So you are saying we can't enforce our existing regulations, so the answer is to create new regulations.
I say enforce the existing, narrowly tailored regulations before creating new, broad ones.
1,797 karma · joined September 10, 2012
I say enforce the existing, narrowly tailored regulations before creating new, broad ones.
Now this place is fun too, we have a nano-brewery opening up, hipster restaurants, new boat tours...
The town planner loves AirBnB because it lets the town use some slack housing supply like guest cottages and in-law suites to host visitors in the downtown area, where it would be impossible to build a new hotel.
And short term rentals bring in a different kind of visitor than the hotels ever did. People come and stay for a week with their family.
It's all really nice actually.
And a large majority of AirBnB hosts are women. AirBnB is empowering a lot of women to become micro real estate entrepreneurs and earn money.
When people support blanket bans, they are cutting off income and opportunity for people, mostly women.
Punish bad guests, have the police fine them. Towns make money off speeding and parking tickets, I see no reason they can't make money off the occasional guest violating a noise ordinance.
A short term rental is residential use, just like a long term rental is residential use. In both cases the property is used by people to live and sleep in.
The question is does local government have the right to regulate the duration of a rental lease?
I would argue it doesn't, and it's a blatant violation of sacred property rights for a government to take that power.
The answer to problems of noise is to enforce noise ordinances. Guests will keep quiet if they are told that the town hands out $500 fines for violations of decibel levels after curfew.
There are simple market and incentive based solutions but so many Americans are so quick to jump on the "Ban! Regulate!" knee jerk train these days.
Investment properties have incentives in place to not spend money on maintenance, not spend on upkeep to the extent the owner can get away with it.
With a vacation rental the incentive is to make it as nice as possible to charge a premium, and the rents support a higher level of finish and polish to a property.
I live right between two short term rentals and people come and go all the time, and I love it. I've met so many cool people, especially from Europe travelling in the US.
The house is kept up much nicer than the other multi families around it.
None of the guests have ever once had a party, made noise, left trash or anything negative.
Short term rentals are considered residential use in my town, and they make up the backbone of the local economy. A public forum was called and almost two hundred locals, many of whom have lived here for decades, spoke in favor.
Only two cranks got up and spoke against. There reasons were all about hypothetical harms and imagined worst case scenarios.
My town is a popular vacation destination for families and weddings. There are about 200 short term rentals and the two opponents were unable to come up with any actual examples of misbehavior, there was not one noise complaint, prostitution, drug use or any other worst case scenarios trotted out against AirBnB. There was a recent prostitution arrest at a local hotel though.
The difference between AirBnB and hotels, is that AirBnB runs an extensive criminal and sex offender background check on hosts and guests. They even check the terrorist watch list!
One opponent at first tried to say that an AirBnB house was hosting loud parties on weekends, and people were drunkenly sleeping in their cars and knocking on their windows. The newspaper ran this story prominently. It turned out it was the owner's young adult children that were throwing the parties when it wasn't rented to families on AirBnB.
My state has struck a deal with AirBnB to collect occupancy tax directly and we are contributing a lot in taxes in a state with a budget crisis.
Homes and rentals are still abundant and affordable, and our town gets all kinds of cool visitors that enrich our town.
I love AirBnB, my town has been doing vacation rentals for a hundred years but it has made it more popular and better. The new visitors are supporting a bunch of nice new and more upscale restaurants and bars. It's really revitalized this town and made it a much for fun place for young professionals to live.
Short term rentals started the revitalization, then new eateries opened, and next I hope we can attract a few tech companies now that we are a more desirable place to live.
In the American economy of 2017 if you don't have scale, pop, leverage, access to the discount window etc... you are going to be poor or close to it.
"The accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, can not continue"
- John von Neumann
I would argue that the intelligence explosion has already occurred. Human affairs as we knew them when that line was uttered have been fragmenting and crumbling all across the world.
The internet itself, the current 10 billion or so machines networked together have resulted in a fundamental change in the human condition.
All of us are operating with amplified brains now. We have access to knowledge from the entire corpus of human information at the touch of our fingers, or now with our voice.
I would say human intelligence is already machine amplified.
The runaway reaction has already begun.
As far as ML, we have seen this before. When the tools get cheaper and easier to use, adoption goes up. RoR + cheap cloud servers and easy VC financing greatly increased the number of startups.
Now TensorFlow and the Nvidia Pascal architecture have made ML accessible and fast.
If there is one thing history has shown us, it is that the Hacker News comment section is full of myopic pessimists with an axe to grind (no offense peers!) -- just go back and look at the Dropbox launch thread here.
Even if ML doesn't meet all the hype (it won't for a time, and then later on it will probably exceed it and create things we can't even dream about right now) there will be an entire wave of ML startups, products and jobs.
There is a ton of money to be made on the ML train guys. It's the new social-local-mobile. Much will be shit, some will change all our lives for the better.
I'm old enough now to know how this works.
Edit PS.
I've heard listenable, interesting music completely generated with tensorflow. I have seen artwork that is arguably as good as anything any of the greats have put out generated through similar methods, and we are in the infancy of machine learning.
Machines have beaten humans at chess, go and most impressively in my opinion Jeopardy!
ML is real and it's here and you should leverage it as much as you can, all the knowledge and tools are free.
If I want to try out something new like this and play around with it, I want it to be snappy.
I am vehemently opposed to the idea that PC's are "fast enough" -- more speed, less waiting!
The only compromise I make is avoiding the extreme versions of their chips, as they can almost $1,000 more. But in the future I might change my mind on that.
Time is the one thing you can't buy more of.
I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but do plan on banking my own stem cells while I'm in my early 30's because parts of me will inevitably start to break down in the coming decades, and I really like the idea of tapping my own young cells when I am old to heal some of that.
The only company I know of that is doing this is Forever Labs, https://www.foreverlabs.co/, I am not associated with them, I just think they are on the right track with stem-cell banking and have spoken to one of the founders and was pretty excited about what they were doing and think its something worth supporting, which is why I'm writing this comment.
It has profound negative effects on the child, and leads to really terrible outcomes like drug abuse and absenteeism.
We have a lot of evidence that shows this. What you posit above amounts to exploiting the gifted child to benefit the needs of the other children. Gifted children are very open to being exploited by peers and teachers in the regular classroom.
It's wrong, and a detriment to the children and society.
I know that the ideology espoused on sites such as dailykos.com were very detrimental to personal drive and success in my college years of 18-22.
That ideology kept pounding home the idea of the unfairness of the economy, of the lower share of the pie allocated to labor vs capital and the increasing inequality of American society.
All of those things were true no doubt, but they were not useful for someone who had been hacking since 4th grade.
I file it under bad luck that the same people that had a correct analysis and opposition to the great mistake of that time, the Iraq invasion and occupation, also had such a neurotic and self-limiting and destructive view towards work, productivity and the modern economy, and that I was too inexperienced in the ways of the world at the time to understand this very important concept.
Why not buy the biggest disk that fits in the space your case and sata cables will support?
All that I am proposing is a maxed out micro-atx case -- it only costs about ~1200
I built my desktop box three years ago and coupled it with a 449 50" 4k monitor, and am still on a four or five year old laptop.
I see now that the 7700k is 23% faster than the 4770k I built my box with. 23% improvement in bzip2 time is worth it to me.
It's great bang for the buck,
But I salute you, it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
There are a number of tasks we do that are compute bottlenecked, how about compressing an archive, or compiling, or transcoding?
Even things like apt-get install is faster with a faster processor, and vim plugins can be ridiculous with their lag. It all adds up to hours and days and eventually weeks of your life over time.
I don't think the tradeoff of saving $100 or $200 on a chip that will last three years and will be worth more on resale is worth it.
Buy the fastest non-extreme consumer intel processor, right now thats 6700k, add at least 16gb of ram, 1 mid-size ssd, 2x 4tb drives in raid.
If you want to do any kind of GPU work add the fastest or second fastest consumer nvidia card, like the 1080 or 1070.
If you want to game get a second ssd and install windows on it. It goes without saying one should install some flavor of linux on the first ssd.
This is a sick development machine and represents the sweet spot in price/performance, saving money on your axe is a false economy.
You will also have the ability to overclock in case you come across a task that needs it.
Aragorn: Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them.
Theoden: For death and glory.
Aragorn: For Rohan. For your people.
Theoden: The Horn of Helm Hammerhand will sound in the deep, one last time!
The reason premiums are high is that costs are high, and our population is obese, disease prone and litigious.
If we want to contain costs we have some options:
1) Public option/Medicare for all could save us 10-20% in parasitical insurance company costs/administrative overhead.
2) We find solutions for obesity. Obesity is the #1 driver of increased health costs in America.
3) We stop holding doctors/pharma financially responsible for bad outcomes outside of their control through the legal system.
I remember how, with great fanfare, DOW 10,000 was ushered in. I was in 8th grade and it was 1998 or 1999, I remember how ten years later the DOW hit about 6,000.
We do not know how capitalism will respond to competent robotics and AI, and a population bust.
One would only need to store solar thermal energy that is available on any sunny or partly sunny day for night time and cloudy days.
Where I live about half of all days produce abundant solar thermal energy even in the depth of winter. Calculating in night time, you end up with about 12.5% of total winter time having abundant free thermal energy.
So one would need to build a system of solar thermal collectors about 8 times the size one would need to heat a house on a sunny winter day, and that is not a very big system.
Space wise I think it would work for single family residential homes on .25 acre lots if the house was designed for it from the start.
And ISP's could stop this DDOS activity. We should police this at that level. A system where when a DDOS is reported by a reputable web hosting company or service provider to a system that ISPs belong to, could stop DDOS in its tracks.
Enable 2 factor auth at the ISP level. If a report of DDOS comes in, send an SMS to the authorized user of the account.
And punish companies that perform bad security in the marketplace. We are getting more tech literate as a people, as a society. The market might not be fulling pricing in security right now, but the issue is new and awareness is just beginning.
Lets be clear, this is selective enforcement. D-Link is one operator, using what were very common practices at the time, and still are.
No one who created these devices was ever told that these practices were illegal, or would result in sanction. And now we are fining them. D-Link will weather this as it is big enough. But small operators wouldn't.
So the result of this government action is that startups and crowd funded projects are less viable. Now, startups and kickstarter projects need to have a line item in their budget for security insurance. And an insurer has to take on this risk. Because it wont be policed or litigated evenly. And thers no telling what the security standards of tomorrow will be.
So startups will have to buy security insurance. And that will be expensive.
Big companies will survive. They will be able to pay the protection fee, the extortion fee. The status quo will remain. We won't be more secure, because the real actors making us insecure are nation-states and Chinese manufacturing.
This precedent creates unlimited liability for so much software and hardware that gets created.
It is the abiilty to warranty against this type of stuff that has let OSS take off. I expect this to have a chilling effect.
In my opinion we should be against this the way we were against software patents and CISPA.
Just because as devs we are mad when our bosses make stupid security decisions, doesn't mean this is the way to handle it.
I believe this is a very different situation than product liability we are used to. In these cases damage is the result of malicious attack by criminal actors.
What we are in for right now is burdensome, expensive and vague regulation that amounts to security theater.
The capital costs of the building and infrastructure and lights and most importantly the input costs of the power are going to have a very hard time beating what is essentially free energy from the sun, free land, free growing medium in the form of soil and virtually free water everywhere but in very dry climates.
These farmers also grow year round, even in places like Canada with very low tech solutions, which are basically plastic sheeting and metal tubes fashioned into low tunnels that cover the rows of crops.
When you factor in labor costs it might be hard to scale it over a certain size, but for a person that owns a half acre lot that came with their house and wants to farm instead of commuting into the city to a cubicle, that economy is going to be hard to beat.
There is something very human about one person teaching another person to produce food in the kind of detail he goes in to, and I think time farming lends itself to quality thinking and reasoning for a philosophically inclined intelligent person.
They are essentially rediscovering the way humanity grew greens before tractors and herbicides, but there are some new innovations that are making these farms work:
1) Growing things like romaine lettuce in holes cut in landscape tarping is eliminating weeding.
2) They are cutting time from harvest to plate by a few days, and the resulting quality is much better, and they are not using toxic chemicals to control pests and weeds.
3) They are using no-till methods, the only input is compost and earth worms do the tilling work.
I wish that there were more farms like this in my area, because I really hate the selection and price of organic produce in my supermarkets. It is very much lacking, or insanely expensive.