I don't see the distinction. It's fine to market your product, but there is such a thing as distortion and as a scam. Providing a fair representation of your product factors into ethics, as does Facebook fairly presenting the feed of your friends news, with a reasonable attempt at NOT distorting it.
You're talking about a situation in which significant damage is done to the building AND the host doesn't report this to Airbnb with photos and evidence. There are bound to be horror stories with any service (hotels certainly included), but I'd expect this particular combination of all-around irresponsibility to be rare.
I've stayed with people who had a few properties that they rented on Airbnb. Renting 1-5 seems okay. More or less, you're running a B&B.
When it gets to whole floors or buildings, you've got a hotel on your hands. That is and should be illegal and Airbnb should work with authorities to shut that down.
I agree. It's clear that (1) hotels aren't worth the cost; (2) people would rather 'live like locals'; and (3) distributing hotel management & maintenance is more effective that concentrating it in giant hotels.
Not to mention that the booking experience on Airbnb is way better than using the counterparts of hotels and hotel booking sites.
Airbnb has sought to bake in accountability both at a large and small scale.
1) Airbnb has a crazy insurance policy [1]
2) Both the host & guest get reviewed. A single bad review can impede your ability to rent on either side.
This is purely based on my experience, but it seems like guests really don't misbehave.
Maybe there is the occasional party or guest who trashes the place. Good hosts tend to hire cleaning services to deal with messes. Generally, guest are tired from traveling and doing activities and are low impact.
View/controller separation, view models and query abstraction are framework-level features. The author of this language is seeking to take the qualities of PHP that make it a 'hypertext preprocessor' and mixing in the no-frills syntax and vocabulary of ruby or python.
I don't understand why you wouldn't just use a framework like Sinatra. It's simple in every way that qualifies it to contend with a 'hypertext preprocessor'. Add it to your gem file, bundle, git commit, push to heroku, deployed! It even has inline templates[1].
You could argue it has a learning curve, but is resistance to learning a good argument against a solid & simple, versatile framework?
Source on fiction selling better than non-fiction?
I can't think of any explanation for a book written by an early female employee at Facebook receiving little attention other than a clear judgment about the value of the author's voice.
Did you read her book? Her point is not that Eggers plagiarized her wholesale, rather that the themes, characters, and plot are uncannily similar to those of her book. But his work receives buzz and hers is passed over. Somehow a hyperbolized book of fiction written by a famous white man is worthy of attention and lofty comparisons while a memoir by a woman who experienced 'boy kings' firsthand, dealing with identical themes, is overlooked.
It doesn't seem to matter what the app does or how its built.
The story goes something like (a) people (yahoo) want mobile apps (b) the kid got investors to give him cash (c) people downloaded it generating 'buzz' (d) more investors and cash (e) more downloads and publicity (f) yahoo plays right into the hands of the investors and the hype around a young founder (g) yahoo buys the company, making the kid a millionaire, it's a PR grand slam, bringing more publicity and 'users' to the app (for now)
It works out really, really well for the investors and founder; in my opinion it seems like Yahoo got duped.
It's definitely an interesting story. The author was offering a personal experience that was enjoyable for both the guest and the host. As he said, his guests and he often established a unique connection. On the other hand:
"When I delivered my rent at the beginning of the next month, I found the management company’s office under construction. It's now a hotel. The “loft-style” rooms are now listed on Airbnb for $169 a night."
Is this how airbnb was intended to be used? Isn't the point of a bed and breakfast-style experience the small-scale feel that the author described? Are guests really going to get the same attention/enjoyment out of airbnb if it's more-or-less a run of the mill hotel experience? Also, aren't there different regulations in place for rentals vs. hotels? The property manager may be violating laws as well.