I make between $3k to $6k from putting a log cabin on Airbnb. This started during period of boredom during the pandemic. I operate remotely with smart home devices and with a local cleaning team/handyman.
I had a project to completely automate this with an AI agent but Airbnb doesn't offer a publicly available API.
I had a shock when I looked up prices for H100 gpus, wanting to use one just for personal experimentation and for an upcoming hackathon. How much this one costs? $300,000?
To elaborate: you can't really buy these except in specific configurations from Supermicro (usually 8x H100) or the like. So take whatever chip-specific cost you have in mind, and 8x it, and add on the cost of CPU/memory/storage. NVIDIA doesn't bother to sell these in a configuration that you can plug into your desktop.
Airbnb doesn’t have a hosts supply issue. Actually in the past 3 years, hosts growth outpace guests growth
The issue is Airbnb attracted recently a lot of get-rich-quick types, similar to what see for Amazon sellers or crypto bros. We are far from the savvy host who want to share travel experiences and give you a unique experience
It now has quality hosts supply issue. Most of the places aren't designed or made for living, they were set up as bare minimum where you can crash on a bed (or, more likely, a couch) for the night and imaginatively call it "a comfy modern clean fully-equipped apartment close to everything" (where only the "apartment" bit will be actually true).
In 2019 it took me 30 minutes to scroll through a list and pick one of good places - or maybe I was just lucky.
In 2023 it takes over a week (I'm not exaggerating) of routine work every evening to find something that may somewhat match my requirements and wishes. All those filters except for price are now useless ("dedicated workspace" is a particularly bad joke), one literally has to skim over every single listing, review the photos and figure out what they really have. Honest good listings still exist but are drowned in sea of low-effort ones.
For a good portion of the airbnb market thats exactly what the guests want. They go, "I have 12 boys in new orleans for mardi gras, we are partying every day for a week straight, lets rent what is basically a frat house and make it cheap by sleeping 4 in a bedroom, and spend the savings on partying since the room is just where we pregame and pass out."
Sure, you can do this stuff in a hotel too, but sometimes the airbnb has cool stuff like a patio or a deck versus your bog standard hotel layout with too much bed and not enough floorspace for partying, not to mention a smoke detector. The lack of any staff oversight also makes it easy to party without fearing noise complaints or having staff see just how many people are staying in the unit. I'd wager airbnb has completely changed how big partying holidays like spring break works in a lot of cities for this reason.
Hm, maybe. It's very different from my typical forced-to-be-a-digital-nomad use case, which is "I need to be in $city/$country for {anything between 2 weeks and 4 months} and I want a private place to live in, with a comfy bed, proper kitchen with a large fridge, decent Internet, comfortable sturdy wooden desk with an ergonomic chair to work at, in a quiet area with a grocery store nearby". AKA home away from home, except that I surely won't find a proper coffee machine there (can't be helped), and that I'm having mini-vacations on holidays and weekends, exploring the new area.
The only alternative I know of is extended stay hotels, but those are extremely rare, especially outside the US. It used to be Airbnb was not just the only option, but also a blessing - I suppose because nomads were a major part of its guest client base. Now it feels like trying to find something tolerable in a pile of garbage.
It depends. I've stayed at many regular B&Bs over the years and many hosts try to make you feel at home. And, generally speaking, they're a more distinct experience than a business hotel is--though when traveling on business I tend to go with the hotel for predictability, 24 hour desk, etc.
If there is no supply problem, why have prices shot up ~30-50% in 4 years ? (Source : I am trying to book an Airbnb in London after a few years away from the platform)
The venture capital ran out. Same way the rideshare and food delivery services spiked in price. Freshman year of college, Uber was subsidizing rides, and was so cheap I would choose when to go visit a friend of mine on the other side of LA based on whether I could get there for less than $15. By senior year, an equivalent ride never fell below $30.
Prices have shot up 30-50% on a lot of things in the past 4 years(and mostly just the past 2) due to inflation. Real estate markets in most places have skyrocketed, so how would you figure real estate to go up but short term rental prices to stay low?
Where I am, there are frequent power cuts or Internet is down because of a storm. We do have a generator so we can keep on living. I hate the fact tho that I'm not able to pay for content I paid for : movies, fitness classes, music etc.
So looking to build a media server full of content, via legal means or piracy!
Another motivation is while I'm ok paying now, what about in 20 or 30 years time? Maybe there will be a time where I want to discard my credit card, but still want to be able to enjoy movies. I would have paid then thousands of dollars to streaming services. A media server with my favorite content sounds like a better bet.
The US exports $25B worth of soybeans per year, which is one of the most water intensive crop. Should these exports be banned? same for almonds, cotton, rice etc.
How? When it comes to pricing the environment, we have a long history of missing the mark by orders of magnitude, due in part to the extremely long delays between cause and effect, and also due to markets and financial vested interests preventing accurate information about costs, and even preventing the analysis of costs. https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
If the externality currently has no cost, then even pricing it low by orders of magnitude should be better than the status quo. Pricing it high by orders of magnitude would have negative consequences, but that seems unlikely to happen in practice.
> even pricing it low by orders of magnitude should be better than the status quo.
No, while this assumption seems econ 101 logical for a second, it’s not really true and the paper I linked above explains why. The pricing has to match the approximate order-of-magnitude cost of externalities for it to actually prevent any of the consequences we’re discussing here (or more likely be regulated so that Saudi Arabia can’t buy all the water regardless of price). There’s enough price flexibility over water and high enough demand that increasing prices 2x or even 10x today will not slow consumption at all. Water in the US west is already over-subscribed, and people with more money have already lined up to buy whatever becomes available. Increasing prices a little will only change who buys water, not whether it gets used. It has to be high enough that people start choosing not to buy it, which with water is an extremely high bar. In the mean time, draining our aquifers has ramifications for the next several thousand years.
This is the whole problem with cost-benefit analysis and free market thinking. When it comes to things that all humans need, like air and water, we have never yet managed to calculate either the true costs or the true benefits correctly, and reducing the equation to money loses all sense of proportion, and more or less always frames things in terms that let rich people and corporations win and take whatever they want.
I don’t think it is as black and white as you make it out to be.
Yes, there will be large demand for water even at higher prices. But less than at lower prices. Maybe a little less, maybe a lot less, but either way we are better off than now.
Also, there are many other effects to consider besides how much the demand will change. As the price increases, alternative water sources become more economic - trucking water in, building pipelines and canals, building water capture systems, desalinization, etc. Rather than solving the problem by using less water it may be possible to solve the problem by using water that has less environmental impact.
Generally speaking, I find your framework hard to parse. Free market thinking and cost benefit analysis are orthogonal, not two parts of a whole. Pricing externalities, as we are discussing here is not the same thing as cost benefit analysis.
Cost benefit analysis is a bureaucrat sitting in an office and deciding what policies should be enacted. Pricing an externality means assigning a cost to use of some scarce resource, and letting the market decide if and when the resource is worth the cost.
That’s just assumption, and history has sometimes proven this assumption wrong. Higher prices do not automatically yield lower demand. It may take a threshold price increase before consumption changes at all, especially for scarce resources.
It’s true that alternatives change the equation, that I agree with. But the problem with allowing the market to sort it out is that Saudi Arabia might always be able to afford more than small town, Arizona. If you raise prices, you might only price out the locals and surrender your water to foreign interests. Charging money is in no way certain to fix this problem, it might make everything even worse.
> Pricing an externality means assigning a cost to use of some scarce resource, and letting the market decide if and when the resource is worth the cost.
What you just described is cost benefit analysis followed by free market thinking, definitionally speaking.
A cost-benefit analysis is the process of comparing the projected or estimated costs and benefits (or opportunities) associated with a project decision to determine whether it makes sense from a business perspective.
Generally speaking, cost-benefit analysis involves tallying up all costs of a project or decision and subtracting that amount from the total projected benefits of the project or decision. (Sometimes, this value is represented as a ratio.)
That is simply not the same as applying a tax or surcharge to something to internalize an externality.
I agree with that; you’re just not thinking all the way through what it means to do what you suggested, assign a cost to a scarce environmental resource in order to avoid the kind of negative future consequences we’re discussing here. In this context, the premise behind assigning such a cost requires a cost benefit analysis.
It's pretty easy, just charge ruinous usage rates for any water use that is beyond replenishment rates.
It doesn't matter if these soybeans are going to China, Mars, or Washington state, the only thing that matters is whether the people growing them are exhausting their region's water supply.
We grow a butt-ton of soybeans in iowa, and I have yet to see anybody irrigating them anywhere. See, we water crops here like god intended - by water falling from the sky for free.
The midwest (not counting Arkansaw in that set, and just going from the labeled state numbers) makes up at least 80% of the total soybean production (Wisconsin and Michigan aren't labeled).
You will note not even a pail yellow on anything west of the Dakotas.
We really shouldn't be growing soybeans or corn in Great American Desert (the vast plains west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies). That is arid land intended for grass, and then you should raise cattle and livestock on the grass, with at most occasional rotations for crops, say once every 30 years or so. That is why herds of buffalo roamed this area and only small regions were cultivated for corn, and only for a few growing cycles, before it again returned to grassland for cattle.
This is how all civilizations traditionally cultivated grasslands -- as lands on which ruminants were raised, and then you drink the milk and eat the meat of the ruminants as your main source of calories.
Trying to raise crops on arid cattle country requires you to deplete aquifers and then import large amounts of fertilizers because the land itself can't sustain that type of production. It can, however, sustain growing grass, with no fertilizer or water additions required. Then as the ruminants eat the grass, they fertilize the soil and the roots decompose, adding more nutrients. Do that over many generations, and you create a rich soil, and on the rich soil, a few crops can be grown, and then they need to be replaced again with grass and cattle.
The decision to grow millions of acres of soybeans and corn in this desert is a short sighted policy. Milk and meat need to be food products from that region, given the climate. East of the Mississippi, there is a wetter climate, and that's where we should be growing most of our crops.
Airbnb Support is the worst. They speak and write very well, and make you feel they listen to you and will do their best to solve your issue. In most cases though, they will come back to you with a negative answer and will leave you in the worst of situations. You can check the reddit sub /airbnb or on Twitter.
Having 0 support like Google would be much better than being promised help will come, then having various customer agents taking over your case from scratch and then after exhaustion, being told you won't be refunded or no action will be taken
This is not just Portugal. I see similar sentiment in Canada where young professionals in Vancouver or Toronto complain they can't buy their first home and Vancouver has been "sold out" to foreigners. Similar sentiment in Australian major cities as well.
Yeah, but it's much worse in Portugal, especially Lisbon. Here are some median home price to median income ratios for various cities (from Numbeo: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/in/Lisbon and corresponding pages for other cities):
- Lisbon: 18.06
- Porto: 13.55
- Sydney: 9.09
- Melbourne: 7.05
- Vancouver: 12.62
- Toronto: 11.82
- San Francisco: 7.02
- Los Angeles: 7.47
- New York: 9.99
This is interesting, because (at least in America) the current rhetoric is that housing was laughably affordable up until the 70s(?).
Now, even in suburbs, housing is far more expensive than most wage earners could expect to afford.
Maybe we are thinking of two different sides of the same coin, but I would genuinely be interested in reading articles from the ~mid-century describing what you suggest.
> This is interesting, because (at least in America) the current rhetoric is that housing was laughably affordable up until the 70s(?).
I always find this a bit of a disappointing discussion, cherry picked to the extremes.
If we're being honest in talking about the cost of housing, we'd try to make apples to apples comparisons.
For example, if we used to eat apples that were 2 inches in diameter, lacked sweetness, had lots of seeds in them and started to rot after two days, and then 50 years later the average apple was tasty, 10 inches in diameter, seedless and juicy and lasted two weeks, you wouldn't necessarily conclude that because its price had doubled that apples have become more expensive.
But we kind of do that with housing.
Since 1969, homes have more than doubled in average size. Such homes were shared by 3.3 people, now by 2.5 (or 25% fewer people per house). And we used to pay 10% interest, now 5%.
So we have 2.6x as much square footage per person, and pay half the financing cost as we did before. And median nominal personal income tenfolded since the 60s. Of course you expect home prices to increase by a lot, it doesn't mean housing was laughably affordable and now isn't.
In fact there's quite a few studies which show that a unit of housing (e.g. the percentage of income spent on a square foot used by 1 person) has gotten cheaper. We just happen to consume more of it, and share it with fewer people, and pay less to finance price levels, which pushes the price levels to new heights without housing itself having become more expensive. [0]
If you then take into account the quality of housing and neighbourhoods, you see even the above is still an apples to oranges discussion. The amenities inside the home and in the neighbourhood are simply no comparison. I literally have a supercomputer allowing 3D simulations of any kind known to creativity on a screen with better quality than a 1970s movie theatre (I'm talking about a PS5 on a 4k screen) in my home. And I live in a town with 190 nationalities and as many kitchens within a 15 minute commute, just like parties with every denomination of music and dance, multiple universities and schools teaching just about any skill, shops selling just about any worldwide product I'd like. Of course all this access comes with a price because there was scarcely a place on earth like it 50 years ago, and now my city (Amsterdam) has many equivalents around the world, Lisbon being an example named in the thread's article. If you put our lifestyles and general wealth of pretty ordinary people like myself in these cities to the test of any city 50 years ago, you'd maybe find some of the very elite in NYC and London living like that, and that's it.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2021/06/25/us-housi... -- this isn't a proper study, but does substantiate some of the claims I made above. It's even missing some things (it overestimates principal paydown as a cost rather than a cashflow, and it doesn't account for quality differences).
Housing prices rose with inflation for 400 years, and after 2000 suddenly started hockey-stick growth. Unless you think the quality and size of housing that people demanded only radically changed within the past 20 years, your theory is lacking for me.
I sometimes put a footnote in when I mention that house prices haven't changed in "400 years" because the records are from the Netherlands, but in your case that makes them more relevant.
> it doesn't mean housing was laughably affordable and now isn't.
I appreciate your approach, and I hadn't considered this perspective, but it still rings hollow to me:
Can I purchase 1/2.6 of a house? Just because the unit cost of housing has gotten cheaper doesn't mean _owning a home_ is more affordable.
Sure, I'll accept larger homes are being built at cheaper unit-cost. But those homes are still being snatched up, continuously "above market". Why aren't more smaller homes being built at similar unit-costs?
The problem is land has gotten expensive, not so much construction. Also, regulations and the like generally raise the bar for what is considered an acceptable house, which also contributes to rising prices (eg. things like mandatory minimum parking, housing amenities, etc.
Some places want to ban apartments smaller than a particular size because they are "expensive dog-boxes", which rather misses the point. I imagine the logic is that larger apartments will be available for the same price if such comes to pass... People are capable of impressive mental gymnastics.
The problem in the US is pretty obvious. We are the time period where the largest generation of Americans (the boomers) are at the retirement, or about to retire point, at the same time the Zoomers, which are a decent sized generation, are entering the housing market.
Over the next several decades as the boomers die off or move to retirement homes the housing supply will increase substantially, and the value of properties in most of the US will plummet.
I see the same cause, but to me Boomers aren't limiting supply as much as many are relying on passive income to maintain luxury lifestyles. When they downsize, they're going to move to retirement homes that have $4-6K/mo rents at the midrange.
As they die, and pass on their property, their kids will just retire young and rents will still rise, along with the prices of luxury goods.
I'll believe that house prices are high because of constrained supply when I see the prices of luxury goods drop.
Review the take-home assignment. Is it really relevant to the job ?
And if you really have to have it, is it specific and interesting? For example don’t ask to use a JavaScript library if the job post specifically asked for talent in rust.
Did they continue tracking health effects years after they study ? It’s possible the drugs reversed the body clock but will accelerate it after. Much like coffee gives you a temporary boost, then makes you crash later
The article also says they're in charge of 36,000 miles of track. Presumably the trains are only in smaller segments, but that's still impossible to patrol it all. There is no reasonable amount of officers that could cover all of the parked trains 24/7 anyway.
Without any actual consequences for getting caught, it's basically a minor inconvenience for the thieves. More officers just means slightly more inconvenience.
Sixty-eight thousand American railroad jobs were lost between 2015 and today due to PSR, from a local-maximum* of ~210k in April 2015 to ~142k in December 2021:
- Play classical music to annoy robbers
- Take pictures to post to twitter
- Follow suspects and personally sue
- Shooting blinding light or less deadly bullets
- Record footage,sell rights to clip brokers
Getting caught means being charged federally and the statue carries a maximum penalty of 20 years.
Half the people commenting on this post don't understand that railway theft is a federal crime which is handled by federal prosecutors in federal court, and has nothing to do with the "liberal governor" or "lazy California prosecutors".
On nearly anything related to societal matters not of a technological sort, HN commenters tend to demonstrate quite a bit of ignorance of the basic facts of the matter at hand.
Also: obviously you don't just patrol 36,000 miles of track: you patrol where the thefts happen (piles of packaging by the tracks), and on the trains. Since you know the schedule of the trains, you even know when people will be trying to do the robberies...
>Getting caught means being charged federally and the statue carries a maximum penalty of 20 years.
Very few people (you plus one other) have mentioned that messing with interstate transportation is a federal crime. Which makes me think there is more to this that meets the eye.
Why have the news been focusing on local prosecutors if this is a federal matter? Why haven't federal prosecutors pressing charges?
I noticed in one article that the railroad referred to the crime as "vandalism." It could be that they are using charges such as trespassing and vandalism, rather than outright theft, to bring it under the purview of local authorities.
You are saying the people who steal from trains would be starving otherwise? That's a ridiculous take, imo. As much as some Americans like to pretend that they are actually living in a 3rd world country & deny how privileged it is to even live there, the reality is that they are absolutely not. Even a minimum wage job in the US can get you above "starving" or even close to that point. Being poor in LA doesn't mean you're starving, and it's weird to assume that poor people just have to commit crimes and steal because they are poor.
Regardless, let's assume Los Angeles was such an economically desolate place for the poor. Well, it turns out that train robberies still aren't a common occurrence in even much poorer places so there must be something else going on too.
I had a project to completely automate this with an AI agent but Airbnb doesn't offer a publicly available API.
$3k seems high but the costs add up and the time as well (details here https://studiozenkai.com/post/airbnb-the-good-the-bad-the-pr... ). I always have a bit of profit at the end of year and the mortgage costs are entirely paid so no complaints here
If I ever get fed up from tech projects, I can see myself getting a bigger vacation property and making this my own version of Barista FIRE