The article compares the service to ebay, but a key difference is that on ebay the highest bidder always gets the item, provided they can actually pay up. By putting that power instead in the hands of the landlords, the company is really shooting themselves in the foot.
Very good point. When I first came to look at the apartment I rent now, as I was walking in, an attractive, well-dressed young couple was walking out. Both looked like they earned more money than me. I looked at the landlord who was showing the place and joked, "Well, I'll still take a look but I guess I'm not getting it."
He replied, "I don't really want to rent to a couple." Simple as that.
Then both the landlord and the company will be buried up to their eyeballs in litigation from every conceivable direction.
Well I think therein lies the germ of this business. Online auctions are nothing new. But contract that requires landlords to indemnify the site from any liability, and which is legally binding, that's what earns the CFO his title.
As I understand it, the purpose of this site is for the landlord to set an asking price and then watch renters fight it out among each other, bidding it up to above the asking price. So that solves your "landlords often don't know either" problem, and the bidding war stomps on the faces of the renters who don't know what market rate is.
Who the hell is gonna show the apartments and however long the bidding war takes means I am out that money if I just could have gotten it rented. And I have to pay a fee for my unit being vacant because of some stupid bidding war, and all my leases will just have random dates instead of something standard like the 1st of the months?
You seem to be contradicting yourself. If you only allow tenants to sign a lease on the 1st of the month, then aren't you giving up some money anyway? Why not let them move in whenever they need to and give them prorated rent for the first month? (And why couldn't the users of this site do that, too?)
As for the "length of the bidding war" argument, if you're in a market like San Francisco or New York, where housing is in incredibly high demand, bidding wars are happening already. They don't generally take that long, either -- I've seen people show up at open houses willing to write a check for the first three months' rent, plus deposit. If, on the other hand, you're not in a market like that, then presumably it could take a few weeks to fill a vacant unit. Maybe something like a rental listing service could help you with that.
Nobody asked these questions in the events ticketing industry and look how it's worked out for them.
All kidding aside, though:
1. The value for the renter is in the listings. Presumably the site facilitates things like credit checks, too, as rental agencies have always done.
2. What would prevent competition is terms of service requiring the landlord be exclusive to that site or else lose the listings. Remember, there is a limited supply of available units at any given time, and not all apartments are equally attractive to all tenants. A site that is perceived as having the highest quality listings wins.
We do not want channels. We want to purchase individual shows or movies. Channels and bundles belong in the 20th century.
Oh, I dunno. Sometimes I don't want to be responsible for picking what I want to watch right now. Just show me something. And I'm not alone -- the El Rey network seems like it might work for my purposes, but millions of people pay extra on their cable bills to get ESPN.
Or how about this: Maybe people don't want terrestrial radio stations anymore, but does nobody pay for SiriusXM? Does nobody use Pandora or Spotify?
I dunno if I'd be investing in this startup. All any municipality would have to do is pass a law that says "any quoted or advertised rental price must be the final price the tenant pays" and the whole concept of bidding wars goes out the window. I wouldn't something like that past San Francisco voters, for example... our city government may be completely corrupt and in the pocket of developers, but there's also a referendum process that lets citizen groups put things on the ballot. And from the sound of it, that would pretty much be the end of Rentberry's business model.
Of course, you can use Typescript as another commenter pointed out, but then you're not using Javascript anymore, you're using Typescript.
Not strictly true, since TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. Unmodified JavaScript code is still perfectly legal TypeScript.
Similarly, other people have advocated using strict coding discipline as a way of writing better JavaScript. Sure you can do certain things in JavaScript, but you just don't ever do those things, including ignoring entire language features completely. This alone wouldn't solve your refactoring problem, though.
On the other hand, if declared variable types are so nonessential, why did Microsoft invent TypeScript, complete with proper support for refactoring in Visual Studio?
I've skimmed the judgment. It's a convoluted case. He asserted his Fifth Amendment rights at some point, but failed to do so again at his contempt of court hearing. When he was held in contempt, he appealed and this time he again asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege. But the court that was hearing his appeal of the contempt of court ruling couldn't weigh its ruling based on the circumstances of his original, criminal case... it could only rule on the civil contempt of court hearing, in which the Fifth Amendment was never made an issue... anyway, something like that. They're giving him a helluva run-around but it doesn't sound like any legal overreach is actually happening here. It's just the usual prosecutor shenanigans. The defense made errors... small though they may be... and got tripped up in the paperwork.
Seems like encryption systems need to have two passwords; one that decrypts the volume and another that wipes the keys and images a fresh filesystem. When they compel you to enter your password, you enter the "destroy code."
Sure, you could be charged with tampering with evidence if they realized what you'd done. But maybe that would be preferable to indefinite incarceration for contempt of court.
Serious question (maybe the wrong place to ask it): What is Samsung Pay?
I have a Galaxy S7 but one of my main problems with it is that it's piled with so much crap that I don't know how to use (or turn off). My assumption was that Samsung Pay was just another of Samsung's attempts to do something that some other thing (like Android Pay) already does, but in its own, Samsung-y way. So I've pretty much ignored it. Now I seem to be hearing that Samsung Pay even works if the checkout terminal doesn't have NFC? If true, that's kind of cool, but how's that work?
And when your users start asking when you're going to roll out new content for your game, what do you tell them? Marketers have a tough enough time already.
Top income tax rate is 33%, and there's a 12.5% sales tax on almost all goods. (There are no states, therefore no state taxes.) That's significantly lower than the USA especially if you live in a high-tax state like California.
I wouldn't say "significantly lower." Top income tax rate in California (state and federal combined) is around 39 percent, but that's for the top 1 percent of earners. Sales tax varies by location but the state base rate is 7.5 percent and in San Francisco (a very expensive place to live) it's 8.75 percent.
This seems par for the course. With Google trying to make the device manufacturers stick to a UI that's closer to "stock Android," they have to differentiate themselves somehow. For example, on the Samsung phone I have now, the "home" and "multitask" buttons are on the opposite sides of the screen than they were for my Moto X. For some people, that would be a deal-breaker.
I'm curious what "unwarranted" mean. Does that mean it's for In-Laws you hate and feel you don't deserve to live with, or you think you don't deserve to have to know them?
"In-law unit," I guess, is an SF colloquialism. It just means a small apartment within a house or other dwelling, usually designed for just 1-2 occupants. Picture something small, probably a single room plus its own washroom, maybe off the garage or in the basement.
"Unwarranted" means it's an illegal living unit. The owner didn't obtain permits to build it, and it probably isn't up to code. So you'd better be pretty friendly with whomever you rent it to (do in-laws count?) because if something is deemed actually unsafe -- like it has no heat, or the wiring is subpar -- you can be sued, if the tenants know their rights.
But because San Francisco (and the whole Bay Area) think that everyone should have a veto on what everyone else does with their property, rebuilding doesn't happen, demand continues to rise, and the city becomes affordable only by the rich.
This paints the problem in too-narrow terms. Sure, the owner converts a single-family dwelling to a 10-unit tower and 9 (or more) additional people move to San Francisco. And lets say this happens to single-family dwellings all over the City. Multiply those new residents by a thousand or more. See what I'm getting at?
Where will all the infrastructure to support these new residents come from? I'm assuming not everybody who lives in these new units will want the hassle of owning a car in a City that's all but openly hostile to them -- and if they did, the gridlock would be totally unworkable. But the 15, 30, and 45 buses across town are already choked wall-to-wall with people. You literally have to ram your way in. BART (the intercity light rail system) is in a shambles. My daily commute downtown (a total of five stops) is often a standing-room-only affair, and any light weather causes delays. On some of the higher-traffic commuter stations, you can regularly expect one or even all of the escalators to be out of service, leaving huge crowds to pile out of trains onto the platforms and march up a few flights of stairs. Some of the staircases are single-file, so the queue just to leave the station can be 30-40 people long.
And where will they shop? Stores in San Francisco -- I'm thinking of something like a Target (department store) or a Safeway (supermarket) -- are typically smaller than their counterparts in cities with more overall real estate. Expect long lines for food and sundries.
And don't forget taxes! Sure, a bigger population does increase the tax base. But will it increase it enough to afford to hire all the extra firefighters and the upgrades they'll need to their engines and equipment to accommodate all those new towers? Ditto the police you need to support the population increase? And when every vehicle on the road is a private corporate bus shuttling workers back and forth from Silicon Valley, who will pay to repair the roads (which are already crumbling)? And the transit systems are once again claiming they need to either float multibillion dollar bond measures or raise the ticket fees -- as they do every other year.
So in short, just adding new people to the population won't solve San Francisco's problems. What longtime San Francisco residents recognize is that you're not talking about solutions, you're just talking about more development -- something that would please the kleptocrats in City Hall greatly, but won't do a lick to correct the complete imbalance in living costs we're currently experiencing.
P.S. Another idea I hear is that San Francisco should just accept that it needs to become more like Manhattan, with the East Bay becoming more like the other boroughs. But the major difference between the Bay Area and New York is that the Five Boroughs constitute a single tax base, under a single city government. San Francisco and the nearest cities in the East Bay aren't even in the same counties.
I spent 20 years in Kansas(and decades more growing up in the south). I can assure you that Lawrence is an oasis of decency compared to the majority of Kansas. Some of the most viscous, bigoted assholes I've ever had the misfortune to have met came from small towns in Kansas. I got my kids the hell out of there, and I have never felt for a moment that I didn't make the right decision.
Seconded. Lawrence is basically what Americans call "a college town." It's got lots of things that cater to students and youngish people, like hip bars and restaurants and bespoke clothing stores and comic book stores. Companies sponsor events there to amuse people. But it's still basically an island. My friends who lived in Kansas City had some very pleasant, LGBT neighbors etc. But they also met folks who fit that "vicious, bigoted asshole" category (and this was in a major city -- the towns are far worse).
These weren't the run-of-the-mill rednecks we get in the Bay Area (and we surely have them). For large areas of Kansas, it's not so much "flyover country" as it is "conservative talk radio country." Plenty of people living there are quite content to spend their entire day hearing descriptions of the bestial practices of the Muslims and the Mexicans and what dire things are sure to come of it all.
I love how CEOs like this guy and Elon (idiot) Musk are predicting the future of AI development. As opposed to say, leading AI researchers that are attending conferences and writing papers on the state of the art.
Slashdot Mirror
The article compares the service to ebay, but a key difference is that on ebay the highest bidder always gets the item, provided they can actually pay up. By putting that power instead in the hands of the landlords, the company is really shooting themselves in the foot.
Very good point. When I first came to look at the apartment I rent now, as I was walking in, an attractive, well-dressed young couple was walking out. Both looked like they earned more money than me. I looked at the landlord who was showing the place and joked, "Well, I'll still take a look but I guess I'm not getting it."
He replied, "I don't really want to rent to a couple." Simple as that.
Then both the landlord and the company will be buried up to their eyeballs in litigation from every conceivable direction.
Well I think therein lies the germ of this business. Online auctions are nothing new. But contract that requires landlords to indemnify the site from any liability, and which is legally binding, that's what earns the CFO his title.
As I understand it, the purpose of this site is for the landlord to set an asking price and then watch renters fight it out among each other, bidding it up to above the asking price. So that solves your "landlords often don't know either" problem, and the bidding war stomps on the faces of the renters who don't know what market rate is.
Who the hell is gonna show the apartments and however long the bidding war takes means I am out that money if I just could have gotten it rented. And I have to pay a fee for my unit being vacant because of some stupid bidding war, and all my leases will just have random dates instead of something standard like the 1st of the months?
You seem to be contradicting yourself. If you only allow tenants to sign a lease on the 1st of the month, then aren't you giving up some money anyway? Why not let them move in whenever they need to and give them prorated rent for the first month? (And why couldn't the users of this site do that, too?)
As for the "length of the bidding war" argument, if you're in a market like San Francisco or New York, where housing is in incredibly high demand, bidding wars are happening already. They don't generally take that long, either -- I've seen people show up at open houses willing to write a check for the first three months' rent, plus deposit. If, on the other hand, you're not in a market like that, then presumably it could take a few weeks to fill a vacant unit. Maybe something like a rental listing service could help you with that.
Nobody asked these questions in the events ticketing industry and look how it's worked out for them.
All kidding aside, though:
1. The value for the renter is in the listings. Presumably the site facilitates things like credit checks, too, as rental agencies have always done.
2. What would prevent competition is terms of service requiring the landlord be exclusive to that site or else lose the listings. Remember, there is a limited supply of available units at any given time, and not all apartments are equally attractive to all tenants. A site that is perceived as having the highest quality listings wins.
We do not want channels. We want to purchase individual shows or movies. Channels and bundles belong in the 20th century.
Oh, I dunno. Sometimes I don't want to be responsible for picking what I want to watch right now. Just show me something. And I'm not alone -- the El Rey network seems like it might work for my purposes, but millions of people pay extra on their cable bills to get ESPN.
Or how about this: Maybe people don't want terrestrial radio stations anymore, but does nobody pay for SiriusXM? Does nobody use Pandora or Spotify?
buying channels individually is just stupid.
It is? I can't think of anything I'd want to watch on Showtime and I haven't a clue what plays on Starz.
I dunno if I'd be investing in this startup. All any municipality would have to do is pass a law that says "any quoted or advertised rental price must be the final price the tenant pays" and the whole concept of bidding wars goes out the window. I wouldn't something like that past San Francisco voters, for example ... our city government may be completely corrupt and in the pocket of developers, but there's also a referendum process that lets citizen groups put things on the ballot. And from the sound of it, that would pretty much be the end of Rentberry's business model.
We should send our troops into battle with headphones blasting the Tetris music! They will be unstoppable. Hell, Putin probably already does it.
Of course, you can use Typescript as another commenter pointed out, but then you're not using Javascript anymore, you're using Typescript.
Not strictly true, since TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. Unmodified JavaScript code is still perfectly legal TypeScript.
Similarly, other people have advocated using strict coding discipline as a way of writing better JavaScript. Sure you can do certain things in JavaScript, but you just don't ever do those things, including ignoring entire language features completely. This alone wouldn't solve your refactoring problem, though.
On the other hand, if declared variable types are so nonessential, why did Microsoft invent TypeScript, complete with proper support for refactoring in Visual Studio?
I've skimmed the judgment. It's a convoluted case. He asserted his Fifth Amendment rights at some point, but failed to do so again at his contempt of court hearing. When he was held in contempt, he appealed and this time he again asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege. But the court that was hearing his appeal of the contempt of court ruling couldn't weigh its ruling based on the circumstances of his original, criminal case ... it could only rule on the civil contempt of court hearing, in which the Fifth Amendment was never made an issue ... anyway, something like that. They're giving him a helluva run-around but it doesn't sound like any legal overreach is actually happening here. It's just the usual prosecutor shenanigans. The defense made errors ... small though they may be ... and got tripped up in the paperwork.
Seems like encryption systems need to have two passwords; one that decrypts the volume and another that wipes the keys and images a fresh filesystem. When they compel you to enter your password, you enter the "destroy code."
Sure, you could be charged with tampering with evidence if they realized what you'd done. But maybe that would be preferable to indefinite incarceration for contempt of court.
Serious question (maybe the wrong place to ask it): What is Samsung Pay?
I have a Galaxy S7 but one of my main problems with it is that it's piled with so much crap that I don't know how to use (or turn off). My assumption was that Samsung Pay was just another of Samsung's attempts to do something that some other thing (like Android Pay) already does, but in its own, Samsung-y way. So I've pretty much ignored it. Now I seem to be hearing that Samsung Pay even works if the checkout terminal doesn't have NFC? If true, that's kind of cool, but how's that work?
And when your users start asking when you're going to roll out new content for your game, what do you tell them? Marketers have a tough enough time already.
Top income tax rate is 33%, and there's a 12.5% sales tax on almost all goods. (There are no states, therefore no state taxes.) That's significantly lower than the USA especially if you live in a high-tax state like California.
I wouldn't say "significantly lower." Top income tax rate in California (state and federal combined) is around 39 percent, but that's for the top 1 percent of earners. Sales tax varies by location but the state base rate is 7.5 percent and in San Francisco (a very expensive place to live) it's 8.75 percent.
.( OK!)
Lol no sane immigration policy has border patrol agents administering visas at the border.
Traveling on a U.S. passport, I've been to several countries where yes, they do indeed issue you a visa at the border.
Over here in the UK, we had the mighty, the master, the supreme genius of John Peel.
Don't you still have Tim Westwood?
This seems par for the course. With Google trying to make the device manufacturers stick to a UI that's closer to "stock Android," they have to differentiate themselves somehow. For example, on the Samsung phone I have now, the "home" and "multitask" buttons are on the opposite sides of the screen than they were for my Moto X. For some people, that would be a deal-breaker.
I'm curious what "unwarranted" mean. Does that mean it's for In-Laws you hate and feel you don't deserve to live with, or you think you don't deserve to have to know them?
"In-law unit," I guess, is an SF colloquialism. It just means a small apartment within a house or other dwelling, usually designed for just 1-2 occupants. Picture something small, probably a single room plus its own washroom, maybe off the garage or in the basement.
"Unwarranted" means it's an illegal living unit. The owner didn't obtain permits to build it, and it probably isn't up to code. So you'd better be pretty friendly with whomever you rent it to (do in-laws count?) because if something is deemed actually unsafe -- like it has no heat, or the wiring is subpar -- you can be sued, if the tenants know their rights.
But because San Francisco (and the whole Bay Area) think that everyone should have a veto on what everyone else does with their property, rebuilding doesn't happen, demand continues to rise, and the city becomes affordable only by the rich.
This paints the problem in too-narrow terms. Sure, the owner converts a single-family dwelling to a 10-unit tower and 9 (or more) additional people move to San Francisco. And lets say this happens to single-family dwellings all over the City. Multiply those new residents by a thousand or more. See what I'm getting at?
Where will all the infrastructure to support these new residents come from? I'm assuming not everybody who lives in these new units will want the hassle of owning a car in a City that's all but openly hostile to them -- and if they did, the gridlock would be totally unworkable. But the 15, 30, and 45 buses across town are already choked wall-to-wall with people. You literally have to ram your way in. BART (the intercity light rail system) is in a shambles. My daily commute downtown (a total of five stops) is often a standing-room-only affair, and any light weather causes delays. On some of the higher-traffic commuter stations, you can regularly expect one or even all of the escalators to be out of service, leaving huge crowds to pile out of trains onto the platforms and march up a few flights of stairs. Some of the staircases are single-file, so the queue just to leave the station can be 30-40 people long.
And where will they shop? Stores in San Francisco -- I'm thinking of something like a Target (department store) or a Safeway (supermarket) -- are typically smaller than their counterparts in cities with more overall real estate. Expect long lines for food and sundries.
And don't forget taxes! Sure, a bigger population does increase the tax base. But will it increase it enough to afford to hire all the extra firefighters and the upgrades they'll need to their engines and equipment to accommodate all those new towers? Ditto the police you need to support the population increase? And when every vehicle on the road is a private corporate bus shuttling workers back and forth from Silicon Valley, who will pay to repair the roads (which are already crumbling)? And the transit systems are once again claiming they need to either float multibillion dollar bond measures or raise the ticket fees -- as they do every other year.
So in short, just adding new people to the population won't solve San Francisco's problems. What longtime San Francisco residents recognize is that you're not talking about solutions, you're just talking about more development -- something that would please the kleptocrats in City Hall greatly, but won't do a lick to correct the complete imbalance in living costs we're currently experiencing.
P.S. Another idea I hear is that San Francisco should just accept that it needs to become more like Manhattan, with the East Bay becoming more like the other boroughs. But the major difference between the Bay Area and New York is that the Five Boroughs constitute a single tax base, under a single city government. San Francisco and the nearest cities in the East Bay aren't even in the same counties.
I spent 20 years in Kansas(and decades more growing up in the south). I can assure you that Lawrence is an oasis of decency compared to the majority of Kansas. Some of the most viscous, bigoted assholes I've ever had the misfortune to have met came from small towns in Kansas. I got my kids the hell out of there, and I have never felt for a moment that I didn't make the right decision.
Seconded. Lawrence is basically what Americans call "a college town." It's got lots of things that cater to students and youngish people, like hip bars and restaurants and bespoke clothing stores and comic book stores. Companies sponsor events there to amuse people. But it's still basically an island. My friends who lived in Kansas City had some very pleasant, LGBT neighbors etc. But they also met folks who fit that "vicious, bigoted asshole" category (and this was in a major city -- the towns are far worse).
These weren't the run-of-the-mill rednecks we get in the Bay Area (and we surely have them). For large areas of Kansas, it's not so much "flyover country" as it is "conservative talk radio country." Plenty of people living there are quite content to spend their entire day hearing descriptions of the bestial practices of the Muslims and the Mexicans and what dire things are sure to come of it all.
I'm willing to bet there are some student loans not mentioned in this equation.
I love how CEOs like this guy and Elon (idiot) Musk are predicting the future of AI development. As opposed to say, leading AI researchers that are attending conferences and writing papers on the state of the art.
Hmm. You mean that same "idiot" who founded an artificial intelligence research organization to help fund the very things you hear about at those conferences and in those papers?
It should be noted that the rich love single payer systems, because it makes them feel good.
Ah yes! That explains all those rich Republicans I've seen at the poll queues, just lining up to support single-payer healthcare in the U.S.