Considering a lot of them are there during school hours and you'll see the same ones there sleeping with tarps at night - I think its safe to say homeless. Probably better to say 'young adults' though - Seattle YouthCare (http://www.youthcare.org/) does a great job with the younger groups.
Not looking for a scapegoat, only a solution. And I lived here before the recession/GFC. I'd completely agree that the "social/medical/mental safety net in this country" is a major problem.
Crime is down nationally since the 80s. So for things to be the same, or only a little better says a lot.
I completely agree that SPD is petrified. I've live/worked in downtown Seattle for a while - and while I think some of the 'scaryness' is overblown, it's hard not to see a change in the trend over the past few years.
Comcast services only select locations too. A good number of apartments around the city don't even offer Comcast (and instead the aforementioned and other services such as 'Wave'). The building I live in (granted, yes, an upscale condo), had several offerings.
Full on competition? No. But better than a wide majority of cities? Yes. (Try living in Florida...ugh)
I'm assuming he means the Pike/Pine alley and Pioneer square, sadly famous for aggressive panhandling, unruly 'youth', and shootings. I live in and work in downtown (haven't driven in months) and it's def. getting a little more 'rough' by the month. Especially Westlake area.
Comcast has other serious challengers here in Seattle as well between CascadeLink (terrible website, but top notch service) and CondoInternet, if you can get either of those, you'll never look at Comcast again (between $30-60/month for 30/100mbit)
What you're talking is yield and volatility. When you're running a fund, you need to manage to benchmarks, and MSFT is a great position for exposure. IV is on the low end, there is plenty of liquidity should you need to raise cash, and with a dividend of right around 3% you have a nice predictable return, which is a big deal with institutional investing.
Additionally securities like MSFT, you can comfortably get 'aggressive' through call writing, and juice returns a little more without your risk metrics being outside your targets.
For credit repair, you'll need to do certified mail for certain requests. This is something we're getting ready to launch :-) Feel free to reach out (info in profile), if we can help.
I think more coincidence. EasyPost and TryPaper both started around the same time (Q3 2013). Nothing specific on the USPS side has happened.
That being said, one thing we've seen, is as companies have invested more and more in digital delivery, they've 'de-invested' in their physical print & mail production, so it makes a lot of off load it to a S(oftware)+S(ervices) model.
At the risk of hijacking the thread, we've been doing this for about 7 months now (out of beta for 4+) @ https://www.trypaper.com, we wish you guys the best of luck!
edit: the big differentiator here is that we print and mail documents ourselves in one of our two print facilities (Seattle WA and Jacksonville FL)
Frankly about time. We evaluated Braintree and just couldn't get over the amount of information requested to get started as compared to Stripe. Secondarily, we reached out to a member of the sales team and got a fairly curt response about their 1,000 startup initiative. Mix it with disjointed API docs (that appears to be better than it was 3 months ago, but not by much), and it wasn't even a decision. (And this is coming from someone who had opened a merchant account in 2003 over the phone with a previous startup)
It's all really a bummer because we'd love to see some serious competition in this space, but at the moment no one appears to be up to the task.