Re:How to Find Hidden Cameras in Your Airbnb
by sitkack on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @12:45PM
(#20461413)
A lot of startup culture is about breaking the social contract for profit. "Value" is locked up in norms, but you can show up to a place, throw those norms away and make lots of money. Cutting down apple orchards to put in tract housing. Making employees contractors and gaming the system so they compete rather than cooperate. This pattern causes others to seek out norms that can bent for profit, so it has spread like a meme.
In Germany, one can openly drink any sort of alcohol one wants. But the social norms as such that jackassery by those consuming alcohol is greatly reduced. The people there are under a stronger social contract.
Re:How to Find Hidden Cameras in Your Airbnb
by TeMPOraL on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @01:38PM
(#20462029)
Yup. That's why for the last few years I've been so outspoken about Uber and (less often) AirBnB - I view those companies not as just poisoning the spaces they work in, but as a general threat to the fundamental underpinnings of societies worldwide. This may sound extreme, but as you correctly pointed out - others see how successful those companies are, how much media praise they're getting, and try to copy them.
Tourists are noisy and careless. That's to some extent forgivable - tourism is a leisure activity. Hotels and other legit tourism-oriented businesses are prepared for it and mostly take care of it (and are appropriately regulated to make sure they do). But take the same tourists doing the same things and sprinkle them around neighborhoods where regular people live and raise families - in that context, their behavior becomes disturbing and destructive to the quality of those neighborhoods. It's breaking social contract.
The sin of AirBnB is that they know they're making the world a worse place, and they don't care. They just keep doing it.