4 ms·

If you do not like the sharing economy, then do not participate in it. "Other people should not be doing this, and should not be doing that, ..." is one bridge

If you do not like the sharing economy, then do not participate in it. "Other people should not be doing this, and should not be doing that, ..." is one bridge too far. For heaven's sake, who the hell are you, to tell other people what to do?

MereInterest 8y ago
Yeah, how dare we insist that people be paid a living wage! And health insurance is only for employees, not employees-in-everything-but-name!
- neokantian 8y ago
  I am free to make the deals that I want, regardless of what they include or don't include. Why would I need you to protect me from myself? Why do you want to micromanage other people's lives? Is your own life not interesting enough already?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    Because your life impacts mine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19335217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19335217
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - antidesitter 8y ago
      Virtually everything you do impacts people around you. So can you be more specific?
  - zanny 8y ago
    Because the price you offer for your time influences the perception of the value of time for everyone around you. Its why minimum wage exists at all. Without it, the most desperate depress wages to the absolute edge of starvation and destitution. It is not, and has never been, and never will be an answer to poverty, but it is a promise by the government that your time can never be valued at less than an absolute floor they set. Because nature and reality are cruel. For many people, in many circumstances, their time is practically worthless. Minimum wage has a carrying effect on the economic baseline - by having minimum wage workers, there exists industry to meet their extraordinarily limited means. Its the old Ford adage that he need pay his workers enough to afford his cars lest he have no market to sell to. This matters to state level actors the same way opiates in the US matter. If isolated, rare, instances of irrationality reign and someone ends up dead from a drug overdose that is a manageable risk for the freedom granted in return. But when millions are addicted, tens of thousands are dead, and whole communities are collapsing from it the individual choices that led people to drug addiction are a consequence to the whole of society. It doesn't even need be in that large a scale. If your brother is a drunk he will by nature he less productive and stable in his life, more prone to disease and illness, and often fall upon his family for support because he cannot support himself due to his own choices. You can then of course choose to not help him, but for those that do their now deflated resources from supporting their drunk brother depress their participation in markets they would have had more voice in. It takes only one bad apple to ruin a family, a bushel to destroy a community, and an orchard can ravage whole counties. Its why anyone contemplating suicide is told its a selfish way out. Because you make the choice, but everyone else gets to deal with the consequences. Almost nothing you do is wholly restricted to yourself alone - everything has consequences, and society at all is built on a foundation of trading personal liberty for freedom from others liberties.
    - wallace_f 8y ago
      Why cant we just give everyone a social dividend and then be done with it? We already create enough in taxation and economic deadloss in market inefficiencies to finance nearly 10k/year to every citizen.
      - zanny 8y ago
        The why right now, at least in the US, is that federal politicians are beholden the monied interests that lobby and fund their reelection campaigns, not to the constituents. So policy is written in their interests, which doesn't require a social dividend because all involved parties are already wealthy. Even if you solved the money in politics problem (which is hard) you still have the issue of a substantial portion of the US congress being elected in uncontested lifelong seats where the citizens have been thoroughly indoctrinated enough into either major parties ideology that they never consider voting for anyone but their incumbent. As long as politicians can feel their seat is guaranteed representing their own interests rather than those of their electors becomes the norm. So to even begin having a conversation about social dividends you need to radically revamp American elections to incentivize the legislature to represent their constituents. Which requires competitive, representative elections (which means you cannot be using first past the post everywhere) and substantially diluted power and influence so that buying influence over the legislature is less trivial (which almost always means substantially more seats in US congress to make buying a majority of seats more difficult). Which is by nature a constitutional amendment, which the congress itself would never ratify because it would end their gravy train of private influence and wealth so many currently enjoy. So you need it to come from the states, but the state governments are often just as corrupt and out of the control of the citizenry, if not moreso for their lack of publicity and presence in conversation, so you would need to figure out how to fix them first. Its a crazy massive expansive problem Larry Lessig was campaigning on in 2016, and Andrew Yang could learn a thing or two from before having pie in the sky conceptions of being able to institute UBI given the structure of the present US federal government.
  - username223 8y ago
    The thirteenth amendment exists for a reason, and as a "neo-Kantian," you should be into treating rational/human beings as ends in themselves. A country where you're allowed to sell yourself into slavery or indenture is one I can't support. So there are limits on what "deals" you can make.
- chillacy 8y ago
  You can land a job as an employee with no fixed hours, no manager, where you bring your own equipment, etc? Seems closer to contractors. I think it would have been smart if Uber let drivers set their own prices, then they'd be more akin to Amazon sellers, who feel more independent (but get screwed in other ways).
  - MereInterest 8y ago
    Where all the money goes to Uber, and is then distributed to the drivers? Where drivers are forbidden from subcontracting? Where drivers are forbidden from establishing regular routes for repeat customers? Those sound more like employees than contractors.
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      Visa or paypal isn't suddenly everyone's employer just because they process payments, and at least in some jurisdictions drivers can and do subcontract. In fact, there are licensed car rental companies that also provide services through Uber.
- joejerryronnie 8y ago
  See, I have a problem with this line of thought. You are not an employee of these companies if you can sign up through an app, choose how much or little you want to work, and have no boss. If you want the living wage, health insurance, and employee perks then apply for an actual job and go through the full interview process like the rest of us. This mentality of “I want everything you have but I don’t want to actually put the time and effort in to get it” is very frustrating.
  - nnnnnande 8y ago
    > This mentality of “I want everything you have but I don’t want to actually put the time and effort in to get it” is very frustrating. How do you know that these people haven't already put time and effort into trying to get an "actual job"? It would seem to me that the free market does not serve everyone with equal economic opportunity and that the world economy is more nuanced than what your average libertarian would like you to believe.
    - joejerryronnie 8y ago
      We’re at historically low levels of unemployment. There’s work out there if you want it. Sure, based on your skills and experience, you may not find a job which supports the lifestyle you want or the rent where you want to live, but then you reset your expectations and move to a place with a lower COL.
      - nnnnnande 8y ago
        You're right, but even that is more nuanced; for instance, the US unemployment rate is based on a survey that counts any paid work during the survey week as employment. I'm not in the US myself, but I think for the HN crowd in general moving to someplace else isn't a problem as we have the financial means as well as the independence. Other social groups might be more dependent on the social support around them (family, friends and maybe government). For them, moving to another place would be akin to resetting everything and starting a new life, with all the associated risk.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  > Yeah, how dare we insist that people be paid a living wage! And health insurance is only for employees, not employees-in-everything-but-name! You're doing no such thing. You're actually preaching that people with less opportunities than you should be left with even less options because your paternalist view of them makes you feel you're entitled to tell others how they can and cannot do to earn a living.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
PostOnce 8y ago
Participation will become non-optional. When one company, or tycoon, or whatever, owns everything, renting will no longer be optional. It's not hard to imagine a world in which most software is SaaS. It's also not hard to imagine a world in which the car company decides to stop selling and start renting. Arcade game manufacturers realized early on that it's stupid to sell a machine that makes $30K for $2.5K, so they started opening arcades. Nolan Bushnell went and made Chuck E. Cheese, and Taito was doing the same thing. Sega does it in Japan still. I know a guy who lives on a yacht with his family, he finances trips via the dozen or so rental houses he owns. The people renting from him may never buy a house, given that building new ones here is becoming hardly possible due to zoning. So yeah, good luck opting out when nothing is for sale anymore.
- anovikov 8y ago
  Well it must be represented by one simple thing: rental yields. What is the rental yield for a typical property in your place? If it's going way up, you can easily afford buying instead of renting so you don't have that problem (at a rental yield of about 6% or so, a mortgage becomes smaller than the rent). If it's going way low, it's a stupid idea to buy and owning will probably never pay for itself and lose money long term. I know a lot of places where rental yield is under 2%. Why would anyone buy there? (explanation is usually: to park dirty money). And it's not due to zoning. Zoning exists so that load of excess people does not make a neighborhood unlivable, or there will be too much traffic and getting to and from job becomes impossible. Wanna fight it? Push employers to let people work remotely. It's not possible for low paying jobs e.g. waiters, but these don't buy or rent anything anyway, for most professions where people have a shot of getting into a real estate market, there is such option. Let people work remotely and suddenly you'll realize there is a shitload of almost free real estate around.
  - PostOnce 8y ago
    Well, that assumes someone wants to sell a house, or that you're allowed to build a new one. Neither of those may be the case.
    - 8y ago
chongli 8y ago
When someone decides to turn their apartment until a hotel room, it affects all of their neighbours. They can't then decide not to participate in the sharing economy, it is thrust upon them unwillingly.
- shard972 8y ago
  The obvious solution here is to then share your apartment and go live in your nicer house.
- KorematsuFred 8y ago
  Then those people should amend HOA rules or move to some other place where they can sign a contract of no AirBnB. If the AirBnB hosts causes an actual loss make him pay for it. At any rate the armchair philosophers should not advice others on what should be allowed or not.
  - sushid 8y ago
    How is complaining about a neighbor being an "armchair philosopher"? I hope the irony of your statement is not lost in you. Apartment complexes don't have HOAs and sometimes it can be a huge hassle to contact your landlord to fix the sink, much less to investigate and shut down your neighbor's illegal Airbnb operation.
- antidesitter 8y ago
  That’s up to neighborhood associations and their contractual arrangements.
cwyers 8y ago
Here's the thing. Economic transactions can have externalities -- costs to someone not a party to the transaction that are not reflected in the cost of the good or service in the transaction. The "sharing economy" has loads of externalities. It's like saying, if you don't like the bonfire, don't participate to it, when you've set the fire downwind of someone and there's smoke blowing in their tent.
- neokantian 8y ago
  Yeah, it is always possible to discover new externalities, if you want to. If you sleep with that girl, I cannot do that at the same time. So, that is also an externality. Since it affects what I can do, I have the right to stick my nose into that business, no?
  - cwyers 8y ago
    That's not an externality. And honestly, your chosen example is rather unpleasant. An externality is something like "cigarettes produce smoke that contains a lot of carcinogens, and therefore cigarette smoking can contribute to the poor health of people who are nearby even if they do not choose to smoke themselves."
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - thomasfortes 8y ago
    Ignoring the terrible taste of your argument for the sake of keeping it civil... Do you really think that everyone should simply bend to the externalities that you generate? You really think that you could drop toxic waste on a river that goes through your property and no one can complain when the river dies because you are more important that the victims of your externalities? Because it is a terrible argument that does not seem to have any basis on how the real world operates.
  - bostik 8y ago
    Technically you can, but the practice is called "gang rape" and is rightly frowned upon. I am choosing to make an even more tasteless point than what you did. It's easy to be a capitalist when you are independently wealthy.
tasty_freeze 8y ago
Aren't you telling him what to do?
lazyasciiart 8y ago
> "Other people should not be doing this, and should not be doing that, ..." is one bridge too far. Wait til you hear about criminal law!
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
It's not that simple and I think that should be abundantly clear. People buying up properties and renting them on Airbnb has wider impact than only to the people that choose to actively participate or don't. And it affects not only the units in that specific building, but the community and property surrounding it. More cars on the road, encouraged by the incentives of Uber/Lyft, affect pollution, road congestion, and public health.
ggm 8y ago
For heaven's sake, who the hell are you, to tell other people what to do? I'm a voting tax-payer: thats how government of the people, by the people works. We pay the taxes so that our representatives stop this kind of "shitting in the commons" nonsense. The ubers and airbnb are avoiding paying community costs, avoiding compliance with safety laws, avoiding all kinds of things, while simultaneously exporting the profit into other peoples hands, by giving some to individuals at a cost to everyone else in the peaceful enjoyment of their own property. Telling people what to do is what government is all about.
- neokantian 8y ago
  "Other people must to do this. Other people must do that." Forcing other people is a form of spam, which naturally leads to anti-spam measures. Your form of spam will work until it doesn't anymore. Seriously, I do not care about your voting circus. There will always come a point at which you will have to prove that you are willing to risk your life and die for what you believe in.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

MereInterest 8y ago

Yeah, how dare we insist that people be paid a living wage! And health insurance is only for employees, not employees-in-everything-but-name!

neokantian 8y ago
I am free to make the deals that I want, regardless of what they include or don't include. Why would I need you to protect me from myself? Why do you want to micromanage other people's lives? Is your own life not interesting enough already?
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  Because your life impacts mine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19335217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19335217
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - antidesitter 8y ago
    Virtually everything you do impacts people around you. So can you be more specific?
- zanny 8y ago
  Because the price you offer for your time influences the perception of the value of time for everyone around you. Its why minimum wage exists at all. Without it, the most desperate depress wages to the absolute edge of starvation and destitution. It is not, and has never been, and never will be an answer to poverty, but it is a promise by the government that your time can never be valued at less than an absolute floor they set. Because nature and reality are cruel. For many people, in many circumstances, their time is practically worthless. Minimum wage has a carrying effect on the economic baseline - by having minimum wage workers, there exists industry to meet their extraordinarily limited means. Its the old Ford adage that he need pay his workers enough to afford his cars lest he have no market to sell to. This matters to state level actors the same way opiates in the US matter. If isolated, rare, instances of irrationality reign and someone ends up dead from a drug overdose that is a manageable risk for the freedom granted in return. But when millions are addicted, tens of thousands are dead, and whole communities are collapsing from it the individual choices that led people to drug addiction are a consequence to the whole of society. It doesn't even need be in that large a scale. If your brother is a drunk he will by nature he less productive and stable in his life, more prone to disease and illness, and often fall upon his family for support because he cannot support himself due to his own choices. You can then of course choose to not help him, but for those that do their now deflated resources from supporting their drunk brother depress their participation in markets they would have had more voice in. It takes only one bad apple to ruin a family, a bushel to destroy a community, and an orchard can ravage whole counties. Its why anyone contemplating suicide is told its a selfish way out. Because you make the choice, but everyone else gets to deal with the consequences. Almost nothing you do is wholly restricted to yourself alone - everything has consequences, and society at all is built on a foundation of trading personal liberty for freedom from others liberties.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    Why cant we just give everyone a social dividend and then be done with it? We already create enough in taxation and economic deadloss in market inefficiencies to finance nearly 10k/year to every citizen.
    - zanny 8y ago
      The why right now, at least in the US, is that federal politicians are beholden the monied interests that lobby and fund their reelection campaigns, not to the constituents. So policy is written in their interests, which doesn't require a social dividend because all involved parties are already wealthy. Even if you solved the money in politics problem (which is hard) you still have the issue of a substantial portion of the US congress being elected in uncontested lifelong seats where the citizens have been thoroughly indoctrinated enough into either major parties ideology that they never consider voting for anyone but their incumbent. As long as politicians can feel their seat is guaranteed representing their own interests rather than those of their electors becomes the norm. So to even begin having a conversation about social dividends you need to radically revamp American elections to incentivize the legislature to represent their constituents. Which requires competitive, representative elections (which means you cannot be using first past the post everywhere) and substantially diluted power and influence so that buying influence over the legislature is less trivial (which almost always means substantially more seats in US congress to make buying a majority of seats more difficult). Which is by nature a constitutional amendment, which the congress itself would never ratify because it would end their gravy train of private influence and wealth so many currently enjoy. So you need it to come from the states, but the state governments are often just as corrupt and out of the control of the citizenry, if not moreso for their lack of publicity and presence in conversation, so you would need to figure out how to fix them first. Its a crazy massive expansive problem Larry Lessig was campaigning on in 2016, and Andrew Yang could learn a thing or two from before having pie in the sky conceptions of being able to institute UBI given the structure of the present US federal government.
- username223 8y ago
  The thirteenth amendment exists for a reason, and as a "neo-Kantian," you should be into treating rational/human beings as ends in themselves. A country where you're allowed to sell yourself into slavery or indenture is one I can't support. So there are limits on what "deals" you can make.
chillacy 8y ago
You can land a job as an employee with no fixed hours, no manager, where you bring your own equipment, etc? Seems closer to contractors. I think it would have been smart if Uber let drivers set their own prices, then they'd be more akin to Amazon sellers, who feel more independent (but get screwed in other ways).
- MereInterest 8y ago
  Where all the money goes to Uber, and is then distributed to the drivers? Where drivers are forbidden from subcontracting? Where drivers are forbidden from establishing regular routes for repeat customers? Those sound more like employees than contractors.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    Visa or paypal isn't suddenly everyone's employer just because they process payments, and at least in some jurisdictions drivers can and do subcontract. In fact, there are licensed car rental companies that also provide services through Uber.
joejerryronnie 8y ago
See, I have a problem with this line of thought. You are not an employee of these companies if you can sign up through an app, choose how much or little you want to work, and have no boss. If you want the living wage, health insurance, and employee perks then apply for an actual job and go through the full interview process like the rest of us. This mentality of “I want everything you have but I don’t want to actually put the time and effort in to get it” is very frustrating.
- nnnnnande 8y ago
  > This mentality of “I want everything you have but I don’t want to actually put the time and effort in to get it” is very frustrating. How do you know that these people haven't already put time and effort into trying to get an "actual job"? It would seem to me that the free market does not serve everyone with equal economic opportunity and that the world economy is more nuanced than what your average libertarian would like you to believe.
  - joejerryronnie 8y ago
    We’re at historically low levels of unemployment. There’s work out there if you want it. Sure, based on your skills and experience, you may not find a job which supports the lifestyle you want or the rent where you want to live, but then you reset your expectations and move to a place with a lower COL.
    - nnnnnande 8y ago
      You're right, but even that is more nuanced; for instance, the US unemployment rate is based on a survey that counts any paid work during the survey week as employment. I'm not in the US myself, but I think for the HN crowd in general moving to someplace else isn't a problem as we have the financial means as well as the independence. Other social groups might be more dependent on the social support around them (family, friends and maybe government). For them, moving to another place would be akin to resetting everything and starting a new life, with all the associated risk.
geezerjay 8y ago
> Yeah, how dare we insist that people be paid a living wage! And health insurance is only for employees, not employees-in-everything-but-name! You're doing no such thing. You're actually preaching that people with less opportunities than you should be left with even less options because your paternalist view of them makes you feel you're entitled to tell others how they can and cannot do to earn a living.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

PostOnce 8y ago

Participation will become non-optional. When one company, or tycoon, or whatever, owns everything, renting will no longer be optional. It's not hard to imagine a world in which most software is SaaS. It's also not hard to imagine a world in which the car company decides to stop selling and start renting. Arcade game manufacturers realized early on that it's stupid to sell a machine that makes $30K for $2.5K, so they started opening arcades. Nolan Bushnell went and made Chuck E. Cheese, and Taito was doing the same thing. Sega does it in Japan still. I know a guy who lives on a yacht with his family, he finances trips via the dozen or so rental houses he owns. The people renting from him may never buy a house, given that building new ones here is becoming hardly possible due to zoning. So yeah, good luck opting out when nothing is for sale anymore.

anovikov 8y ago
Well it must be represented by one simple thing: rental yields. What is the rental yield for a typical property in your place? If it's going way up, you can easily afford buying instead of renting so you don't have that problem (at a rental yield of about 6% or so, a mortgage becomes smaller than the rent). If it's going way low, it's a stupid idea to buy and owning will probably never pay for itself and lose money long term. I know a lot of places where rental yield is under 2%. Why would anyone buy there? (explanation is usually: to park dirty money). And it's not due to zoning. Zoning exists so that load of excess people does not make a neighborhood unlivable, or there will be too much traffic and getting to and from job becomes impossible. Wanna fight it? Push employers to let people work remotely. It's not possible for low paying jobs e.g. waiters, but these don't buy or rent anything anyway, for most professions where people have a shot of getting into a real estate market, there is such option. Let people work remotely and suddenly you'll realize there is a shitload of almost free real estate around.
- PostOnce 8y ago
  Well, that assumes someone wants to sell a house, or that you're allowed to build a new one. Neither of those may be the case.
  - 8y ago

chongli 8y ago

When someone decides to turn their apartment until a hotel room, it affects all of their neighbours. They can't then decide not to participate in the sharing economy, it is thrust upon them unwillingly.

shard972 8y ago
The obvious solution here is to then share your apartment and go live in your nicer house.
KorematsuFred 8y ago
Then those people should amend HOA rules or move to some other place where they can sign a contract of no AirBnB. If the AirBnB hosts causes an actual loss make him pay for it. At any rate the armchair philosophers should not advice others on what should be allowed or not.
- sushid 8y ago
  How is complaining about a neighbor being an "armchair philosopher"? I hope the irony of your statement is not lost in you. Apartment complexes don't have HOAs and sometimes it can be a huge hassle to contact your landlord to fix the sink, much less to investigate and shut down your neighbor's illegal Airbnb operation.
antidesitter 8y ago
That’s up to neighborhood associations and their contractual arrangements.

cwyers 8y ago

Here's the thing. Economic transactions can have externalities -- costs to someone not a party to the transaction that are not reflected in the cost of the good or service in the transaction. The "sharing economy" has loads of externalities. It's like saying, if you don't like the bonfire, don't participate to it, when you've set the fire downwind of someone and there's smoke blowing in their tent.

neokantian 8y ago
Yeah, it is always possible to discover new externalities, if you want to. If you sleep with that girl, I cannot do that at the same time. So, that is also an externality. Since it affects what I can do, I have the right to stick my nose into that business, no?
- cwyers 8y ago
  That's not an externality. And honestly, your chosen example is rather unpleasant. An externality is something like "cigarettes produce smoke that contains a lot of carcinogens, and therefore cigarette smoking can contribute to the poor health of people who are nearby even if they do not choose to smoke themselves."
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- thomasfortes 8y ago
  Ignoring the terrible taste of your argument for the sake of keeping it civil... Do you really think that everyone should simply bend to the externalities that you generate? You really think that you could drop toxic waste on a river that goes through your property and no one can complain when the river dies because you are more important that the victims of your externalities? Because it is a terrible argument that does not seem to have any basis on how the real world operates.
- bostik 8y ago
  Technically you can, but the practice is called "gang rape" and is rightly frowned upon. I am choosing to make an even more tasteless point than what you did. It's easy to be a capitalist when you are independently wealthy.

tasty_freeze 8y ago

Aren't you telling him what to do?

lazyasciiart 8y ago

> "Other people should not be doing this, and should not be doing that, ..." is one bridge too far. Wait til you hear about criminal law!

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

It's not that simple and I think that should be abundantly clear. People buying up properties and renting them on Airbnb has wider impact than only to the people that choose to actively participate or don't. And it affects not only the units in that specific building, but the community and property surrounding it. More cars on the road, encouraged by the incentives of Uber/Lyft, affect pollution, road congestion, and public health.

ggm 8y ago

For heaven's sake, who the hell are you, to tell other people what to do? I'm a voting tax-payer: thats how government of the people, by the people works. We pay the taxes so that our representatives stop this kind of "shitting in the commons" nonsense. The ubers and airbnb are avoiding paying community costs, avoiding compliance with safety laws, avoiding all kinds of things, while simultaneously exporting the profit into other peoples hands, by giving some to individuals at a cost to everyone else in the peaceful enjoyment of their own property. Telling people what to do is what government is all about.

neokantian 8y ago
"Other people must to do this. Other people must do that." Forcing other people is a form of spam, which naturally leads to anti-spam measures. Your form of spam will work until it doesn't anymore. Seriously, I do not care about your voting circus. There will always come a point at which you will have to prove that you are willing to risk your life and die for what you believe in.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]