Slashdot Mirror
Airbnb To Start Collecting Hotel Tax On Rentals In San Francisco
An anonymous reader writes Airbnb announced that it will begin collecting a 14% occupancy tax on behalf of its San Francisco hosts October 1. "This is the culmination of a long process that began earlier this year when we announced our intent to help collect and remit occupancy taxes in San Francisco," wrote Airbnb public policy leader David Owen. The company already collects taxes in Portland, and has discussed the possibility of collecting taxes in New York.
Why stay in a hotel when you can stay on the road? Now, with UberRV, you can move around and avoid any pesky taxes. The law says if you're not parked, you're not living there, or at least that's what we're claiming this week. AirBNB is old news thanks to UberRV.
Why is it so much higher than the state sales tax rate? Probably because the people that have to pay it are from out of state and therefore not CA voters.
It is really great that AirBNB is being a responsible civic citizen and charging / paying taxes which apply to their business.
Can we go ahead and explain to Uber and Lyft that they need taxi licenses and to pay their share or gtfo.
How long until companies realize they can save 15,000-30,000 on paying their software engineers that telecommute. It is silly to require a programmer to be on site anyway. You gain some extra time out of him each day because he doesn't have to commute, and less distractions mean you get more productivity. If you don't trust your coders to do work, just set up a version control repository and make sure some stuff is done each day.
God spoke to me
Because face time is important. Interacting with coworkers is important. Being able to go over a design at a whiteboard together rather than reading the same powerpoint slide separately is important. THe best ideas I've had in my career have been created as a result of talking to my coworkers over lunch/coffee break/tangent from another discussion. Telecommuting is a loss to productivity even if they are perfect about actually working (which having done it for a year- its not an easy thing to do, there's a lot of temptations). Its not only easily worth 15-30k, its worth 2-3 times that to have then onsite. That's ignoring the fact that a large number of people won't be on point when working from home- many without even meaning to cheat the system.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Because face time is important. Interacting with coworkers is important. Being able to go over a design at a whiteboard together rather than reading the same powerpoint slide separately is important. THe best ideas I've had in my career have been created as a result of talking to my coworkers over lunch/coffee break/tangent from another discussion. Telecommuting is a loss to productivity even if they are perfect about actually working (which having done it for a year- its not an easy thing to do, there's a lot of temptations). Its not only easily worth 15-30k, its worth 2-3 times that to have then onsite. That's ignoring the fact that a large number of people won't be on point when working from home- many without even meaning to cheat the system.
As a developer I'll just say that "face time" and interacting with coworkers are two of the main impediments to me getting shit done.
I can't imagine many people are paid to commute. Most are paid from the time they get into the office, to the time they leave.
Assuming you work with people in your office. Due to globalization, there are a lot of groups that are dispersed and people work with others across cities, states, continents for a majority of their work.
they just lost. That's all. I'm sure they fought mightily to avoid paying.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That's what airplanes and/or cars are for. I telecommute and get as much face time as I need. I can adjust it as needed. For the other 75-80% of the time, typically, I'm fine at home, not shitting up the world with CO2 and causing fatal traffic accidents.
As a developer I'll just say that "face time" and interacting with coworkers are two of the main impediments to me getting shit done.
That's because you're a curmudgeon. :)
Obviously the people we work with can be distractions, but there's value in being in proximity with the team you work with at least some of the time even if that time is spent just building a sense of being a team.
I have the ability to WFH about 1 day a week now, and previously could do about 2. But I'm not sure even I'd want to do 5 if it were offered. My wife, who does sales, works out of our home (another reason not to be there, amirite!), but even she treks into the corporate office to get face-to-face with her team and visits clients face-to-face after initial video conferences.
So...back to the old paradigm of slipping the problem under your office door and hoping an answer falls out in a decade or so?
FAIL!
If it's just your house or apartment or whatever, why should you have to pay anything for anything? This has nothing to do with covering certain regulation expenses of the hotel industry (since it isn't one) and everything to do with "we want a piece of every pie because we can't be bothered to reign in our budgets and fuck the taxpayers".
Well, I work with adults. So despite the fact that we have all worked with each other a thousand or three miles apart for 15-20 years, we all do rather fine in terms of teamwork, self-motivation, responsibility, accountability, and productivity.
Not really. Face time is very little unless you're a manager type of employee and you can interact with coworkers over phone/video chat. They want employees on site so they can keep an eye on them, i.e. personally supervise them, otherwise the employees are likely to goof off.
You gain some extra time out of him each day because he doesn't have to commute
No, they don't. At least my organization doesn't. My workday starts at xx:30, and ends at yy:zz. Whether I am telecommuting or not.
I would have to work (away from home) at something, at least part of the time, even if money was no longer a consideration.
Too many days off in a row and I don't have anything to measure against.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I think it's more important to have the option of being able to remote work if you choose to. Not even to remote work, but being able to roll in at midday and leave at 8pm. Let your workers work on their schedule, unless their role is something that demands a normal business day e.g. client/partner facing. I personally wouldn't enjoy working from home full time; I don't have the self control to not get sidetracked with other projects I have going. I do, however, like turning up late morning and working until 8 or even 10pm some days. That and I enjoy where I work and interacting with my colleagues. I would seriously consider taking a pay cut to be able to completely define my hours, it's more important to me than working a fixed schedule.
As a developer I would have to say that with modern communications one can be virtually face-to-face with coworkers while telecommuting. I am also more productive because there are fewer distractions. I also have access to better equipment and facilities. And I don't waste hours each day pointlessly commuting from A to B and back again. But, best of all, I earn much more money.
I have never ever retained any really useful information from a powerpoint slide.
Posting as anon so I don't lose my mod points.
I just booked a cottage in Portland, OR for 4 nights. The price on the website was $65 a night - seemed reasonable. Price after AirBNB Fees and PDX Tax? $110 a night. Give me a break. Almost double for the fees? The tax was something like $14 a night, so AirBNB was pocketing a big chuck of money every fucking night. Last time I use them. Back to the Hilton for me; as a member I get a decent breakfast, access to the Executive Floor (free food and wine in the evening) and points to apply to free rooms.
How has this javascript, ad-laden, broken site survived for so long? is there no lightweight alternative? ghostery shows over 11 trackers on Scribd....
I live in California, but stayed in hotels in several other states in the last couple of weeks... 14% occupancy tax does seem high, but this is San Francisco, they love taxes up there...
Dallas = Room + 2% DTPID Fee + 7.1% City Tax + 6.1% State Tax
NYC = Room + Sales Tax 8.875% + Occupancy Tax 5.875% + Room Tax $2.00 + Room Unit Tax $1.55
Boston = Room + State Tax 5.7% + City Tax 6% + CCF Tax 2.75%
Philadelphia = Room + Lodging Tax 8.5% + Sales Tax 8%
In Europe they are much more civilized about it -- they just toss in some huge VAT tax (like 20%) and may or may not mention that it is "included" (how thoughtful of them.) In some places there are still more taxes - in Dublin Ireland, my hotel bill had the room fee, with VAT included, but also added "other local taxes and fees" amounting to 9.25% of that...
In general, the observation that taxing visitors is popular is accurate, and accelerating, it seems.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I agree it should stop. But you need to realize that this is far worse elsewhere.
How long until companies realize they can save 15,000-30,000 on paying their software engineers that telecommute.
It isn't that easy.
No, I'm not going to be Douchey McOfficedroneson and whine about "face time" (2005 called, and I believe I made out the words, "video", "conference", "skype", "you stupid excuse-spewing bitches") and other such nonsense.
Rather, when home becomes your place of work, you no longer have a home.
Do that for ten years. I have.
I'd murder someone to attend a boring, incoherent PowerPoint presentation. Hell, at this point, I'd actually stay awake during said presentation.
"bad tempered and surly" - certainly in line with what I have observed from self-declared 'adults'.
Cities don't give a ratfuck if your neighbors are pissed off. All they worry about is the tax. 14%? That's a steal compared to some places. That will of course double soon.
Get it's pound of flesh. Here in RI they charge an extra 1% on prepared meals. One of these days I can see Chinese food places and pizza parlors just delivering raw ingredients to the customer.
Better yet - overnight parking permits are $100 per year. Except where I live it's so fucking dense the house across from me has THREE cars parked on my side of the street. Good thing I don't have a car. And when I do finally give in and buy a car again I'll just make my own permit. Not many security features built in and I doubt the cops checking overnight are gonna call the code in.
So...back to the old paradigm of slipping the problem under your office door and hoping an answer falls out in a decade or so?
FAIL!
Back to the paradigm of getting your shit in order and knowing what you want before you ask me to build it.
Back to the paradigm of reading the emails I send out.
Back to the paradigm of responding to emails, answering questions therein (I even bold them for you!), and providing unambiguous responses. "Yes, that's fine." is not a proper response to an email containing 3 separate questions (none of which are satisfied with a "yes" or a "no").
Back to the paradigm of understanding your own business and policies so that when I build an application around them you don't have to ask me to change the underlying design a week after launch.
Back to the paradigm of not having meetings that result only in you saying "we'll get back to you on that" when asked about things in your policy that I have to model in the application.
Why not sleep while traveling?
You might want to suggest answers to the questions you ask, so that "Yes, that's fine" is actionable. Things like "What if the beflitter zongs? Shut down the gnord.".
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In almost any situation, you're going to have to have some defined times to directly interact with people. Nobody cares when I show up or leave as long as I don't abuse that, but there are meetings I normally have to attend.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Most software developers are salaried. If commuting takes an hour a day, a standard 40-hour week becomes 45 hours out of the employee's week. That five hours is at least negotiable.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I do, but that doesn't help when there are 3 different questions questions and their response tells me they clearly didn't read the questions, my suggestions, or my notes explaining why I'm recommending what I'm recommending and what the implications of making that decision are. Inevitably, I'll get a call a month later asking if we can change that shit, and I'll refer to the previous email, only to get a "Oh, well it needs to be the other way." response.