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wateroverfire posted:Yet some laws seem more relevant than others, don't they? For instance, consider an apartment building with 50 units in which some are being rented on AirBNB. If the building meets the code requirements for people to live in it long term, does it become unsafe if some of the units are rented short term? The relevance of hotel buliding and fire codes to this sort of operation seems less obvious. Ahh yes, the "common sense" school of jurisprudence.
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May 11, 2016 17:01
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Kobayashi posted:Ahh yes, the "common sense" school of jurisprudence. So...you're saying yes, the building does become unsafe if some units are short-term rented?
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May 11, 2016 17:04
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San Francisco has many interests, only one of which is safety. However, because the people in a hotel are necessarily transient, there are strict laws about marking exits with lights, because somebody who's there for only one night isn't familiar with where the halls and stairs are. Apartments don't have to do that. But that's a minor example. The major example is that San Francisco's stock of long-term housing is far, far smaller than the demand, and as a result non-wealthy people are being priced out of the city. In reaction to this, San Francisco has passed strict (and sometimes counterproductive) laws about how you can use private housing. You can't turn something that was previously long-term rental space into hotel housing without getting permission. If you just say "Dude, whatever is most profitable for you", then there will be less and less rental housing available. This benefits people who own property, but harms the city. Unless you're going to go all Libertarian on us, cities have the right and responsibility to pass regulations and laws for the common good. They are going to screw this up because, duh, people, but leaving all regulation to the whims of profit-making people has turned out badly when we've tried it before.
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May 11, 2016 17:14
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FlamingLiberal posted:Wasn't this also the reason that buildings in NYC all had fire escapes installed? I'm pretty sure you ended up with women throwing themselves from several stories up out of windows in order to escape the fire. If memory serves it was a major factor yes but the 19th century is just chock full of "...and this is why we have safety laws now" stories. You can't really pick one singular cause for a safety feature because for every one story that got told there's like a bajillion similar stories that didn't. The notable exception, of course, being the horrifying poo poo storm that followed San Francisco's great quake leading directly to laws best summed up as "this city was built in the single dumbest way imaginable let's not do that ever again."
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May 11, 2016 17:18
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That's a really good example, because safety regulations often iterate after something horrible happens. See the changes to code after the La Prieta earthquake, when we found out that soft stories collapse quite literally like a house of cards. Or look at all the coal-mining regulations that Donald Blankenship blithely ignored, leading to the death of 29 miners. All those mining regulations were written in blood.
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May 11, 2016 17:24
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asdf32 posted:Lending Club and Prosper are both good ideas and legitimate business models. Much like Uber. They may have just screwed things up. Lending Club is reliant on being able to charge higher interest rates on their loans than state capped rates through private deals with banks. The Madden vs Midland ruling dropped their share value by 43% and they are now forced to redo their operating model. If your business is dependent on bypassing one or two key regulations and is constantly under threat of being upended by a supreme court ruling then it doesn't feel like a very legitimate business model to me.
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May 11, 2016 17:26
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Arsenic Lupin posted:That's a really good example, because safety regulations often iterate after something horrible happens. See the changes to code after the La Prieta earthquake, when we found out that soft stories collapse quite literally like a house of cards. Or look at all the coal-mining regulations that Donald Blankenship blithely ignored, leading to the death of 29 miners. All those mining regulations were written in blood. Or even in the modern day, after Deepwater Horizon they mandated that Professional Engineers have to sign off on designs.
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May 11, 2016 17:31
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wateroverfire posted:So...you're saying yes, the building does become unsafe if some units are short-term rented? The building itself doesn't become unsafe necessarily, but the unit itself can become unsafe. Does the unit have its own water heater, or furnace? Does it have a CO monitor? Is it getting checked for bed bugs that could then infest the whole building? Frequent guests are going to increase your chance of bed bugs because they could be bringing them from their own home. Is the unit being kept clean, or are guests leaving it messy and the owner isn't cleaning it thoroughly, which can attract vermin? These are all important things that need to be taken care of when running a hotel out of an apartment.
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May 11, 2016 17:55
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wateroverfire posted:So...you're saying yes, the building does become unsafe if some units are short-term rented? I'm saying your "common sense" argument is bullshit and you don't get to arbitrarily turn my apartment building into a flophouse.
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May 11, 2016 18:14
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wateroverfire posted:So...you're saying yes, the building does become unsafe if some units are short-term rented?
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May 11, 2016 18:31
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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computer parts posted:Or even in the modern day, after Deepwater Horizon they mandated that Professional Engineers have to sign off on designs. Exactly. Not all laws are dumb regulations existing due to rent-seeking within an industry. Sometimes (dare I say often) they exist because we learned a hard lesson and people who have worked their entire lives in a particular field know that the rule will prevent really bad poo poo from going down. What a lot of these "sharing economy" companies are doing the civil engineering equivalent of those goofy "redneck engineering" things you see online. Yea, it kinda works. Hell, at first glance it even seems kinda fun. But it's not a sustainable solution in the long term.
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May 11, 2016 19:07
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Oooh... Salty VC tears ahoy! (An article written by a VC and Lyft investor, talking about how Austin's vote on Uber and Lyft is not only bad, but medieval.)quote:The Sun Doesn’t Rotate Around the Earth, and TNC’s Don’t Work with Fingerprinting.
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May 11, 2016 19:23
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ShadowHawk posted:Ok, so people buy houses or condos to be airbnb landlords since this is now more profitable. But then they rent out that housing to tenants. How is there "more demand" or "less supply" than we started with? Funny how you only tend to hear arguments in favor of airbnb from people who manage an airbnb
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May 11, 2016 19:24
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I wonder what the overlap is between people who support voter id laws and people who are mad at required fingerprinting
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May 11, 2016 19:26
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nachos posted:Lending Club is reliant on being able to charge higher interest rates on their loans than state capped rates through private deals with banks. The Madden vs Midland ruling dropped their share value by 43% and they are now forced to redo their operating model. If your business is dependent on bypassing one or two key regulations and is constantly under threat of being upended by a supreme court ruling then it doesn't feel like a very legitimate business model to me. It's funny because if you look at it closely how many startups are literally based on "how do we get past this regulation?" Same with the financial sector; it's like "hey so there was a time you could abuse the lack of this rule to vomit piles of cash in a bank account soooo....you guys think we can get around this rule somehow?" Then the government says "knock that poo poo off you fucks" and a pile of programmers suddenly decide they're libertarians. Then we get the Great Recession, nobody learns anything, nothing gets fixed, and poo poo just constantly burns down everywhere all the time because gently caress you I want another Porsche.
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May 11, 2016 19:37
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Uber just settled a lawsuit by requiring their drivers to accept seeing-eye dogs.quote:The suit, filed by the National Federation of the Blind in September 2014, said many Uber drivers have refused to take passengers with dogs.
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May 11, 2016 19:47
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So backing up a bit to hyperloop chat and Elon Musk, it's totally the sort of project that you'd expect as a parody. He threw out the idea as something that'd be possible at a TED talk, just supposed to be a throw away, like "We should think outside the box, maybe something like pneumatic tubes for transport!" that got way too much traction so he wrote up a 50 page or so idea of how he thought it could work. Then at least 2 separate groups started trying to vacuum up the unicorn money and talent willing to work for stock options using his brand and the buzzword he coined, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc and Hyperloop Technologies Inc.
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May 11, 2016 20:15
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nachos posted:I wonder what the overlap is between people who support voter id laws and people who are mad at required fingerprinting 
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May 11, 2016 20:21
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Back to Google and Java for a moment (oog). Didn't discovery turn up a smoking-gun email in which somebody senior said something to the effect of "Yeah, we know this is sleazy, but let's go for it because of time constraints"?
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May 11, 2016 20:27
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Uber just settled a lawsuit by requiring their drivers to accept seeing-eye dogs. what keeps the drivers from just rating these service animal riders a 1
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May 11, 2016 20:37
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:what keeps the drivers from just rating these service animal riders a 1 Presumably the same thing that keeps them from using someone else's name to drive for Uber.
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May 11, 2016 20:41
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:what keeps the drivers from just rating these service animal riders a 1 Just-world fallacy. That's all you need to get around the ethical implications.
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May 11, 2016 20:46
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:what keeps the drivers from just rating these service animal riders a 1
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May 11, 2016 20:51
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wateroverfire posted:If the building meets the code requirements for people to live in it long term, does it become unsafe if some of the units are rented short term? Yes
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May 11, 2016 21:09
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Gawker usually blows, but this article gave me a good chuckle In which a 20-year-old Yalie becomes his VC fund manager father's tax dodge through corporatespeak Apologies if it was already posted.
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May 11, 2016 21:18
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nachos posted:Lending Club is reliant on being able to charge higher interest rates on their loans than state capped rates through private deals with banks. The Madden vs Midland ruling dropped their share value by 43% and they are now forced to redo their operating model. If your business is dependent on bypassing one or two key regulations and is constantly under threat of being upended by a supreme court ruling then it doesn't feel like a very legitimate business model to me. They facilitate loans. Loans have been a good business model for forever. And lending club in particular actually has a large amount of higher quality lower rate loans.
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May 12, 2016 02:15
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nachos posted:Lending Club is reliant on being able to charge higher interest rates on their loans than state capped rates through private deals with banks. The Madden vs Midland ruling dropped their share value by 43% and they are now forced to redo their operating model. If your business is dependent on bypassing one or two key regulations and is constantly under threat of being upended by a supreme court ruling then it doesn't feel like a very legitimate business model to me. Yeah I'm not really understanding this. When I look at the interest rates on Lending Club I don't see anything confiscatory. Many of the loans I see are specifically for credit card debt consolidation and the interest rates are lower than what the borrowers were paying previously. Are you saying there are cheaper loans out there that are capped by the state that the borrowers are simply unaware of? How would that even work for Lending Club's sales pitch? Are they just targeting ignorant people?
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May 12, 2016 02:33
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negativeneil posted:Yeah I'm not really understanding this. When I look at the interest rates on Lending Club I don't see anything confiscatory. Many of the loans I see are specifically for credit card debt consolidation and the interest rates are lower than what the borrowers were paying previously. Are you saying there are cheaper loans out there that are capped by the state that the borrowers are simply unaware of? How would that even work for Lending Club's sales pitch? Are they just targeting ignorant people? From what I understand, a peer to peer loan on Lending Club used a Utah bank called WebBank which means they could charge Utah interest rates for a loan made in another state with state capped rates lower than those of Utah. I don't know if this still exists since the Supreme Court decision happened at the end of last year.
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May 12, 2016 03:07
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negativeneil posted:Yeah I'm not really understanding this. When I look at the interest rates on Lending Club I don't see anything confiscatory. Many of the loans I see are specifically for credit card debt consolidation and the interest rates are lower than what the borrowers were paying previously. Are you saying there are cheaper loans out there that are capped by the state that the borrowers are simply unaware of? How would that even work for Lending Club's sales pitch? Are they just targeting ignorant people? I believe the non kosher stuff going on is the less than transparent way institutional investors and the broker's friends are getting the first bite. Also the debt is unsecured and they may be passing on the cruft and selling stuff they know should be write offs as assets.
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May 12, 2016 04:20
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Kobayashi posted:I'm saying your "common sense" argument is bullshit and you don't get to arbitrarily turn my apartment building into a flophouse. Also one person's "we don't need regulation, just use common sense" is another's "its not forbidden, gotta go for maximal exploitation!" It's the kind of thing that enables a race to the bottom in all sorts of areas.
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May 12, 2016 06:00
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Coolness Averted posted:Then at least 2 separate groups started trying to vacuum up the unicorn money and talent willing to work for stock options using his brand and the buzzword he coined, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc and Hyperloop Technologies Inc. Which one is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon? The CMU one keeps emailing me as if I'm some sort of alumnus who would give them money for their "Make life more like Futurama!" project. (Everyone knows the proper project is to make life more like Real Genius.  )
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May 12, 2016 06:03
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eschaton posted:Which one is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon? The CMU one keeps emailing me as if I'm some sort of alumnus who would give them money for their "Make life more like Futurama!" project. Oh that's actually a completely separate team on a completely separate project as well! Hyperloops for everyone!
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May 12, 2016 06:38
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I'm going to make Hooberloop. It's like Hyperloop only it goes 775 miles per hour. What now? 
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May 12, 2016 07:29
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I'm going to make Hooberloop. It's like Hyperloop only it goes 775 miles per hour. What now? Hüberloop
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May 12, 2016 08:16
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Not a Children posted:Gawker usually blows, but this article gave me a good chuckle A donation has been made in your name to The Human Fund.
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May 12, 2016 09:09
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Unguided posted:A donation has been made in your name to The Humanloop Fund. You know this isn't actually that uncommon -I mean the make-work fake start ups for worthless children. It's just now we're seeing enough ulra-wealthy enough to take this vanity fake company thing to a whole new level. At least in the past you'd have to setup a company that leeches your staff and general expertise and just runs itself with your brat on as a vestigial executive. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 09:47 on May 12, 2016 |
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May 12, 2016 09:44
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I'm going to make Hooberloop. It's like Hyperloop only it goes 775 miles per hour. What now? Also it ends 200 miles north of LA city centre instead of 100 miles like Hyperloop And the tube is kept aloft by surplus helicopter engines, so there is no need to worry about land! Disruptive.
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May 12, 2016 10:47
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MikeCrotch posted:Also it ends 200 miles north of LA city centre instead of 100 miles like Hyperloop Space is also involved for uh reasons
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May 12, 2016 11:16
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Shifty Pony posted:That ultrasound startup is hilarious by the way. It is basically a photo-Theranos and ticks pretty much every box in Silicon Valley startup bingo. Some choice bits: loving hell, I wish I'd had the gumption to take my high school science projects to tech conferences. Is anyone here by chance a brilliant vernture capitalist that would like to throw some liquidity at a radio* that doesn't need external power? I can demonstrate a working prototype and don't need much, even a couple grand would be appreciated.
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May 12, 2016 11:45
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nachos posted:From what I understand, a peer to peer loan on Lending Club used a Utah bank called WebBank which means they could charge Utah interest rates for a loan made in another state with state capped rates lower than those of Utah. I don't know if this still exists since the Supreme Court decision happened at the end of last year. So it's exactly as shady as the entire credit card industry but with better rates?
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May 12, 2016 16:37
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