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Comment by jdp23 | Hacker News Reader

Here's an excerpt from the librarian's Facebook post that went viral:

"Out of your $12 mil of hotel tax, only 1.4% percent goes to the SF Public Libraries. So that's $168,000. Divided by the 868 library staff, we have $193 per person. Assuming each employee works 5 days per week minus holidays, this is $0.78 per employee per day. Since that's significantly under San Francisco minimum wage ($12.25/hr), I doubt that your hotel tax can keep the libraries open more than a minute or two later.

However, had you donated that $8 million you spent fighting Proposition F directly to the public libraries you love so much, that could have made a bigger difference. Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20!"

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100700506082939

Also note the comment: "what a smug, shitty ad"

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Ah, thanks! As someone unfamiliar with how taxes are used in SF this ad seemed completely fine to me but after hearing how the taxes are really provisioned this is obviously really misleading.

I agree that the ad is tone deaf, but this criticism is not relevant. AirBNB doesn't determine how much of its taxes go to libraries, and the $8m they've spent fighting Prop F probably pales in comparison to what the hotel lobby has spent.

Here's some info on the amount that has been spent on advertising on Prop F.

http://ballotpedia.org/City_of_San_Francisco_Initiative_to_R...

Reported financing in favor or prop F is $354,398 raised, $354,398 spent (these numbers are in the link above).

Against prop F has raised $8,432,791 and spent $3,601,423.

That's a silly argument. The point of the ad is that the hotel taxes allow the city to offer better public services. Of course if your analysis only considers 1.4% of the tax money you'll find the benefits aren't that impressive. But then you have to account for what the other 98.6% of the money is doing: presumably providing other public services!

If SF spent the whole $12 million on libraries, that would be $55/employee/day, which seems plenty to keep libraries open for an extra few hours. Even if SF only spent "some" of the money on libraries, as the ad suggested, even spending $3 million would come to $14/employee/day which seems enough for a meaningful expansion of services.

That "silly" argument is directly refuting the silly specificity on the silly poster.

Maybe I'm the one confused here, but your response doesn't make sense to me -- it's like you're almost agreeing with the librarian but you don't think you are. Airbnb "started it" by focusing on one specific service (libraries) and humble-brag-whining about how it better improve because they/customers are paying so much. It makes perfect sense then to show how that one specific service Airbnb singled out will not be able to achieve what Airbnb says it should, because it doesn't get nearly as much money as Airbnb implied by tossing around a huge number.

As to hypothetical numbers at the end, why? The percentage the libraries get is fixed by the city, presumably...

P.S. Apparently they have variations of the ad for other services. Maybe on some, however they phrased it makes more sense, but not really in the libraries' case.

P.P.S There is actually a small fallacy/glossing-over in the librarian's argument: the $12MM (or 1.4% thereof) is (presumably) an increase that Airbnb can claim credit for. But theoretically the library could have other sources of income that together would allow for more opening hours. I guess the assumption is that they don't have a lot of surplus.

That's an incoherent argument when Air B&B has other ads touting their support of other government services. Splitting them up with arbitrary large amounts makes their contribution to the tax coffers seem larger than it is.

If they're suggesting they are paying so much taxes that (among other things) the library can now offer longer hours the librarian's post is a pretty straightforward approach of how you should analyze it.

It's $193 which is more than nothing but not much...but there are also a lot of other business taxes that pay for the library - what businesses are all the other contributions coming from?

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