Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

Sorry, I competed absolutely fine when I had an Airbnb rented out for a year. I certainly paid my tax. I didn't cheat anyone.

Your proposition that to compete I must cheat doesn't stand up. Individuals chose airbnbs based on quite a few variables. The only time things are going to be equal is if the units for rent are identically positioned, decorated to same standard, have the same furniture and appliances.

> It always was a way to easy money

Tell me again how Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook were "easy money"

The devil personified in here, Mark Zuckerberg turned down the most "easy money" ever. 1 billion in cash for a couple years old company with an unproven business model, very few paying customers and no moat to speak of.

You gotta choose one, if extreme luck is involved in the process then it's not "easy" because it could have gone the other way as well, and the protagonists knew it too, but still decided to step into the arena.

We all know what happened to Digital Equipment which was the "easy money" company for the longest time.

Kodak? What happened to that "easy money printing machine"

Xerox anyone?

The reality is that you either die as a hero or live long enough to become the villan.

So now the villans are Bezos, Gates and Zuckerberg. Jobs and Allen died so they are the dear heroes who we miss and things would be much better if they were here today.

Musk is the hero charging on his white horse right now, but unless he OD's on that pure cartel coke he snorts or blows up together with one of his rockets , I expect the tide to turn against him violently and suddenly.

Then it's the turn of the crypto guys such as Brian Armstrong and Vitalik to have their moment of glory, and on and on and on.

I think the "heroin" comparison is needlessly dramatic.

"Over-tourism" as you describe it is just one possible symptom of excessive capitalism.

There are many nice spots with tourists, and many ways to ruin a place without any tourists when regulations are lax or poorly enforced, e.g. privatization and massive price increases in the crucial infrastructure, or reckless industrial projects.

And some things are just dumb traditions. Of course Oktoberfest sucks for the locals, but so does new year's eve in Berlin if you dislike continuous explosions until dawn and rockets flying horizontally. Tourism doesn't change the nature of these events much, just the scale.

Many other big economical sectors are also highly dependent on a small set of factors that could quickly change and cause ripple effects when they go down. This is not unique to tourism. Think e.g. the decline of Detroit.

Exactly. Flat owners can't privatize their gains while their socialized their costs. If a factory pollutes, we agreed that it should pay for the damage and control it. Why it is so difficult to understand that we just want the externalities from Airbnb to be addressed?

> Liberals (at least in US/Canada) used to be the one who would care about working middle class and their living conditions.

This confusion is understandable, but liberals never cared about the working middle class. Its just that in the US, the democratic party is a big tent of liberals, socialists and progressives, and the other side is a big tent of evangenicals, libertarians and conservative.

The ones that (claim to) care about the working class are the socialists. Liberalism comes from the French revolution, and is exported to the world through Amsterdam (appropiate in this topic!) and its value system is the foundation of modern day capitalism and enterpreneurship by free individuals (no matter how you pray or what you say) in a republic (every vote equal). So standard, you take it for granted.

You find the same disconnect between values in the other tent. Libertarians preaching small government for a republic ticket, even though every republican president has ended up spending more money than any president before.

One of the big downsides of first-past-the-pole is that a political world simplified to just two sides, doesn't do most people justice. Don't vote for the democrats if you want socialism. Don't vote for the republicans if you want libertarianism.

Evangelicals and progressives on the other hand, can do bussiness with the liberals and conservatives, since what they want isn't incompatible. Liberals hear progressives talk about 'inclusion' and they hear 'more customers' (hello, rich gay couples) or 'cheap labour' (hello, poor immigrants) and they get all wet in their stock portfolio.

Sidenote: If you ever wonder what America would look like when its just libertarians and socialists having to come together .. its called Burning Man, where autonomous libertarians feed socialist hippies, without liberal transactions or conservative judgment.