What bothers me about the ban is that anti-vaxxers - at least the ones I've read - are not Luddites.
I've never heard an anti-vaxxer say things such as "It's God's (or Gaia's) Will that Johnny died of measles."
They believe, wrongly in my opinion, that vaccines cause other medical problems serious enough to justify not using vaccines. To me, that's legitimate dissent.
Given the stakes, maybe GoFundMe did the right thing.
But what's an acceptable threshold of risk?
Because, for various reasons, anti-vaxxing has become a political problem as well as a health problem. Maybe more so.
The political aspect - i.e. GoFundMe being vulnerable to political charges of endangering the public - is probably what drove GoFundMe to institute the ban.
Which leaves other politically charged uses of GoFundMe vulnerable.
> They believe, wrongly in my opinion, that vaccines cause other medical problems serious enough to justify not using vaccines. To me, that's legitimate dissent.
I don't get it. How is this any more legitimate than actually being a Luddite and saying "technology and modern medicine is bad"?
Would you say that racism and bigotry against minorities becomes legitimate if it's phrased as "this minority group will give you a disease if you let them near you"? Because that's actually a pretty classic feature of racist propaganda.
Both examples are about diseases. Your claim was that their argument is of a legitimate form because it makes a claim about medical risk. My rhetorical argument was of the same form.
I appreciate Rick Steves and always enjoyed his shows.
But reading recent posts on HN about how tourists are ruining Europe (and other places) makes me wonder if his message has become obsolete.
After all, air travel contributes to climate change. And I for one do not relish jumping on the QM2 - which surely burns fossil fuels - to spend two weeks (one week each way) traversing the Atlantic.
Perhaps ruining specific parts of Europe, but I think it’s unfair to say tourists have ever ruined an entire country or even city. Usually there’s just small easily avoidable areas if you don’t want to deal with crowds and overpriced food. That said I will never travel to Rome, the Bahamas, or Paris unless forced.
> Usually there’s just small easily avoidable areas if you don’t want to deal with crowds
I recently visited Madrid, a city I lived in nearly 20 years ago. What struck me was not just the suffocating crowds of tourists in the very center of the city compared to back then. I also found that what used to be quiet residential neighborhoods (after all, they lack any particular sights) now had a distinct amount of tourists walking around with suitcases or backpacks – I assumed that AirBnB was now spreading tourists throughout the whole city.
For the ones in local neighborhoods, as long as they're not overcrowding the place, or committing crimes or something, you have to remember that all those tourists are pumping money into the local economy. They're eating food at the local eateries, they're paying for transport (probably helping fund the local public transit), they're giving money to local homeowners who then spend at least some of it locally and hopefully pay some extra taxes, etc. I fail to see how this is a problem, unless it's just too many of them of course.
>AirBnB has priced locals out of their own housing markets. Just ask Venice.
AirBnB can be good and bad. I used AirBnB in Germany last year because the hotel rates in Nuremberg were ridiculous because it was tourist season; I stayed at a private home, in an extra bedroom that used to be their kid's room (now moved out). It was a great experience: I saved a bunch of money, I got to see a small town outside the main city that I otherwise wouldn't have seen (not really much to see there, but it was good seeing someplace "normal" that tourists never see), and I got to talk to the homeowner with his broken English and my broken German. I wouldn't have had an experience like that in a hotel, and there was no negative effect on the housing for locals since I was only renting an unused bedroom, not a whole house. This, to me, is what AirBnB is really supposed to be about.
The vast majority of AirBnB listings now are managed properties. You can still find a family renting out a spare room, but that is gradually disappearing and ever less what AirBnB is about.
There's a saying in physics that if your theory predicts the demise of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, you might have just earned a Nobel Prize, but if your theory violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, there's no hope: you better go check your work again.
As someone who has bought a couple of houses, a buyer's agent mostly provides convenience because they can access the property just as easily as the listing agent.
While agent fees usually run in the thousands of USD, probably the larger source of tacked-on fees is on the mortgage side, especially when the buyer does not have the 20% down.
So not sure if transferring more of the fee load to buyers will help move real estate. After all, except for strong seller's markets or when shopping for a specific type of home, the seller usually has more incentive to sell their home than a buyer has to buy it.
Regarding selling, I'm not sure this development is the realtor kill-shot - I would argue outfits such as Opendoor (convenience) or even Redfin (eliminate realtor fees) probably will inflict more damage to a realtor's income.
Because selling a house is a 100x greater PITA than buying.
Convenience shouldn’t cost 3% though. When I was looking for a house I was able to find houses I liked on search engines and then call the aeller’s realtor directly to set up a viewing. When time came for an offer, paying a real estate lawyer an hourly fee ends up saving $10k+.
I would argue that as a way to describe a selection process, "Meritocracy", warts and all, works great.
By warts, I mean that merit, as shorthand for "assessment of skill, talent, or capability", has other factors mixed in because flawed people decide who gets life's prizes.
The Gates example shows the missing ingredient - not luck, but recognition of luck's role in success, what some might call humility. The article referred to gratitude research, which probably means the same thing.
It's a missing ingredient because it doesn't seem too valuable anymore, especially when compared to other qualities, such as the ability to "talk smack."
And it's associated with sackcloth and ashes, or being a "loser." Moreover, it's often called false.
Coming back to meritocracy, what do we have as alternatives? Random selection? Suppression of individual differences (aka C.S. Lewis' "Parity of Esteem")? I don't know.
I've never heard an anti-vaxxer say things such as "It's God's (or Gaia's) Will that Johnny died of measles."
They believe, wrongly in my opinion, that vaccines cause other medical problems serious enough to justify not using vaccines. To me, that's legitimate dissent.
Given the stakes, maybe GoFundMe did the right thing.
But what's an acceptable threshold of risk?
Because, for various reasons, anti-vaxxing has become a political problem as well as a health problem. Maybe more so.
The political aspect - i.e. GoFundMe being vulnerable to political charges of endangering the public - is probably what drove GoFundMe to institute the ban.
Which leaves other politically charged uses of GoFundMe vulnerable.