61–70 of 120 posts
We can do this in Europe because we are great at killing innovation through our taxes and regulations. This way we can safely tax innovative tech giants without hurting our own tech giants. Because they don't exist here. We don't like that thing that you do. So we'll just apply taxes and let you continue doing the thing we don't like you to do.
As opposed to the billions tech giants dodge taxes
We can do this in Europe because we are great at killing innovation through our taxes and regulations. This way we can safely tax innovative tech giants without hurting our own tech giants. Because they don't exist here. We don't like that thing that you do. So we'll just apply taxes and let you continue doing the thing we don't like you to do.
As opposed to the billions tech giants dodge taxes
This reminds me of the Estonian business startup thing that BBC covered, has anyone actually used this to a success? What would be the point of starting a business in countries like Czech and Estonia vs the US?
Do you mean e-residency ( https://e-resident.gov.ee/ )? I work there, happy to answer questions if you have them. The value of starting a business in Estonia vs. elsewhere depends on a number of factors - we mainly focus on folks from outside the EU (or citizens of the EU but living outside it) who want an EU based company they can run remotely in English which is tough in some jurisdictions
Does Estonia offer any anonymity through its e-residency program?
A lot of us have stereotypes towards EU regulations as being restrictive, wonder if you could address this one glaring fear in the back of our minds (ex. GPDR).
What should folks on HN know a thing or two about Estonia? I've literally only heard of the country 4 years ago when I played Arma: Cold War with an Estonian gamer, which ironically is a military simulation of gorilla warfare against a USSR invasion of the Baltics..... (see OF: Resistance)
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Airbnb is highlighting a zoning problem that governments are unwilling to admit to themselves. Sublets and short term rentals existed long before before and most cities on Earth didn't care, but once a frictionless platform came along it suddenly was a problem. My landlord kicked us out to run an airbnb fulltime after seeing how much a neighbour was earning. (Around New Years /Christmas you could easily bring in 2 mo…
It's not a "zoning problem." It's much simpler than that. * Airbnb flophouses are not obliged to conform to fire, health, or safety codes, and they don't pay taxes. Right off the bat, they're scads cheaper than hotels because they don't bear those costs. * Visitors and residents have very different incentives. Tourists may wish to stay in cute residential areas, but they are not necessarily interested in being neighb…
For the most part I stick with hotels.
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This is brilliant, I've never thought of it this way. In a sense, GDPR already kind of does this, increasing the burden of storing user data. Would be interesting to consider dramatically ramp up this burden---maybe with a literal tax---for behavioral data stored longer than 90 days (or some other grace period), like a weaker version of Maciej Ceglowski's Six Fixes. https://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_…
That's just going to optimise for short term thinking. Your customers will probably just get treated like crap long term.
Offline businesses now and always don't and have never had indefinite surveillance records of their customer's behavior. Is it your position that offline businesses are incapable of not treating their customers like crap?
Besides which, aggregated data that can't be de-anonymized would be exempted, as described by Maciej Ceglowski. The 90-day limit is only on fine-grained, personally-identifiable behavioral data that isn't explicitly shared (the content of my HN comment should of course be kept forever/until I delete it; but there's no reason to keep the IP address I used, other than aggregate statistics about what cities people access HN from).
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> Airbnb flophouses are not obliged to conform to fire, health, or safety codes, and they don't pay taxes. Right off the bat, they're scads cheaper than hotels because they don't bear those costs. Because Airbnbs aren't flophouses. They're holding usually just a couple or family, maybe a dozen people tops unless the place being rented is a really big detached house. Expecting them to be held to the same standards as…
> More tourism attracts the ire of residents that now have to deal with out-of-town people walking around their neighborhood, but I have rarely seen someone complain about negative economic impact of tourism let alone make a coherent argument about why it's bad. Tourism is an economic curse similar to the curse of resources. It makes most unrelated economic activity less viable.
Got any source to back up this claim? Plenty of regions with strong tourism industries have other viable industries. San Francisco, LA, and New York are all heavy tourist destinations but no reasonable person would say that this tourism has made unrelated economic activity less viable. Same with London and Paris. Large tourism industry, but plenty of other industries.
It may be true that as other economic opportunities are exhausted, communities try to use tourism to bring in money to the community (e.g. Leavenwoth, WA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leavenworth,_Washington). Underdeveloped countries that don't have the ability to participate in many industries lean on tourism more heavily (especially eco-tourism since the lack of development is actually an asset for that industry) which makes tourism take up a larger proportion of their GDP.
But I am highly skeptical of your claim of a causal link between growth of tourism and inability to sustain other industries.
Intermediary platforms such as Airbnb and Uber exacerbate cities’ housing problems and weaken worker protections. Its interesting that this line has no support and just treated as fact for this article. Is there a source to explain the reasoning?
I've heard that in Prague due to explosion of AirBnB rentals it's difficult even for software developers to rent reasonably priced apartments. I guess this is a counter reaction meant for a city that hosts >10% of country's population.
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> More tourism attracts the ire of residents that now have to deal with out-of-town people walking around their neighborhood, but I have rarely seen someone complain about negative economic impact of tourism let alone make a coherent argument about why it's bad. Tourism is an economic curse similar to the curse of resources. It makes most unrelated economic activity less viable.
> Tourism is an economic curse similar to the curse of resources. It makes most unrelated economic activity less viable. Got any source to back up this claim? Plenty of regions with strong tourism industries have other viable industries. San Francisco, LA, and New York are all heavy tourist destinations but no reasonable person would say that this tourism has made unrelated economic activity less viable. Same with Lo…
I think it's generally a good thing overall, but if I were a buggy whip manufacturer around Detroit in 1920, I wasn't as happy with my lot in life 20 years later...