I like having a place I call "home." I want more than a roof and a bed to sleep in. I want a place that feels like my base and is emotionally comforting.
Also, the pop-up chat thing is amazingly annoying.
Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
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Re: Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
#22I don't think the metaphor works very well. Cloud hosting is much more like a hotel (or a hostel), since you stay on the same "infrastructure", but you don't have a dedicated physical location. Moving between infrastructure would be a nightmare for computing as well.
Re: Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
#23I think part of the problem is that he was attempting to find sublets to fulfill his space needs. This is a pain because each period of stay has to be negotiated, which is time consuming... especially when you are moving around a lot.
What you really need to make this work is a provider of living spaces with set prices and set contracts for set durations. Think extended-stay hotels crossed with a fast food joint. You can walk into any McDonalds in the US and know what will be on the menu, and for roughly what price. Likewise, you need a place that you can walk into with various room options and set prices/terms. I guess you could call them franchise apartment complexes.
Well obviously the closest thing to what I'm describing is a hotel. The problem with hotels is that they are too expensive, and (often) don't offer kitchens or offices.
I'm going to pick $1500 for a reasonable Big City rent amount, which works out to $50 a night. Throw in furniture rental and a maid, and it's probably more like $70 a night. So really, if you could rent a studio apartment as if it were a hotel room for $70 a night, you'd be breaking even but gaining all that flexibility.
Of course, in most places rent is much cheaper, so in Kansas City, for instance, the place would need to be more like $30 a night to make sense.
I wonder if it's economically possible to offer various apartment size places on a per-night basis at those prices. Does the hotel industry just rampantly overcharge, or is this an economic pipe dream?
If you did away with daily maid service (only have maids clean between guests), and things like complimentary laundry service, maybe it would be feasible. Thoughts?
Of course, there are other issues, like carting around your wardrobe. Maybe we can have franchise closet/changing rooms too. It'd be like a PO Box for your clothes.
Re: Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
#24I like having a place I call "home." I want more than a roof and a bed to sleep in. I want a place that feels like my base and is emotionally comforting. Also, the pop-up chat thing is amazingly annoying.
Agree Re the pop-up chat. I disabled JS, so I could read the article in peace. (and then wondered why I couldn't vote when I got back to HN!)
Re: Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
#25I don't think the metaphor works very well. Cloud hosting is much more like a hotel (or a hostel), since you stay on the same "infrastructure", but you don't have a dedicated physical location. Moving between infrastructure would be a nightmare for computing as well.
Rather, cloud hosting is a commodity.
There is much less qualitative differentiation than there is in accommodation.
Re: Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
#26Of course it doesn't work.
The time cost of finding a new place every few days must be considerable. You've got no guarantee that demand at certain times wouldn't price you out or that there will be any inventory at all that suits your needs. There are costs associated with moving your stuff and there is an acclimation period while you get settled. I might see this as an experiment to "try" a number of neighborhoods before you settle on a place to live, but it sounds just awful as a long-term method of living (Good choice with the East Village by the way).
Reliability and predictability are two very important considerations when picking a place to live. Throughout time, people have paid a premium for it.
Re: Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
#27Another reason moving around a lot is always going to be a painful because your address, you being known to be available at a location, is important for legal and financial purposes for lots of service suppliers. Any kind of ongoing transaction will be made difficult by history of moving around a lot.
You can work around this with a mail-forwarding address, some vendors also scan your mail so you can look at it online and even deposit checks. Lots of RVers seem to be using this.
Re: Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
#28I like having a place I call "home." I want more than a roof and a bed to sleep in. I want a place that feels like my base and is emotionally comforting. Also, the pop-up chat thing is amazingly annoying.
I was surprised the author didn't mention the (hard to quantify) emotional cost of living out of a suitcase. Bits don't care where they live, people usually do.
Re: Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
#29eh? What? I don't get the relationship. When would you need more space and less space?
Re: Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
#30I really like the concept and I'm glad someone managed to try it out. I also immediately thought of Airbnb (good job on ramming your brand into my brain guys!), but there seems to be something missing that even Airbnb doesn't quite cover: standardisation, perhaps? If you're extending the parallel to cloud storage, sure, you can spin up and spin down as required - but you (generally) stay within the same provider to d…
What about something straight out of Snow Crash? Take one of those storage space rental places, and rent out something like that on a daily basis. You might have to do some work on getting things like plumbing,etc in there, but it would be cheap space that could be rented quickly and for variable amounts of time.
Of course, it would be relatively low-quality... but in Snow Crash he wasn't living in a 'high-class' neighborhood.