The 211 number was given as what Airbnb has found to be what it takes to break even on the cost of a unit. Prop F, and others like it, are not trying to destroy Airbnb but stop people from purchasing housing and using it exclusively for short term rentals.
That statistic is meant to say that only 340 units were rented out enough to match what could have been made via a lease. So if people are snatching up property to use just for Airbnb, they either aren't doing it a lot or aren't actually making a sound economic decision in all but 340 cases.
I understand what the statistic is meant to say and it does that well.
However, the city's already limited units to 90 days, so the 211ers are already handled -- if the city (with AirBnB's cooperation) enforces the law, that is. So I don't this point isn't particularly relevant to Prop F. Your mileage may vary, of course!
That is how representative democracy works. You decide how things work in the area where you live. Imagine if I got to decide how things worked in your neighborhood without living there, that wouldn't be fair.
People who _want_ to live somewhere have no rights to it. They are by definition not yet part of the community. That's like allowing job applicants vote on company policy. I'm sure they would want to, but communities are defined by those in them.
I get what you're saying, and what you're saying does indeed sound fair to a certain extent.
The problem is that it encourages and allows NIMBY attitudes to proliferate, and creates an environment of stagnation. I certainly think we should balance the wishes of current residents, but there has to be limits.
I do live in SF, and I'm pissed that other residents are allowed to slow down housing development. SF is turning into a less desirable place for me to live because of the housing crunch... and I'm not even talking about my rent costs. I don't want to live in a city where only high-income people (and entrenched incumbents with ridiculous rent control) can afford to live. The NIMBYs are the problem, here.
"Sharing economy" is just the marketing term for it. If I share a bench with you, I'm not charging you for the privilege. I agree that it is the word we use, but it doesn't accurately communicate what we're talking about.
It's a difficult line to walk. On the one hand, sharing sounds nice. Even as capitalists we are suspicious of efforts to make a profit. And many of the "sharing economy" services are about using things that you personally own and selling use of them to the public.
On the other hand, when AirBnB/Uber/etc try to make an economic argument for their services, it is clearly not around sharing. We're exchanging value (my empty home, parked car, etc.) for value (your dollars, as a proxy for work you have done.)
I get that you're trying to break down "sharing economy" by the semantics of the word "share", but even in your hypothetical the bench is [presumably] owned by the city, who has granted already access to it for everyone.
By sharing access to economic goods and services that were previously unavailable, waste from market inefficiencies are being eliminated. Just because companies are profiting from this waste elimination doesn't negate the fact that shared economies can still be beneficial.
Even so, considering the size of these markets now, I don't think people are going to confuse "Sharing economy" with altruism.
People have chanted "sharing is caring" at demonstrations against greater regulations and restrictions on short term rentals. I think we're stepping close to a deliberate ambiguity.
I used to share a ski house in Tahoe. Should I expect to pay part of the rent or not?
I think the term "share" is strictly agnostic on who pays but also does have a gifting connotation that appeals to marketing. I have no problem with its use here but if there is a better word what is it?
> nothing stops an unethical founder from raising 800k at a 8M cap, and turning right around and letting the company get acqui-hired for 4M a month later, pocketing $3.6M and leaving the investors with half their money.
Except that they just exchanged a stake worth $7.2m and sold it for $3.2m. Founders with large stock options are _more_ incentivized than even investors to maximize valuation in the event of a sale.
I understand that you want to make a bet while minimizing risk, but if you're going to try and guarantee your money back then as a company I'm going to price that in by minimizing the upside.
Without liquidation preferences, you as an investor can negotiate more reasonable valuations (if you're setting a cap of $8m and the company is willing to take a $4m buyout, you've seriously mispriced the company.) That means more potential upside.
In Silicon Valley it would be like a company that is raising record amounts of money at mind-boggling valuations but whose revenue isn't growing at the same pace.
One of the major question marks has been wage growth during the recovery. Stock markets have been skyrocketing, but wages have generally remained stagnant.
Similarly, labor participation (i.e. of the people who could work, how many are actively looking/employed) has remained worryingly low. While the US unemployment rate is very low (~5.1%), that isn't a direct inverse of those who are employed. There is a huge group of people who have simply given up trying to find work and others who are working but less than they would like (e.g. part-time, have one job but would like to work another/overtime, etc.)
We see that effect on inflation, which is no where near the 2% level that the Fed would like. Inflation crudely correlates with real growth because it encourages spending; if the money I have will be worth less in the future, I'm more likely to spend it today.
So in effect, we look at the S&P and think "Awesome! We're at all time highs!" But then we look at the economic fundamentals for people and it looks less sketchy.
Don't you mean "more sketchy", as in we look at the S&P and think "Yay" But we are getting dubious signals from the so-called real economy that do not correlate with the signals we are getting from the stock market. Hence, "more sketchy", no?
I'd venture to say that our wage and labor problems have less to do with the economy itself and more to do with a shift in global demand and specialization. All of those manufacturing jobs are going to China (whether we like it or not, China's labor costs are probably always going to be more cost effective for business), and the US labor market is demanding more skilled labor. We have an enormous oversupply of unskilled labor that isn't meeting the shift in labor demand.
Instead of using politics and complex tax systems to try and gain back those manufacturing jobs, I wish our government would focus more on helping our workforce adapt to the things where our country can have a competitive advantage in the world: education, technology, engineering, etc.
> Seeing a team build a prototype shows another level of commitment. I've built hardware, so i know how much more time/effort/money it takes over a software wireframe...
A wireframe is not the same as a hardware prototype. The similar analogy would be a functioning product, which in software is also difficult to do well. Functioning means it solves a need better than existing solutions, which requires research, experience, insight, and technical knowhow.
Furthermore, building a functioning software product that is well-engineered to scale (as opposed to a hacked out MVP) is, in my personal experience, rare. Very few "engineers" are able to.
I agree. Perhaps using wireframes was not the best analogy. I studied computer science and spent quite a few years as a developer, both inheriting code bases, and building my own, so i do appreciate code thats built to scale! (though to be honest, mine rarely was...)
Could you run the other ones as well? If you're positioning yourself as a faster alternative to ABP, it makes sense to compare yourself against other popular alternatives.
That's really been the most enlightening part of the series for me.
Reinforces that the hardest part in engineering is rarely the technical problem. Distributed databases are really f*ing hard, but infinitely harder if the people can't work together or don't open up to faults.
From experience I think some of the problem is that not everyone appreciates the importance of correctness in this sort of system. At the very least you should clearly documenting your expected failure modes, so that it's possible to build correct things on top of it.
In part it's hard to convince everyone of the importance of spending time on what looks like an unlikely corner case until after the outage - when it also becomes much harder to fix as you usually need to build this into the core design of your system.
We struggle with that last one all the time. Our sales team can't add issues with tags or assign them without write access to the repo. So they just have to dump them in issues and then engineers have to categorize them.
That statistic is meant to say that only 340 units were rented out enough to match what could have been made via a lease. So if people are snatching up property to use just for Airbnb, they either aren't doing it a lot or aren't actually making a sound economic decision in all but 340 cases.