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l4yao

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So I'm trying to navigate the personal cognitive dissonance I'm facing after reading your comment.

Would you agree that "All Lives Matter" is racist because it's derisive of "Black Lives Matter" the proper noun? The sentiment that all lives are important is not racist, and it's also not mutually exclusive from BLM's message. If anything, they align right?

BLM is saying Black lives matter just as much as any other life. Black people should not be treated as second class citizens. They're not claiming Black lives matter _more_ than others.. that _would_ be racist.

A true merit based evaluation would be.. just that - based on merit and not racial background, sexuality, age, political affiliation, the clothes you wear, the food you eat, or even the schooling you've received. To give any group preferential treatment would be not based on merit.

* People stop fighting the data privacy fight. Laws will be created for user data collection consent, but people will ignore it like current day EULA or terms. Killer applications for user data will start showing up and public options will shift to "eh, I guess it's okay if they collect and share data about me, I get some good utility out of it"

* VR hype passes, maybe because technical limitations doesn't make for a pleasant experience. Remains a bit gimmicky

* haha remember bitcoin?

* alternative meats become mainstream, account for half of meat consumption. (Note for future readers and myself. As of 01/2020 Impossible Burger has recently partnered with BK for an impossible whopper and the Beyond Bratwurst served at work was quite good, though still somewhat niche. Only in a few stores and restaurants)

* Pet ownership will become frowned upon, or maybe just less acceptable than it is today

This already exists to an extent on the other end of the transaction. Payment processors like Stripe are too ubiquitous to not have some level of oversight.

Some bot had flagged me as suspicious, and as a result

- I couldn't take any Lyft rides, and my company only subsidizes lyft.

- I couldn't rent a car on Getaround

- I couldn't rent a scooter on Skip, one of two providers in SF at the time

My mobility was severely hampered. I almost couldn't close on my house in time because my insurer of choice at the time also used Stripe.

To add insult to injury, Stripe's customer service absolutely refused to address the issue, flat out ignoring it. They claimed the issue was on the vendor side and to follow up with the vendor directly. It was only when I left a poor review on Google did they follow up with me within 2 hours, lifting the ban. For someone unfamiliar with the idea of a "payment processor", this may have never been resolved since the company "Stripe" is never visible during the transaction.

GPS may not be accurate enough, especially in urban areas. And the current geofence isn't detailed enough. For example: it doesn't account for things like a wheelchair ramp from a private property intersecting with a public walkway.

In San Francisco, scooters were picked up by the city and impounded. I don't see why it's unfair for private property owners to do the same.

The threshold for banning needs to be scrutinized for essential services. There's potential to really hurt people's quality of life, particularly people that are already disadvantaged. An arbitrary star rating scale with no clear definitions is definitely not appropriate.

Public transit doesn't ban you if you're loud or smelly. Private rideshare may. As rideshare takes over ridership from transit, mobility is removed from loud and smelly people.

I tend to agree - critical services like transportation should have some oversight in how they're gatekeeping. Another example is Stripe - some small number of users are incorrectly flagged by their fraud detection and couldn't use a large number of services that have Stripe as their payment processor.

it's actually 12,374 (65%) units that are listed as entire unit

I had filtered out the 3300 "Entire home/apt" listings that were available for 0 days a year. Not sure why it's part of the dataset, but I assume it's for people with previously active listings.

I'm not really understanding the mortgage point, but you bring up an interesting point of treating "multi-listing" hosts as bad actors. If we approximate it by saying 45% of 9550 are bad actors, that's still only 4300 listing. That's still tiny relative to the Toronto rental market. To be fair, the realistic number could be a lot lower since a multi-listing host might be hosting multiple bedrooms in a single house and inflating the # of multi-listing hosts, or they might be hosting their primary residence and an investment property where only the investment property is a bad actor.

You say it's negligible but you have to remember that we have one of the lowest vacancy rates.

I don't deny that Airbnb has an adverse affect on rent prices, but it appears to be quite small relative to other levers affecting the housing crisis. I wonder if a study may exist that shows the economic benefits of Airbnb in communities, keeping more of the income within local residents, patronage to a larger spread of local businesses, greater financial independence from self-employment etc...

just go on r/toronto

I'm pretty active in the community, but less and less these days. It's become a major echo chamber where fact based level headed discussion is quickly down voted if the rhetoric doesn't fit the majority's views. Just look at the comments the next time Airbnb is brought up :). In all seriousness, having an overwhelming majority of people agreeing with you isn't always indicative of "being correct". For any viewpoint, there's probably an active internet community out there that feels strongly one way. Take r/the_donald or r/The_Mueller/ for example.

I think it's reasonable to assume Airbnb reduces supply. I don't see how you can conclude the 30% rent increase you experienced was largely driven by Airbnb.

Lets say anyone renting out their unit for less than half a year wouldn't have put the unit on the rental market anyways. If you download and dive into the data, you'll see that there are ~9550 "Entire home/apt" listings, of which 5992 are available for less than half the year, leaving only 3558 units. In a city the size of Toronto, that seems negligible.

Data: http://data.insideairbnb.com/canada/on/toronto/2019-03-07/vi...

Even if we took Fairbnb's number at face value, it still seems small relative to Toronto's total number of rental units.

Here is a report published by McGill's School of Urban Planning, commissioned by the Hotel Trades Council, that found Airbnb responsible for a 1.3% rent increase over a 3 year period in New York: https://mcgill.ca/newsroom/files/newsroom/channels/attach/ai...

Water's heat capacity means you'll need a lot of water in order to keep a house heated for weeks, in a temperate climate.

There are interesting Phase Change Materials (PCM) out there that take advantage of a material's latent heat properties that get you a bit closer.

I'm also puzzled. I guess one angle is if the losses from a generator are captured, you get a bit more utility from having more of the total energy as electrical energy? Maybe they're picturing all of the generation and conversion inside the building envelope to capture losses.

I'm overwhelmed by the number of credit union options. Are there significant differences between the options? Anything in particular I should look out for? In general, I'm just looking for something to do day to day banking and potentially get a mortgage in the near term.

Sealed headsets, bottom brackets seemed to increase reliability and make it easier to repair

Braking didn't go from side pull caliper brakes to disc brakes as the author suggested. Disc brakes are still quite heavy and expensive and unsuitable in many cases. There are still many new bikes today with side pull caliper brakes and V brakes. Over the years, a ton of different designs were tried like U brakes and cantilever brakes.

Shimano's indexed shifting products allow multiple down shifts. My 105 brake levers allow shifting by 1 or 2, depending on how far I press it. I've used their "v-brake" trigger shifters that allow more than 1 down shifts as well.

On the other hand, non-indexed systems never bothered me much. My favorite commuter bike was from the 80s and had downtube shifters. It became muscle memory and somewhat subconscious when moving my hands to shift to the correct gearing. It always shifted reliably and precisely. Maintenance was dead simple too compared to today's indexed shifting.

I don't understand the outcomes of the second scenario. Wouldn't adding housing stock A) make more room for them and B) as a result, lower the cost to stay within the neighborhood

Won't their checks be for fair market value of their expropriate property? So by definition, they should be able to relocate within the neighborhood?