I wasn't going to "shame" or denounce the guy, if that's what you were fishing for. I'll leave moralistic judgements up to those directly impacted by his activities -- in this case, his landlord and his neighbors (and quite possible, depending on how he files his returns, the NYC taxpayer, as well).
But on broader fronts, the poster's confession does add to the body of anecdotal evidence we have (being as hard data would be extremely difficult to come by) that a significant chunk of Aribnb's business model is based on outright fraud, in various forms. "Outsourced" fraud, one might, for which Airbnb can't be held directly or legally culpable -- but fraud, pure and simple, nonetheless. And even if only 5-10% (a very conservative guess) of Airbnb's host are engaged in a comparable sort of scheme -- we're still talking about a scale affecting quite literally millions of people, globally.
Which in turn the leadership of Airbnb must no doubt be cognizant of one some level; and -- until they're forced to do otherwise (because you we nearly always have to force these companies to behave properly, it turns out) -- more than happy to turn a blind eye at.
"Socializing costs, privatizing gains", in other words.
Yes, though. I am sort of saying that by asking one guy out of a crowd very obvious questions you were attempting to publicly shame him or call him on something. Were you actually asking that question to gain a data point you needed, or was it mainly commentary?
Anyways, like with Uber. I know the taxi's companies have a government granted monopoly. I don't ride with Uber because I'm ignorant of that, I ride with them almost because of that fact (and that they're just so much better of an experience). But as a rider I have nothing to lose.
With AirBnB when people are waving around fairly ludicrous threats of fines and liens on your property, who'd admit to anything when they know the other side is just looking for a scapegoat?
My intent wasn't to "shame" him -- but if he understood the consequences of his actions (and to collect the data point).
With AirBnB when people are waving around fairly ludicrous threats of fines and liens on your property, who'd admit to anything when they know the other side is just looking for a scapegoat?
I'm not sure what threats you're referring to. The collateral damage (to property owners, neighbors ... and as we have seen from the other article posted today[1], to customers who fall on the wrong side of Airbnb's liability coverage) are very real -- so I don't see the concerns people are raising about it as "scapegoating."
The damage may be real, but "the problem of damage" is not. If my (theoretical) AirBnB guests damaged something I'm on the hook as if I damaged it myself. I don't get a free pass, so there's no externality. My strata organization can fine me for noise, wether caused by a party or an unruly tenant.
Even the way you present it is as if users of AirBnB are ripping everyone off ("consequences of his actions..."). It's just taken for granted.
And anyways, scapegoating is about the picking of a specific person to suffer for the crimes of the many. Singling out one person for something many people are doing is pretty unkind even if the thing is bad, which is debatable in this case.
Even the way you present it is as if users of AirBnB are ripping everyone off ("consequences of his actions...").
No, my observation applies strictly to those who rent their apartments in violation of their leases and/or local ordinances.
..even if the thing is bad, which is debatable in this case.
You're welcome to debate whether "the thing" (subleasing his apartment in violation of his lease -- for a huge profit) is bad or not, but to me it seems pretty clear.
But here you imply that anyone breaking a contact of adhesion is a bad person. I literally cannot rent a suite that doesn't forbid sub-letting, even though local law forbids forbidding of (reasonable) subletting.
And if we then say, well it's not bad in my city because the contract that tried to prevent it wasn't enforceable, we have to step back and ask how it's magically bad in another city with different laws.
I'd rather talk about actual harm, or rather lack thereof outside scare stories, to buildings and other tenants. No harm, no foul, and harm to abusive contracts doesn't count.
I'm not so sure I'm getting what they are trying to say here.
Companies have been playing the taxation arbitrage game since the beginning of taxation. Isn't that what states to do each other in the USA? Why do you think FL has no income tax while NY/NJ/CT do?
FL has no income tax because it doesn't want retirees to rip off wage earners. It is clearly not a play to attract portable businessz since it has almost none.
the media seems intent on sinking Tesla. While I agree with the conclusion that they should stick to car instead of loan technology, the tagline under the 500$ seems enough to me to indicate it is a cost of ownership figure. These practices are certainly not more deceptive than what is seen elsewhere in the auto industry
This is silly and borders on conspiracy theory. It would be suspicious if Tesla is being attacked over technicalities or falsehoods, but all of the criticism in this article is true, representative, and on the money.
It's not just Car & Driver, there have been recently discussions on HN also where it's been shown many times over that the $500 figure is straight out to lunch and grossly misleading.
Why is it that some of us here feel the need to constantly worship at the feet of demigod Musk, He Who Does No Wrong, and anything negative said about him is dismissed as slanderous propaganda by Big Automobile? What is this, the USSR?
I appreciate what Elon Musk is doing to advance electric cars and wean us off of oil, but he is a shrewd businessman subject to the fallibilities of all shrewd businessmen. He is neither a messiah nor a saint.
"he is a shrewd businessman subject to the fallibilities of all shrewd businessmen."
Rather a broad generalization, don't you think? Like most fields, business turns out to have more variation than outsiders think. "Businessmen" range from pure money grubbers who will do whatever makes the most, to people who are in business simply because the thing they want to build can only be embodied as a business. I don't know for sure, but it seems to me that Elon Musk is toward the latter end of the spectrum.
> "the thing they want to build can only be embodied as a business."
I agree completely. It's easy to see how improving the state of electric
vehicles requires significant capital, so without a business, there's no
viable way to make the desired advancements.
Some of the backlash against Elon Musk seems to be caused by some people
having extremely high expectations for everything he does. Those
expectations are occasionally unrealistic, and blaming him personally
for every misgiving of the entire Tesla company is entirely unfair.
Most car sales/lease terms are horribly and intentionally confusing and
complicated, but someone in marketing at Tesla made a serious mistake.
The mistake wasn't using industry norm of difficult to comprehend
claims and terms, instead, the mistake was failing to live up to
expectations of something better, namely, clear and direct terms with
fair and easy comparisons.
As a business, Tesla must compete with all of the entrenched businesses
but by using the "best practices" of the industry in terms of marketing,
they missed an opportunity and failed to meet expectations. There are
few people on the planet who have set expectations so high as to get
blamed personally for failing to innovate absolutely everywhere, but it
seems Elon Musk is one of them.
The world would be a better place if more people had his problems. ;-)
> ""Businessmen" range from pure money grubbers who will do whatever makes the most, to people who are in business simply because the thing they want to build can only be embodied as a business."
True - but I don't think it's necessarily quite so polarized in this case. When Musk went off and screamed fraud at the New York Times for their review, one can reasonably explain it away as a passionate man protecting his dream company - an example of being on the latter end of the spectrum.
This is a bit different - and I think this Tesla financing brouhaha is proving that Musk has more of the former in him than we'd like to admit.
I for one am a bit disillusioned. We have heard the conveniently woven story many times - passionate individual starts a company to change the world for the better - but that's always overly simplistic. While I wouldn't describe Musk as a pure money grubber, I honestly do not believe Musk is as far down that spectrum as popularly believed.
Elon's more of the real deal than most of the ecosystem out there.. his degree of belief is evident post Paypal. Most exits of that scale spawn VCs or incubator dons..
“There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”[1]
Why is it that some of us here feel the need to constantly worship at the feet of demigod Musk, He Who Does No Wrong, and anything negative said about him is dismissed as slanderous propaganda by Big Automobile?
Many of the complaints are absolutely legitimate and have nothing to do with sinking tesla. For example:
" the fuel savings calculator nestled among these references to the buyback program defaults to driving 15,000 miles per year. Nowhere on the page does Tesla mention that the buyback program explicitly limits mileage to 12,000 per year, and that any miles in excess are charged at $0.25 apiece ... they’d have to pay an additional $2250 in mileage penalties."
This is the type of thing you expect from a scummy used car dealer.
It's not a cost of ownership figure. By definition, if you're paying Tesla or Wells-Fargo $1,200 a month for your car, your cost of ownership is at least $1,200 a month.
Rent one from me for $1500 a month. That will save you the $1200 you otherwise would pay to Tesla, so your total cost of ownership is only $300 per month.
In other words: your logic does not make sense to me.
I didn't say I improved the probability of the game. I improved the probability of my betting decisions producing favorable outcomes. Huge difference.
Think of it as betting by considering the physics of the game vs. in complete ignorance. Betting single numbers, black, white, dozens, columns and rows is absolutely moronic once you stop to think about how the game actually works.
No you aren't, roulette is not an RNG, it is a PRNG. If you take into account the initial marble velocity and rate of rotation of the wheel, you can seriously reduce the probability space of where the ball will land. Further, this can be modelled statistically pretty simply.
To win at betting with roulette you only need to bet on a set of numbers, where the probability of the marble landing on that set is pretty good, and the payout of winning over time covers the losses from being wrong.
So say you can accurately guess which 1/4 of the wheel will capture the marble. (and there are no greens... the real math is the same but uglier a bit). You put down equal bets on the 9 numbers represented by that. Each beting round will net you a 4:1 payout.
Now say you can only guess that 1/4 of the wheel, 50% of the time. You will still average a 2:1 payout.
Guessing the 1/4 of the board 50% of the time is not that hard, you just need to calculate the linear drift of the time the marble passes a fixed point, and know the frequency of "loops" that is too slow for the marble to stay on the track. Accounting for the rotation of the board is straight-forward, it is almost constant for a given play. The 50% covers the wierd bounces. Just calculate board position for the time that the marble will get below the threshold, and the marble position as well, and you've won. A person can't do it well, but an arduino is overkill for it.
Edit: further notes on this- casinos will be able to detect this easily. All they have to do is look for people on hot streaks that are "too hot", then compare betting placement with wheel positions. And they generally kick people out who are winning too much anyway, even if they can't prove 'chaeting'.
And this is why shoe computers are banned in casinos!
Google Glass will make this hack so simple, the casino's will have to ban them from being anywhere close to a roulette table to reduce team cheating possibilities.
This seems highly unlikely to be practical, given chaos. If this system shows high sensitivity to initial conditions, then we probably can't know the various inputs to enough precision to get any results.
Consider that a 2 link pendulum is chaotic. The tiniest difference in your estimate of the initial kinematics results in divergent predictions.
Some folks published a paper last year or the year before about their roulette monitoring system. You can improve your odds because you're allowed to place bets while the ball is bouncing. Some physics prof claims to have successfully used a device to count the bounces and decide which half of the wheel to bet on. I'd find the citations for you, but I'm sure you could do that just as fast as I.
One thing to keep in mind, always in such situations[1], you don't have to be right, you just have to be probabilistically right -- that is the goals is to just increase the chances of being right in such a way as to have an edge.
[1] Where you are betting, or otherwise working on odds and long term averages.
1) In the age of the smart phones, could one not develop an app to do this calculation for you? It might be tricky to film the wheel, but I'm sure that can be done stealthily somehow.
2) Would this work on online roulette games who claim to simulate the real-world physics of a roulette table?
I won't spell it out here because the fun is in working out these problems, at least it is for me. I'll shove you in the right direction though.
Betting on a single number is foolish. The mathematical probability of hitting any single number is only 2.7%. In other words, the house absolutely loves you.
Dozens and Columns are better, 32.4%. Still, the house advantage is huge.
Even/Odd or Red/Black get you up to 48.6%. Hey, that's a deal, right?
Well, no. The problem with all of these calculations you'll find around the internet is that they are equivalent to picking a random number (or 12 or whatever) out of 38. The problem is that this is NOT how the roulette works.
The roulette has a spinning wheel with numbers separated by fences. The ball spins as well. Along the path of the ball there are also little bumpers that can alter the path of the ball.
Yes, in the long term it is just like picking random numbers. However, if you look at what makes you win or loose at the "micro" level it is a little simpler.
If you bet on a single number the ball only has to move one slot for you to loose. As it lands on the number field the ball has a bunch of excess energy. The surfaces are hard and it bounces around with great efficiency. It can go over one or more number fences very easily.
In fact, if you study every single common bet, single numbers, rows, columns, dozens, color, even/odd, etc. they all share one trait: If the ball jumps over just ONE fence you loose.
If you've played roulette enough you'll eventually run into this stereotype: Big guy. Smells and looks like money. Shows up with piles of cash, gold watch and gold chain around his neck. And starts to place piles of cash on numbers he is pulling out of his anal orifice. Most of the time these guys loose a ton of money. Why? The "one fence" problem.
OK, I think that sets it up. Actually, it is probably beyond obvious at this point. Take a look at a roulette wheel and think about how you should bet to solve the problem that makes every single common bet nearly worthless.
I don't get it, surely if I bet on only one number and win, my return must be higher than if I bet on even/odds. it's not the probability that counts, rather the expected return.
If I drop the ball directly on one of your numbers from, say, 1 inch above the number. Wheel not spinning. How far would the ball have to bounce for you to loose?
Bet on the dozens, columns, rows, black/red and other common ( and convenient) bets. Repeat the exercise.
You have nothing useful to say yet feel compelled to attack what I am saying. Why?
It has been proven that roulette can be beaten through predictive methods. This is nothing new. Not sure I get your angle when all you do is shoot the messenger.
I am going to take you at your word that you aren't baiting me. Yes, you can (and people have) predicted where a roulette ball will land while it is in motion, particularly if you have the aid of cameras. This is more useful in European Roulette and American Roulette - but it can work.
What you can't do, is come up with a positive expected value through any kind of betting pattern.
if you are going to be walking in front of your desk it seems foolish to use electricity to power both your computer and the "walking simulator" or treadmill. Why not just have an non-powered treadmill that is capable of generating electricity for the rest of the workstation with the energy you expend?
There are an incredible number of people who own trucks, and use them like cars. Even an significant number of people who have "work trucks" and "good trucks". The former for trucky things and the later for car things.
Exactly. My father (construction) complains all the time about how trucks are no longer made for guys like him. Last I heard "work trucks" account for about 10-15% of truck sales in the US.
