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Comment by ihsw | Hacker News Reader

> trust that keeps the society together

The success of Uber and Airbnb rides on that, you are correct, but we have seen that people are generally good about working within that trust.

Every single month, millions of people take the risk you are talking about and they're fine.

People hop into cars with complete strangers (or homes of complete strangers) where there is a minimal level of security, and they're fine.

We are witnessing the capacity at which society is willing take risk with one-another, and I think we are going to increasingly see the limits being tested. Direct financial risk is right around the corner and we will see people lending to each-other on a large scale.

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I didn't mean that kind of trust. You see, AirBnB and Uber are perfect for their customers. They offer quality services cheaper and better than the alternatives. But the true cost of those services is hidden from the customers.

In case of AirBnB, it's the issue with subletting we're discussing here, which a) damages neighbourhoods quality of life, and b) antagonizes landlords and people who want to rent. It is to be expected that, as AirBnB grows popular, landlords will be much more suspicious and the contracts they offer will be worse for people seeking a place to live.

In case of Uber, they blatantly break the law and have enough money to get away with it. This destroys the trust other taxi drivers have in their local administration ("Why are you letting them get away with it? Why do we have to follow law?") which, as we've seen over the last year, leads them to desperate, stupid-ass protests and gridlocking cities. That antagonizes taxi drivers and general population, the latter then loses trust in the administration which, for some obviously completely unreasonable reason, tries to ban the great Uber.

Why are you conflating the taxi-driver desperation and the general population's trust in the administration?

Many see the taxi-driver cartels for what they are, and act in the interest of the general populace by removing the restrictions. This restores trust in the administration.

And whether Airbnb actually damages the quality of life in neighborhoods is not proven, and I highly doubt landlords will get more suspicious. Insurance providers for vehicle owners and homeowners aren't making noise, so the risk is only to incumbents' business models.

> Why are you conflating the taxi-driver desperation and the general population's trust in the administration?

How I'm conflating the two? Taxi drivers get desperate because they can't compete with someone who's breaking the law, and they don't have the money to ignore the law themselves. The genera population gets annoyed because they see government trying to mess up what seems to be a perfectly good service for them.

> Many see the taxi-driver cartels for what they are, and act in the interest of the general populace by removing the restrictions. This restores trust in the administration.

If by "many" you meant governments here then I agree. Governments that see the cartels and remove the problematic regulations are seen as a good thing. But, at least in Europe, it's often the case that those regulations arose for some reasons and are beneficial to the public. The government is reluctant to touch those.

> And whether Airbnb actually damages the quality of life in neighborhoods is not proven, and I highly doubt landlords will get more suspicious.

It's not proven in general, but it is in particular cases, by the sole virtue of reports and journalist investigations. Nobody is accusing AirBnB of only profiting off damaging things - but we have enough evidence to notice that those destructive deals are a big part of their business.

> Insurance providers for vehicle owners (...) aren't making noise, so the risk is only to incumbents' business models.

Why would they make noise? They just add a "no Uber" clause and get to happily keep their money when a person who didn't notice (or elected to ignore) that particular point gets into a car crash while driving for Uber.

I can't predict the future, but I resigned a lease this weekend and noticed a new clause that banned AirBnB et al.

At least you're right about the trust between management and leasees degrading to the point that it has to be specifically called out on contracts. Anyone know what percentage of AirBnB is rentals, and how that would impact their revenue if they're phased out in 10 years?

What pisses me off, as a condo owner who had this sort of language specifically written into my condo association documents is that it was essentially already there! It's there in condo documents, it's there in town laws and it's there in state laws. But it didn't specifically say "Airbnb or other short-term rental services", which seems to be what it takes to get anyone to actually pay any attention that what they're doing isn't wanted and in fact isn't legal.

"Anyone know what percentage of AirBnB is rentals, and how that would impact their revenue if they're phased out in 10 years?" I'd love it if this data were accessible, but, alas, Airbnb has been very secretive about that (if they even have that data; they might be sticking their heads in the sand and playing dumb if/when their clients are busted for breaking the laws).

Are HOA docs public? Could they be scraped from the county recorder's website?

If you were able to tie HOA or other community org bylaws to property addresses, you'd be able to get the data you're looking for.

I have mulled at a startup idea to report AirBnB listings to HOAs that prohibit short term rentals (property compliance), just haven't gone down that road yet.

Trust isn't about outcomes. In the case of AirBnB, it doesn't matter if the "guests" in the apartment or condo next door don't bludgeon me to death. Trust is violated when my neighbor ignores the terms of his or her lease (or legally binding HOA CC&Rs) and decides to turn the community into a hotel for his or her own gain.

You know, financial theory pretty much has this theory of people lending directly to each other not looking so good.

Quite frankly, you have zero predictive ability to outperform the market, particularly over an extended timespan or multiple credit cycles.

Furthermore, even if you were to "average out" / index your portfolio of P2P loans, your transaction costs would be way higher than simply going through a financial institution that streamlines that process for you so as to minimize transaction costs.

Aside from legal reasons, this is one reason stocks and other financial instruments aren't sold P2P. Considering transaction costs are probably the biggest controllable variable affecting your portfolio's returns, particularly over time, I just can't see how this makes the cost of borrowing go down for the system as a whole.

Never mind that individuals can't lend other people's money on a fractional-reserve basis. Once you factor that in, the P2P lender is at a huge disadvantage.

Can you elaborate? This isn't necessarily true.

I have to actually have cash in order to lend it to someone, right? A bank can lend out more cash than it actually has (since this cash is the depositors', and they could not return all depositors cash if they asked for it all at once, having lent 90% of it out)

How could an individual operate similarly?

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