Also, when you're older and have already spent a decade or more accumulating good friends (one hopes!) the exploration/exploitation equation starts to favour spending more time with old friends than making new ones.
I am wondering how many segments there are in the "accomodations" industry. We have the homely/warm/cozy opinioned root kind of segment CalRobert has exemplified; then we have the dirt-cheap hobo-shelter-minus-stabbing that people on a tight budget seem to value, etc.
Any thoughts.
To be fair, if more hotels were cozy and made it easier to meet local people I'd be more inclined to go with hotels. They're not _bad_, per se, just kind of sterile.
There are exceptions, of course. I've stayed in small, usually family-run, bnb's in rural Ireland, and Germany's romantic road. These tend to be more charming.
Like local hotel taxes.
And how the soviet union would only have one manufacturer and one shitty product.
Now we have walmart.
No matter the ideology, powerful people will want to possess power and wealth and will use whatever systems are in place to get there.
Many of the things made during the Soviet era were made to last. I'd recommend the documentary: "The Lightbulb Conspiracy." It talks about planned obsolesce and the throw away economy.
It's not necessarily because the Soviet state, but more simply due to resource scarcity and needing to make things that last a very long time.
It's more than appalling that our cell phones are only intended to last two ~ four years. Of course that gives miners and Chinese manufactures jobs and growth (and the war industry too as they start a few more wars to collect resources).
They were made to last because they were costly and difficult to obtain, but they were of shockingly poor quality. Consumer goods in the soviet union were uniformly terrible. These dreadful products were the natural result of material shortages, obsolete design, inept management, a total indifference to quality and consumers who had no other choice.
Look at soviet cars. Trabants, Yugos and Ladas were shoddily built from the cheapest materials. Soviet citizens kept these cars running because they had no other choice - either you figured out some way to fix up your pile of junk, or you walked. When Ladas and Yugos were exported to the west, they required major upgrades to meet safety and emissions standards and were still the worst cars on the market.
That maps across the entire soviet economy. The very best goods available to soviet citizens were usually worse than the shoddiest goods on the western market.
And no pressure to make shitty things just to ensure you have return customers.
OTOH, if we could get minimum warranties from the EU's standard 2 years to something like 20 years for appliances and 10+ years for digital electronics... maybe then companies would start to care.
The bad, if done wrong, you get poor recycling of input materials. If done right, you get iteratively better more environmentally friendly products.
We would not want to be using inefficient air conditioners, washers, dryers, refrigerators, water heaters, etc. from yen years ago. They are simply inefficient compared to a new model. The problem is in recycling the displaced products.
There's plenty of wrong with the current state of facts, but suggesting it's roughly similar, let alone equivalent, to what the situation was in the USSR is quite ridiculous.
The big difference is that, unlike those "sharing" economy companies, Couchsurfing was not a business, and once it turned its focus to making money an exodus of "users" ensued.
Couchsurfing was not targeted at Airbnb's "get a cheap place to sleep at city X" demographic, and people that couldn't demonstrate they were looking for anything other than a low cost hotel would see their requests turned down. Couchsurfing users were willing to share their house, not for a small amount of money, but for the value of making international acquaintances (and friends for life, sometimes), which is something they also received through the service when going abroad.
Actual sharing like couch surfing hasn't been nearly as popular.
If it were a real sharing economy, the developers and system engineers on the platform would make the same hourly rates as the drivers. In such a way everyone would contribute to the co-op and everyone would benefit.
It'd be interesting to see a price breakdown internally at Uber or Lyft and see how much people would actually get paid if every driver/contractor and every dev/admin/janitor/board member were to make the same hourly rate.
If it were a real sharing economy, the developers and system
engineers on the platform would make the same hourly rates as
the drivers. In such a way everyone would contribute to the
co-op and everyone would benefit.
Different services are worth different amounts depending on the value they yield and, sometimes, who they're targeted at. If a relatively small team of programmers can enable a massive business, then they may be deserving of apparently outsized compensation for their time and work.
So everyone's a winner, what's the problem? Everyone is getting a better deal than they would with an alternative, excellent I say.
Your feelings don't match reality. The licensed taxis I've ridden in were nasty, far worse than the unlicensed Uber cars I've ridden in. Taxi: 20-year-old P-O-S Crown Victoria. Uber: 2-year-old Mercedes
There's also plenty of rat-trap motels out there that are properly licensed. I live a couple of miles from one; people have even put videos on YouTube about how awful it is there. There's plenty of really nice hotels too, but that's because people are willing to pay double the price of the rat-trap, and those hotel chains are nation-wide and want to maintain their reputations, not because of any regulations. The only thing regulations are good for is making sure places don't burn down. And even that's iffy; generally places just burn down anyway and then someone gets punished afterwards.
There are terrible motels and good motels; same with hostels. I've stayed in many hostels that were far Superior and better value than hotels. I've been in some that had mold infestations everywhere.
Regulations play a part, and the are an important part of equality. Do people game the system, bend the rules and lobby to pass their own laws that benefit them over the customers and employees. Of course.
But it's all a very complicated system. You need to do a lot of surveys, research and have a good set of controls to say "regulations might correlate with x, y and z," and you'd need people to replicate your work before you can even start addressing causality.
A claim was made that "I feel that regulation makes things clean and safe". I pointed out that that claim is utterly false using actual examples. I don't have to prove that regulation doesn't work anywhere, I only have to prove that it doesn't work somewhere. And in the places I've used taxis (NJ, AZ), they're awful. I have used them in NYC too, and those are OK (though to be fair, I'm not black, which I've read is a big problem there). You're right: it depends on the city, etc. Regulations and regulators are different in different places. But to make the broad claim that "regulation is wonderful!!" is blatantly false, and easily disproven by showing only one example of a place where it doesn't work right. Now, if you want to make the claim that "regulation works really well in location X", that's a defensible claim, and only disproven by showing that things are actually bad in location X (and not other locations).
This seems to be the problem with this whole regulation vs. anti-regulation argument WRT taxis and hotels: the pro-regulation people cherry-pick a few places where things seem to be OK. The anti-regulation point out that their experiences in other places are entirely different. The pro-regulation people them stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to believe that there's places where regulations don't work well. Maybe regulation really does work well in those cherry-picked places, but that doesn't help the places where the regulation is bad and the regulators are corrupt.
To reiterate coldpie's point, "regulations don't come about because some lawmakers got bored, they come about in answer to a problem". Before going full anti-regulatory based on personal experience, one would be good to consider the relative impact on all places.
Sure, if you consider the desire of incumbent businesses to lock out competition and artificially inflate their profits to be a "problem".
I merely have the position that regulation is not the panacea that the pro-regulation people seem to think it is. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, then instead of harassing the people who work around broken regulations which just support rent-seeking by cronies, maybe we should look at fixing the political system and eliminating the corruption and bad regulation and bad regulators instead. But that's never proposed as a solution, probably because 1) it's too hard, and 2) the pro-regulation people don't like to admit to the existence of corruption.
You have very little evidence that this is true.
And anecdotal data suggests that explicit "social ranking" introduces a whole host of other problems. See: the kerfuffle about AirBnB and renting to minorities.
Congratulations. You just invented "zoning laws".
As well, maybe it takes a while before the true societal risks are understood, AitBNB regulations may be too weak for some reason, but until we discover that, perhaps we've "unfairly" put some marginal hotels out of business that would have survived under the impending new legislation. (Hope that makes sense?)
As I touched on a above, the thing about restricted markets is that price is able to rise artificially due to the unnaturally constrained supply. This ends up being a government subsidy; one that is disproportionally paid for by the poorest people. If you are already comfortable with subsidizing licensed businesses, why not continue to subsidize the marginal ones? Perhaps even in a way that is less impactful to the poorest people?
My issue would be buying a house or condo with the neighbors across the hall or across the street changing daily. It's not an issue of the quality of the hotel. It's an issue of respecting zoning laws.
somebody would like to spend less, be in more welcoming/cozy/more spacious environment, have a kitchen at hand and so on? well there is now an option for those too.
I don't see where the problem lies. just don't take perks from the other 'side' as granted.
People get scammed by shady taxi drivers and landlords all the time. Regulations don't work. Haven't you heard about all the taxi drivers who don't take credit cards because "the card reader is broken"? I've had this happen many times, and I don't even use taxis very much.
I had look at places that needed roommates, but the good ones filled up by the time I called back and the others were not places I wanted to live. I ended up paying a premium for having my own place.
http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/
Looking back, I didn't want to share after spending much of that time in hostels and shared spaces. But months later, I realize the benefits I've lost. I have too much stuff once again and am desperately trying to cut down. I'm in a city that's filled with cold an unfriendly people, and thanks to having my own place, allows me to be more of a hermit.
I plan on buying a car again at some point and downsizing to less than a car full of stuff. Big salaries are a kind of death trap. It can get people addicted and justify jobs that many of us hate. I'd rather have the small salary and only have enough stuff that I only take up one room; where I could easily pack up and leave.
I'm not sure whether the ability to do this truly empowered them, whether the life with it is better than the alternative. Clearly they judge it to be.
On the other hand was a chap renting out his spare room who loved being a host, chatting to the people he met etc etc. He was definitely happier with it.
Now suppose we divide old units of accommodation priced £ in two (halve the slope of the supply curve). The price of a new unit will be close to £. But an old unit then costs nearly 2£. So you have a choice between slum housing and coughing up double the rent.
I have nothing against AirBnb itself, I was generally talking about the bigger and bigger disconnect that has formed between the middle classes (who have seen their real wages stagnating for the last 10-15 years in the Western world) and the holders of capital, presumably because the latter have accumulated more and more wealth also because of those stagnating wages for the middle classes.
We both know that without VC money (which in the end comes from holders of big capital) companies like AirBnb and Uber wouldn't be where they are right now.
Eventually, a "business" has to actually create value and earn a profit somehow. If VCs actually intend to support neat stuff on charity, they can just write checks to the National Science Foundation.
I don't use airbnb because my travel needs can't tolerate any random last minute host cancellation. I continue to use hotels. I'm rarely happy with hotel prices but I am willing to pay for reliability of service.
That's true for some people. But for others, it's more "want" than "need".
Like one driver I rode with last week: she started driving for Lyft part-time, in addition to her day job, because she wanted to make a little extra money in order to afford the down payment on a house. She didn't need to do that; she could have continued living in her existing place indefinitely, and her day job lets her afford her current living expenses just fine. But she wanted something more, so she took up Lyft. And I got the impression that she'll give up Lyft as soon as the down payment is made.
Or other drivers I've talked to who could work a full-time job in another field and make a decent living doing so, but choose to drive for Uber or Lyft because they like the idea of being their own boss. This actually reminds me of how insurance companies work... I've been approached by a few of them while unemployed in the past, and they came off as pyramid schemes to me, but there are a few people who have the mindset to make it work for them, and they enjoy it.
You have to pay to become an agent, you work solely on commission, and you have to pay for all of your own work expenses (drive around to meet with clients? You pay for the gas!). The agent who recruited you into the biz gets a cut.
It's probably best to browse sites like ripoff report for descriptions of how being a life insurance agent works. A lot of people are unhappy with the system, but if you look through the reports, you'll also see positive reviews by agents who are happy with how the system works who are.
Here's one (this specific company repeatedly contacted me in 2010-2011): http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/liberty-national-life-in...
Here's how one review compares it to a pyramid scheme:
> So let me get this straight. You are hired informally through a conference type atmosphere where they sell you their business opportunity. They tell you that it is your business and you get what you put in. Claiming that you can make over 100k each each year working solely on commission. After reaching a sales cap they place you ahead of 5 low level sales persons. When those people reach their sales cap they give you five more or 'promote' you again to have 5 managers below you and 5 agents below each of them?
> If this in anyway sounds like the operation that liberty National adheres to then it is a Pyramid Scheme.
Another says:
> This is not a job for anyone without deep pockets. It is an expensive company to go to work for. I have probably spent more money to work for this company than for all other companies I have worked for combined!
And another:
> Also, count on spending several hundreds of dollars (or thousands) to work for this company. You will have to have a (relatively) new laptop computer and a GPS plus appropriate attire and suitable automobile. You'll probably be driving 100 miles a day at your expense. It is unlikely that you'll make enough money in the first few months to off-set these expenses and have anything left over for your family. I've probably spent more than I've made with Liberty National.
But here's one guy who made being an agent work for him and really likes it:
> I have enjoyed the comments from "ex-employees" of the company. I started in August of '06. Prior to this career move, I owned a business for 6 years, worked 16 hours a day consistantly.
> The reason I bring that up is, I believed in what I was doing, these comments have a common thread, LAZY people expecting more than they are willing to put in!
> I have been with Liberty for over a year now, I have worked very hard to get what I have and where I am with the company, with out my "WORK ETHIC" I would not be where I am, with that said, I have not worked a 16 hour day since I sold my business in '06...on average I work 9-11 hours 5 days a week...not bad when you consider my yearly income IS over 6 figures! Oh, and I get to see my family!
> 1. If you work hard, yes you can make over $100k your first year, I did!
This sounds like legitimate MLM not a pyramid scheme. I'd suggest reading the MLM section on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
Nobody wants to share things, it's all done for economic reasons. People buy on AirBNB and Uber because it's cheaper than an equivalent hotel or taxi. People sell on AirBNB and Uber because they need the extra income.
For a short while, VC investments paid out as bonuses to the participants, and just the novelty of the thing might keep both sides happy. But eventually there has to be a balance found between "I want to pay less" and "I want to earn as much as before" and "government wants as much taxes as before".