobs out of state,” said Indeed’s Paul D&#039;Arcy, who presented this research to San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday afternoon. D’Arcy said that, specifically, they’re looking in Seattle, Portland, Austin and Denver — cities that have emerged as tech hubs, but where salaries go a little further.

According to Indeed, tech workers in San Francisco are making an average $113,497 a year. In Seattle, that figure is lower, at $98,215, and in Austin, lower still, at $94,025. But when those salaries are adjusted for cost of living, which is much higher in California than it is in Texas, that order is reversed. While San Franciscan techies are spending around 37% of their income on rent, Austinites are only shelling out 23% of their earnings on housing.

“We&039;ve seen, globally, tech salaries equalize,” said D’Arcy during his presentation on Wednesday. “It used to be people in San Francisco made much more, but that gap is decreasing. With the dramatic increase in cost of living, the economics are becoming less favorable to workers.”

As a result, according to Indeed’s data, San Francisco has has fallen behind Washington DC and Austin when it comes to desired destinations for people searching for jobs in tech. (San Jose is still in the lead, though.)

If the city is interested in reversing this trend, D’Arcy said, it will need to invest heavily in transportation systems that would help commuters access cheaper housing; if companies want to help, he said, they’ll need to offer workers based in San Francisco increased flexibility — aka, permission to work from home.

San Francisco is the third most unequal city in America after Bridgeport, CT and New York City, according to Indeed’s report, and that gap is widening. As the top earners get richer, the lowest earners — those in the bottom 20th percentile — are actually seeing their income decrease. It’s a problem Kate Downing is thinking about, even as she prepares to bail on Silicon Valley proper.

“It’s clear that if professionals like me cannot raise a family here,” she wrote, “then all of our teachers, first responders, and service workers are in dire straits.”

Quelle: <a href="Even Techies Can’t Afford San Francisco Anymore“>BuzzFeed