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Comment by ProblemFactory | Hacker News Reader

It's funny to see the sharing economy promoted as a goal in itself, when 30 years ago one of the criticisms of the Soviet Union was that people there are so poor that they are forced to share kitchens and cars with strangers.

Nobody wants to share things, it's all done for economic reasons. People buy on AirBNB and Uber because it's cheaper than an equivalent hotel or taxi. People sell on AirBNB and Uber because they need the extra income.

For a short while, VC investments paid out as bonuses to the participants, and just the novelty of the thing might keep both sides happy. But eventually there has to be a balance found between "I want to pay less" and "I want to earn as much as before" and "government wants as much taxes as before".

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For what it's worth, I genuinely like using AirBNB over most hotels due to the service and insights I get from the host. It also tends to feel cozier. Similarly, I used to prefer hostels to hotels for the human interaction, though I've gotten pretty old for that.

Well, that means that AirBNB should be charging more that an equivalent hotel room, doesn't it? At least to the market segment that values the same things that you do.

I am wondering how many segments there are in the "accomodations" industry. We have the homely/warm/cozy opinioned root kind of segment CalRobert has exemplified; then we have the dirt-cheap hobo-shelter-minus-stabbing that people on a tight budget seem to value, etc.

Any thoughts.

I would not be surprised if AirBNB has applied their data engineers to the task of identifying these segments; it sounds like a classic unguided ML problem.

To be fair, if more hotels were cozy and made it easier to meet local people I'd be more inclined to go with hotels. They're not _bad_, per se, just kind of sterile.

There are exceptions, of course. I've stayed in small, usually family-run, bnb's in rural Ireland, and Germany's romantic road. These tend to be more charming.

AirBNB does charge market rates for that stuff. They just work out to be cheaper because they don't provide other costly things that many hotels do.

> They just work out to be cheaper because they don't provide other costly things that many hotels do.

Like local hotel taxes.

And insurance premiums, and ADA-compliant housing...

I understand and agree with you w.r.t. hostels vs. hotels, and also feeling too old for that scene. I regularly get the impression that people become less outgoing over time (unless they're already tipsy when you meet them). I feel like when I meet people around my age (late 30s/early 40s) they're already all friended up and will donate no more than polite small talk or mindless automatic chit-chat. The halcyon days of being moulded by new experiences and sharing in a stranger's adventures belong to my son now :)

I can sympathize there. I still like meeting new people, but I have a partner now, which makes it harder. Also, I suppose the conversation has to shift a bit; you can only talk about which countries you've gone to before it seems like you're just having the same chat over and over again.

Also, when you're older and have already spent a decade or more accumulating good friends (one hopes!) the exploration/exploitation equation starts to favour spending more time with old friends than making new ones.

It's about shared negative emotional experiences, of which their are more when one is young e.g. school, leaving home. It follows that if you wish to befriend adults you need to share a rock climbing accident, get stuck together in an airport for 72 hours, or similar.

"It's funny to see the sharing economy promoted as a goal in itself, when 30 years ago one of the criticisms of the Soviet Union was that people there are so poor that they are forced to share kitchens and cars with strangers."

And how the soviet union would only have one manufacturer and one shitty product.

Now we have walmart.

No matter the ideology, powerful people will want to possess power and wealth and will use whatever systems are in place to get there.

> one shitty product.

Many of the things made during the Soviet era were made to last. I'd recommend the documentary: "The Lightbulb Conspiracy." It talks about planned obsolesce and the throw away economy.

It's not necessarily because the Soviet state, but more simply due to resource scarcity and needing to make things that last a very long time.

It's more than appalling that our cell phones are only intended to last two ~ four years. Of course that gives miners and Chinese manufactures jobs and growth (and the war industry too as they start a few more wars to collect resources).

> but more simply due to resource scarcity and needing to make things that last a very long time

And no pressure to make shitty things just to ensure you have return customers.

Increase sales tax on status/luxury items. Decrease sales tax on long-life products.

I don't see how the latter would help - "long-life" products would break anyway.

OTOH, if we could get minimum warranties from the EU's standard 2 years to something like 20 years for appliances and 10+ years for digital electronics... maybe then companies would start to care.

The idea is to give companies an incentive to make tough stuff by increasing their revenue for such products. But let's do both!

There is both good and bad in a quick product cycle.

The bad, if done wrong, you get poor recycling of input materials. If done right, you get iteratively better more environmentally friendly products.

We would not want to be using inefficient air conditioners, washers, dryers, refrigerators, water heaters, etc. from yen years ago. They are simply inefficient compared to a new model. The problem is in recycling the displaced products.

>Many of the things made during the Soviet era were made to last.

They were made to last because they were costly and difficult to obtain, but they were of shockingly poor quality. Consumer goods in the soviet union were uniformly terrible. These dreadful products were the natural result of material shortages, obsolete design, inept management, a total indifference to quality and consumers who had no other choice.

Look at soviet cars. Trabants, Yugos and Ladas were shoddily built from the cheapest materials. Soviet citizens kept these cars running because they had no other choice - either you figured out some way to fix up your pile of junk, or you walked. When Ladas and Yugos were exported to the west, they required major upgrades to meet safety and emissions standards and were still the worst cars on the market.

That maps across the entire soviet economy. The very best goods available to soviet citizens were usually worse than the shoddiest goods on the western market.

Walmart doesn't source from a single manufacturer though, and while competing with them may not be a walk in the park, it's still orders of magnitude less tricky than competing with state owned soviet companies ever was.

There's plenty of wrong with the current state of facts, but suggesting it's roughly similar, let alone equivalent, to what the situation was in the USSR is quite ridiculous.

While I don't disagree with the overall content of your post, but the world is not so black and white as you paint it with "Nobody wants to share things". Look at long running projects like Couchsurfing for example. Also, from a personal perspective, I always liked to share my possessions with other people. Interestingly I'm much worse at sharing my time.

See also young children and tribal communities. They love sharing with eachother and do so spontaneously.

But do you think those people you mention would "love to share" if they were forced to it in order to secure a safe place to sleep and a plate of food?

Well they usually are forced to. They accept sharing with others as just the way of the world, not something they get to have a personal opinion about.

>> Look at long running projects like Couchsurfing for example

The big difference is that, unlike those "sharing" economy companies, Couchsurfing was not a business, and once it turned its focus to making money an exodus of "users" ensued.

Couchsurfing was not targeted at Airbnb's "get a cheap place to sleep at city X" demographic, and people that couldn't demonstrate they were looking for anything other than a low cost hotel would see their requests turned down. Couchsurfing users were willing to share their house, not for a small amount of money, but for the value of making international acquaintances (and friends for life, sometimes), which is something they also received through the service when going abroad.

But AirBnB and Uber aren't actually sharing. The uber driver isn't carpooling on their way to work, they're your driver, which is a luxury. Likewise an entire apartment on vacation is much better than a hotel room.

Actual sharing like couch surfing hasn't been nearly as popular.

I remember reading a blog post on "The Bullshit Sharing Economy" while I was backpacking and it made the same general argument.

If it were a real sharing economy, the developers and system engineers on the platform would make the same hourly rates as the drivers. In such a way everyone would contribute to the co-op and everyone would benefit.

It'd be interesting to see a price breakdown internally at Uber or Lyft and see how much people would actually get paid if every driver/contractor and every dev/admin/janitor/board member were to make the same hourly rate.

I generally agree that the "sharing" economy isn't a sharing economy. But I don't think this:

  If it were a real sharing economy, the developers and system
  engineers on the platform would make the same hourly rates as
  the drivers. In such a way everyone would contribute to the
  co-op and everyone would benefit.

follows.

Different services are worth different amounts depending on the value they yield and, sometimes, who they're targeted at. If a relatively small team of programmers can enable a massive business, then they may be deserving of apparently outsized compensation for their time and work.

This is the leak that connects "sharing economy" with real economy. In a proper sharing economy (e.g. couchsurfing), you don't have compensation.

lol I fail to see the logic in where "real sharing" and equal wage became correlated. If I lent my lawnmower to my neighbor what does that have to do with his wage?

Presumably because you shouldn't be even talking wages in a sharing economy, at least not beyond money flow that's necessary to keep the system afloat.

> People buy on AirBNB and Uber because it's cheaper than an equivalent hotel or taxi. People sell on AirBNB and Uber because they need the extra income.

So everyone's a winner, what's the problem? Everyone is getting a better deal than they would with an alternative, excellent I say.

I'd rather have a bigger salary and not to have to share my living-room with total strangers in order to have a decent income.

One of the AirBnBs I crashed at when I was between permanent residences was a 2 bed apartment operated by a lovely Polish couple. They rented out both the bedrooms and had converted the living room into a permanent bedsit for themselves in order to make ends meet living in a reasonable part of London.

I'm not sure whether the ability to do this truly empowered them, whether the life with it is better than the alternative. Clearly they judge it to be.

On the other hand was a chap renting out his spare room who loved being a host, chatting to the people he met etc etc. He was definitely happier with it.

The danger is that the experience of your London hosts becomes normalised and the market rent rises to match it.

That's not how market forces work. If you increase the supply, the price goes down, not up.

You're probably overlooking the change in the quality of the good. Demand in London is highly elastic. If a lot of new sleeping units come on to the market, they will be filled easily because lots of people want to live there.

Now suppose we divide old units of accommodation priced £ in two (halve the slope of the supply curve). The price of a new unit will be close to £. But an old unit then costs nearly 2£. So you have a choice between slum housing and coughing up double the rent.

But banning AirBnB seems unlikely to improve your salary, and while it may actually lower your rent, it probably shan't do so by very much at all.

> But banning AirBnB seems unlikely to improve your salary

I have nothing against AirBnb itself, I was generally talking about the bigger and bigger disconnect that has formed between the middle classes (who have seen their real wages stagnating for the last 10-15 years in the Western world) and the holders of capital, presumably because the latter have accumulated more and more wealth also because of those stagnating wages for the middle classes.

We both know that without VC money (which in the end comes from holders of big capital) companies like AirBnb and Uber wouldn't be where they are right now.

The solution then is to heavily incentivize the middle and lower classes to acquire capital other than owner-occupied housing.

renting your place out on AirBnB allows a middle income person to receive income from capital assets.

I had been backpacking for 11 months when I was running low on resources and decided to go back to the tech industry.

I had look at places that needed roommates, but the good ones filled up by the time I called back and the others were not places I wanted to live. I ended up paying a premium for having my own place.

http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/

Looking back, I didn't want to share after spending much of that time in hostels and shared spaces. But months later, I realize the benefits I've lost. I have too much stuff once again and am desperately trying to cut down. I'm in a city that's filled with cold an unfriendly people, and thanks to having my own place, allows me to be more of a hermit.

I plan on buying a car again at some point and downsizing to less than a car full of stuff. Big salaries are a kind of death trap. It can get people addicted and justify jobs that many of us hate. I'd rather have the small salary and only have enough stuff that I only take up one room; where I could easily pack up and leave.

I kinda like hotel and taxi regulations. I feel they keep things safe, clean and above-board. Despite what Republicans would have you believe, regulations don't come about because some lawmakers got bored, they come about in answer to a problem. Don't tear down that fence before you understand why it was constructed...

You're welcome to use hotels and taxis that you like. The issue is with stopping other people from using hotels and taxis that you don't like.

It's not a matter of "like", regulated industries are a matter of "safe" and "consistent".

I disagree. I think safety and ethics standards are important and I don't think it's reasonable to expect every citizen to be able to completely evaluate every single product or service they consume.

I think that is what the parent was suggesting. Those who want the government's evaluation can utilize the services offered by licensed providers, and those who want to do the evaluation themselves can choose whoever they want.

Except why do those licensed providers have to adhere to those laws, maybe they don't want to also?

As well, maybe it takes a while before the true societal risks are understood, AitBNB regulations may be too weak for some reason, but until we discover that, perhaps we've "unfairly" put some marginal hotels out of business that would have survived under the impending new legislation. (Hope that makes sense?)

They adhere to the laws to maintain their licensing to attract the consumers that demand that. As with now, customers pay a premium to have a certain standard certified for them, which benefits the service provider through higher incomes.

As I touched on a above, the thing about restricted markets is that price is able to rise artificially due to the unnaturally constrained supply. This ends up being a government subsidy; one that is disproportionally paid for by the poorest people. If you are already comfortable with subsidizing licensed businesses, why not continue to subsidize the marginal ones? Perhaps even in a way that is less impactful to the poorest people?

What people are discovering is that tech + crowdsourced feedback loop is better than gov regulation. Feedback loop is faster, more thorough, and more reliable.

What's the feedback loop for someone that lives next to a place being rented out on AirBnB?

If there is a loud party, call the cops.

And when the cops are getting called every week what happens?

Congratulations. You just invented "zoning laws".

Nothing, as long as the participants aren't violating the law. Much in the same way that you don't get any input on how long my grass is, unless it happens to be a fire hazard.

Actually, to the contrary, through things like town ordinances and homeowner's associations it is very likely that you do get to have input on how long your neighbor's grass is

I got fined by the city once for "harboring rodents" because my neighbor felt my grass was too long (and was also a dick).

My city has an ordinance for a fire hazard. It's established as a specific length. My neighbor does not get input on that, it either is, or is not, a violation of the city ordinance.

> What people are discovering is that tech + crowdsourced feedback loop is better than gov regulation. Feedback loop is faster, more thorough, and more reliable.

You have very little evidence that this is true.

And anecdotal data suggests that explicit "social ranking" introduces a whole host of other problems. See: the kerfuffle about AirBnB and renting to minorities.

What people still fail to discover though, is that "crowdsourced feedback loop" is very vulnerable to companies with lots of money to spend on the so-called "growth hacking".

> You're welcome to use hotels and taxis that you like. The issue is with stopping other people from using hotels and taxis that you don't like.

My issue would be buying a house or condo with the neighbors across the hall or across the street changing daily. It's not an issue of the quality of the hotel. It's an issue of respecting zoning laws.

But the reason we don't like them is that they choose to skirt the law.

you want to be in highly regulated environment, and pay according price for it? great, you have hotels, hostels and so on.

somebody would like to spend less, be in more welcoming/cozy/more spacious environment, have a kitchen at hand and so on? well there is now an option for those too.

I don't see where the problem lies. just don't take perks from the other 'side' as granted.

Sure, but then we have streets filled with taxis, out-of-towners renting space in areas not built to accommodate them, an increase in sickness due to poor sanitation, people getting scammed or worse by shady drivers or landlords, and so on. These things affect me, too, even if I'm not participating in the service.

This is expected, no law is perfect for everyone. Less regulation has it problem but also has it benefit.

And collectively we get to decide the ratio of problem to benefit we will tolerate. We call those decisions laws...

>people getting scammed or worse by shady drivers or landlords

People get scammed by shady taxi drivers and landlords all the time. Regulations don't work. Haven't you heard about all the taxi drivers who don't take credit cards because "the card reader is broken"? I've had this happen many times, and I don't even use taxis very much.

I'm okay with hotel and taxi regulations...as long as they deal strictly with quality and not quantity. Unfortunately, in too many locations there is a hard cap on the number of taxis, which leads to rent-seeking, low quality of service, and high prices.

>I kinda like hotel and taxi regulations. I feel they keep things safe, clean and above-board.

Your feelings don't match reality. The licensed taxis I've ridden in were nasty, far worse than the unlicensed Uber cars I've ridden in. Taxi: 20-year-old P-O-S Crown Victoria. Uber: 2-year-old Mercedes

There's also plenty of rat-trap motels out there that are properly licensed. I live a couple of miles from one; people have even put videos on YouTube about how awful it is there. There's plenty of really nice hotels too, but that's because people are willing to pay double the price of the rat-trap, and those hotel chains are nation-wide and want to maintain their reputations, not because of any regulations. The only thing regulations are good for is making sure places don't burn down. And even that's iffy; generally places just burn down anyway and then someone gets punished afterwards.

Your argument is anecdotal and based on empirical and not scientific data. I've ridden in many fine taxis. It depends on the city, cultures, cab companies, regulations and a host of other factors.

There are terrible motels and good motels; same with hostels. I've stayed in many hostels that were far Superior and better value than hotels. I've been in some that had mold infestations everywhere.

Regulations play a part, and the are an important part of equality. Do people game the system, bend the rules and lobby to pass their own laws that benefit them over the customers and employees. Of course.

But it's all a very complicated system. You need to do a lot of surveys, research and have a good set of controls to say "regulations might correlate with x, y and z," and you'd need people to replicate your work before you can even start addressing causality.

No, you don't need to do any of that stuff to disprove an invalid claim.

A claim was made that "I feel that regulation makes things clean and safe". I pointed out that that claim is utterly false using actual examples. I don't have to prove that regulation doesn't work anywhere, I only have to prove that it doesn't work somewhere. And in the places I've used taxis (NJ, AZ), they're awful. I have used them in NYC too, and those are OK (though to be fair, I'm not black, which I've read is a big problem there). You're right: it depends on the city, etc. Regulations and regulators are different in different places. But to make the broad claim that "regulation is wonderful!!" is blatantly false, and easily disproven by showing only one example of a place where it doesn't work right. Now, if you want to make the claim that "regulation works really well in location X", that's a defensible claim, and only disproven by showing that things are actually bad in location X (and not other locations).

This seems to be the problem with this whole regulation vs. anti-regulation argument WRT taxis and hotels: the pro-regulation people cherry-pick a few places where things seem to be OK. The anti-regulation point out that their experiences in other places are entirely different. The pro-regulation people them stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to believe that there's places where regulations don't work well. Maybe regulation really does work well in those cherry-picked places, but that doesn't help the places where the regulation is bad and the regulators are corrupt.

Regulations aren't mathematical proofs. Laws not working somewhere doesn't justify tearing them down everywhere. You don't see people arguing "Hey, seen that robbery on the news? Those regulations obviously don't work; fuck it, let's make theft legal."

To reiterate coldpie's point, "regulations don't come about because some lawmakers got bored, they come about in answer to a problem". Before going full anti-regulatory based on personal experience, one would be good to consider the relative impact on all places.

I never said they should be torn down or that they can never work.

I merely have the position that regulation is not the panacea that the pro-regulation people seem to think it is. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, then instead of harassing the people who work around broken regulations which just support rent-seeking by cronies, maybe we should look at fixing the political system and eliminating the corruption and bad regulation and bad regulators instead. But that's never proposed as a solution, probably because 1) it's too hard, and 2) the pro-regulation people don't like to admit to the existence of corruption.

"regulations don't come about because some lawmakers got bored, they come about in answer to a problem"

Sure, if you consider the desire of incumbent businesses to lock out competition and artificially inflate their profits to be a "problem".

They come in answer to a percieved problem. Lots of people like to make noise about "that one bad thing they heard happened that one time"

>For a short while, VC investments paid out as bonuses to the participants, and just the novelty of the thing might keep both sides happy. But eventually there has to be a balance found between "I want to pay less" and "I want to earn as much as before" and "government wants as much taxes as before".

Eventually, a "business" has to actually create value and earn a profit somehow. If VCs actually intend to support neat stuff on charity, they can just write checks to the National Science Foundation.

My place is on AirBnB because the income is great and gives me the freedom to hang out anywhere I want in the world while someone else pays to stay in my place.

In other words, "sharing" is for the educated singles that can work from anywhere at any time...

I use Uber for its pleasant vehicles and drivers, more than its cost. I'd absolutely user then over taxis even if they were 20% more expensive.

I don't use airbnb because my travel needs can't tolerate any random last minute host cancellation. I continue to use hotels. I'm rarely happy with hotel prices but I am willing to pay for reliability of service.

> Nobody wants to share things. I don't think that is always true. Some people want to see resources being used efficiently, which is why they like to share.

I personally hate buying things. I prefer pre-furnished bedrooms and roommates who share whiteware and dishes. It's nice to be able to live somewhere for a year and still pack everything up in the same two bags after a year and take off again.

It's mostly done for economic reasons, but there is a social aspect to sharing too. More so on couchsurfing than airbnb, and i generally prefer to chat to a part time uber driver than to a full time taxi driver.

> People sell on AirBNB and Uber because they need the extra income.

That's true for some people. But for others, it's more "want" than "need".

Like one driver I rode with last week: she started driving for Lyft part-time, in addition to her day job, because she wanted to make a little extra money in order to afford the down payment on a house. She didn't need to do that; she could have continued living in her existing place indefinitely, and her day job lets her afford her current living expenses just fine. But she wanted something more, so she took up Lyft. And I got the impression that she'll give up Lyft as soon as the down payment is made.

Or other drivers I've talked to who could work a full-time job in another field and make a decent living doing so, but choose to drive for Uber or Lyft because they like the idea of being their own boss. This actually reminds me of how insurance companies work... I've been approached by a few of them while unemployed in the past, and they came off as pyramid schemes to me, but there are a few people who have the mindset to make it work for them, and they enjoy it.

OK I don't want to fall for the bait or anything but how in insurance a pyramid scheme?

(I should probably qualify that I'm specifically talking about life insurance here. Other kinds of insurance may be different.)

You have to pay to become an agent, you work solely on commission, and you have to pay for all of your own work expenses (drive around to meet with clients? You pay for the gas!). The agent who recruited you into the biz gets a cut.

It's probably best to browse sites like ripoff report for descriptions of how being a life insurance agent works. A lot of people are unhappy with the system, but if you look through the reports, you'll also see positive reviews by agents who are happy with how the system works who are.

Here's one (this specific company repeatedly contacted me in 2010-2011): http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/liberty-national-life-in...

Here's how one review compares it to a pyramid scheme:

> So let me get this straight. You are hired informally through a conference type atmosphere where they sell you their business opportunity. They tell you that it is your business and you get what you put in. Claiming that you can make over 100k each each year working solely on commission. After reaching a sales cap they place you ahead of 5 low level sales persons. When those people reach their sales cap they give you five more or 'promote' you again to have 5 managers below you and 5 agents below each of them?

> If this in anyway sounds like the operation that liberty National adheres to then it is a Pyramid Scheme.

Another says:

> This is not a job for anyone without deep pockets. It is an expensive company to go to work for. I have probably spent more money to work for this company than for all other companies I have worked for combined!

And another:

> Also, count on spending several hundreds of dollars (or thousands) to work for this company. You will have to have a (relatively) new laptop computer and a GPS plus appropriate attire and suitable automobile. You'll probably be driving 100 miles a day at your expense. It is unlikely that you'll make enough money in the first few months to off-set these expenses and have anything left over for your family. I've probably spent more than I've made with Liberty National.

But here's one guy who made being an agent work for him and really likes it:

> I have enjoyed the comments from "ex-employees" of the company. I started in August of '06. Prior to this career move, I owned a business for 6 years, worked 16 hours a day consistantly.

> The reason I bring that up is, I believed in what I was doing, these comments have a common thread, LAZY people expecting more than they are willing to put in!

> I have been with Liberty for over a year now, I have worked very hard to get what I have and where I am with the company, with out my "WORK ETHIC" I would not be where I am, with that said, I have not worked a 16 hour day since I sold my business in '06...on average I work 9-11 hours 5 days a week...not bad when you consider my yearly income IS over 6 figures! Oh, and I get to see my family!

> 1. If you work hard, yes you can make over $100k your first year, I did!

But life insurance companies sell a real product (life insurance) that produces real revenue (the premiums).

This sounds like legitimate MLM not a pyramid scheme. I'd suggest reading the MLM section on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme

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