Not so. Their rent was extremely low due to the clever use of their Wayback Machine which permitted them to sign a 1000-year lease in 1906 when nobody else wanted to rent there anymore. You should check the Archive.
No, I think he has a reasonable chance of living through his attempt as you put it. You may note that the "Personnel" section of their web site does not list any "Astronaut" and their Mission Statement says in the 2nd paragraph:
Our mission is to launch human beings into space on privately build rockets and spacecrafts.
So for all we know there's a skid row somewhere in DK whose inhabitants will soon be riding high with promises of "lots of beer" onboard.
Washington's biggest European critic -- France -- also has a serious wiretapping habit, as Marc Perelman points out in Foreign Policy: "In addition to judicially ordered taps there are also 'administrative wiretaps' decided by security agencies under the control of the government."
Actually, a reference to a former US vice president:
Agnew was known for his scathing criticisms of political opponents, especially journalists and anti-war activists. Emulating the "blistering blue barnacles" verbal style of Tintin's Captain Haddock with striking similarity, Agnew attacked his adversaries with relish, hurling unusual, often alliterative epithets, some of which were coined by White House speechwriters William Safire and Pat Buchanan, including "pusillanimous pussyfooters," "nattering nabobs of negativism" (written by Safire) and "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."
"Airbnb's legal troubles continue to mount in New York with an acknowledgment Monday that the state's attorney general has subpoenaed the startup for information about all 15,000 people who rent out spaces through the website.
Which is as it should be of course. For example, if I make a reservation to stay at a firetrap motel that subsequently burns down, it is the motel operator/owner, not I, who is held for the crime of negligence because of his responsibility in running a firetrap motel.
You apparently misunderstand the term "stable, affordable housing".
"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.
It doesn't mean that the housing market provides a stable source of upward spiraling income for landlords so that whatever landlords want becomes affordable to them. That sentence has the words "stable" and "affordable" but it doesn't mean the same thing.
Here's a 2-page paper that might help you with understanding the meaning of "stable" and "affordable" housing and the societal benefits that accrue when it is available:
So what? I don't see a problem with rich people being the only people who can live in a really expensive area.
Funny you should mention "a really expensive area" because the airbnb complaint is not specifically about an expensive area but rather about turning residential communities into transient communities. You pointed that out yourself in your second sentence above:
the landlord is responding to pricing signals from people who desperately need short-term rental housing rather than long-term rental housing
There you are! You hit the nail on the head The airbnb complaint is that long-term housing -- whether rental, coop, condo, or owned home -- the stuff that makes what people know as a "community", is being converted via airbnb into very short-term rental housing. That is a problem, not simply because it's against the zoning laws in these places but because it destroys the community.
But you knew that. This is just a way for, as you say, The worst sort of landlords/slumlords, willing to do illegal things to make a better profit.. to make that better profit, and the community be damned.
I do not want that to happen to my community. And I would be willing to bet that you wouldn't want that to happen to your community either, especially if you have a family, and especially if you have children.
You go on to say:
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.
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):
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.
According to this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City New York City has a population density of greater than 10,000/km**2 yet I pay $40/month for "naked" DSL with nominal bandwidth of about 7Mbps (Verizon) and $50/month for Clear Internet with a nominal bandwidth of about 3Mbps.
So, just sayin', I don't think your relation scales exactly the way you think it does.
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).
Not necessarily. There have been numerous cases reported by regular tenants in apartment buildings where:
1. The owner of the building wants the higher short term rental fees that he/she can get via airbnb rather than renting to someone who intends to actually live there year round.
2. An "investor" buys up one or more coop/condo apartments for the sole purpose of renting them out via airbnb.
3. A landlord harasses and/or illegally empties a building's apartments of rent-stabilized tenants so that he/she can rent those units out at the higher airbnb rates. (This is a specialized case of #1 above.)
4. Someone looking for a pied-a-terre rents or buys an apartment and then rents it out for most of the year via airbnb.
All of these cases are detrimental to the existence of a stable, affordable housing market in NYC and lead instead to a city in which only tourists and rich folks can find a place to live.
For all of these reasons I applaud this initiative on the part of Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
The courageous yet curiously named Anonymous Coward asked a simple question unrelated to cockaroaches turned into cyborgs by a children's hobby kit:
If you understand, please explain what Menachim Begin meant when he said, "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.".
Well Mr. A.C., we have moved quite offtopic here but I think that the explanation below of what Begin did not actually say regarding drugged roaches may satisfy your request for an explanation of what did not actually occur:
Besides the false quotes portraying Israeli leaders as brutal ethnic cleansers, Walt and Mearsheimer also dredge up other supposed quotes (page 89) to argue that Israeli leaders are racists. Thus they charge that former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin called the Palestinians "beasts walking on two legs" and former IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan termed them "drugged roaches in a bottle."
Did Begin say that Palestinians are beasts? The answer is absolutely not. In a June 8, 1982 statement to the Israeli parliament, Begin did use the term "two-footed animals," but he was referring not to Palestinians but to terrorists who would murder Israeli schoolchildren. Begin's statement is available online; here is the relevant passage:
The children of Israel will happily go to school and joyfully return home, just like the children in Washington, in Moscow, and in Peking, in Paris and in Rome, in Oslo, in Stockholm and in Copenhagen. The fate of... Jewish children has been different from all the children of the world throughout the generations. No more. We will defend our children. If the hand of any two-footed animal is raised against them, that hand will be cut off, and our children will grow up in joy in the homes of their parents.
Obviously there is nothing racist in the least in Begin's statement, and once again the genuine quote actually undermines the point Walt and Mearsheimer were deceptively trying to make.
That I think implies that the site is protected by federal police, and in light of the widespread shutdown it seems plausible that they felt it couldn't be properly supervised. They may have their hands full as it is.
Human rights observers and those close to Kokabee say that he did not receive a fair trial.
"It's not really a trial in the sense that we are used to. He was not allowed to speak to a lawyer," said Eugene Chudnovsky of Lehman College, one of the co-chairs of the Committee of Concerned Scientists.
During the trial, no evidence was brought against him. He was not permitted to see a lawyer during his incarceration or the trial, and was not told his court date until he was brought to the courtroom. During his imprisonment, Iranian security forces used harsh techniques to coerce confessions from him.
(This was from the second article linked at the top of this discussion, BTW.)
Iran has been pursuing a kind of uranium enrichment called SILEX which uses carbon dioxide lasers, the same kind of lasers that Kokabee was using in his graduate studies.
Answer to 1) took a few more Google cycles:
Did you know that thousands of Iranian students study in the United States each year? In fact, for the past several years, the number of Iranian students studying in American colleges and universities has steadily grown such that Iran is now 22nd among the top 25 places of origin for international students.
And, in recent months, President Obama and Secretary Clinton have announced big steps forward in promoting exchange and opportunity with the Iranian people. As Secretary Clinton announced in May 2011, (http://www.youtube.com/), new visa regulations now allow Iranian students to receive two-year, multiple entry visas. This gives young Iranians the opportunity to return home for family events, to participate in internships, to travel outside the United Statesâ"and they wonâ(TM)t need to get a new visa every time.
Yeah, my local libraries don't in general even want book donations for them to sell for 10-cents anymore. I think that the problem is that library budgets have been cut to the bone and they just don't have the money to pay their staff to deal with all of this extra stuff. Here's what one NYC library system has to say about this:
Why does Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) no longer accept donations of books and other material from the public? Donated books and other materials incur costs and additional time to process. Before they can be shelved with the larger collection, their condition must be evaluated, followed by cataloging, processing and transporting. These materials ultimately have a shorter shelf life. It is more cost-efficient to purchase new books and media, which are delivered "shelf-ready."
On looking through their PDF manuals, it appears that the charging cable is separately connected, not part of what looks like a thick wiring harness. Maybe they supply a charging cable or maybe they leave it up to the use to supply their own.
As for your other question to which I had intended to reply before but forgot, it need not be a special charging cable "for the blind", but perhaps for some other type of accessibility device. The person who started this thread didn't specifically say that Apple was opening themselves up to a suit by a blind user, just by some user whose accessibility apparatus depended on a cable that worked before but not after their "upgrade". It was you who asked that person what his disability was, rather than asking what types of disability / accessibility hardware he was referring to.
This is a backported change, so if he has equipment that he must use because of his blindness that previously worked with a non-Apple-blessed cable and now stopped working because of the change, then he may be able to show that he has been discriminated against.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so. Their rent was extremely low due to the clever use of their Wayback Machine which permitted them to sign a 1000-year lease in 1906 when nobody else wanted to rent there anymore. You should check the Archive.
No, I think he has a reasonable chance of living through his attempt as you put it. You may note that the "Personnel" section of their web site does not list any "Astronaut" and their Mission Statement says in the 2nd paragraph:
So for all we know there's a skid row somewhere in DK whose inhabitants will soon be riding high with promises of "lots of beer" onboard.
Let Me Google That For You:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar-absorbent_material
Peter Allen had it right ..
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/how_they_do_it/2006/02/wiretapping_europeanstyle.html
Reported and discussed several years ago:
Oh no, there's another profession with an even worse record.
At least engineers haven't been targeted by Jack The Ripper and other serial murderers. Yet.
Actually, a reference to a former US vice president:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Agnew
Bobby? Bobby McFerrin? Is that really you?
No, you are misinformed there also.
It is only the "pop up motel landlords" whose information has been subpoenaed, not as you say "anyone who participated".
Here is link to an article that explains that:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-07/airbnbs-15-000-landlords-in-new-york-face-scrutiny-from-prosecutors
which clearly states:
"Airbnb's legal troubles continue to mount in New York with an acknowledgment Monday that the state's attorney general has subpoenaed the startup for information about all 15,000 people who rent out spaces through the website.
Which is as it should be of course. For example, if I make a reservation to stay at a firetrap motel that subsequently burns down, it is the motel operator/owner, not I, who is held for the crime of negligence because of his responsibility in running a firetrap motel.
You apparently misunderstand the term "stable, affordable housing".
"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.
It doesn't mean that the housing market provides a stable source of upward spiraling income for landlords so that whatever landlords want becomes affordable to them. That sentence has the words "stable" and "affordable" but it doesn't mean the same thing.
Here's a 2-page paper that might help you with understanding the meaning of "stable" and "affordable" housing and the societal benefits that accrue when it is available:
http://www.childrenshealthwatch.org/upload/.../12_05_PAhousingbrief.pdf&%238364;Z
Funny you should mention "a really expensive area" because the airbnb complaint is not specifically about an expensive area but rather about turning residential communities into transient communities. You pointed that out yourself in your second sentence above:
There you are! You hit the nail on the head The airbnb complaint is that long-term housing -- whether rental, coop, condo, or owned home -- the stuff that makes what people know as a "community", is being converted via airbnb into very short-term rental housing . That is a problem, not simply because it's against the zoning laws in these places but because it destroys the community.
But you knew that. This is just a way for, as you say, The worst sort of landlords/slumlords, willing to do illegal things to make a better profit .. to make that better profit, and the community be damned.
I do not want that to happen to my community. And I would be willing to bet that you wouldn't want that to happen to your community either, especially if you have a family, and especially if you have children.
You go on to say:
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.
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):
and I'm glad that Attorney General Schneiderman is taking a stand to stop this race to the bottom.
According to this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City New York City has a population density of greater than 10,000/km**2 yet I pay $40/month for "naked" DSL with nominal bandwidth of about 7Mbps (Verizon) and $50/month for Clear Internet with a nominal bandwidth of about 3Mbps.
So, just sayin', I don't think your relation scales exactly the way you think it does.
Not necessarily. There have been numerous cases reported by regular tenants in apartment buildings where:
1. The owner of the building wants the higher short term rental fees that he/she can get via airbnb rather than renting to someone who intends to actually live there year round.
2. An "investor" buys up one or more coop/condo apartments for the sole purpose of renting them out via airbnb.
3. A landlord harasses and/or illegally empties a building's apartments of rent-stabilized tenants so that he/she can rent those units out at the higher airbnb rates. (This is a specialized case of #1 above.)
4. Someone looking for a pied-a-terre rents or buys an apartment and then rents it out for most of the year via airbnb.
All of these cases are detrimental to the existence of a stable, affordable housing market in NYC and lead instead to a city in which only tourists and rich folks can find a place to live.
For all of these reasons I applaud this initiative on the part of Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
The courageous yet curiously named Anonymous Coward asked a simple question unrelated to cockaroaches turned into cyborgs by a children's hobby kit:
Well Mr. A.C., we have moved quite offtopic here but I think that the explanation below of what Begin did not actually say regarding drugged roaches may satisfy your request for an explanation of what did not actually occur:
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=21&x_article=1446
I get it. Isaac Bashevis Singer was Jewish. Israel is a Jewish state. Therefore you go on a rant about bad things you believe about Israel.
It's almost like somebody implanted electrodes into your brain and is turning the knobs to see how you react.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Bashevis_Singer
This for that?
The "Pisga Inn" is a privately operated concession in a building owned and on land leased from the federal government.
http://www.wsoctv.com/news/news/local/pisgah-inn-closes-because-government-shutdown/nbFm2/
That I think implies that the site is protected by federal police, and in light of the widespread shutdown it seems plausible that they felt it couldn't be properly supervised. They may have their hands full as it is.
To avoid wrecking somebody else's life perhaps?
At this point they fully realize that a collision can hurt others, not only themselves.
Often it's because their family is still there.
Amen Brother!
Thankfully articles like this one put those canards to rest where they should:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/23/terrorism.iraq
Yeah, fsvo "trial":
(This was from the second article linked at the top of this discussion, BTW.)
Answer to 2) is in TFM#1:
Answer to 1) took a few more Google cycles:
You can find the quote here:
http://iran.usembassy.gov/education.html
Yeah, my local libraries don't in general even want book donations for them to sell for 10-cents anymore. I think that the problem is that library budgets have been cut to the bone and they just don't have the money to pay their staff to deal with all of this extra stuff. Here's what one NYC library system has to say about this:
http://www.bklynpubliclibrary.org/support/donating-library-materials/
On looking through their PDF manuals, it appears that the charging cable is separately connected, not part of what looks like a thick wiring harness. Maybe they supply a charging cable or maybe they leave it up to the use to supply their own.
As for your other question to which I had intended to reply before but forgot, it need not be a special charging cable "for the blind", but perhaps for some other type of accessibility device. The person who started this thread didn't specifically say that Apple was opening themselves up to a suit by a blind user, just by some user whose accessibility apparatus depended on a cable that worked before but not after their "upgrade". It was you who asked that person what his disability was, rather than asking what types of disability / accessibility hardware he was referring to.
Well, this one may in fact be licensed, I don't know, but unless I'm blind it's clearly a special cable for an iPhone:
http://www.dynamiccontrols.com/component/docman/doc_download/169-jontys-story-iportal-accessibility-case-study
This is a backported change, so if he has equipment that he must use because of his blindness that previously worked with a non-Apple-blessed cable and now stopped working because of the change, then he may be able to show that he has been discriminated against.
Now that we understand his problem, what's yours?