I don't see the distinction. It's fine to market your product, but there is such a thing as distortion and as a scam. Providing a fair representation of your product factors into ethics, as does Facebook fairly presenting the feed of your friends news, with a reasonable attempt at NOT distorting it.
I agree! I'd put unethical behavior like distortion and lying in a different category than Facebook's, but I agree. I was trying to kill the parallel between Facebook intentionally manipulating user emotions for science, and Budweiser intentionally manipulating viewer emotions for beer sales. Video games work here too: Amnesia scares the unmentionables out of me, but I'm ok with that, because I know that's the whole point.
Another missing component here is user control. I can turn off the commercial and stop playing the game. I'm currently working (in a minor capacity) on the National Children's Study, and our participants can walk away at any time. When the Facebook subjects on the negative side started feeling slightly more sad, they had no idea why, and no clue how to stop it.
I've stayed with people who had a few properties that they rented on Airbnb. Renting 1-5 seems okay. More or less, you're running a B&B.
When it gets to whole floors or buildings, you've got a hotel on your hands. That is and should be illegal and Airbnb should work with authorities to shut that down.
I agree. It's clear that (1) hotels aren't worth the cost; (2) people would rather 'live like locals'; and (3) distributing hotel management & maintenance is more effective that concentrating it in giant hotels.
Not to mention that the booking experience on Airbnb is way better than using the counterparts of hotels and hotel booking sites.
Airbnb has sought to bake in accountability both at a large and small scale.
1) Airbnb has a crazy insurance policy [1]
2) Both the host & guest get reviewed. A single bad review can impede your ability to rent on either side.
This is purely based on my experience, but it seems like guests really don't misbehave.
Maybe there is the occasional party or guest who trashes the place. Good hosts tend to hire cleaning services to deal with messes. Generally, guest are tired from traveling and doing activities and are low impact.
But the landlord is not a party to the contract between Airbnb and the host. If any damage were to occur to the building, the landlord would need to sue the host and collect from him, and Airbnb says nothing about paying for legal expenses. (And once the landlord got involved, it would probably ultimately result in eviction proceedings against the host for violating the terms of his lease.)
Note that the Airbnb guarantee doesn't insure the host's personal property: "The Host Guarantee is not insurance and should not be considered as a replacement or stand-in for homeowners or renters insurance." However, using your apartment as a rental property probably violates the terms of a standard renters insurance policy, so the insurance company would probably not pay for losses that were due to an Airbnb guest.
You're talking about a situation in which significant damage is done to the building AND the host doesn't report this to Airbnb with photos and evidence. There are bound to be horror stories with any service (hotels certainly included), but I'd expect this particular combination of all-around irresponsibility to be rare.
The guarantee terms and conditions exclude damage to common areas and units not owned or controlled by the host. Water damage or a truly abusive guest still leave the host exposed to claims and the landlord exposed to damages for which no solvent party has liability.
I have no problem with the landlord restricting renters from re-renting on AirBnB or the like, but how is that different from the host (first-instance renter) doing water damage himself?
It's possible in both cases. The difference is two-fold: The landlord can control the probability of damage through the application process, assuming some people are predictably more risky, and the renter can be required to purchase insurance to ensure that damages are paid. I doubt (but haven't confirmed) that a standard renter's policy covers damages arising from short-term rentals.
Oh please. What is with the echo chamber's fixation on user reviews? You have mostly self-selected bimodal distributions that are made worse by the review system being gamed in unintended ways. The other day there was an article on an AirBnB seller not giving bad reviews out of fear of retaliation.
View/controller separation, view models and query abstraction are framework-level features. The author of this language is seeking to take the qualities of PHP that make it a 'hypertext preprocessor' and mixing in the no-frills syntax and vocabulary of ruby or python.
I don't understand why you wouldn't just use a framework like Sinatra. It's simple in every way that qualifies it to contend with a 'hypertext preprocessor'. Add it to your gem file, bundle, git commit, push to heroku, deployed! It even has inline templates[1].
You could argue it has a learning curve, but is resistance to learning a good argument against a solid & simple, versatile framework?
I am a big supporter of building applications in consistent way, and the big part of that is being able to code components which do not know anything about the presentation layer. Building these components on hypertext preprocessor is exactly the thing I would not want and would avoid at all costs. We already have it with PHP, and we have learned to follow some practices to live with it.
Well, you may say, this is just for small stuff to run some scripts easily. Well, the reason behind the PHP was the same. And look what it has become :)
Please don't assume I will not use Sinatra just to plug Sinatra here :). I might.
