Because it lowers the housing stock in urban areas. Wealthy travellers will pay more for accommodations than the local market, so apartments become airbnbs and investors gobble up condos and housing which they turn into short term rentals. The scarcity pushes up the housing prices, but it never balances out because the locals can never make enough to compete with wealthy travellers and are forced farther from the city. The end result is a hollowed out city core.
I totally agree. However that is not what it became. This cannot have been a surprise to AirBnb, as it must have required huge lobbying across many countries.
The three stages of airbnb:
- actual sharing of spare capacity on a temporary basis (for example effectively a house swap while on holiday)
- rental of permanent properties by "early adopters" who saw the loophole and the gap in the market
- inundation of full time speculators who own many properties and lots of highly leveraged "owners" who have one or a handful of properties, plus landlords who couldn't add up and had negative yield on their long-term rentals and bailed to short term
The last layer here are going to get hit hard. Many will retreat to long-term rentals again, which will see rents fall. For those who already had negative yield before moving to airbnb, this will be even worse now.
Also many airbnb rentiers will have a low skill set, with bad qualifications. They got into it because it seemed like easy money, and they will be the first to suffer in the coming recession. Forced sellers.
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I'll add my comment here as I mentioned unearned income, which hacker news really don't like, so they gave me the fake "you're posting too fast" even though I've posted nothing for over 20 minutes.
They used Ireland as a proxy to avoid tax? God these people have zero shame.
Here in Germany, the last mentioned tier will also have looked fondly upon getting the money wired in from Ireland and may have lived with the assumption that they don't have to think about taxes at all. At least some of the "owners" of those basic, Ikea-equipped flats did not really strike me as being quite up to it. There has also grown a job market for "room service" agencies, cleaning and equipping AirBnB rental objects for many "owners". I've seen their actual check lists (think restroom cleaning checklist) pinned to the object's door.
The corporate structure institutionalizes immorality, it cannot be avoided. By law shareholder profits come first, everything else is secondary to that goal.
The person filing the paperwork still isn’t necessarily the one who made the call. In fact, it usually isn’t; they are just the ones whose responsibility it is to carry it out, or else their head is on the block.
It is my experience that everyone who self identifies as a republican or democrat is brainwashed at this point. The worst offenders are those who are so delusional that they mock anyone who avoids political discourse or abstains from voting. They are so high on political fumes that they can’t imagine that there are things more important than our cancerous political process.
From my observations (total anecdata, I am aware), those pro-specific-party people also usually don't tend to participate in politics on more local levels at all (county, state, etc.), despite the fact that those are imo way more impactful and can lead to changes "trickling up" all the way to the national level. Most of the people I personally know who vote in county/state elections can be best described as independents.
I think part of the issue is that politics appears to have become something akin to a national sport, where we elect to support team A or team B. Because it is similar to a sport, our hopes and dreams, our entire being is drawn into this particular identity. That is why if team A supports position C ( that happened to be supported by team B previously ) it becomes a valid position. I do not know how to make people dislike sports.
I absolutely agree about the importance politics at local level. In fact, this is likely where regular citizens have biggest chance to actually influence an outcome.
Sports and politics can both give people an easy feeling of belonging to something greater than themselves. Both can give you addictive neur-ochemical rushes while interweaving the experience of victory and defeat with tribal identification and othering.
I used to have a condescending attitude towards people who took sports 'way too seriously', but now I wonder if it is a net gain for society to give people a comparatively harmless outlet for these tendencies. Real harm is done when our policy discussions are dominated by the kind of tribalism, ideological intolerance, and rush-seeking engagement that seems to happen when people bring these tendencies to politics.
I mean, in lots of Europe, football matches are one of the only places where flag-waving nationalism isn't a social faux pas. It's obviously a harmless outlet for human tribalistic tendencies and thirst for battle. But Europe has gotten ravaged in living history - you can talk to plenty of Brits today who will tell you stories about taking shelter in the subways while the Nazis bombed London. Americans don't really have a living memory of going to war with our neighbors and having our homeland pummeled - wars are a thing waged in faraway lands with people from strange and different cultures, so nationalism is allowed to flourish without any acknowledgement of its toxicity to humanity as a whole.
Tribalism in America goes deep, and you're right: rooting for a sports team is fairly harmless, and rooting for a political party is probably harmful, but I'd argue it's not nearly as harmful as as rooting blindly for an ideology. If you want your party to succeed, you should be engaged in your local politics, talk to people from the other side, listen honestly to their concerns, be willing to change your own opinion on specific policies, and push for those sensible policy changes to be adopted as part of your local party's platform. That's how you win people over, that's how you win elections, and how you enact real change that affects people's lives. Anything else is just yelling into your echo chamber, or getting into bar fights with the guys wearing the "wrong" jerseys.
Ideologies form the axes of socioeconomic space, they're not an ideal point, and the push toward an "us versus them" mentality in politics is embarrassing. It's a quirk that's arisen out of new media, an easily exploitable bug, and the sooner people see through the bullshit and we outgrow this, the better.
I agree there are serious problems with brainwashing on both sides. My criticism was directed leftward only because it seemed most relevant to my disagreement with the GP.
That excludes a huge number of students who will have never had the experience to try programming before university.
I never did any programming before my first year, I was planning on going into economics. But then I took an elective in CS and it became my major. I wasn’t alone either, most of the students were not programmers previously.
