In my Google news feed this morning there was a clickbait Buzzfeed piece about issues with Airbnb. The piece starts with a host complaining about not being able to rent their place, and it ends with the complaints that I’d expect: cleaning fees are too high, Airbnb fees are too high, and hosts expect guests to do too much work around their place. This is consistent with my experience traveling for large chunks of time during the past year. Hosts — especially “superhosts” who basically manage rental properties for others — have a list of extremely picky requirements posted prominently in their properties. Once you factor in all the fees, Airbnb charges are similar to hotel room charges without the amenities. In addition, hotels are getting more competitive, and hotel rental sites (like Hotels.com) are showing Airbnb-like properties along with traditional hotel rooms. In other words, the oft-worshipped invisible hand of the free market is giving Airbnb, and by extension the hosts, a few slaps upside the head.
Airbnb is an especially egregious example of the fundamental problem that will plague the current generation of “dot com” companies, by which I mean venture funded companies that sold themselves to investors as billion dollar plays that will out-compete stodgy old pre-Internet industries like hotels and taxis. The problem is simple: to generate the return on investment that was promised, these industries must someday suck a huge profit out of both the consumer and the “gig economy” non-employees in their value chain. Airbnb is worse in this regard than Uber and Lyft, because their non-employees (hosts) often pay mortgages by renting out properties on Airbnb, so they also want a big profit out of the exchange. At least Uber and Lyft can just keep screwing their drivers as they always have in their effort to wring an extraordinary profit out of a market that was previously only reasonably profitable.
If you’ve taken a Lyft or Uber lately, you know how they’re planning to make their supernormal profits: by raising prices. Since Twitter only makes money on ads, which aren’t very profitable, it’s not hard to guess why Elon Musk is pledging to lay off 75% of Twitter’s staff. Of course, this is pure Elon stupidity, since these kinds of layoffs will cause all the good technology employees there to flee, not to mention that the platform will be overwhelmed with trolls and bots. Still, details aside, Elon understands that the supernormal profits he craves will require slashing the main costs at Twitter: people. He also doesn’t care how many Nazis invade the platform.
All of this price gouging will leave Airbnb, Lyft and Uber open to competition from some new disruptor that will use a time-honored strategy of lower prices plus better service to out-compete them. Drivers already drive for Lyft and Uber at the same time, so if the new low-priced competitor “Luber” comes into the market, they can just drive for them, too. Similarly, Airbnb hosts can list on VRBO or whatever other competitor gets a few million bucks from Silicon Valley. As for Twitter — well, Twitter can just die. We already have plenty of alternatives.
Personally, I’d like to see local alternatives rise up to replace Lyft and Uber — maybe the ghosts of the former cab companies can finally get their shit together and coalesce around one app in a market that can be used to hail all kinds of different rides. There’s no reason that a ride hailing facilitation app needs to be a billion dollar company, other than to buy billionaires private islands and bigger jets.
Walter’s Fund in Action!
CaseyL
IIRC, Airbnb started out as regular people wanting to rent out extra rooms, make a little extra money.
Then it got acquired,commodified, and monetized into the unfriendly behemoth we see now (aided no doubt by the investor class buying up affordable housing as “investments,” and turning the properties into Airbnbs).
This is a pattern we’ve seem repeatedly, everywhere, in all types of businesses and markets. An interesting little idea takes off, the creators get bought out, and the original interesting little idea becomes a Billion Dollar Industry that outlasts its usefulness, if not its welcome.
I hate it.
Baud
I’ve seen a lot of recent criticism of Airbnb, but it wasn’t clear whether all the extra chargers were surprise charges or not. Obviously, surprise chargers would be a lot worse.
Baud
I am curious to see what replaces Twitter after Musk burns it to the ground.
trollhattan
Zipcar–rent the car, not somebody’s personal car. But it takes critical mass to have enough cars to serve a metro area, otherwise where’s one when you need it.
Obvious application of autonomous vehicles, which seem permanently several Friedman Units into the future. I’d be cool with a car that delivers itself which I then drive my own damn self rather than having a heart attack with every left turn in traffic.
Also, Lyft and Uber drivers are employees but the companies skate on calling them contractors. They buy their way out of every attempt to correct that.
Ken
That’s why the real money is heading into crypto and NFTs — things that are valuable because the venture funding agrees they must be valuable.
There was a report a day or two ago about play-to-earn games, where players get NFTs for playing. There are a few games out there with under a hundred daily players. However the game NFTs — which have no use outside the game that nobody plays — are still being traded and have a market capitalization in the tens of millions.
Low Key Swagger
No doubt, AirBnB is rife with problems. I’m a Superhost near Nashville (25 minutes from downtown) and I have just the one property. It’s a cabin, roughly 200 years old that we renovated. Stays pretty booked all year. We do not charge a cleaning fee, and I think our guests appreciate it, and not a single guest has left the place dirty. We do this because being a landlord really sucks. I wouldn’t have the heart to evict someone who has fallen on hard times. Fortunately, we have no mortgage but there is a ton of upkeep since it sits on 70 acres. Anyway, we enjoy this and it has been an enjoyable experience. We’ve made life long friends.
The problem is that far too many people expected to make a killing and they overextended. Also, Corporations swoop in during hard times, buy every house in the area, then market them as STR’s. But the days of people simply renting out a spare room to people passing though are long gone. They exist, but as was noted in the post, hotels are more competitive for that.
trollhattan
@Baud: Maybe it’s “Hey, we didn’t need that after all.”
I know I’ve managed to get by without an account.
kalakal
Ebay went like that. Originally it was a giant yard sale and very useful
Baud
@trollhattan:
Maybe, but there’s a demand there. The harder question is how to make money off of it.
wegners shoppers club member mistermix
@kalakal: I forgot to mention that I recently sold a camera on Ebay for ~$480 and netted ~$400 after fees. I only ever use it to sell camera equipment and haven’t sold any in years. I don’t remember fees ever being more than a few bucks for ~$500 camera equipment. That will be my last Ebay sale.
Bnad
In NYC now, yellow cabs are 25% cheaper than Lyft or Uber.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Baud: There’ll probably be some attempts to make smaller systems that try to capture the good aspects of Twitter, such as they are. I remember when LiveJournal was bought out by the Russians; it prompted several alternate sites with similar structure, one of which (DreamWidth) is still running, although with a small fraction of LiveJournal’s userbase.
Or there’ll be some other social media system that somehow catches lightning in a bottle and attracts the general population to it.
mrmoshpotato
Good. Fuck this unregulated hotel bullshit. Stayed at an Airbnb last December for a family weekend, and what a goddamn dump.
Ann Marie
All my colleagues at my firm use Uber, or sometimes Lyft. I have continued to only use regular taxis. Here is Philadelphia there is an app for them, but I prefer to call. Apps don’t understand “corner of 9th and Chestnut”, but a human being on a call does. I feel safer in a taxi and so many of the drivers are immigrants — it seems like an important entry-level job for them.
trollhattan
@Bnad: Interesting. Have the medallion prices recovered? Read that they cratered after Uber launched–and they were expensive.
Embir
Silicon Valley used to be a wealth transfer mechanism from trust funds to Bay Area landlords. 9 out of 10 VC companies cratered but rents were sky high because you might win the IPO lottery. Then COVID hit. Expect to see a lot more anticompetitive behavior out of these libertarian weiners as the Piper demands the vig on the crazy VC bets. It will be an orgy of insiders screwing each other for the scraps while all the “contractors” get reamed.
pacem appellant
I am pleased Musk is making my career as a seer tenable.
Rumbling that he’s going to sack 3/4 of Twitter after acquisition will hasten the demise of Twitter NOW. This in turn will lead to the fulfillment of my prophecy: Musk’s purchasing Twitter ensures its demise.
I am both Cassandra and Pythia. Fear me.
As a viable micro-blogging alternative to Twitter, I am using Mastodon now. Twitter was raising my blood pressure even prior to Musk’s shenanigans. Mastodon is much more chill. Check out https://mstn.social as a starter instance (Mastodon is de-centralized).
Another Scott
The MotU’s try to make a killing by claiming that they are exempt from the rules that established businesses have to follow. Zoning, minimum wage and benefits, and all the rest. Those rules exist for a reason, and we shouldn’t be bamboozled into thinking that an app makes everything different and this time there really is a free lunch!!1
Grr…,
Scott.
Ken
Especially since the available evidence suggests the user base would drop to near zero if they tried to charge customers for the service.
If not for that, well, in my day we had these things called “government-regulated monopolies”, for utilities we thought were too important to leave to the free market…
kalakal
@wegners shoppers club member mistermix: I used to/ occasionally still sell music gear on Reverb. About 2 years ago Etsy bought it, jacked up the fees and ruined it.
pacem appellant
@Embir: I grew up in the Silicon Valley (remember silicon?!). I still live and work here.
I see no lie in your assessment.
trollhattan
@Ann Marie: I always feel weird riding in some stranger’s personal car. A taxi is a taxi, even though I don’t know the driver.
And good cabbies know the tricks Google Maps or whatever software will never learn.
Baud
I personally like the convenience of the Uber app, especially for international travel. But I have no emotional attachment to the service.
raven
We have an Airbnb in the keys next week. We got switched to another property because of something about Marathon, Fl imposing some kind of window requirements. When I looked up the property it I could only find a Zillow listing, no Airbnb. I don’t know if it means anything but I guess we’ll find out.
Our rental house turned out interestingly. My friends in the property management business insisted that we list it and require background and financial checks and a couple of months deposit. After having always done work-of-mouth (not always happily) we rented to a couple of artists who wanted a long-term rental to use two or three months a year. We’ve seen them twice since January!
MomSense
I refuse to participate in the alphabet rentals, Uber Lyft, etc.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@mrmoshpotato:
A similar theme is found all over twitter from housing justice people:
We ran an actual B&B in Central Misery for 22 years and saw what phucking airbnb was doing to the business because it was unregulated. Little did we know when we finally moved uber-urban to Denver the havoc “short term rentals” like phucking airbnb have done to established neighborhoods. Everybody in such neighborhoods hate them and the people who run them. It’s hysterical to see upper-middle class white people here complaining that they can’t find “reasonably priced cleaning people for our airbnb”.
There’s reasons mayors in big destination cities like NOLA, Barcelona, Lisbon and a host of others have seen what phucking airbnb has done to their urban core in actuality (as opposed to the quaint “it’s just for people renting out a room on the side”). Steps are being taken to try and reverse the damage that’s been done but it’s a long slog.
dnfree
Back at the time of the solar eclipse, I booked a hotel through Expedia. They were going fast, and I grabbed a reservation quickly and then read the reviews about cockroaches etc. Getting my money back was an ordeal. The fleabag hotel and Expedia kept saying they’d be glad to give my money back if only the other one wasn’t being such a jerk.
Consequently, I now book hotels only through the hotel itself or the corporate website, so I’m only dealing with one party in case of any issue.
As for AirBnB, I was once waiting in line to pay my bill at a Florida resort behind a young couple with kids in tow arguing that they didn’t owe anything, because they had rented their room directly from the owner. The clerk was telling them it didn’t work that way, rooms were rented only through the hotel. Apparently the rooms really were condos, but the owner was trying to circumvent the rules to make more money. I’ve heard too many horror stories.
Ohio Mom
I am currently very attached to Uber because the county gave Ohio Son an account to use to get to his volunteer gig. It also allowed him to get to school before he graduated, and if he should ever land a job, to work and back.
This takes the place of the Access bus, which I understand needed to be scheduled far in advance and was often not on time. AFAIK the Access bus still exists and is used by some (guessing primarily by higher support needs individuals) but I believe the Uber set-up saves the county some money.
Of course I am ambivalent. This set-up allows a great deal more independence for Ohio Son (and isn’t that my goal in life, helping him become independent) but I am not thrilled to be supporting Uber because I think the whole idea is based on exploiting the drivers, and I remain unconvinced Uber will be around for the long run.
On the other hand, the public Metrobus system is about to launch a pilot project with some sort of taxi or van for the “last mile.” I am assuming it will be building on Uber/Lyft type technology and hoping that will make us less dependent on Uber.
Citizen Alan
@Bnad: In Oxford, MS, cabs are a flat $10 to go anywhere in town, while Uber ranges from $6 to drive you around the downtown area (which is perfectly walkable unless the weather is inclement) to $15 to carry you all the way across town.
Mousebumples
With 2 young kids, I’ve been preferring AirBNB (or VRBO) as of late. A few reasons –
We don’t do many trips, but rental homes/units have been a good option for our young and growing family.
I do agree that some of these investors are causing housing problems (by buying up homes to use as short term rental properties) and maybe can’t believe that their get rich quick scheme isn’t working as well.
But there’s some value to these options, on my view.
ETA – VRBO and AirBNB are also great for non continental US travel, especially to timeshare like locations. Have had great stays in the US Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, and Hawaii – all before kids, and more reasonably priced than resorts, which often includes a Resort Fee.
Frankensteinbeck
Elon says a lot of shit. Maybe 10% of it is true, and even then there’s important missing information. He’s an internet troll. Will he cut them? Won’t he? Will he even buy Twitter? Until he has actually done something, don’t ever consider the deal done.
@Ken:
No, they don’t. Or rather, they don’t in the way any sane person would use the words. This is a huge thing in NFTs and crypto. ‘Market capitalization’ isn’t calculated in realistic ways. You can make 100 duplicate items, have a friend buy one for ten thousand dollars, buy it back from them for ten thousand dollars, and now you’ve proven it’s worth ten thousand dollars and your market capitalization is one million dollars. That specific scam gets pulled all the time, and it’s only one of many that crypto (and especially NFT) scammers use to convince dumbass investors to buy something that they’ll never be able to resell.
MisterDancer
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: There’s already Mastodon as a quasi-Twitter, complete with decentralization.
In truth, there are a LOT of Twitter-like services that did not catch on. I don’t think of these as “replacements,” no moreso than Facebook “replaced” Twitter. These services just come and go; Facebook came in as MySpace was already starting to have challenges with growth.
Overall, I think this pseudo-survival of the fittest approach to how we see “competition” is really flawed, and masks a lot of the details and nuance around, esp. how Tech flows in and out of our culture.
It just feels all…Fight Club-by, yanno?
Betty Cracker
Still hoping the Twitter deal falls through. I’ll miss it if Musk ruins it.
Leto
@trollhattan: I honestly don’t know if Uber or Lyft operates in London (I guess they do?), but I do know that it takes approximately 3-4 years to become a licensed cabby in London just due to the city’s layout. It takes that long to know all the ins and outs, all the weird back alley ways, etc… just agreeing with your statement.
We used Airbnb while living in Europe and it was always pleasant. Good places, clean, no issues. And YMMV def applies here.
Frankensteinbeck
@Betty Cracker:
It’s Elon Musk, a man who promises and fails to deliver even more than Trump. Who the Hell knows. I hope he doesn’t too.
raven
Not that we can do anything about it but when I hit the original Airbnb listing and punched “call the host” and googled the number “Mary” came up maryhouse.com with listing in the Keys. Astoundingly the “about us” tab actually has a long description of the owners and how they stated with a small Airbnb in their garage apartment and now have them in Mexico, Dubia and the Dominican Republic!
Ohio Mom
@Ann Marie: Remember, I am ambivalent about Uber but I will say they have done a few things to make riders feel more comfortable.
First, there is a “share my ride” feature. Ohio Son tells the app my phone number, I get a text that he has called a ride, with ETA for pick-up.
I am able to see the Uber on its way to Ohio Son, it tells me he has been picked up, and then I watch the car drive up the map to our house (this makes *me* more comfortable, Ohio Son still thinks he is invincible).
I also get the driver’s name, car license, make and model (just like the passenger does); and you can share your ride with several people.
Finally, there is a panic button on the passenger’s app screen, though I don’t know how that works (maybe it calls 911?).
twbrandt (formerly tom)
Between 20212 and 2015, before I changed jobs, I did a great deal of business travel, mostly out to the Bay Area. I rented several dozen AirBnBs, and with only a couple of exceptions it was a good way to go. I would book in different neighborhoods each trip, which gave me a better feel for wherever I was staying rather than staying in some generic hotel somewhere. But that was before all the fees and restrictions.
Now I only book hotels. The AirBnB fees, restrictions, and better awareness on my part of the damage AirBnb is doing, caused me to switch back. I also know that if I book a reputable chain and there is a problem, it is more likely to be resolved successfully than trying to resolve something through AirBnB. The rates are mostly competitive now.
I miss the early AirBnB, but if/when the current version collapses I won’t miss it.
Origuy
I’ve had pretty good luck with AirBnb and Vrbo. I had a basement apartment in Whitehorse, Yukon, that was owned by the nice people who lived upstairs; a downstairs apartment in Tahoe City also owned by the people upstairs, and a quirky underground in Vieste, Italy, that doubled as a jazz club. It still had all the audio and lighting for a small group to perform, along with several sofa beds, a kitchen and a bathroom. The biggest problems were the A/C was working hard and the bathroom was constantly damp. Not surprising considering the Adriatic Sea was just outside. I think the people running it had some other properties. I had to use my limited Italian with them, though.
I also had an apartment in Naples that was called “La Casa di Nonna” and it was decorated like an old lady’s apartment. It had a lock with an ancient key like those of 100 years ago.
realbtl
I live outside Glacier NP and a large ski area. VRBO/Air bnb have wiped out the employee/lower income rental market. It’s either jam a bunch of people in one house or drive 25 miles (figure an hour in a snowstorm) to and from work.
Low Key Swagger
About AirBnb being unregulated…not sure that’s the case. It’s the property owner that is responsible for complying. Also, reviews are helpful when you are looking. Ignore the first few, as those are usually friends trying to help out. We did it, but now we have nearly 350 reviews, all 5 stars, and that is at least in part why we stay so busy. Also, we have tons of repeats. AirBnB is just the broker.
MattF
I’ve been using Instacart for about a year— since my hospital/rehab stay. Basically, gig economy shopping. You make list for, say, groceries, and pay for the items on the list. Then a gig ‘shopper’ takes the grocery list, finds the items on the list in the supermarket, pays for them and checks out. The shopper then delivers the items to your door. If an item is out of stock, you can chat with the shopper and make a replacement. It works pretty well. Instacart has been trying to do an IPO,but has not yet done it.
suzanne
@mrmoshpotato:
Agreed.
I stayed at an Airbnb exactly once. Family vacation with the kids by the beach, got a two-bedroom condo with a kitchen. It was great for that kind of trip, didn’t have to get multiple hotel rooms for privacy. But for almost every other kind of trip, I can’t see it being better than a hotel. I do like the hotel rooms with the kitchenette for coffee and heating up a snack or cutting up a piece of fruit. But I don’t like the risk that Airbnb presents.
TaMara
@Low Key Swagger: You sound like what Airbnb used to be like. I have friends who used to use it exclusively.
My one and only time trying to book was so frustrating and, in the end, sooo expensive, we just stayed at a beachside hotel for just a little bit more money, and had a great, relaxing time where the staff was just grateful to see post (actually, as it turned out, MID) pandemic, visitors.
And as far as Lyft and Uber goes – women need to really be cautious about this. Here we just had a driver arrested on multiple rape/kidnapping charges, and it’s a real problem no one is discussing.
Betty Cracker
I’ve used Airbnb about half a dozen times and have never had a bad experience, but Airbnb is controversial in my hometown because it’s a small place that gets overrun with tourists who come to see the manatees during the winter. People rent out houses in residential neighborhoods on Airbnb, and allegedly there’s a ton of partying that disturbs the residents. Seems more like a commercial vs. residential zoning issue than anything else.
CliosFanBoy
@wegners shoppers club member mistermix: I closed my eBay store too. It wasn’t worth it.
CliosFanBoy
Only used AirBNB once, with a small group of friends going to a wilderness area in Maine where the hotel options were very limited. It was nice but yeah, the cleaning requirements were rather strict.
cain
@kalakal: Once it gets bought by a publicly traded corporation – then things change. Investors want a return on investment. Google changed for the worse after it IPO’d.
Just say no to public companies, yo.
raven
@mrmoshpotato: Well I’ve got to echo what other have said. I’ve stayed in a bunch and they have almost always been really good. No worse than the joint we rented on Hatteras before Airbnb. They put a bullshit photo that made it look like it was on the water and it wasn’t.
As far as what it has done locally. Athens, as some of you are aware, is home of the National Champion Georgia Bulldogs, and it is a hot Airbnb market for game days. People we know rent their homes and go out of town for those few weekend. A big problem here is rich parents buying properties for their snotty ass frat boys while they are in school and then turning them into rentals.
suzanne
@Ann Marie:
Are we neighbors? That’s where my office is.
kalakal
The BBCs Newsnight used it’s opening credits to say goodbye to a world class disrupter last night. Its superb, a masterclass in how do put video to music
https://twitter.com/timoncheese/status/1583216768986013701?s=20&t=Hew3E0vpFtwdaC_IjDTqzw
while the kings of lettuce used one image but with a perfect backdrop
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1583205566024818688?s=20&t=bm8rVvGIZMlQC6ufK6z2vQ
cain
@pacem appellant: I am on mastodon as well. I still use twitter though because that’s where all the political stuff is – as well as the diversity and inclusion stuff.
Baud
@kalakal:
Damn.
Montanareddog
@Frankensteinbeck: in the 90s, I was working an IT project at the HQ of a famous Oil & Gas multinational. A precipitous fall in the oil price triggered management panic and all the IT operations support contractors were given a week’s notice. As I was on a project budget, I was safe and still around to see them go, and then dribble, then flood, back over the next few weeks as IT management realised only these contractors knew how to keep their legacy systems running.
If (big IF) Musk really does fire 75%, expect a similar result.
Roger Moore
@CaseyL:
Yes, and Uber and Lyft started out as “ride sharing” services where people could charge for rides in their car on trips they were going to be taking anyway. All these things change because the company sees some bigger and/or more profitable change to their original business plan. I think the lesson in this case is that the original ideas of occasional sharing just don’t make business sense compared to professional rentals.
cain
@raven:
So I have a house, mortgage is paid for – it’s a nice little house – first house I ever got. After 2008, I rented it out and purchased another home – just enough to cover the mortgage. Now the house is paid for and after my divorce, I moved back into it as my primary residence.
Of course, now I’, remarried and the house is empty again. The tax person said that I would make more money as an airbnb than if I had rented it because of the way the tax laws are structured.
I”m very uncomfortable doing this – even the rental – I don’t want to sell it either because I’m paranoid and want a home that in case my really expensive first house goes south because of my job or something I have some place to crash at instead of finding myself renting somewhere. I could also exchange it for some other place elsewhere as a summer cottage or something. But I found it interesting that people make more as an airbnb than as a rental with some other benefits.
TaMara
@kalakal: That was brutal. Perfect song
Tony G
I personally use Lyft a few times a month (since I stopped driving after an auto accident a few years ago) and it’s convenient for distances that are too far to walk. But I’m well aware that Lyft (and Uber) are based on a business model that makes no goddamn sense, and I’m waiting for the day when they go bankrupt after the idiot Venture Capitalists decide to stop throwing money at them. (The whole logic of Venture Capitalists escapes me. They’re like two-year-olds throwing Monopoly money around.)
raven
@cain: Yea, my wife wanted to do an Airbnb with it but I resisted on the grounds that it’s right next door and I didn’t want to deal with the bullshit. This setup is ideal except that we dropped $70k on the renovation and it’s basically sitting empty.
MisterForkbeard
@Baud: Yes. I have it for travel, basically. It’s also useful in an emergency.
But I also try to use local versions of whatever the app is when I can. Lots of major cities have their own app, and airports will frequently tell you about it. And Lyft is a little morally better than Uber, so I try to use that instead.
Another Scott
@cain: During the early part of the ABnB boom in the DC area, there were stories about property developers buying up multiplex homes and even single-family homes just to have them be ABnB rentals. It was hugely disruptive to the property market, neighbors didn’t like strangers coming in and going at all hours, etc., etc. AFAIK, it’s still working its way through the housing market.
If someone is suddenly making huge profits on property, it’s because they’ve temporarily found a way around existing laws and rules. Property development is as old as civilization – there’s not a lot of “innovation” that is possible there. If someone is making huge profits, it’s because they’re taking it from money that should be going elsewhere.
Cheers,
Scott.
suzanne
My in-laws are going to try to do an AirBnB at their farm. Apparently there’s a cabin on it that they want to renovate and rent out. I am skeptical. As someone who is keenly aware of the risk inherent in construction, it would take a convincing business plan to get me to take out a loan to improve a property with the hopes that AirBnB would be profitable enough to make it worth the time, money, and energy.
kalakal
@Tony G:
The ‘logic’ is like betting on every horse in the race in the expectation that your gains on the winner, whichever it is, makes up for the losses on the rest. These people have far too much money.
pacem appellant
@cain: I have to stay off Twitter. It’s not good for my health. I wish journalism would move to Mastodon.
I have many friends IRL and on Masto that are LGBTQ+. And there aren’t trolls to derail the conversations about trans rights.
Once Musk completes the destruction of Twitter, it’ll just be a troll-fest before it succumbs to entropy. I hope the good eggs on Twitter find voices on other platforms. Either fediverse products like Mastodon, or some other low-toxicity platforms.
You can find me, btw, on mastodon with the handle of @[email protected]
MisterForkbeard
@Montanareddog: Yep. IT/QA/Administrators are the invisible people at tech jobs. Their value is somewhat hidden, and if you let them go it bites you really hard… in a few weeks.
I’ve seen this at every company I work at when there’s a downturn. The internal service people are great targets for layoffs or for not backfilling, and it inevitably goes super wrong and they have to hire them back – frequently at larger cost.
Ksmiami
@trollhattan: staying in some Airbnb dude’s bed is way weirder than that
Mike in NC
We went to early vote this morning and it took less than 10 minutes. I was disappointed that our state senator — a very corrupt Republican — was running unopposed yet again.
Ksmiami
@suzanne: they’ll probably do ok but it is a lot more work to do it right …
Tenar Arha
@pacem appellant: Did you typo & mean
@[email protected] ?
AKA “https://mstdn.social/@mstdn” & here’s a link to the Server Rules
(This is a just in case copy paste link if it’s easier for everyone who’s not set up an account on a Mastodon instance already ;)
Zzyzx
My one AirBnB experience was in a small town in Idaho that was having a festival and all of the hotels were booked. It was our first trip after a year of quarantine so I was up for it.
It worked but I’ve moved back to hotels.
Tenar Arha
@pacem appellant: I think you’ve got a typo (a missing “d”) in that address for mstdn.social ?
I believe you meant @[email protected] ?
or here’s the about page link https://mstdn.social/about
Low Key Swagger
@cain: Being a host isn’t that demanding, but it really helps if you like people. By and large, people on vacation are in good moods, happy to be at their destination, and I meet every guest to do a personal check-in. This allows me to explain the little idiosyncrasies of the cabin and it allows me to size them up. Helps that we live on the property. Sometimes, we hang out with guests if they invite us. As I said, we’ve made some very good friends.
suzanne
@Ksmiami: They are smart people but they tend to not have great business sense. My FIL, in particular, is one of those people who just brushes problems or concerns or constraints aside, and just assumes that everything will work out okay. The optimism is charming, but I have lived long enough to know that it is better to anticipate problems that don’t end up presenting themselves. I am worried they would invest money that can’t recoup, and they can’t sell the property separately if it doesn’t rent as frequently as he thinks (and he has no data or evidence to suggest that it will rent frequently).
In construction, it always — always — costs more than you think.
Tenar Arha
Hi @pacem appellant
you’ve got a typo in your Mastodon server recommendation didn’t you mean “mstdn.social”?
Low Key Swagger
@suzanne: Farms (like ours) are ideal because people are looking for authenticity, and peace and quiet. One piece of advice, tell them to go for a 3 day minimum. Otherwise, the weekends will get booked and the place will be empty too many days of the month.
Roger Moore
@Ohio Mom:
LA Metro decided to replace regular bus service in my area with a last mile van service. The service is probably better overall, with lower average waiting times. It’s also much nicer for people who aren’t close to the old bus routes, since the vans are much more flexible and will drop them off closer to their destination.
pacem appellant
@Tenar Arha: Damn it! Sorry. I did in fact mean https://mstdn.social
FYI, you can find me on the Fediverse at https://mastodon.coffee/web/@vincent
Frankensteinbeck
@Montanareddog:
My expectation is that if he can’t get out of it – and that race is not over yet – Musk will do one of two things: He’ll completely ignore Twitter and leave it running as-is, or he’ll deliberately crash it straight into the ground, fast, to get it off his hands. He clearly doesn’t want to run it. Probably the latter.
LeftCoastYankee
The more useful business model, which would be more sustainable long term, would have been for Uber/Lyft to build a platform for taxi and limousine companies to offer their services to potential customers.
This would have required actual work in understanding the business model(s) of the industry, accommodation of local licensing/certification, and selling to actual existing businesses who may be cautious or skeptical of the need. The growth rate of this approach would be slow and costly until a tipping point is reached in the market (ie skeptical “Happy Cabs” owner realizes her competitors all use the tech).
Instead build an app, let people sign up, get buzz, show ridiculous growth (venture capital candy), break all kinds of laws (disruption!), and live happily ever after. Or at least until the growth curve levels off, the bills come due for the disruption (and learning the business after the fact), and the VC community finds a new squirrel to chase.
Figuring out how to better automate existing work being done by learning from those who do it VS. creating a whole new industry to buy your app… I know what I’d invest in, but I’m not a super-genius.
MobiusKlein
95% of my airbnb experiences have been great, similar to hotel stays.
One recent time my brother, sister and I shared a house in central California while we were cleaning my hoarder dad’s house while he was in assisted living place for a week.
It was close to the facility, and let us have a place we could choose to make dinner at rather than a week of takeout. Other times before and after we stayed at hotels. But for a week, having a real base was critical for sanity.
suzanne
@Low Key Swagger:
See, that is really good advice.
They do not think through things and have made a lot of bad financial decisions in the past. I do not have any kind of education or expertise in business, but even I can see why they keep walking into buzz saws.
P Socolofi
Maybe it’s a generational thing and most people are just used to the Ubers and Lyfts of the world existing…
Prior to Uber, the taxi industry SUCKED. Sorta worked in NYC, but even there it heavily exploited cabbies — most were immigrants who would put up with the insane costs to “rent” a medallion & cab. SFO? Seattle? Houston (which is huge and sprawling)? forget it. Further, the grift (which Uber didn’t target and I don’t think knew even existed) was huge. I got a ride once from the Hyatt Embarcadero in SF to the airport – guy was one of Uber’s first 30. Told me he used to pay the doorman at the Embarcadero $1K under the table _per month_ so he could park there and take airport fares, and he still had to tip the doorman 10%. He’s making more $$ w/ Uber despite them taking 20%, oh and he can deduct all his expenses vs just eating the $12K bribe he used to have to pay.
Finding a BnB, or even a place to stay if the hotels in an area were sold out, also SUCKED. It’d be looking them up in guidebooks, then calling one, then calling another, then leaving a message, then negotiating the price, then dealing with the reality of the place vs what was in the guidebook… sometimes things were as advertised, sometimes not so.
Ultimately, most of these companies, like Uber or AirBnB, are trying to satisfy demand. People wanna go from A to B, and people wanna stay at B when they get there, and they’re willing to pay. Maybe the end result is that the existing regs and such get fixed to satisfy demand, but I never begrudge someone for creating a company and earning $$ to actually solve a problem I have.
cain
@pacem appellant: Cool – I am [email protected] for anyone else who wants a mastodon friend.
Alison Rose
LOL trump got subpoenaed. POPCORN TIME.
NYT gift link
cain
@Low Key Swagger: That’s great!
dr. luba
@wegners shoppers club member mistermix:
@kalakal: Similarly Etsy. It used to be for artists/craftspersons to sell things they’d created.
Then it was supposed to be only handmade goods, resellers allowed.
Now it’s eBay.
jonas
Isn’t that the reason he was trying to claim Twitter wasn’t worth as much as they were asking? So his plan appears to be:
1. Hollow out Twitter, let it devolve into a cesspool of incel shitposting or whatever, and drive away advertisers
2. ???
3. Profit.
Genius. Any bets on how long it is until he ends up on Dancing with the Stars?
P Socolofi
VCs are satisfying a demand – investors (primarily big and long term investors, like state pension funds and such) are looking for a high risk / high reward play, which comes from investing in a company when it’s worth next to nothing and then seeing that investment pay off in 10 years. So they invest with a VC company that is usually Seed to Series B (startup) or Series C – IPO (established startups).
VCs earn their money by finding people who can actually start a company that solves a real problem. They see thousands of people, and every single idea is both a great idea and a horrible idea. They’re great because yes, there is a problem to be solved. They’re horrible in that yes, some established other company could and should solve it and crush the startup.
Nonetheless, most don’t get funded and some do. A lot is more bets on people who will be able to work through the issues that come up (and there are always issues) while at the same time convincing people _who are good_ to join their startup for not great wages but promises of a delayed payday in the form of stock (and all of these people could get much higher paying jobs at established companies).
And finally, it takes a lot of work to become an established VC – big companies also are conservative and look closely at whether a VC has delivered returns in the past before handing over millions for a 10+ year payback. So the people at a VC need to have demonstrated they can do that a few times. And if they blow it (and lots have) – they usually don’t get a second chance. Looking at you, Softbank…
geg6
@trollhattan:
Same. I sensed from the very start that Twitter was going to be a bad thing, especially when they started with the blue checks and all the usual suspects were vying to be one. And, honestly, I think almost all social media is poisonous. I’ve been weaning myself off all of it except FB for family. And that looks to be going down the drain, too.
Martin
@Tony G: VC is actually quite good and useful. But their role really needs to be contextualized around the alternative.
The main problem is that in the US, finance is way too big and carries the same expectations of profitability as a manufacturer. This is a national problem. So, US finance philosophy is that a dollar of capital should never be put at risk. So if you want to build a factory (let’s say a nice new EV battery factory in the US) you’re going to have to a fuckton of work before one of the investment banks hands you a dollar. You need to do market studies, you need to get letters of commitment for everything (and the folks you are getting letters from need letters from you before they can write their letters, etc) and so on. It takes ages to get financing set up, and they’re going to trickle money to you no faster than they want it spent.
Now the larger theory of capital is that you want to put it to work – and there’s socialism that argues that the public is best suited to do that, or capitalism that argues that private capital holders are best suited, but either way, the objective is that any excess capital needs to be put to work. Just letting it sit around is bad (this is also part of the theory of taxation – that the government should tax idle money so the government can put it to work if the person being taxed isn’t willing to – every dollar of profit is a dollar that wasn’t immediately put to work).
Anyway, the point of VC is to do what the finance industry will not do. And yes, it is to throw Monopoly money around, because money should be put to work. VC takes a very different approach. VCs view is that money should be put to work *quickly* and if some of it is wasted, that’s fine – the faster you can turn capital into economic output, the faster you create more capital. And if you do it fast enough, you cover the losses from the failed bets, provided there aren’t enough of them. The whole *point* of VC is break through existing impediments to economic growth, often by simply capitalizing ideas faster than captured regulatory agencies or captured finance can respond. And VC does this by laying down dozens of bets, calculating that out of a dozen bets, 1 will to to the moon, 1 will be big, 4 will turn into a profitable but not spectacular business, 2 will break even, and 4 will fail catastrophically, but the 2 that hit big will do so to such an extent that it covers the investment in all 12. The problem is that at the outset, the VCs can’t tell which of the 12 will wind up in which category. It’s stochastic investment.
But it’s also the engine that powers California. Apple was one of the first VC successes, and it’s now the largest business in the world and part of what drives US dominance. And it’s worth noting that in this day, California is relatively immune to regulatory capture – and part of that is due to VC. Ag is the main capture agent when it comes to water, but Chevron is a CA company and has almost no influence over energy policy here. And in addition to hardware tech and software tech, most of the clean energy companies are in California because that’s a big area of funding, same with food tech – meat/dairy alternatives, etc.
I mean, none of this would have gotten funding through traditional finance. None of these companies would exist. Are there bad VC companies? Sure. But I wouldn’t consider AirBNB to be one of them. There was a LOT of regulatory capture by the hotel industry, and that’s gotten a lot better. The big chains were using government to keep independent hotels out of markets, and that’s to some degree now broken. Same for taxi/ride share.
Is AirBNB cheaper than hotels? No, of course not. Nobody should have ever expected that – the market would always find a certain equilibrium here. But AirBNB brings new *types* of rentals that Hilton won’t provide, and to places that Motel 6 won’t set up. It’s also inevitable that there will be a form of capture of the booking sites by the large players, and AirBNB will cut through that.
No, the problem you are really objecting to is the efficiency of rent seeking that the US property rights system allows for and the way that local cartels of homeowners, city councils, etc. can stifle the construction of new and affordable housing, or proper public transit. If we can fix this (and the current system is destroying this country) then services like Lyft will get seriously knocked back, same for AirBNB.
Constance Reader
“Personally, I’d like to see local alternatives rise up to replace Lyft and Uber — maybe the ghosts of the former cab companies can finally get their shit together and coalesce around one app in a market that can be used to hail all kinds of different rides.”
On our last couple of vacations we price compared Uber, Lyft and taxis – the taxis came out cheaper every time. Also, here in Hawaii we have a local alternative called Holoholo. I’ve never used them because 1) they couldn’t get a driver to me anywhere near as quickly as Uber/Lyft and 2) they were more expensive than Uber/Lyft.
Ksmiami
@suzanne: costs for construction and wait times are really inflated Rt now. We just got a roof done after arranging it 16 months ago…
Sister Golden Bear
Totally agree that AirBnB has totally gotten out of hand and has had really destructive effects.
I’ve only used it once, when I went to Buenos Aires for five weeks for surgery and recovery. It was infinitely easier than finding a place on my own, as well as having a host who spoke reasonable English. I friend of mine was a AirBnB host, but only did longer-term rentals, e.g. a month or more. (It was her apartment, but she stayed with her boyfriend when it was booked.) That’s one area where there’s useful niche for an AirBnB-like company.
In Thailand, I used a Uber-like app called Grab — which at least at the time treated their drivers pretty well. It was 1) reassuring to know there was at least some record of my trip, and 2) it incorporated an auto-translation program, which was extremely useful, mostly for helping drivers figure out where I was in busy areas.
Interestedly, one of the inspirations for either Lyft or Uber (I forget which one) was/is a service called Homobiles (Motto: “Moes getting hoes where they needs to goes”) — which was started because taxis frequently refused to pick up drag queens, and other visibly queer/trans people. It was all quasi-volunteer. You’d call a dispatcher and they’d contact drivers for you to arrange pick-up, and you paid the driver with a pay-that-you-can donation.
GregMulka
@kalakal:
It’s worse. Bet on every horse, get your money for winning, shot the rest, and charge the owners for more than you bet for killing their horse.
Martin
@P Socolofi: Yeah, there were a few key innovations brought by Uber/Lyft – the primary one was that reviews were a mandatory component of a ride. Reviews made individual drivers at least somewhat accountable. Prior to that, you could be as big an asshole as you wanted because it had no impact on your earnings. But once someone built a hailing service that incorporated reviews, and forced riders to give a review, that created a needed feedback loop.
And again, these services expanded the hailing space. Used to be you could call a cab, or rent a u-Haul, but there was nothing in-between. Need to buy a chair and get it home – better hope they have delivery. You can now call a Lyft SUV, and a shit ton of other services have popped up in the middle that do some combination of moving/hauling/trash disposal/handyman stuff. Those never would have existed if Uber didn’t push through the regulatory capture. Same for bike/scooter rentals, etc.
They’ve all run through the same gap in the wall that Apple opened by giving users a computer in their pocket that knows where you are and can convey that to another party and by VC funding of ride hailing that tore down regulatory capture that kept everyone out.
The ‘problem’ this creates isn’t new, but it gets new attention which is that gig workers are left out of corporate benefits like health insurance. CA tried to solve that with Prop 5, but Prop 22 undercut that solution. Ultimately, the state will be forced to go single payer to shift its MediCal costs back to the gig employers because provisions like Prop 22 keep breaking that effort.
But these aren’t new problems. They’ve always been there. We just didn’t pay attention.
suzanne
@Ksmiami:
Oh, believe me, I am aware. GCs right now are just throwing huge numbers at the wall. The media keeps saying that a recession is coming, but none of the construction professionals I work with seem to think that’s coming! And we’re looking at seven years of escalation.
Ohio Mom
@Roger Moore: I figured public transportation agencies in other places had already started last-mile services because Cincinnati is famous for being behind the times. (Supposedly Mark Twain said (paraphrasing here) that if the world was ending, he’d move to Cincinnati to get another ten years in.)
Salty Sam
Port Aransas TX has the same issue- a vacation beach town, very popular during Spring Break. The city council just passed an ordinance that owners who used their properties for STR must now get some sort of license, are now responsible for the behavior of their guests.
This is very recent, no idea how it is shaking out.
Craig
Here in SF the old line can companies all got together on the Flywheel app. Works just like Uber/Lyft except you still pay the driver direct.
Martin
@GregMulka: If your business fails, you don’t owe the VC anything, so I don’t know where you get that from. One thing that is common in VC compared to traditional investing is the VC will often insist that you hire a proper finance person, or COO or whatever that has extensive industry experience if they see that lacking from your team. That person is designed to keep the founders out of the weeds.
But this fear of failure is a real problem in the US. A big part of the US experiment is that you are expected to try new things, and failure is not catastrophic. That’s why our bankruptcy rules work the way they do. If you are operating in good faith and the public doesn’t catch onto your idea, and you go under, then start over with a new idea. This notion of ‘don’t bet on an idea unless it’s a guaranteed hit’ is a big reason why the US lags in things like manufacturing. The finance folks – notably private equity – don’t tolerate that and so they block investment that would allow a business to remain competitive because they refuse to acknowledge that the market is changing. If your startup fails, oh well – you go off and come up with a new idea, and VC will still be there to help you fund it. VC isn’t so arrogant to assert that they know what ideas will work any better than anyone else (traditional finance does that all the time).
Here’s a product I’m currently looking at. They make smart electrical panels that if you have a solar/battery system on your house allow you to change priorities of what should be powered by the battery during an outage. Most people solve this with a sub panel that requires an electrician to physically move circuits from the main to the sub panel. That’s useless during a hurricane, etc. It’s a genuinely useful product but Siemens and Square D aren’t going to make this product because they know fuck-all about how to make smart systems. Well, Siemens does, but they’re kind of too big to care about this market just yet. So here’s a startup out of SF that is filling a critical need for homeowners trying to address home solar/battery systems. Traditional finance won’t touch this idea either. Will they succeed? I have no idea. They don’t either, nor do the VC funders. But they’re running a solid operation and have effectively no competitors.
Similarly there’s a new market opening up for electric meter collars. Basically, rather than completely rewire your panel to accommodate solar, they insert a collar between the meter and the panel so your system can detect a failure on the grid and act accordingly. It’s a cheaper way to build such a system by making the solar look more like the external service connection. It’s a clever solution. Also, all of these are VC funded. Nobody else was interested in this market either in creating the product or in funding it. And if it fails? Oh well. They’ll have new ideas. It’s not a hardship to the workers – this is understood when you go work at a startup, and because these are so tightly clustered in one place, it’s not even really like you need to move.
PaulB
I’ve had pretty good experiences with AirBnB, including a couple of stays just this year on my trip to the Olympic Peninsula. These days, though, I’m much more careful when reviewing potential bookings, as I nearly got caught in a bait-and-switch scam on a trip to Washington, D.C.
Here’s a link to an article from 2019 that describes how this works. Basically, the host notifies you just a few hours, or even minutes, before you’re about to take possession that there is a problem with your booking, but, hey, they have another property nearby that they can let you have. The trouble is that you have to accept their offer sight unseen, and once you’ve accepted, AirBnB’s rules allow the host to charge you for at least one night’s stay, plus a cancellation fee, regardless of the condition of the property.
Since you’ve just arrived in a strange city and now don’t have any place to stay, there is a strong incentive to accept the switch. AirBnb’s support isn’t any help in these situations, based on reviews and articles that I’ve read, and the perpetrators of the scam will leave a terrible review of your profile should you dare complain about them on the site.
At the time I was traveling to D.C., I found a property that was reasonably priced and advantageously located. Fortunately, I did a web search on the property and found a TripAdvisor post that revealed the scam for that particular property/host, which also led me to that Vice article. As far as I know, AirBnB still doesn’t handle this situation well.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin:
It’s why our blockbuster movies keep getting boring.
wenchacha
Our next door neighbors were older snowbirds, and the husband died, recently. For some reason, the house was bought by a realtor who turned it into an Airbnb. Out here in the suburbs, where there is no real attraction for tourists to visit. For $200/night!
I just don’t get it. They have had a few customers. One of the first had a small family gathering that went sour, with somebody puking in the yard. Complaining about why was this place rented twenty minutes from downtown?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I also had the impression AirBnB was more of a specialty service, more for a group traveling that wanted to stay is some location a week or more, so it was never going to be able to scale up to compete with the hotel chains. Uber was merely updating current technology and it was the traditional tax services own fault for letting Uber do it first. I think the ones with the best future are the delivery services like Doordash, since it means the restaurant chains don’t have to hire someone to do delivery and Doordash can work on economy of scale.
Joey Maloney
Customer Support has entered the chat
raven
@PaulB: Shit, our switch came yesterday so I don’t think it’s the same deal but it makes me nervous.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@kalakal: Do you know who and what the song used in the clip was? (I’m sure it is well known, but unfortunately, not to me).
raven
But AirBNB brings new *types* of rentals that Hilton won’t provide,
Ding
We’re going to be in the keys for 5 days. This place has the beds and a kitchen that will save us how much instead of eating out every meal? Plus we’re going to catch a TON of fish and being in a hotel just wouldn’t work!
Falling Diphthong
My AirBnB experiences have been fine to great–and if your comparison is a 3 bedroom AirBnB to 2 or 3 hotel rooms, the ABB is usually markedly cheaper and gives you a pleasant common gathering spot as a family. (When I stayed in hotels last summer and fall things like maid service were absolutely not happening, so I glance a bit quizzically at “all those lovely hotel amenities.”)
I also find that the additional ABB fees (cleaning, taxes) are clear and upfront early in the process, while I have had far too many hotels wait until I am almost through booking to pull “Of course, as a *resort* we charge an extra $50/person/day because there’s a pool.”
raven
@Martin: We invested in a hydrogen-electric truck startup in Europe that is looking pretty good.
P Socolofi
@Martin: Yup, totally true (and loved your comment above on VCs btw).
Disclosure: pre-pandemic, I used to work at Grab (Uber / PayPal / DoorDash of Southeast Asia, HQ in Singapore). While they do try and treat drivers reasonably, what they discovered is they backed themselves into an implicit union – which turns out for a company is WAY WORSE than an explicit one. You can negotiate with an explicit union. An implicit union, people just do what everyone else does. Case in point:
– Drivers have forums and tell others how to maximize profits. Turns out for drivers, you want to maximize $/mile, not $/hour, as your costs are per mile (fuel, wear & tear, etc.). So drivers will all turn off their app until surge pricing kicks in, then all turn on and take fares at a higher rate. Grab would respond with things like incentives – stay on for 30m and get $x, that kind of thing. Drivers, being smart and motivated and numerous, would then find the next trick. I told them that the only way forward would be to hire a bunch of drivers full time (and they could find the good ones who earned well and effectively did drive for 8 hours a day easily from data) vs continue the arms race, but there is reluctance there.
– In the US, every driver drives for both Lyft and Uber. This forces Lyft and Uber to have the same cost, as drivers switch from one to the other really quickly. It also forces the same general package / benefits / etc. In some cases this is good – like it doesn’t allow Lyft or Uber to lower driver commissions, because they just lose their workforce immediately. But in other cases, it hurts badly – if one company gave health benefits, they’d have to raise prices, but that kills them as workers go to the other company (maybe not 100%, but enough) – so neither will. Ends up being a problem that gov’t needs to solve (via regulation or Obamacare or something).
And yeah, it’s good that these problems are now something people can see, as that means we can possibly solve them.
Origuy
I forgot to mention that the AirBnb app translates messages into the host’s language and vice versa. I could send a message to my host and he would read it in reasonably good Italian.
MikefromArlington
In Ireland we often find spectacular coastal homes where hotels don’t exist. For this alone I think it’s a great option.
Falling Diphthong
@Roger Moore: On the business models shifting, I think a lot of that was just responding to what the market wanted.
As a traveler with a family, I don’t want a mattress on someone’s floor sharing their space, but I do want someplace with 3ish bedrooms and a common area where we can gather. Even with just my spouse, it’s nice to have a place where we can spread out a bit.
As someone who needs a ride from my hotel to the museum, I can see where a model using people who just dedicate themselves to providing rides, like taxis, is going to be more responsive than hoping for a person near my hotel, who wants to go to the museum, at this exact time, and considers a few bucks worth letting a stranger in their car.
Geminid
@raven: I still see people saying that widespread use of hydrogen will never, ever happen. Then I’ll read that the EU is planning on incorporating hydrogen into their economy, from steelmaking to heating to transport (Hyundai is already selling large fuel cell powered trucks in Switzerland and Germany). Somebody’s got it wrong, and I don’t think it’s the EU.
raven
@Geminid: From TEVVA
J R in WV
@Geminid:
I think hydrogen as a fuel is mostly going to be an industrial usage, rather than consumer, just because it’s so very difficult to handle safely and keep contained.
Look at the issues NASA has had with trying to use hydrogen — it leaks so well, because the molecule is so very small. And once it’s a liquid, it’s so very cold! In an industrial facility all those issues are more easily addressed than in a residential home’s garage, or even a filling station.
Just my $0.02 worth of opinion, maybe a grad student is working on a gasket material that will keep hydrogen contained easily right now. Wouldn’t that be a clever and profitable dissertation?
mali muso
Count me in as another traveler with a family (young child) that much prefers being able to rent an apartment or house where we can have common areas, cook our own food, and put the kid to bed in her own room without having to have everyone asleep and quiet at 7:30pm. But I definitely get the concern over how AirBnB has jacked up the rental markets.
Tenar Arha
@pacem appellant: so I just followed you. I’m @[email protected], FYI I’m trying not to follow politics on Mastodon. I’m saying that because I try to keep politics mostly firewalled on Twitter & here. Meanwhile, I hope your wife’s healing is going well?
Geminid
@J R in WV: Hydrogen will be used in transport first for fleet vehicles that refuel at the company depot. It really does seem to have a future in heavy transport, at least in the EU which is taking decarbonizing the economy seriously. But even in the US trucking companies are taking a serious look at hydrogen fuel cell powerbecause the batteries required for a large electric trucks add so much weight.
I think it will take another few years to see whether hydrogen will have a major place in the clean energy economy. The EU seems very intent on making it happen, though.
kalakal
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Rihanna – Take a Bow
sorry I’d’ve answered sooner but I’ve just got back
Tony G
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: That sounds about right. I’ve used AirBnB a total of once in my life — In August of 2018 I and six of my old college friends (none of whom live in Philadelphia) gathered for a few weeks for an informal reunion in that city. AirBnB was used to rent a small house for a few days, and being able to stay in the same place made things more fun. Before and after that, though, there’s never been a reason for me to use AirBnB.
Jager
AirBnB ruined VRBO, took them about 6 months.
louc
My use of AirBnB mainly centered on staying as close to my dad’s nursing home as possible. There were hotels, but they were the kind with thin walls and lots of noise and awful shopping mall traffic. I could rent a room and private bath in someone’s house for relatively low cost and stay close by. I noticed just before my father died of COVID that the prices were starting to increase and were becoming more expensive than the crappy nearby hotels.
My brother’s family and my husband and I also rented a house once for a family reunion and that was advantageous, though it did have the ridiculous cleaning rules.
Re: Uber and Lyft. Quite frankly, cabs in DC were awful before Uber. And they wouldn’t come to my neighborhood. Once I reserved a cab to pick me up at 4:30 a.m. for a 6:30 flight. 5 a.m. no cab. called dispatch. “We don’t have any cabs in the area.” Then why bother with allowing reservations? Case 2: I was bringing something to a in-town conference that was too heavy to carry on mass transit. The conference was a 20 minute drive away. I gave myself 45 minutes when I called. An hour later, they still hadn’t dispatched a cab to me. When a driver finally showed up and I was an hour late to the event, she told me a lot of drivers avoided my neighborhood, which once was high crime but hadn’t been in years.
So DC cab scene definitely needed some shaking up. Now I do feel sorry for the drivers.
Lyrebird
@Ann Marie:
@Ohio Mom:
I have lived in places without regular taxi service. Far suburbs, rural places, I can imagine having Uber or Lyft would be a big improvement.
In cities, I am confused, the ride apps are even more expensive than the cabs and they feel more risky. Maybe they have a strong appeal to people who never want to ride in an old vehicle.
Lyrebird
@mali muso: With bigger kids, I like bargain hotels better, because there are no antiques around that I might have to replace. Luckily we usually go to places that have extended stay hotels or at least fridge and microwave.
But what @Mousebumples: said has me dreaming of someday traveling abroad with them. Who knows.
cintibud
We prefer VRBO, have always had good experiences with them. Almost always it’s us and at least one other couple, sometimes 3 or 4 couples, going on outdoor adventures – Whitewater kayaking or cross country skiing. Usually there are no hotels anywhere near where we are boating or skiing but there are often vacation homes or cabins in the woods in the area. We love that we can all socialize together and cook nice meals. Hosts love us since we are out most of the day and not hanging around drinking and partying. We used to camp on our kayaking trips but no longer care to sleep on the ground and can’t afford big RV’s. VRBO is a great solution.
I prefer VRBO because when searching for places one can set a filter for the total amount of the rental which includes all fees, except taxes. AirBnB only has a price per night filter. There have been times we found a nice place at a very reasonable price per night and it wasn’t until starting to book that we saw the total amount of extra fees was greater than the total rental price! Big middle finger to those places.
The Lodger
@Tenar Arha: I got on Mastodon first and found it as https://mastodon.social/web/@[email protected]
Didn’t try your version of the address. It may work too.
El Cruzado
@kalakal: Funnily enough I’ve found that eBay has circled back into being useful as Amazon has become a flea market of mostly Chinese knockoffs.
eBay had to spend years making itself somewhat trustworthy, while Amazon just doesn’t care now that it has a near monopoly on online sales for stuff.
kalakal
@El Cruzado: Interesting, I must take a look. Thanks
Alabama Blue Dot
@Bnad: I’m in DC on vacation this week and we decided to only use taxis. You can go on the Yellow Cab website, book a taxi for now or later, then prepay from a link in the confirmation text. It actually is a common dispatch, because we’ve had other taxi company cabs pick us up. It’s not exactly an app like Lyft, but close enough. I don’t know how the cost compares but having a driver who was somewhat vetted was more important to us.