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Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

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Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#551
post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow

Doing rentals to tenants without a paper trail would allow them to claim squatter's rights, which are a nightmare for landlords.

OP was doing it outside of US so I'd imagine such cases would have been settled very differently.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#552
The company that scraped Craigslist and made “every” home in my favorite local places a speculative opportunity for out of state investors (and funds), moving the workforce into their inventory to create a competitive hiring advantage against other tech companies by letting me work at my (or any) kitchen table. Sounds like this won’t be sustainable. Should it become an acquisition target and the remote workforce is an impediment to their valuation, it will cost very little to send email demanding a return to the office.

The only way to pull off the whole, employee independence thing is to not concentrate resources in the hands of so few. You can work from your home, sure, but the CEO and board, for their risk receives outsized compensation and offers little control. It works because we a technologist breathing entrepreneurial air feel, one day I too will have millions in reserve so I won’t begrudge the few who are now.

I think a better response it to coordinate and not show up in the office or on zoom until…(I don’t know I am a contractor and have been working from home the past 12 years and really don’t have workplace complaints)

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did. The whole point is that I wasn't just a one-or-two-day ghost. I lived in these places for as I said 3-6 months (in one case almost a year). So I knew my neighbors, and treated them as I would neighbors in any other apartment I rented as a regular tenant. [edit] I should just add that I'm as embarrassed to make noise or screw with anyone's living space as a homeowner as I was as a tenant. I could make $400…

What it is that leads you to believe the 3-6 months thing is so significant? There are (a very small proportion of) AirBnB guests who are awful. There are (a very small proportion of) longer-term tenants who are awful. At least with AirBnB, the awful guests are gone after a couple of nights. I know some AirBnBs are used as party destinations, and that's different -- but it's a problem with those hosts, not with the p…

Even simple examples can come to light - someone who lives next door for 3 months is unlikely to be able to perpetually party every single night; but an AirBNB on the coast could see a party each night.

Another huge thing is people learn to live with consistent annoyances; if your neighbor runs a leaf blower at 8 AM every Saturday, you may hate it but you learn to live around it. If instead, he were to run a leaf blower randomly at different times it would get really annoying.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#554

>Most companies don’t do this because of the mountain of complexities with taxes, payroll, and time zone availability, but I hope we can open-source a solution so other companies can offer this flexibility as well. I think this is a genius growth play for Airbnb. Make it easier for _other_ companies to operate in a similar way so that _their_ employees can travel and live in an... Airbnb! Next, they should lobby to g…

> tourism + wfh

Can't you do that on a normal tourist visa? As long as you're not getting paid by a US company or to a US bank account, you're not employed in the US, so as long as your company allows you to be remote, I don't see an issue with it.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#555
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can visit for 90 days but what you're allowed to do is restricted to tourism and "temporary business". The US substantial presence test is actually something like 31 days in the current year, and ~180 calculated as a weighted sum of presence over all visits in the preceeding few years. That's just to determine if you should pay tax, and note that vacations to the US contribute. Whether you can legally work in the…

90 days is the number agreed upon by company lawyers. Company lawyers do not have a sense of adventure, so this is a relatively watertight figure for most countries in the world and not dependent on your honesty.

Personally I'm curious about how they have rights to even know where you are at any given time.

If you're an in-office employee, your responsibilities are (a) show up at the expected work hours (b) get your tasks done.

If you're defined as a fully remote employee, your responsibilities are (a) be online and available at the expected work hours (b) get your tasks done.

Besides that you're just an amorphous black box, a person that has been placed in the cloud, much like a website placed on Cloudflare, where the input is money and the output is work. They don't need to know where you are, and I'd say they shouldn't even have a right to know -- that would be quite stalkerish, IMO. All that's really important is that this black box gets tasks done.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#556

>Most companies don’t do this because of the mountain of complexities with taxes, payroll, and time zone availability, but I hope we can open-source a solution so other companies can offer this flexibility as well. I think this is a genius growth play for Airbnb. Make it easier for _other_ companies to operate in a similar way so that _their_ employees can travel and live in an... Airbnb! Next, they should lobby to g…

It is, in my opinion, a massive and near total loss for all the renters, first-time homebuyers, existing families, and the sense of community in areas affected by AirBnB's cancerous growth.

Why?

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of locals? You can't imagine how much better Rome has been in these last two years without Americans coming to colonize our historical districts. It's not entirely Americans fault, they do not belong here, don't know the language, the traditions, but they gather together all in the same place and suddenly it's not Rome anymore and obviously prices skyrocket up to the point that locals can't afford to live…

Big cities are by nature cosmopolitan, it’s very strange to say only some people “belong” and others don’t. Would you prefer the world isolate into pockets of belonging based on generational inheritance as it has been and we crank back globalization? Certainly there are growing pains, but I would view more globalization as the direction we want to go.

It's only bad if it's Americans moving abroad, it's actually racist and/or fascist and/or xenophobic if Americans complain about foreigners moving to their cities legally or otherwise and not adapting culturally.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that exists between the people who do the work and the government, i.e. the parasitic ruling class. And to clarify, I say that as someone who is not at all “leftist” oriented, even though it may seem so at first glance of reading that to some I definitely wouldn't say that criticising big inefficient government is a leftist talking point at all.

100% agree. reading "parasitic ruling class" makes me think of a Trumpist rather than a socialist, for sure.

That would also be wrong (or disastrously incomplete).

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...Of course, these laws never foresaw technological progress and so the world governments look the other way because they do not know how/what to enforce... Other than the current scale of activity, the law has no "never foresaw technolo..." excuse for failing to cover such things. Centuries ago, it was perfectly normal for authors, composers, painters, etc. to travel to and work in other countries - "for their he…

I'm not sure I agree. With computers, people can literally teleport around the world which would have been ridiculed even 50 years ago. Probably something like "Haha, you think one day you'll be able to reach into the telephone and fix the thing on the other side, haha". I think it is an open question whether or not a sysadmin working on servers around the world is any different than paying the sysadmin to travel to…

Let's say it's 1937, and I'm a successful author enjoying life at a hotel in Italy. And writing my latest novel. Mailing chapter-by-chapter draft copies of that back and forth with my literary agent in London. Occasionally calling that agent on the (then-expensive) telephone with both questions, and instructions for him to execute on my behalf. Occasionally calling editors at various publishers (perhaps in several countries) to discuss business. Or to argue about how they destroyed the beautiful cadence of my dialog in Chapter 8 of my prior novel. Maybe I send telegrams to another agent I employ in New York, asking questions and giving instruction.

The modern, computerized version of this is faster, cooler, and sexier - but (IANAL) I see little basis for saying that there's a legal difference in kind.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of a landlord who’d rather have a string of short term rentals than one continuous long term rental unless there’s some renter protection law that makes you an effective permanent tenant. Just rent through Airbnb and then talk to the guy about a normal lease. If you want, text me where you are, I’ll put up $10k for a bet and then if I can find you a 3 room office, you give me $10k. If I can’t, I’ll give y…

This isn’t a Vegas poker table. Making prop bets for more money than a lot of people here can make in a year is rather uncouth.

I'm pretty sure the claims are overstated so I'd want some skin in the game. I'd have to go learn conversational Spanish / able to read local cultural cues / travel there so that's going to cost me time.

Reading it back, it does sound kind of gauche, but I'm pretty sure the stated issue is a non-problem. Like I said, people have lots of trouble getting things done and I find that the things are not that hard.

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