he's just pointing out that nobody writes the flu as the cause of death on a death certificate. The CDC simply releases estimates, while we've been tracking the severity of COVID-19 deaths by asking clinicians to write the cause of death as COVID-19 on the death certificate if they tested positive.
Patient has flu and dies of a stroke? Flu can increase the chance of stroke by 50% but the cause of death was the stroke, not the flu. Same thing happens to covid-19? They died of covid-19.
The point is that the data collection methods are so different there's no possible way you can really look at the numbers and tell if one kills more than the other.
Your explaination seems sensible but I don't think this was the point that the author made. The way I read it was he meant that the CDC overestimates the number of flu deaths and therefore anyone thinking covid's lethality is comparable to flu is wrong as the flu kills a lot less.
I wouldnt offer air bnb a billion for 10%. I dont think they can pay it back. I hope they can't pay it back. Dublin Ireland saw 67% more housing available overnight because air bnb home owners needed to offer their homes to long term stayers since the travel ban. They're a nuisance.
I think that's great that 67% of supply was quickly re-allocated. Imagine if this was a hotel. How many people would loose jobs and how many buildings would have to be demolished.
A hotel can tie up the resource of 100 places to live in temporarily inside one single building. Airbnb spreads that out to 50-100 separate places to live in. There's a difference, don't you think?
Empty hotels have the same CPVID19 effect as empty AirBNBs.
In fact, empty hotels are serving very important roles right now around the world housing homeless and quarantined people and travelers.
Finally there is no comparison between a hote and a cruise ship. Travelers in hotels, much like Airbnbs, are all back at their homes. The problem with cruise ships is that they cannot easily get back to wherever they’re from.
Worldwide housing supply is never going to keep up with radical changes in usage. One takes literally trillions of dollars worth of construction in not just housing but also transportation etc, the other takes a website.
Well yes, but also no. I would hope that it's not terribly surprising that just about any property in a major metro area is going to earn more revenue on average as a series of short term rentals than a long-term tenant or sale. I mean that's pretty much the standard trade you make for lots of things. You accept lower rates in exchange for lower risk and more consistent revenue.
Airbnb did a weird thing and proved/facilitated so much demand that landlords realized that listing on Airbnb could net you that increased profit with lower risk since they provide a steady stream of renters changing the risk/reward profile.
So we're left with some awkwardness of people being priced out of their apartments not because of anything evil but because Airbnb et al close that information gap and proved that short-term rentals aren't nearly as risky as landlords thought and that forking over 30% for customer acquisition still works out in their favor.
I think you’re leaving out the key aspect of Airbnb’s move, which is to transform a large amount of housing into hotels without appropriate regulation. That’s what enables it to be so profitable.
Right but that's an orthogonal issue to what the market will pay for a given property. I agree that a lot of the draw of Airbnb is that it's cheaper than hotels but this is the case where the current crop of regulations are harmful since people on Airbnb know exactly what they're getting. The regulations aren't addressing any information/knowledge asymmetry or safety concerns that aren't covered in "this is just some randos house" disclaimer. I'm sure that helps Airbnb's funnel but I doubt the absence of hotel regulations would make the current crop of hotels any cheaper since the regulations are tailor made for what they were doing already. Yayy regulatory capture. Right! Back on topic. But none of this matters because we're not comparing hotels to Airbnb, we're comparing Airbnb to renting or selling which is a different batch of zoning regulations they're skirting.
But that reinforces my point since the reason that city planners zone properties/areas for long-term residential only sans a few excepted hotels is keep the prices down to levels that individuals and families can actually afford because you're only competing with other people in your rough income range and not commercial buyers. So I don't see a contradiction in cities just banning Airbnb like any other commercial activity for that reason but it's all like artificial mannn.
Also current situation shows there is a 100 year risk that will likely return the average risk of short term renting to the original (pre AirBnB) value. So in a Long enough time frame AirBnB didn‘t change anything?
I once stayed at an Airbnb condo in Toronto that was relatively new. I saw many, many tourists coming in and out of the building, the lobby looked like a hotel with about 20 different groups with luggage, etc. It looks like this entire condo was mainly for investment purposes and for people to Airbnb these condos out. It's not surprising that Dublin saw a huge increase in rentals and I bet the same thing has happened across the world.
I’ve been hearing people say this for years, and it is certainly an easy and nice line to say. But supply for new housing is not the solution or the issue.
1. When new housing enters the market it is priced at “fair market value”. That fair market value is inflated by numerous known and unknown factors. Such as foreign investors, short-term rentals, etc...
2. Cost of construction follows the trend and what used to cost X to build is now 2x, 3x.
3. Numerous cities have reduced pricing of permits and have even simplified the planning approval process for homes in an effort to attract imvestors and developers.
4. Cost of land is at an all time high. Which again is a factor of the fair market value. Land owners are wanting to sell to large development projects that have investors. Developers are bidding against each other to secure land.
Those and more are compounded into a complex relationship that has created a market that very few people can afford to live in. Is it possible that the fear of being priced out is driving a lot of these motivations?
According to Berlin 5€ per m² is a fair market value for a 50+ year old apartment. It's obvious that new construction can never reach a price that is this absurdly low.
I've never understood this focus on rental pricing. The problem has never been the price, how can prices constantly go up if nobody can afford them? Well, the answer is that someone can actually afford the price and for some reason you are competing with that person that is far more richer than you. Remember one of the core causes of inflation? Too much money chasing too few goods? It's not just printing an excessive amount of money that is necessary to cause inflation. You also need a shortage of goods. You need to have more people than housing to cause inflation of rental prices. If there are 10 houses but 15 people then you can be assured that landlords will only care about renters with high incomes and construction companies will focus on building for these high income people first and only after there is enough housing will they build housing for the less wealthy residents.
This is only true if Airbnb creates demand for owner-absent short term house lets. Otherwise it's just a platform taking market share from other platforms like VRBO or Craigslist and the amount of housing supply would be the same with or without Airbnb.
And of course it is the latter. The great majority of listings on the platform are for owner occupied dwellings where a room, loft, basement, or guest house is being let out. This does not keep supply of housing suppressed.
Hmmmm, what else changed in that period... I can't think of anything. Other than airbnb's drying up, my life is about the same as it was a few months ago. There are so many things that have changed in that period, it's nearly impossible to make a strong argument that any one change caused any one other change. In stats speak, the exclusion restriction you'd usually require for this kind of statement is not valid here.
Many of the shelter-in-place orders have banned anything not essential, like groceries or other supplies. That includes moving.
How did the supply dry up so fast when no one is to leave their houses? It has to be AirBnB/travel bans; even the 2008 housing bubble 'asplosion didn't move that fast.
One of the fun things about governments is their ability to ban things they don’t want and punish those who flout the ban with fines or imprisonment.
Such things are not perfect, naturally, but any popular website listing property does literally let the government know which house to confiscate, if fines don’t get paid.
It's the closest to printing money as the real world gets. "Hey here's an insane amount of money at 0% interest rate so you could literally invest in ANYTHING and make free money. Go ham."
Lets remember what causes slowdowns in productivity, panics, the great depression, the recession etc: people being slammed with too high interest rates for what's feasible for them to repay when times are tough. If the fed offered low interest rates directly it would be a different world. Remember also, the world is an auction house, so when people get these kinds of perks and you don't, your money doesnt go as far.
i disagree on pretty much every underlying supposition here: the tax evasion whataboutism, “why facebook when everybody evades taxes?” US allowing these other companies to offshore profits, as if the IRS has the ability to, at any point, ask for that money back; The government having any use for the facebook; facebook being capable of coercion/ memes and advertising having any effect on the way people vote.
We know people read what they want into political media. the content may affect your experience on facebook but Facebook has not been proven to have any effect on the ballots.
Facebook was probably caught in the act. IRS probably found some legal loophole to actually sue facebook and has not yet found one for google, etc. whats more important to the irs? Getting facebook to change its content policies which would have zero effect on this upcoming election given everyone already knows how theyre going to vote, or 9 billion dollars?
wasn’t the original intent of copyright law to protect the intellectual property of authors, presumably like gulliver’s travels?
Also i love the idea of the site, and the idea of fan fiction being an opportunity teach the youths to write stories (to a degree, for instance i also worry too many professional instagram photographers can make you feel like you cant shoot photography) Im honestly waiting for a “github” for stories, movies, graphic novels, etc. Perhaps one already exists, perhaps someone’s using github as such.
Or fanfiction.net. I find it easier to find things there than on AO3, and in the categories I like reading stories in it seems to have a fair bit more.
i havent come to a personal conclusion on if its even a feat of engineering. Im impressed by amazon’s handling of logistics, and I do think consumer data helps Amazon know when and where products are most likely to sell, perhaps even upsell customers or get customers to agree to a steeper markup, but beyond that, i don’t think actual predictive models of consumer behavior has really been achieved here. Ive never gotten a sense that amazon intuits my consumer habits and ive made a lot of purchases over the years. i dont think amazon has made a dime on storing timestamps for when i turned a page on a kindle or learned anything from the music i listened to. ive never bought a single recommended product. On a scale of 1-10, 10 being Delos incorporated and perfectly modeling user behavior—-accurately predicting how i’ll react before I even see the products they place in front of me—and 1 being Wall-E making blocks of trash, id say this data collection is a 2.5 at best.
I would personally define efficacy of predictive modes to be a scientific achievement rather than engineering, but that might just be a vocab discrepancy.
Do you think it’s possible to determine how good their modeling is externally? I would assume we’d need an extensive peek behind the curtains to come to a conclusion.
I enjoyed this post on reddit explaining why China has such a large population [1]:
"You might be familiar with how the Nile River in Egypt works from school. If you aren't - for 9 months out of the year the Nile has a moderate flow rate that is sufficient to support human settlement and agriculture. For the remaining 3 months the Nile's flow rate increases dramatically and it floods a huge area around its river banks.
That flooding might sound bad but its not. Using soil for agricultural purposes will deplete it's minerals within about 100 years. That's a long time compared to a human life, but not compared to a civilization. When the soil runs out of minerals you can't grow anything in it anymore, and it turns out that this is the limiting factor for most civilizations. IE, a civilization will begin intensively farming its soil, deplete the soil, then starve to death.
In the modern world we're able to replenish the soil's minerals with fertilizer. They were sort of able to do this in the ancient world as well, but this involved transporting huge amounts of animal manure which is difficult to do and, in practice, if an ancient civilization had to manually fertilize the soil it would result in very low agricultural yields.
This is what makes the Nile's floods so good for the development of civilization - every time the Nile would flood it deposits a huge amount of new soil in the areas that got flooded. The source of that new soil was hills and mountains in Central Africa, so it was filled with minerals. Or to put it another way - every year the Nile naturally dumped a huge amount of fertilizer on Egypt.
This natural fertilizing allowed Egypt to be by far the most productive agricultural region West of India for thousands of years - everyone from the Pharaohs to Alexander the Great to the Roman Empire fed themselves using the food that the Nile was able to grow.
How does this relate to China? The Yellow River in China is the same type of river as the Nile. It spends most of the year with a moderate flow rate, then has massive floods for a few months that deposit a bunch of new soil along its banks.
Where the Yellow River is different from the Nile is in its size. The Nile is a single, small river with practically no tributaries or lakes. The Nile's floods only cover a small geographic area located immediately adjacent to it.
The Yellow River, on the other hand, is a massive system with hundreds of tributaries and lakes. When it floods, it covers almost the entirety of South East China - which is an area thousands of times the size of that covered by the Nile.
The Yellow River basin has been among for the most productive agricultural areas on Earth for much of human history. Because the only limiting factor to population size is a region's ability to produce food, this also means that the Yellow River Basin (and by extension, China) has managed to maintain a huge population for the entirety of human history."
Another point to add to this is that the Nile River is significantly easier to manage for the Egyptians than the Yellow River was for the Chinese. Unlike the Nile River that flows along the same path and floods the same areas every year, the Yellow River has a nasty tendency to change its mind about where it wants to flow into the sea, and it destroys all the farmland along its path when it shifts its outflow from the north side of the Shandong peninsula to the south and back again a few hundred years later. That widespread flooding and shifting of the rivers path makes the entire North China plain very fertile compared to a thin strip along the Nile, but it also causes widespread damage and casualties whenever a bad flood year shifts the Yellow River's path down the middle of a town.
If Hacker News is a pack of cigarettes, what is Facebook? I mean, this platform itself isn't tracking me across a major portion of the internet or trying to manipulate me to any significant degree relative to Facebook. Maybe some users are, but at least the platform itself isn't. Like any bad habit, some of worse than others.
Just remember that Herbert Hoover was a terrible test taker. His colleagues vouched for his brilliance because they read his previous work and thought he was a genius. It turned out he was the type to spend a lot of time revising his answers until they were perfect, so under any sort of timed test he would fail, including his entrance exam into Stanford.
I'm only sharing that factoid because I find it interesting. Maybe Herbert was a terrible engineer by today's standards. He almost certainly wouldn't be president today for completely different reasons, but would he be have been accepted into Stanford? Would he even make it as an engineer? I don't know--certainly not if we put as much weight as we do on tests.
If you could create instructions efficient enough for a computer to drive a car, it always seemed like you just created the best instructions for a human to drive a car too, and a human who had similar instructions would always be a better driver of the two. "Pay attention to this, prioritize these things, brake when this occurs, turn when this occurs, safest speed is this given these parameters." and so on. You would think silicon valley would be obsessed with learning how to drive really well given the amount of time so many engineers have spent on automating it. We should have our own F1/WRC team by now sponsored by these companies.
Patient has flu and dies of a stroke? Flu can increase the chance of stroke by 50% but the cause of death was the stroke, not the flu. Same thing happens to covid-19? They died of covid-19.
The point is that the data collection methods are so different there's no possible way you can really look at the numbers and tell if one kills more than the other.