> I prefer living in places where you can leave your laptop on the front seat of your running car and come back twenty minutes later and it’s all still there.

We have that and it's one of the few perks of our suburban hell. My neighbor was gone for two weeks and had 10-20 packages on his doorstep. Our only concern was that rain might get to them.

Username makes me a little apprehensive nonetheless

It's simpler than that: the assumption is that a bag will hold something of value, whether laptop, purse, wallet, cash, or otherwise

I really hate this! Long ago, I had a quarterlight window smashed because someone broke into my 20 year old Toyota Corolla to steal a 4L, but half empty bottle of engine oil and a street directory. Obviously the engine oil wasn't expensive, and no-one used street directories anymore, even back then.

This was in nice suburb in New Zealand, so it was a bit of a surprise. The replacement window cost many times the value of what they took, and I was finding small pieces of glass for a while afterwards despite careful vacuuming.

Since then I'm more careful that there is nothing removable visible at all through windows. Ideally, anyone looking through the window should think I am the kind of compulsive person that carries every single thing inside each night. Unfortunately, the trick to making that work almost requires it to be true.

I dunno about drawing attention. I've heard enough stories of physical pentesters getting into secure areas using the "wear a hi-viz vest and a hard hat" strategy. The outfit seems a little like Douglas Adams' "Somebody Else's Problem Field". People seem to be blind to the stereotypical "workman" getup.

Ha! I used to be a land surveyor before I was an engineer. I had one of those vests and yes, I did put a laptop in there a few times during lunch breaks when I didn't want to leave the laptop in the truck.

Field vests for biologists or other folks who work outdoors but not near a highway or construction site have lots of pockets and aren't hi-viz.

It's possible to have lots of different experiences across the many people with different lifestyles who might interact with public transportation. I loved my bus lines when I lived in sf because they were safe and super convenient and I hated city parking and I don't have kids. I can imagine the bus being crappy if those things aren't true.

I didn't say owning a car was dumb, just that driving to downtown SF specifically for an office job is pretty inconvenient and expensive and therefore most of my startup colleagues didn't do that.

Also it's hardly a hot take, I am sure 90% of the ones who do that commute would agree!

Two different groups of people commenting different things.

You don't need to be rich to have enough backbone to do your own thing, and not worry what someone else might think.

Maybe... I mean in the sense that the median lifestyle in North America is 90-some percentile in the world. Is that even true?

Sure, it's just ...pretty odd? for OP to say "backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car" when it's 65% of people who do not use a car in this context at all.

(aside: transit is up to 25% again recently, apparently; https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/remote-work-home.... And that graph has an even more interesting number which is that in 2019 transit was the plurality.)

Also keyword is "looking" poor. 300 hundred dollar jeans, fifty thousand dollar hybrid civics -- meanwhile, my Casio got a lot of curt remarks.

Good thing my backpack was stolen so I won’t look poor when I go into the police station to report the theft.

Police (and DA) in SF don't punish any theft from anyone in my experience.

Suburban office parks still have lots of parking.

It's only a Y10K problem if people assume that a year that happens to be 4 digits is existing in a system that doesn't permit years of 5 or more digits.

But as soon as you put a leading 0, (besides confusing people) you seem to be telling people to definitely use arbitrary fixed lengths for years and analogous purposes. Even though they weren't necessarily doing that before.

Sincerely,

    "neilv                           "

Cringe (him, not you)

I'm sure you can find even more things to sneer at me about. Perhaps you would find my choice of programming languages flamboyant and my attire effeminate, as well.