Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

news.airbnb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 736 posts

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#651

Post by MikeTheGreat »

ericmay wrote: post #456
oxfordmale wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure when this 90-day rule was written, but I imagine it was written in a time before now with high-performance laptops, video conferencing, common jet travel, and people wanting to work 30 days here, 90 days there, 120 days over there, etc. This should be revisited. Also I think this is a good example of the need to have expiration dates on new laws and regulations. This should be something that expires and…

> the need to have expiration dates on new laws and regulations.

This is a terrible idea. Here in the US the ever more hyper-partisan political environment makes it hard to do _anything_, even once. The idea that our Congress critters are going to re-pass all legislation for everything every (say) 5 years is ridiculous.

Those of us who like knowing that our food is safe to eat, our cars aren't firebomb death traps waiting to explode, that planes won't fall out of the sky onto our houses that aren't going to spontaneously collapse / flood from shitty plumbing / burn down from an electrical fire will disagree that all legislation should be repealed (either directly or via repeal-by-expiration), but please - let's be honest about what the effects of an 'expiration date' on legislation would actually accomplish.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#652

Post by mensetmanusman »

bitschubser_ wrote: post #376
hocuspocus wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU and FoM countries you're still supposed to pay social contributions where you work. There are many complex rules for people who are regularly on the road (like truck drivers, artists on tour) and dispatched workers, but as the average tech worker you can definitely get your employer in trouble if you work more than 20% outside the country of employment. That's why cross-border commuters can't work from home…

The 20% rule only applies to Switzerland and the "Doppelbesteuerungsabkommen" with the neighbor countries or EU. This was the reason I quit my job in switzerland and moved back to germany (without taking a huge pay cut ;), more vacation days and only 35hour/week), now the 183day rule for social contributions and tax apply as long as I live in germany. So now I can work from portugal during winter :)

Not a day goes by where someone fails to mention Doppelbesteuerungsabkommen!

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#653

Post by renewiltord »

notch656a wrote: post #581
chrisseaton wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lie to immigration? People in this thread are insane. Going to get yourselves banned from counties.

I've been to many nations including for months and including illegally overstaying. No one gave one fuck to ask whether I was working not. The only people that have ever grilled me like this is my own country, the USA, where returning as a citizen the last time I entered I was forcibly taken to a hospital to be anally probed (with even a warrant, although after 16 hours they could not find a doctor to execute it) bas…

Same experience, sans probing. I have also, interestingly, overstayed in the West including using a residence permit to enter that was no longer valid. Japan they checked my baggage, same smuggler thing, but I only had my host of bootleg (not really, I just like being equipped so I just get them from generics factories) antibiotics + pharma and they don't really care about those personal quantities.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#654

Post by somethoughts »

noahtallen wrote: post #320
somethoughts wrote: post #112

I'm kinda of curious how this works if you are remote: "Most of you should expect to gather in person every quarter for about a week at a time. Some roles, especially senior roles, will be expected to gather more often. We’ll do our best to define windows when most large team off-sites will occur and give you plenty of notice so you can make it work with personal and family plans." Is this like just plan to be in the…

I work at Automattic (no proper offices, fully remote), which (pre-pandemic) does meetups once or twice per year per team, plus one for the whole company. Meetups are typically a week long. I’ve had the chance to visit Lisbon, Hawaii, and soon Cancun on the company’s dime, so I can’t see a world where I am upset about “having” to attend these trips :) I recognize that kids makes it difficult. And there are also folks…

I think the sweet spot would be quarterly weekly meet-ups for culture building which occurs during normal hours from 9am-5pm and occur at the local office versus some "get away" all inclusive conference center where there is a packed schedule of 24/7 culture building (aka drinking, etc.) from 8am-11pm.

If its during normal work hours - employees with kids can live within 1-2 hours can suffer the commute for a week every quarter and socialize but still be home in time for dinner with the kids/wife.

Conversely - the single folks/DINKs can go out and paint the town from 5pm-11pm and experience the actual local nightlife.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#655

Post by bryanrasmussen »

renewiltord wrote: post #562
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #353

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. or unless you can make significantly more money as a short term rental. Also if you can theoretically hide your earnings (although I guess you can't most places anymore) also, I believe most EU countries have some form…

Well, at that point, it's that old HN adage: there's no shortage; you just refuse to pay enough. There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals.

well that adage is normally applied to employees under the naive assumption that you can pass the costs onto your customer (assumption generally made because you are looking for an employee because you have projects to finish with customers that pay for those projects), but when finding a place to live if you are middle class and not able to afford to live in the area it does not follow that a reasonable solution would be that you pay money that you do not possess and what, pass it on to your boss in the morning by saying 'guess what, you gotta give me a raise now!'

>There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals.

oh yeah, right the cost under discussion is $15 a month, forgot about that. I thought it was that the cost to rent an apartment in lots of areas took up such an exorbitant amount of a monthly income that natives to the area could not afford to do it.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#656

Post by techdmn »

throwawayboise wrote: post #606
schrodinger wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just legally avoid taxes by not letting your employer know. Sure, they prob won't know and you'll get away with it, but you're technically breaking the law and an employer won't knowingly condone that. So it's not that they have a right to know where you are, it's that if they do notice and not act on it that's a legal risk to them as well since they're enabling it. (IANAL but this feels common sense.)

The simple answer is to do away with the notion that earning income should be taxable. Tax on the consumption side, it's easier to enforce and harder to avoid.

The problem with taxing consumption is that it's pretty regressive. Not to say that there aren't solutions, but the existing sales tax, gas tax, etc aren't it.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#657

Post by heavyset_go »

renewiltord wrote: post #280
lultimouomo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a city that is a major tourist destination worldwide. Tourism has always been a blessing and a curse; shops always suffered a pressure to become tourist oriented; some big buildings were converted to hotels. With AirBnB the problem has expanded massively. I cannot find a 3-room office that is not miles away from the city center because everything that size is an AirBnB. An employee I just hired that moved h…

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…

In cities like NY, you can easily make more in a week of renting out your apartment via AirBnb than you would in a month via a traditional lease.

I've seen entire floors of apartment buildings being converted into AirBnb flop houses. People will convert every room, besides bathrooms, in a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment into separate AirBnb rooms. Instead of renting an entire 1 bedroom apartment to one person, you can easily stick 3+ people in there as an AirBnb setup.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#658

Post by pedrosorio »

throwawayboise wrote: post #610
pedrosorio wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People work because they need money to survive (pay bills, rent, food, etc.), not because "the ruling class is imposing taxes through government". A consumption tax will do nothing to reduce the power of the "ruling class" since their consumption is a much smaller fraction of their income compared to the working man.

Consumption as a fraction may be smaller but as a number it's much larger. Wealthy people own larger homes (often more than one), more and more expensive cars, boats, private aircraft, any number of other toys. They spend more on clothes, entertainment, virtually every other category of spending is higher if you are wealthy. Maybe they spend about the same amount on toilet paper.

> Consumption as a fraction may be smaller but as a number it's much larger.

The current status is one with progressive tax rates where people with higher incomes pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. This is still not enough due to loopholes, etc.

The person I replied to complains about "ruling class" and proposes (presumably as a way to mitigate the ruling class' accumulation of wealth) tax on consumption.

Since the fraction of income used for consumption decreases with income, a consumption tax corresponds to a regressive income tax (higher income -> lower tax rate). This is much worse, penalizes the poorest and leads to much worse wealth inequality than the existing system.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#659

Post by fartcannon »

dan-robertson wrote: post #607
devmor wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's almost impossible to purchase a house if you live and work in a large city now. Airbnb "hosts" use their ever growing stream of reverse mortgages to purchase more and more single family homes at cash offers over what others can afford.

It seems like Airbnb is an easy scapegoat to use for the actual problem of not enough houses existing/being built. Another scapegoat is ‘foreign investors’ but I think this also isn’t true. In the US I think the people willing to make cash offers for houses in expensive cities are often the rich people who live there. There are also companies that will advance you the cash so that you can make a cash offer before goi…

It's a symptom of viewing homes as investment properties. Building more just dilutes the value of their investments. Heavily tax or ban owning mulitple homes and watch as cities suddenly become affordable again.

Re: Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

#660

Post by albedoa »

gowld wrote: post #550
wmeredith wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How does a paper trail prevent that? A paper trails gives the squatter far more rights, since they have proof of their right to live there.

The paper trail provides proof of the start of the occupancy. It provides proof that the occupier does not live there.
Post reply on HN