"Stable, affordable housing" means that people, including families, including families with children, can afford to put down roots in the community and get on with their lives. It means that school age children don't get shuffled off to a different school every year because their family had to move again because their rent was doubled.
So why should New York City support such a model? I think the flawed thinking here is assuming every place should be able to sustain your desired social ideal even when doing so would be very expensive for various reasons. I wouldn't expect, for example, New York City, Silicon Valley, Washington, DC, or Detroit to be able to do so. I wouldn't expect some place without any infrastructure whatsoever, say, a wild environment without even road access. My view is that if you want a stable environment for a family, live somewhere where you can do so.
Technology has given us a clever new way to solve the short term rental problem. But established interests are trying to kill it politically.
Well, you're incorrect there. What the airbnb supplied technology has given is a bog-standard way of making online reservations for transient stays. Nothing new there, almost any motel, hotel, hostel, or campground offers that these days.
This is Slashdot, but do you have a reason for your claim? After all, I have the actions of the New York Attorney General and obvious self-interests of the established businesses.
The difference is that airbnb is encouraging the use of residential premises as motel accomodations. But airbnb doesn't require that these accomodations comply with existing health and safety laws for motels (e.g., the different level of fire safety provisions for ordinary residences versus transient residences like motels, that others here have already described). In your own words (though surely contrary to your intended meaning):
You haven't established that this difference in "health and safety laws" is relevant. Every place in NYC has to have them. Only significant difference I can see is some contagious diseases and parasites like bedbugs. I don't see the current fight being about preventing genuine public health issues.
it's a race to the bottom with huge incentives to do illegal activities that don't exist in saner real estate markets
and I'm glad that Attorney General Schneiderman is taking a stand to stop this race to the bottom.
By attempting to block the technology altogether and punish anyone who participated.
All of these cases are detrimental to the existence of a stable, affordable housing market in NYC
Let's look through the cases in question.
Cases 1, 2 and 4 clearly aren't detrimental to the existence of a stable, affordable housing market since the landlord is responding to pricing signals from people who desperately need short-term rental housing rather than long-term rental housing. Case 3 is a tough one since there are illegal actions going on. The harm to the renters mooching off of life-long cheap rent might outweigh the societal benefit of getting rid of them.
and lead instead to a city in which only tourists and rich folks can find a place to live.
So what? I don't see a problem with rich people being the only people who can live in a really expensive area.
As you might have guessed by now, I oppose rent control. And New York City is a good example of why I do. The first problem is that it destroys most incentive to build new apartments or repair old ones. The key problem here is lack of price signalling. Expensive rent encourages people to build more apartments to take advantage of that.
Second, it's a race to the bottom with huge incentives to do illegal activities that don't exist in saner real estate markets. The worst sort of landlords/slumlords, willing to do illegal things to make a better profit, thrive in a price regulated market like what NYC has.
Third, rent controls were put into place to fix a temporary problem for GIs returning from the Second World War and being unable to find affordable housing. It might have fixed that problem at the time, but it's still going on.
And that brings us to the current problem. Technology has given us a clever new way to solve the short term rental problem. But established interests are trying to kill it politically. I used the term "rent-seekers" appropriately.
The problem I see with this alleged tactic is that it's about two orders of magnitude too small. If New York were to enroll more people than live in the state, then that would be amusing.
Something created out of compassion and solidarity is very hard (and I mean this sincerely) for a more capitalistic society to contemplate, let alone implement.
I think rather it is hard for someone who doesn't live in a free society to understand compassion and solidarity, be they in a capitalist society or not. The key is that they are voluntary. You might get desirable results when you force people to do or pay for something, after all, the English health care system does work more or less, but it's neither compassion or solidarity.
Yet, they're fundamental to a lot of manual sorting tasks we do all the time. For example, sorting playing cards - a common approach is to sort by suit (hash table), then by number. Similar, if you had to manually sort a ton of job applications (or other documents) in alphabetical order, it'd go a lot faster if you hashed by first letter of their last name first, putting all the applications that start with "A" in one pile, those with "B" in a second, and so on.
The full theory is complicated, but a lot of people create simple hash tables and such without realizing it.
I disagree that something can't be considered basic just because some aspect of it is extremely complicated. That's like saying that writing a problem that ends isn't basic because of the stopping time problem.
I'd include basic concepts of discrete math, combinatorics, and graph theory even though these rapidly grow into deeper, far more complex problems.
That's an interesting play on words (here, "rent-seeking") since NYC and the established hotels are the actual rent-seekers here (in the economic sense).
Does it really? A lot of people seemed concerned by the possibility of an out of control, totalitarian US government. My take is that those 200 years of "practice" have led to many of the losses of freedom that the US imposes the world and its own citizens.
If they were to convince me to donate, I'd have to know that I was indemnified against any blowback from their actions.
Sounds like every state has some sort of "good Samaritan" law that protects donations given in good faith from liability for the non profit.
All in all I think I'd rather contribute more to the local police and work to get them up to scratch if they are lacking in some way.
Such as lacking in their willingness to do their job or being run by a corrupt government that will attempt to pocket any such donation?
Detroit has been experimenting with such organizations, which are basically private security businesses or non profits. They have to work with the police or they don't work. But they can be around when the police can't.
THE CONSTITUTION IS NOT THE INCHANGEABLE WORD OF GOD, JUST SMART PEOPLE WHO REALIZED THAT THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE.
Actually, I think it should be pretty damn close. If you want to change how the Constitution is interpreted, there are standard ways to do that via amendments. The problem is that if you can just change what the Constitution means on the fly, then it ceases to be a constraint on the actions of government (which is its primary role).
As to "change", the whole US Constitution is four pages. It's compactness makes it unusually responsive to change.
And if we're going to devolve to some sort of touchie feelie basis to our law that means whatever we want at the time, then I want to be the one touchieing and feelieing, reaping those benefits.
Unfortunately, the branch with the job of determining what is or is not Constitutional is the Supreme Court. They have deemed it to be Constitutional, so it is.
It still remains unconstitutional no matter how the Supreme Court spins it.
FYI, The court has been cutting out the "unconstitutional" pieces of legislation and leaving the rest since they've been using Judicial Review.
The court has been violating the Constitution for some time. This is just one way.
Judicial review is not severability. If Congress doesn't provide for severing of law (such as is the case here), then the courts shouldn't have that option.
As for cars, the Porsche is whatever amorphous dream-system you seem to want. I suspect you don't care about much other than winning your dogmatic battle.
Didn't look that way to me.
The current system of health insurance is broken for anyone whose employer does not offer coverage. I don't have time to write an essay about how individual health "insurance" has not been insurance so much as a gamble that the insurer won't find some way to kick you off the plan if you get expensive.
Good for you. You would be wasting your time with an incorrect argument. There's nothing keeping insurers from violating the the terms of their contracts except contract law, enforced by the courts. Get a lawyer, do some discovery on how often your insurer does this practice, threaten to enlarge it to a class action lawsuit (since you're not magically going to be the first person they ever did this to), and then get them to settle in your favor.
Finally, I would not mind single payer (it is economically efficient, although has many downsides)
One of those downsides is that it is not economically efficient - how do they regulate consumption of medical services? How do they encourage more supply of medical services when supply is artificially constrained? I will admit that a decent single payer system would be more efficient that the current US mess, but my bet is that single payer would be screwed up, just like the current law was.
Even if they were up for election today, they would still get re-elected because their consituents probably support shutting down the government to get rid of that nasty Obamacare. Not because they don't want affordable healthcare (they're probably the ones who need it most), but because it has Obama's name on it and they hate Obama. Is it because he's black or a Democrat? Probably both, but that's all that matters to them.
I think a good part of this problem is the stupid stereotyping that goes on here. Why think (I'm being generous here, I admit) that alleged "affordable health care" or "Obama is black/Democrat" are the only possible reasons for opposing such a law?
How about you shut up for a moment and listen a bit to an opponent of this law. Here's the problems I have with it: 1) it is unconstitutional (due to the individual mandate, the state-oriented spending obligations, and some other games played with passing the law), 2) it makes health care even more expensive (which makes all of the problems worse, including that of coverage), and 3) it's just remarkably bad law forced through by remarkably incompetent politicians.
Note that point 2) neatly gets around the assertion that I oppose "affordable health care" since I don't think that's even an option while Obamacare is active. Second, note that nowhere do I imply that it matters whether Obama is black, democrat, or whatever. Or that I "hate" Obama.
I'm worried it might bring even more long term dependency on foreign oil when US supplies are depleted.
Price goes up, people switch to other things. That dynamic hasn't changed.
Right now, if SHTF and all of the ME decided to stop exporting to the US, it would hike prices, but not completely stop the US economy.
Doesn't sound like much of a problem then because you're speaking of a temporary thing. Supply shocks would just encourage people to switch over to other systems even if the good is otherwise in plentiful supply.
If the US is empty, then it means a dependency on that area, far worse than now, similar to how if Russia turns off the natural gas to Germany, German citizens will freeze to death by the tens of thousands.
German citizens would not. They can switch over to electric heat.
The hundreds of Congresscritters and their staff who are responsible for doing this.
Again, I ask you, why do you think they could do that?
Of course, your argument trivially absurd: a group of people wrote it, so of course it was possible for at least some humans to keep track of it.
Nope. It doesn't work that way. Adding stuff or editing stuff doesn't require that anyone was keeping track of anything. The thing was in constant flux and far too large for any one person to read it and keep up.
And once again, I'll bring up Representative Pelosi's infamous words, "We need to pass this bill to find out what's in it." Political leaders couldn't even say what was in the bill because they didn't know. And as I noted, the House itself never saw or voted on the completed bill. So that's one whole branch that wasn't able to "keep track".
Slashdot Mirror
Price goes up, there's no realistic alternative
We can stop already. There are realistic alternatives, they just aren't attractive at current price points for fossil fuel petroleum.
Public transport sucks and bikes and electric cars are extremely impractical.
Well, that's three alternatives right there. They are "extremely impractical" now, but won't necessarily be in the future.
What alternative sources of energy are drivers going to switch to? Or airlines? Or anyone else who depends on fossil fuels?
Biofuels and coal-derived synthetic fuel for example.
"Stable, affordable housing" means that people, including families, including families with children, can afford to put down roots in the community and get on with their lives. It means that school age children don't get shuffled off to a different school every year because their family had to move again because their rent was doubled.
So why should New York City support such a model? I think the flawed thinking here is assuming every place should be able to sustain your desired social ideal even when doing so would be very expensive for various reasons. I wouldn't expect, for example, New York City, Silicon Valley, Washington, DC, or Detroit to be able to do so. I wouldn't expect some place without any infrastructure whatsoever, say, a wild environment without even road access. My view is that if you want a stable environment for a family, live somewhere where you can do so.
Technology has given us a clever new way to solve the short term rental problem. But established interests are trying to kill it politically.
Well, you're incorrect there. What the airbnb supplied technology has given is a bog-standard way of making online reservations for transient stays. Nothing new there, almost any motel, hotel, hostel, or campground offers that these days.
This is Slashdot, but do you have a reason for your claim? After all, I have the actions of the New York Attorney General and obvious self-interests of the established businesses.
The difference is that airbnb is encouraging the use of residential premises as motel accomodations. But airbnb doesn't require that these accomodations comply with existing health and safety laws for motels (e.g., the different level of fire safety provisions for ordinary residences versus transient residences like motels, that others here have already described). In your own words (though surely contrary to your intended meaning):
You haven't established that this difference in "health and safety laws" is relevant. Every place in NYC has to have them. Only significant difference I can see is some contagious diseases and parasites like bedbugs. I don't see the current fight being about preventing genuine public health issues.
it's a race to the bottom with huge incentives to do illegal activities that don't exist in saner real estate markets
and I'm glad that Attorney General Schneiderman is taking a stand to stop this race to the bottom.
By attempting to block the technology altogether and punish anyone who participated.
The country's still around isn't it (at least for another week ;p)? The US is still considered one of the better places to live isn't it?
The thing is how do you keep things that way? You don't do so by ignoring violations of the fundamental rules that made the US what it was.
You have a peer-reviewed reference for that? Heh.
Who's "denying science" here? I merely agreed with a good observation. You're flinging completely irrelevant monkey poo.
All of these cases are detrimental to the existence of a stable, affordable housing market in NYC
Let's look through the cases in question. Cases 1, 2 and 4 clearly aren't detrimental to the existence of a stable, affordable housing market since the landlord is responding to pricing signals from people who desperately need short-term rental housing rather than long-term rental housing. Case 3 is a tough one since there are illegal actions going on. The harm to the renters mooching off of life-long cheap rent might outweigh the societal benefit of getting rid of them.
and lead instead to a city in which only tourists and rich folks can find a place to live.
So what? I don't see a problem with rich people being the only people who can live in a really expensive area.
As you might have guessed by now, I oppose rent control. And New York City is a good example of why I do. The first problem is that it destroys most incentive to build new apartments or repair old ones. The key problem here is lack of price signalling. Expensive rent encourages people to build more apartments to take advantage of that.
Second, it's a race to the bottom with huge incentives to do illegal activities that don't exist in saner real estate markets. The worst sort of landlords/slumlords, willing to do illegal things to make a better profit, thrive in a price regulated market like what NYC has.
Third, rent controls were put into place to fix a temporary problem for GIs returning from the Second World War and being unable to find affordable housing. It might have fixed that problem at the time, but it's still going on.
And that brings us to the current problem. Technology has given us a clever new way to solve the short term rental problem. But established interests are trying to kill it politically. I used the term "rent-seekers" appropriately.
The problem I see with this alleged tactic is that it's about two orders of magnitude too small. If New York were to enroll more people than live in the state, then that would be amusing.
The problem was introduction of the private sector into government work
The government has to monetize its power, and that's the main way they do it.
Something created out of compassion and solidarity is very hard (and I mean this sincerely) for a more capitalistic society to contemplate, let alone implement.
I think rather it is hard for someone who doesn't live in a free society to understand compassion and solidarity, be they in a capitalist society or not. The key is that they are voluntary. You might get desirable results when you force people to do or pay for something, after all, the English health care system does work more or less, but it's neither compassion or solidarity.
Nethack wouldn't be even half the fun it is, if it had input validation.
Hash tables are not "basic".
Yet, they're fundamental to a lot of manual sorting tasks we do all the time. For example, sorting playing cards - a common approach is to sort by suit (hash table), then by number. Similar, if you had to manually sort a ton of job applications (or other documents) in alphabetical order, it'd go a lot faster if you hashed by first letter of their last name first, putting all the applications that start with "A" in one pile, those with "B" in a second, and so on.
The full theory is complicated, but a lot of people create simple hash tables and such without realizing it.
I disagree that something can't be considered basic just because some aspect of it is extremely complicated. That's like saying that writing a problem that ends isn't basic because of the stopping time problem.
I'd include basic concepts of discrete math, combinatorics, and graph theory even though these rapidly grow into deeper, far more complex problems.
these AirBNB rent-seekers
That's an interesting play on words (here, "rent-seeking") since NYC and the established hotels are the actual rent-seekers here (in the economic sense).
Does it really? A lot of people seemed concerned by the possibility of an out of control, totalitarian US government. My take is that those 200 years of "practice" have led to many of the losses of freedom that the US imposes the world and its own citizens.
I agree. This experiment has a ways to go to true break even.
If they were to convince me to donate, I'd have to know that I was indemnified against any blowback from their actions.
Sounds like every state has some sort of "good Samaritan" law that protects donations given in good faith from liability for the non profit.
All in all I think I'd rather contribute more to the local police and work to get them up to scratch if they are lacking in some way.
Such as lacking in their willingness to do their job or being run by a corrupt government that will attempt to pocket any such donation?
Detroit has been experimenting with such organizations, which are basically private security businesses or non profits. They have to work with the police or they don't work. But they can be around when the police can't.
But if you do "forget", there's not much they can do about it.
$800 == a months rent?!?!
In Sacramento it would.
THE CONSTITUTION IS NOT THE INCHANGEABLE WORD OF GOD, JUST SMART PEOPLE WHO REALIZED THAT THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE.
Actually, I think it should be pretty damn close. If you want to change how the Constitution is interpreted, there are standard ways to do that via amendments. The problem is that if you can just change what the Constitution means on the fly, then it ceases to be a constraint on the actions of government (which is its primary role).
As to "change", the whole US Constitution is four pages. It's compactness makes it unusually responsive to change.
And if we're going to devolve to some sort of touchie feelie basis to our law that means whatever we want at the time, then I want to be the one touchieing and feelieing, reaping those benefits.
Unfortunately, the branch with the job of determining what is or is not Constitutional is the Supreme Court. They have deemed it to be Constitutional, so it is.
It still remains unconstitutional no matter how the Supreme Court spins it.
Are you complaining about the reconciliation process?
Yes.
You are boring me, now.
So what? My arguments will still be true ten years from now.
Your argument appears to come down to, "I think maybe not every Congresscritter read every last word of this bill," based on an out-of-context quote.
The primary House advocate admitted that she didn't keep track of what was in the bill.
The PPACA received a lot MORE scrutiny than average
After it got passed. That's because of the considerable impact it had.
FYI, The court has been cutting out the "unconstitutional" pieces of legislation and leaving the rest since they've been using Judicial Review.
The court has been violating the Constitution for some time. This is just one way.
Judicial review is not severability. If Congress doesn't provide for severing of law (such as is the case here), then the courts shouldn't have that option.
As for cars, the Porsche is whatever amorphous dream-system you seem to want. I suspect you don't care about much other than winning your dogmatic battle.
Didn't look that way to me.
The current system of health insurance is broken for anyone whose employer does not offer coverage. I don't have time to write an essay about how individual health "insurance" has not been insurance so much as a gamble that the insurer won't find some way to kick you off the plan if you get expensive.
Good for you. You would be wasting your time with an incorrect argument. There's nothing keeping insurers from violating the the terms of their contracts except contract law, enforced by the courts. Get a lawyer, do some discovery on how often your insurer does this practice, threaten to enlarge it to a class action lawsuit (since you're not magically going to be the first person they ever did this to), and then get them to settle in your favor.
Finally, I would not mind single payer (it is economically efficient, although has many downsides)
One of those downsides is that it is not economically efficient - how do they regulate consumption of medical services? How do they encourage more supply of medical services when supply is artificially constrained? I will admit that a decent single payer system would be more efficient that the current US mess, but my bet is that single payer would be screwed up, just like the current law was.
Sure, it is. It's just a very aggressive form of negotiation.
Even if they were up for election today, they would still get re-elected because their consituents probably support shutting down the government to get rid of that nasty Obamacare. Not because they don't want affordable healthcare (they're probably the ones who need it most), but because it has Obama's name on it and they hate Obama. Is it because he's black or a Democrat? Probably both, but that's all that matters to them.
I think a good part of this problem is the stupid stereotyping that goes on here. Why think (I'm being generous here, I admit) that alleged "affordable health care" or "Obama is black/Democrat" are the only possible reasons for opposing such a law?
How about you shut up for a moment and listen a bit to an opponent of this law. Here's the problems I have with it: 1) it is unconstitutional (due to the individual mandate, the state-oriented spending obligations, and some other games played with passing the law), 2) it makes health care even more expensive (which makes all of the problems worse, including that of coverage), and 3) it's just remarkably bad law forced through by remarkably incompetent politicians.
Note that point 2) neatly gets around the assertion that I oppose "affordable health care" since I don't think that's even an option while Obamacare is active. Second, note that nowhere do I imply that it matters whether Obama is black, democrat, or whatever. Or that I "hate" Obama.
I'm worried it might bring even more long term dependency on foreign oil when US supplies are depleted.
Price goes up, people switch to other things. That dynamic hasn't changed.
Right now, if SHTF and all of the ME decided to stop exporting to the US, it would hike prices, but not completely stop the US economy.
Doesn't sound like much of a problem then because you're speaking of a temporary thing. Supply shocks would just encourage people to switch over to other systems even if the good is otherwise in plentiful supply.
If the US is empty, then it means a dependency on that area, far worse than now, similar to how if Russia turns off the natural gas to Germany, German citizens will freeze to death by the tens of thousands.
German citizens would not. They can switch over to electric heat.
The hundreds of Congresscritters and their staff who are responsible for doing this.
Again, I ask you, why do you think they could do that?
Of course, your argument trivially absurd: a group of people wrote it, so of course it was possible for at least some humans to keep track of it.
Nope. It doesn't work that way. Adding stuff or editing stuff doesn't require that anyone was keeping track of anything. The thing was in constant flux and far too large for any one person to read it and keep up.
And once again, I'll bring up Representative Pelosi's infamous words, "We need to pass this bill to find out what's in it." Political leaders couldn't even say what was in the bill because they didn't know. And as I noted, the House itself never saw or voted on the completed bill. So that's one whole branch that wasn't able to "keep track".