I live in Canada as a US expat. US allows ISPs to control the last mile so Comcast and such prohibit any competition for service to your house. Ontario, at least, requires Rogers, Bell to lease their lines to anyone. So I contract with VMedia and get cable with a couple of premium packages and 35 mbit down for about CAD$70 a month, much cheaper than what I was paying in the US ($70 a month for 1.5 mbit down. Really. Try living in Qwest territory.)
OTOH the US prohibits telcos from owning cell towers, and the cell tower operators must lease to anyone so competition is fierce. As a result there's lots of competition and mobile prices are reasonable. In Ontario, Rogers owns Rogers towers, and no one else can use them. Each telco has to build its own tower network, decreasing competition and driving up prices.
What the numbers in the report don't show is that in the US you can get family bundles that substantially lower the bill; I have 5 lines and pay about US$120 a month for the service; the first line is $60 and then each additional line is $10. If I was to contract with Rogers, I'd pay CAD$60 PER LINE with no discount. Sure I can share data, but I have to pay full freight for each line.
That's happening here. Lots and lots of people have entered the rental pool, mostly renting out short term on weekends and holidays and when they're not home; these people typically rent very low. While people like us have a full-time rental and we actually need to have a return on investment. AirBnB wants us to rent at low prices to keep their fees rolling in, while we want to rent high to maximize profits. We stay booked about 80% of the time which is about what we want.
You do understand how AirBnB works, right? The guests pay AirBnB to find hosts. The hosts pay AirBnB to find guests. AirBnB makes sure everyone gets paid. No different from Orbitz, or Ebay, or Amazon. Or are those all passing fads too?
And how does anything you said have anything to do with crowdsourcing and a sharing economy? We get paid to provide a service. The guests pay to use the service. We pay an agent to make it happen.
This is funny. No host wants their houses to be turned into party house.
The vast majority of hosts pre-screen their guests; we have turned down people who have bad reviews. We do not allow parties. We comply with zoning codes. As do most hosts - it's impossible to get insurance otherwise.
The problem is that a few cities do not have effective regulations of bed-and-breakfast operations, and tend to enforce on a "complaint" basis. The fault lies with the cities, not with VRBO or AirBnB or whoever else.
We looked at opening an AirBnB in another city; they require that the property be owner occupied, no more than 2 rooms rented, and no more than 25% of the square footage used for rentals.
Other cities have limits on how many unrelated people can stay at a house - another jurisdiction we looked at limits it to 3 unrelated people under one roof without a commercial hotel or apartment permit.
A bit of research will bear out what I said. The AVERAGE expectancy in the Roman Empire was 20-30 years. Sure, the wealthy lived a long time but those in the countryside died young. The wealthy always live longer.
The reason we can drink the water from rivers today is because of stringent surface water regulations; as recently as 60 years ago rivers burned quite regularly. I went to high school in New York City; if you fell into the Hudson River they would take you to the hospital and pump your stomach, as even a small bit of river water was extremely hazardous.
I worked in surface water for 30 years. You could not drink surface water from the dawn of civilization and city building to about 1980.
A lot of what we do when we cook dates back to preserving health. Most of kosher and halals techniques are used today in commercial kitchens, without the religious overtones.
Beer, or any boiled substance, is sterile and thus less likely to kill you. People who drink boiled water live longer, and have more children who survive to have more children. It's simple, really. Once agriculture started, and cities started to form 7,000 years ago, people had to have some form of sanitation.
Those personal choices - and the luxury of demeaning others - rely on the functioning of the underlying system. The people who are at this moment foaming at the mouth about how all those leeches are sucking at the public teat can only do that precisely because they have a well-functioning society that all of us pay for.
For those of us who have raised children so much of the hyperbolic rhetoric today is much like a toddler screaming NO while relying on mom & dad to keep them safe and fed and housed.
You can only focus on your personal choices when society takes care of all your other needs.
Yeah, this. OK so I know it's 8AM on the US west coast where my daughter lives, and in Japan where my MIL lives, and in the Czech Republic where my parents are. That still doesn't tell me a damn thing about what time it is over there - can I call them? Are they home? At work?
This is an idiotic solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
It's like the Tennessee legislature passing a law that pi equals 3.
Most Euro-based software companies won't take contributions from Americans because of the absurd US laws on encryption. The US has warrantless wiretaps, Stingray, Gitmo, etc. etc. etc. Basically, all the US has to do is to listen to your "free speech" without a warrant, proclaim you a terrorist, and ship you off to Gitmo forever without a trial.
It used to be the Gulag.
So... There are many, many other countries with greater privacy protections than the oft-ignored First Amendment.
Although I have to wonder about a "spec" or "standard" that allows damage to core hardware if the fricking cable is bad.
Seriously? What about component failures in the cable as it ages?
Didn't the engineers think this through?
This brings me back to the Apple Mac stroke of genius non-standard DB9 serial port when you could short the Mac power supply to ground by plugging in a standard null-modem cable,
Good grief. Any society depends on cooperation and sharing of resources. You can manufacture outrage that your "unlimited" plan is actually limited, and demand that your carrier provide you with your own dedicated cell tower everywhere, for the "agreed upon price" but that's bullshit. What's more you know that's bullshit.
Of all the carriers, TMobile is about the most generous with bandwidth per dollar, and most reasonable with its terms of use.
Not at all. As an engineer, you give me clear goals:
Meet these specific standards under these specific conditions.
I can do that. I will probably do that at the expense of performance under other conditions. That's engineering. that's not being a corporate apologist. Now VW took it over the line, by actively modifying the code to pass those tests, something that is forbidden, but without third-party review it's impossible to catch this sort of stuff.
What needs to be happening is that the software is audited by independent third parties, and there is random testing of actual road performance.
Don't forget agri-business use. It takes a lot of power to pump all that water. The City of Hermiston on the Columbia Gorge uses less power than the single mega-farm just upstream on the Columbia River.
As someone who works in the RV industry, you're right to some extent. But also, appliances in houses do not get shaken, bumped, subjected to temps from well below freezing to 120*F, so the testing and quality is far more stringent.
Lastly, we use a lot of appliances common to boats, and durability and repairability are also important. You can't go to Walmart when you're on a boat; you fix, patch, or do without.
Our customers who installed dorm fridges because RV fridges are too expensive have found that the dorm fridges don't last too long.
Did you ever try to get a license for a "performance" like this? I did, once, just to see how difficult it is.
Turns out that, at the time, neither BMI nor ASCAP had a way to legally play their music unless you were a professional DJ, were pressing at least 200 CDs, or were re-mixing their music.
After 6 weeks of phone calls and emails, and getting shuttled off to various other agencies, it turned out that they had no license that would allow an individual or a business to play songs from their catalog for a single event.
Of course that does not prevent them from suing for lack of the same.
Incorporation provides no shield whatsoever, at least in the US. They can still sue you into bankruptcy.
What you want is to spell out in the contract that anything you provide is an "instrument of service" and that it cannot be distributed, modified, blah, blah, without your permission.
And yes, you need a contract for each and every single job you do, no matter how small. There's always the chance that you will have an insane client (like I did) who ran up nearly a million dollars in costs arguing with us, and then ended up paying a quarter of that, when we calculated the original remedy would cost $1,800. And yes, the client was insane, absolutely bonkers. And I had bought that job from another company that we purchased, and they did not have a strong enough contract, and the job was tiny, about $4,000.
Being incorporated does absolutely nothing for you to protect you from that.
Seriously? With a criminal record, he's unlikely to be able to get a full time, long-term job. So he will bounce from one short term job to the next, filling the gaps with unemployment.
Further, he's probably likely to commit more crimes, even if petty crimes like drug use, so he will cost you and me in police time, court time, jail time. And he's more likely to get busted for those petty crimes since he will be living in high-crime, high police areas; whereas a rich kid would not be busted for simple possession a poor kid with no job will be.
Then there's the predictable drain on social services, subsidized housing, and so on.
It is far, far cheaper to pay for this kid's college at an Ivy League school than it is to send him to jail.
That's the part that the "law and order" "lock 'em up and throw away the key" nutjobs fail to understand.
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I live in Canada as a US expat. US allows ISPs to control the last mile so Comcast and such prohibit any competition for service to your house. Ontario, at least, requires Rogers, Bell to lease their lines to anyone. So I contract with VMedia and get cable with a couple of premium packages and 35 mbit down for about CAD$70 a month, much cheaper than what I was paying in the US ($70 a month for 1.5 mbit down. Really. Try living in Qwest territory.)
OTOH the US prohibits telcos from owning cell towers, and the cell tower operators must lease to anyone so competition is fierce. As a result there's lots of competition and mobile prices are reasonable. In Ontario, Rogers owns Rogers towers, and no one else can use them. Each telco has to build its own tower network, decreasing competition and driving up prices.
What the numbers in the report don't show is that in the US you can get family bundles that substantially lower the bill; I have 5 lines and pay about US$120 a month for the service; the first line is $60 and then each additional line is $10. If I was to contract with Rogers, I'd pay CAD$60 PER LINE with no discount. Sure I can share data, but I have to pay full freight for each line.
That's happening here. Lots and lots of people have entered the rental pool, mostly renting out short term on weekends and holidays and when they're not home; these people typically rent very low. While people like us have a full-time rental and we actually need to have a return on investment. AirBnB wants us to rent at low prices to keep their fees rolling in, while we want to rent high to maximize profits. We stay booked about 80% of the time which is about what we want.
You do understand how AirBnB works, right? The guests pay AirBnB to find hosts. The hosts pay AirBnB to find guests. AirBnB makes sure everyone gets paid. No different from Orbitz, or Ebay, or Amazon. Or are those all passing fads too?
And how does anything you said have anything to do with crowdsourcing and a sharing economy? We get paid to provide a service. The guests pay to use the service. We pay an agent to make it happen.
This is funny. No host wants their houses to be turned into party house.
The vast majority of hosts pre-screen their guests; we have turned down people who have bad reviews. We do not allow parties. We comply with zoning codes.
As do most hosts - it's impossible to get insurance otherwise.
The problem is that a few cities do not have effective regulations of bed-and-breakfast operations, and tend to enforce on a "complaint" basis. The fault lies with the cities, not with VRBO or AirBnB or whoever else.
We looked at opening an AirBnB in another city; they require that the property be owner occupied, no more than 2 rooms rented, and no more than 25% of the square footage used for rentals.
Other cities have limits on how many unrelated people can stay at a house - another jurisdiction we looked at limits it to 3 unrelated people under one roof without a commercial hotel or apartment permit.
You really have no clue how airbnb works, do you?
Try being a host. You'll discover that pretty much everything you said is wrong.
And yes we have overhead. We pay ourselves. We pay for the space, the utilities, replacement sheets, towels, soap, etc.
But the bottom line we make a tidy profit at the end of the month on a nice apartment. Why else would you stay in business?
I support restrictions. AirBnB shoild.be owner occupied, and limited to a few rooms. Many cities have this already.
It really is a problem where cities don't have effective laws regulating bed and breakfasts as opposed to hotels.
And children died of mostly water-borne diseases like cholera and dysentery. Water borne diseases were quite common (and still are.)
A bit of research will bear out what I said. The AVERAGE expectancy in the Roman Empire was 20-30 years. Sure, the wealthy lived a long time but those in the countryside died young. The wealthy always live longer.
The reason we can drink the water from rivers today is because of stringent surface water regulations; as recently as 60 years ago rivers burned quite regularly. I went to high school in New York City; if you fell into the Hudson River they would take you to the hospital and pump your stomach, as even a small bit of river water was extremely hazardous.
I worked in surface water for 30 years. You could not drink surface water from the dawn of civilization and city building to about 1980.
and died at 22-25.
A lot of what we do when we cook dates back to preserving health. Most of kosher and halals techniques are used today in commercial kitchens, without the religious overtones.
Beer, or any boiled substance, is sterile and thus less likely to kill you. People who drink boiled water live longer, and have more children who survive to have more children. It's simple, really. Once agriculture started, and cities started to form 7,000 years ago, people had to have some form of sanitation.
Those personal choices - and the luxury of demeaning others - rely on the functioning of the underlying system. The people who are at this moment foaming at the mouth about how all those leeches are sucking at the public teat can only do that precisely because they have a well-functioning society that all of us pay for.
For those of us who have raised children so much of the hyperbolic rhetoric today is much like a toddler screaming NO while relying on mom & dad to keep them safe and fed and housed.
You can only focus on your personal choices when society takes care of all your other needs.
Yeah, this. OK so I know it's 8AM on the US west coast where my daughter lives, and in Japan where my MIL lives, and in the Czech Republic where my parents are. That still doesn't tell me a damn thing about what time it is over there - can I call them? Are they home? At work?
This is an idiotic solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
It's like the Tennessee legislature passing a law that pi equals 3.
Listen to Fox much?
Most Euro-based software companies won't take contributions from Americans because of the absurd US laws on encryption. The US has warrantless wiretaps, Stingray, Gitmo, etc. etc. etc. Basically, all the US has to do is to listen to your "free speech" without a warrant, proclaim you a terrorist, and ship you off to Gitmo forever without a trial.
It used to be the Gulag.
So... There are many, many other countries with greater privacy protections than the oft-ignored First Amendment.
Although I have to wonder about a "spec" or "standard" that allows damage to core hardware if the fricking cable is bad.
Seriously? What about component failures in the cable as it ages?
Didn't the engineers think this through?
This brings me back to the Apple Mac stroke of genius non-standard DB9 serial port when you could short the Mac power supply to ground by plugging in a standard null-modem cable,
Reduce your browsing? Turn off your phone, just like you turn off your appliances?
What you're saying is that your big expensive light shines in the corners of your house, and you don't use that light so you don't want to pay for it.
Good grief. Any society depends on cooperation and sharing of resources. You can manufacture outrage that your "unlimited" plan is actually limited, and demand that your carrier provide you with your own dedicated cell tower everywhere, for the "agreed upon price" but that's bullshit. What's more you know that's bullshit.
Of all the carriers, TMobile is about the most generous with bandwidth per dollar, and most reasonable with its terms of use.
Seriously, there are greater abuses out there.
Not at all. As an engineer, you give me clear goals:
Meet these specific standards under these specific conditions.
I can do that. I will probably do that at the expense of performance under other conditions. That's engineering. that's not being a corporate apologist. Now VW took it over the line, by actively modifying the code to pass those tests, something that is forbidden, but without third-party review it's impossible to catch this sort of stuff.
What needs to be happening is that the software is audited by independent third parties, and there is random testing of actual road performance.
Don't forget agri-business use. It takes a lot of power to pump all that water. The City of Hermiston on the Columbia Gorge uses less power than the single mega-farm just upstream on the Columbia River.
How exactly do you spill propane on yourself?
As someone who works in the RV industry, you're right to some extent. But also, appliances in houses do not get shaken, bumped, subjected to temps from well below freezing to 120*F, so the testing and quality is far more stringent.
Lastly, we use a lot of appliances common to boats, and durability and repairability are also important. You can't go to Walmart when you're on a boat; you fix, patch, or do without.
Our customers who installed dorm fridges because RV fridges are too expensive have found that the dorm fridges don't last too long.
Did you ever try to get a license for a "performance" like this? I did, once, just to see how difficult it is.
Turns out that, at the time, neither BMI nor ASCAP had a way to legally play their music unless you were a professional DJ, were pressing at least 200 CDs, or were re-mixing their music.
After 6 weeks of phone calls and emails, and getting shuttled off to various other agencies, it turned out that they had no license that would allow an individual or a business to play songs from their catalog for a single event.
Of course that does not prevent them from suing for lack of the same.
Really? Seriously? That's just a dumbass comment.
FB is a tool. Like any other tool. We use it because it works and it's cheaper than rolling our own.
We use Wordpress too. And cloud email. And a whole bunch of other technologies.
And if any one of them goes out of business we will find something else.
We use Facebook at work. A lot. It's how reach thousands of customers.
Face to face does not work so well when your 40k customers are spread over all of north america.
Google "Piercing the corporate veil".
And yes, I've owned LLCs, S-corps, and others. Right now I work for two LLCs both of which I own, as well as a full time job for a company.
Incorporation provides no shield whatsoever, at least in the US. They can still sue you into bankruptcy.
What you want is to spell out in the contract that anything you provide is an "instrument of service" and that it cannot be distributed, modified, blah, blah, without your permission.
And yes, you need a contract for each and every single job you do, no matter how small. There's always the chance that you will have an insane client (like I did) who ran up nearly a million dollars in costs arguing with us, and then ended up paying a quarter of that, when we calculated the original remedy would cost $1,800. And yes, the client was insane, absolutely bonkers. And I had bought that job from another company that we purchased, and they did not have a strong enough contract, and the job was tiny, about $4,000.
Being incorporated does absolutely nothing for you to protect you from that.
Seriously? With a criminal record, he's unlikely to be able to get a full time, long-term job. So he will bounce from one short term job to the next, filling the gaps with unemployment.
Further, he's probably likely to commit more crimes, even if petty crimes like drug use, so he will cost you and me in police time, court time, jail time. And he's more likely to get busted for those petty crimes since he will be living in high-crime, high police areas; whereas a rich kid would not be busted for simple possession a poor kid with no job will be.
Then there's the predictable drain on social services, subsidized housing, and so on.
It is far, far cheaper to pay for this kid's college at an Ivy League school than it is to send him to jail.
That's the part that the "law and order" "lock 'em up and throw away the key" nutjobs fail to understand.