7 ms·

If it's not profitable then why should Airbnb be the one to subsidize it? Why not the government? Or some charity? Or you? We don't expect anyone who meets a h

• empath75 10y ago
  Yeah, those people shouldn't have made the choice to be disabled.
  • jdminhbg 10y ago
    How is this at all a response to the parent poster?
• Lawtonfogle 10y ago
  Why should anyone have to support them at all? It comes down to they and their supporters convinced society we should care about them and we decided those profiting off the majority to be the ones bearing the cost of the minority. Why do I have to bake a cake for a gay wedding if I do such for straight weddings? Because the people who want that requirement have won the level of support needed to have legal support.
  • fennecfoxen 10y ago
    Circular reasoning.
    • wruza 10y ago
      Isn't it the way society works?
• crdoconnor 10y ago
  >If it's not profitable then why should Airbnb be the one to subsidize it? Because they're massive rent extractors. Rent extractors should subsidize most things.
  • fennecfoxen 10y ago
    AirBnB is a rent extractor? That's a tendentious claim; the reason all the 'sharing economy' stuff works is that it's improving capital utilization and damaging cartels. I'd expect that real rent extractors are hotel owners in big cities with limited hotel zoning, who lobby for anti-AirBnB regulation to keep competition low and prices high. Or the politician/business alliances who build the local convention center by forcing a $N/night tax on local hotels.
    • makomk 10y ago
      The reason all that "sharing economy" stuff works is that you can afford to have worse capital utilization if you ignore existing regulations. For example, there's a big difference between what people can afford to pay for hotel stays and what they can afford to pay to live somewhere which means that dedicated AirBNB apartments can stay empty a large chunk of the time if you ignore zoning regulations intended to block this. Similarly, Uber cars can operate at much lower hours and mileage because there aren't the same restrictions on the number cluttering the streets or the same vetting of new staff.
      • fennecfoxen 10y ago
        > there's a big difference between what people can afford to pay for hotel stays and what they can afford to pay to live somewhere ... which means that the capital associated with "people living somewhere" is poorly allocated, and would be more profitable utilized as a nice hotel space. Capital utilization isn't just about the raw duty cycle of someone using that capital. You don't markedly improve your organization's capital utilization by running SETI@Home on idle computers, because SETI@Home is a worthless waste of cycles of little or no benefit to you or society at large. > Uber cars can operate at much lower hours and mileage Uber's more of the damage-cartels case, admittedly.
• geofft 10y ago
  Why would that argument not apply to "It's 1960, and I don't want to seat black customers at my fancy restaurant because it's statistically likely to be less profitable than seating white customers"?
  • blfr 10y ago
    Because black customers pay the same prices and do not require additional accommodations. It would apply if the restaurateur was required to maintain separate dining rooms for whites and blacks or additional water fountains.
    • geofft 10y ago
      Everyone pays the same prices for what they order, but they can choose to order more or less expensive foods, more or less expensive wines (or none at all), etc., and they can tip differently. If you have more customers trying to make reservations than tables to seat them, it is economically rational to seat the customers most likely to buy your more expensive items. We decided (correctly, IMO) that it is more important for society to fight entrenched racism than to enable business owners to make that particular locally-rational economic decision.
  • reinhardt 10y ago
    It would apply just as well, hence the "Why not the government?". You probably don't want to be the first/only fancy restaurant to fight racism.
  • m4chth1s 10y ago
    I've never worked in the restaurant industry, but, I've heard from people who have that it's STILL extremely common for black customers to be considered undesirable. I.e. a server will get upset at a host(ess) if they get "too many" black customers assigned to their tables. Why? Servers claim that black customers - on average - tip less. I don't know how prevalent this belief on the part of servers is. And I don't know how much of a numerically accurate basis in reality it has. But, as a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that there exists an identifiable group [black people, star trek fans, old people, dentists, ...] that are likely to lead a server to go home with less money at the end of the night. There can be a really fine line between statistics/machine learning and "bias"/"racism". Where it gets even more complicated is that there might be variables which are not expressed as "is the customer black" which ultimately predict/are highly correlated with the question "is the customer black" - but are also predictive of the question "is the customer profitable".