I'm not really sympathetic to the way that this article suggests the owners of excess housing are suffering from too many rentals on the short term market.
These are folks who are wealthy enough to own excess housing stock, and they are using it not to house people but for vacationers.
Prices low for short term rentals? Good. Hopefully they'll enter the long term housing market (or be sold to home owners).
Short term rental opportunities are just a reflection of investors seeing high enough yields from a particular activity. Since when is the default economic behavior for humans a benevolent and unselfish one? You don’t see people just hanging out the extra cash in their bank account, so why should they do the same thing with an extra property? If you’re looking for someone to aim at, it should be various levels of government and the corporate entities which make this behavior possible, and with relatively little friction.
The humans are just doing what is incentivized and what they see other humans doing.
FWIW interest rates on mortgages for investment properties/vacation properties are typically a good deal higher than primary residences, and this is one to reduce demand for such things.
here's another scapegoat: companies like vacasa that buy up entire apartments and own 20000+ units in a city to put up on Airbnb. They're not beholden to the zoning laws or employment restrictions, compliance, etc that hotels are bound to. Yet operate basically the same way. not to mention cleaning fees scoot by, while resort fees are getting banned
> Since when is the default economic behavior for humans a benevolent and unselfish one? You don’t see people just hanging out the extra cash in their bank account
We see this all the time. People don't act like economic automatons; people do plenty of things for other people without any economic benefit to themselves.
I don't know why so many people hold this poisonous viewpoint.
The poisonous viewpoint has lifted literally billions out of poverty. The problem with being benevolent is that benevolence requires resources, and misallocated resources attract free riders.
The problem that people consistently seem to ignore is that 100% free-markets don't incorporate the costs of negative externalities. So frequently what arises out of the free-market is a situation of misallocated resources.
In this case, the cost to society of people not being able to live close to where they work, or having to pay more to live notably outweights the benefit of people getting to pay a bit less for a vacation. However, because that cost is paid by others and not the people putting the home up or staying there this misallocation still occurs.
>In this case, the cost to society of people not being able to live close to where they work, or having to pay more to live notably outweights the benefit of people getting to pay a bit less for a vacation. However, because that cost is paid by others and not the people putting the home up or staying there this misallocation still occurs.
I don't think the standard economics characterization of "externalities" includes the opportunity costs of people not being able to use a resource. Even then, I don't see how your argument that vacationers are creating an externality for long term renters is more convincing than the opposite (ie. long term renters are creating an externality for vactioners). Instead, what you seem to be doing is ignoring price signals (ie. the fact that vacationers are willing to pay more for the same unit than "actual" renters), substituting in your own value judgement, and then concluding that there's an externality because the market behavior isn't aligned with your value judgement.
Compared to what? Governments that spend billions on useless things and make things far more expensive than they need to be?
Healthcare used to affordable for most. Now it’s insanely expensive per month for a family, and still costs a huge amount to actually use. That’s not free market, that’s government trying to help out.
Free market has raised hundreds of millions out of poverty.
It’s far from perfect, but it’s better then everything else.
I would be hard pressed to name an example of any truly 100% free markets. That would essentially be a place that has no taxes, no regulation, no control on production, etc…
I will say one example I had of this: I had a friend who moved in with me in a condo I owned and I gave him a healthy discount on rent. At the end of his stay he was getting kind of weird and essentially one day just disappeared and skipped out on 2 months of rent. Now my mindset is that in business transactions that include friends either 1) don’t charge anything 2) don’t expect the agreement to hold up 3) avoid these kinds of things altogether
Of course on an individual level there are people who act unselfishly, on a group level you are not often going to see a herd that shows economic activity that goes against the grain in business transactions. Humans have gotten pretty damn good at extracting short term value from things.
It’s very easy to go on vacation: rent from a motel or hotel, which is infrastructure that is in place specifically for vacationing. Go camping. Go rent a van or RV.
Single family housing should not be seen as an investment vehicle apart from the equity one builds in their own home.
There are zoning laws in place for a reason and when you bypass those laws to turn residential areas into businesses, it does not end in a positive experience for either side.
Again, if you read my comment, you would understand that I think it is totally fine that humans are acting towards what is incentivized. But for those that see this behavior as detrimental, it is no use to point fingers at the owners of those properties, but instead to aim at the overarching structures.
In concept Airbnb is fine. Renting out spare rooms, renting unused time on your holiday pad at Cape cod, all make complete sense. It's making more space available, at a cheaper rate, while maximizing utilisation, and return, on an existing asset.
Equally there's some place for buy-to-rent investing to exist. There is, and will always be, a segment of the population who cannot, or doesn't want to, buy and this segment rely on rental for housing. If there was no invest-to-rent then that segment would be homeless.
The problem happens when there's an imbalance. When there's too much Airbnb (like Barcelona), locals get squeezed out of their own city. Some supply is good, too much is bad.
The solution to this is regulation. By regulating supply (prioritize in-home, limited permits for others etc) one can balance the three markets such that ultimately everyone wins.
Agreed, I would say once the threshold was crossed where people specifically sought out to buy 2-10 properties in different cities to make a business out of it, it was time to scale back. Renting a room in a place one lives or while one is on vacation seems reasonable enough.
I think short-term rental rules really need to be determined on a community by community basis. In some places (like beach towns, or ski resorts) it might be ok to have 50% (just pulling that number out of nowhere) houses be short-term rentals. In NYC or San Francisco it might make more sense to limit short-term rentals more (a certain number of nights per unit per year), the policing of such a policy though, oi!
Tricky. I live in a region that contains a lot of ski communities. AirBnB has trashed the rental market. I'm working on a deep-dive blog post on this, but basically local blue collar workers are being squeezed out entirely by short term rentals.
I work remotely in tech, but I want to continue living here year-round, contributing to the community.
Short term rentals are simply too lucrative compared to owning and long term renting. Much of this is the government's fault -- the tax system has a lot of loopholes, like mortgage interest deductions, depreciation, business cost deductions, and untaxed fees that make short term renting even mire lucrative. I hope the government steps in soon to remedy this, but considering their response to the housing crises in the past I am not hopeful.
This is incredibly backwards: people on vacation tend to go to places to explore or be on the beach or whatever, they will typically opt for smaller spaces because a) it’s usually a place to sleep and b) it’s not permanent. People like house because it is where families spend a majority of their time, so have more space makes sense.
I also think you missed the part of owning property…because you don’t actually own it…just try not paying your taxes :)
How many people would you say be okay with having a homeowner run a meth lab next door? So back track from there and at some point there does need to be a line. I am not against building more housing, I think that would actually be fantastic, but if you think that people having total free reign over their properties ends up in a sunny picture, there are plenty of global examples of how it doesn’t.
If we extend your idea over total freedom in home ownership, why have building codes? Why have regulation on the mortgage/loan process? Why have anything that supports trust in the market?
It shouldn't. But it should enact rules that govern certain types of goods, like local housing.
Housing and rentals are different because unlike most goods, there really isn't a good alternative to not purchasing the good, and because the supply side of the market is necessarily slow, and constrained by geography.
In other words housing in your local area is an entirely different good than housing 100 miles away, and we should recognize that ensuring the opportunity for shelter to all people is a moral necessity higher than ensuring that pleasure travelers can stay in any given place.
We place a mountain of restrictions on real estate in most of the western world. Requiring that housing be used as housing is a pretty reasonable take.
If you think that people should be able to use their property for anything they want, fine, but don't get upset when someone wants to open a 24 hour go kart track nextdoor.
> I'm not really sympathetic to the way that this article suggests the owners of excess housing are suffering from too many rentals on the short term market.
This is the Wall Street Journal we're talking about, it's the paper for plutocrats and wannabe plutocrats.
As far as I've read, they aren't sure about human to human transmission. Roughly a dozen people have had H5N1, but they all plausibly could have gotten it from poultry handling.
Which means a) no need to panic, but definitely a good idea to keep an eye on things in case we do observe human<->human transmission and b) Maybe we need to revisit how we raise animals for food....
To worry? Yes, it's unreasonable, because there's not a thing the WHO can do about it. "Worrying", in particular, does nothing. For that matter, pretty much anything involving a PR spokesperson from the WHO does nothing.
But that goes 10x for hyperbolic articles from the Guardian, which are the real problem here. They take the inanities from the PR person, and twist them into hysterical headlines that panic people for clicks. You'll note the use of the classic "X happens after Y" pattern, which is a standard yellow-journalism trope to link X and Y implicitly, even if they're unrelated ("puppies die after politician speaks!")
In this case, the WHO spokesman said that the 'increasing reports of bird flu in humans are "worrying"' (which is itself an anti-pattern of quoting a single word), but the rest of the article doesn't at support the headline. If anything, it goes out of its way to say that this particular case is not worrying, literally in the first paragraph:
> The discovery of two cases of bird flu within the same family in Cambodia has highlighted the concern over potential human-to-human spread of the virus, although experts have stressed the risk remains low.
No, they weren't. They spread widely, and then simply petered off for reasons we don't fully understand.
To conclude that we therefore "contained" these viruses via some bureaucratic measure is a classic example of human hubris with regards to our power over nature.
That's totally false. Infection control systems were activated. SARS and MERS did not spread widely, either. Here's one example from Canada:
>All hospitals in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and Simcoe County were ordered to activate their “Code Orange” emergency plans by the government. “Code Orange” meant that the involved hospitals suspended nonessential services. They were also required to limit visitors, create isolation units for potential SARS patients, and implement protective clothing for exposed staff (i.e., gowns, masks, and goggles). Four days later, provincial officials extended access restrictions to all Ontario hospitals.
Contact tracing is standard even for outbreaks of diseases as common as measles. Page 6 of this Alberta health document for measles control from 2018 discusses how to respond, including contact tracing.
No one said otherwise. You're leaping to the conclusion that these "control systems" caused the viruses to go away.
> SARS and MERS did not spread widely, either.
SARS: 8096 known cases across 29 different countries. [1]
MERS: 2603 known cases across 27 different countries. We're still seeing cases, btw. [2]
I guess we have different definitions of "spread widely". (Also "contained", in the case of MERS.) As I said, the viruses petered out after rapidly spreading around the world. We still don't understand why, but it's arrogance to conclude that it was something humans did that "contained" them (particularly when at least one of them wasn't stopped).
> Contact tracing is standard even for outbreaks of diseases as common as measles.
...and it doesn't work well for respiratory viruses, as we just learned from watching the world try to do it for years, only to fail completely.
Of all the debunked interventions we witnessed over the last 3 years, "contact tracing respiratory illnesses" is uniquely amongst the most costly and damaging blunders in human history. Yes, "public health" may engage in this kind of pseudo-scientific, bureaucratic theater, but it certainly doesn't mean that it's effective.
Bringing this to the current day, the bird flu is now endemic amongst wild birds (and possibly other animals) around the planet -- that is how it is getting into chicken farms despite all of our current efforts. The horse (or the chicken, in this case) is literally out of the barn. If bird-to-human or human-to-human transmission were common, we'd know it by now. Moreover, if that were true, there's literally zero chance that we could somehow "contain" a virus endemic in the animal population. It's going to do what it's going to do.
I lived in a place that did contact tracing for SARS-Cov-2 and it definitely worked. Other places in Canada had large outbreaks they had to quell with extensive lockdowns to prevent hospital overwhelm.
Nova Scotia did extensive contact tracing when a case first appeared and often could get rid of small outbreaks without additional measures (beyond border controls.)
The spread of SARS and MERS around the world was via airplanes. That doesn’t mean they for firmly established in any population.
In literally every part of the world, SARS-CoV2 is endemic. It didn't "work", you're just making a post hoc attribution of wiggles in the first derivative of case counts to an action that you prefer.
A far more parsimonious reason that (for example) Novia Scotia had fewer cases (for a time) is that Novia Scotia is in the middle of nowhere and has less than a million people. It's the inverse of the reason that the major cities of the world got it first.
Valve has been historically quite comfortable with Nazis and white ethnonationalists on steam. There are limits, but Valve generally doesn't care about making sure steam/Valve games are friendly places to players. If it's not illegal, Valve isn't going to do anything about it.
"Why not Rust?" is a question I ask about game development a lot these days.
I'm an engineer with a decade of experience as a web services engineer, and 5 years of game development engineering. Rust seems like the right direction for game developers -- safer code, faster compile times, more portable binaries.
Ambient looks very cool, but I had some questions --
1) WebAssembly, but no native web player? One of the most powerful things a game dev can do is provide a link to a game and just let people play it on itch or other space. Having a binary you have to download to play is a major turn off for small time games. It looks like it's on the roadmap, but without a clear target?
2) No editor/tooling yet? What's the plan for a unity-like editor interface? How do non-developers (designers, artists, audio folks) interact with a game made with ambient? Is that in the plans for the future? Could you expand on it a bit more?
3) Sustainability? A five person crew working on a free product, how do you plan on monetizing it?
4) Single executable? One concern that jumps out right away is the single executable for server and client. Often in multiplayer games you want to avoid shipping server binaries (for cheat protection, for instance, or to avoid the cost of deploying a large client to a headless server environment). Are there plans to provide the ability to separate client and server builds?
5) HTML for front end? Games are increasingly moving to HTML to power their UI. Given you are already using WebAssembly, it seems like it wouldn't be that far off to enable an interface so that UI could be handled in JS/HTML. (Yes, this is performant enough for games. Yes, it's being done in AAA games. No, you aren't the first commenter who thinks that UI shouldn't be done in HTML. No, I'm not interested in hearing complaints about it.)
Last game engine(C++) I worked on was a full hour to build if you touched a core header, and that was with Incredibuild that farmed out the compile across the studio.
If you care about compile/iteration times you can get them down to a reasonable level, Bevy does a good job splitting the heavy lift part into a section that is linked dynamically[1] which leads to pretty reasonable compile times even in something Rust based.
That said most of the high-churn areas I've seen drop to some scripting language(ex: Lua or others) for both hot-reload and avoiding compile times. Usually the heavy compute pieces are out in native with orchestration in scripting or something more flexible.
That is why we now have incremental linking, hot-code reloading and for the lucky ones on VC++, modules.
This toy application https://github.com/pjmlp/gwc-rs takes about 15 minutes to compile from scratch on a humble Asus 1215B, whereas the C++ original (thanks to having Gtkmm available as binary), takes about 2 minutes.
> The terrible compile time is a big reason why I avoid rust for game dev.
Compile times are the least of your worry.
The big problem is lack of tools and libraries in Rust gamedev. You can't even achieve PS2-era graphics with Rust right now. Neither Bevy nor FyRox support blend shapes / morph targets, and that's a two decades old and absolutely essential animation tool.
Rust for gamedev is going to take a decade to really get going.
> You can't even achieve PS2-era graphics with Rust right now.
Don't you have access to Vulkan from Rust? So you should be able to do whatever you want, same as doing it in any other language I assume that can plug into it.
Haven't looked into it, but I think there were a bunch of projects for Vulkan bindings for Rust. Not sure how much harder it's to use that vs using it from C++.
So ambient uses WebGPU, which on rust usually means the wgpu library, which has a vulkan backend for platforms that support vulkan. It's possible that's what you're thinking of.
The issue is that vulkan is really low level. So while it's possible to do whatever you want, you need tooling to make it worth the effort to do in rust. For example, let's say this morph thing is a click and drag difficulty level operation in Unreal engine, but in ambient there's no specific tool for it so you have to write 10K lines of code to do the same thing. In this case, the issue isn't what's possible through the gpu, but rather how much work a developer has to do.
If you have to choose between writing big portions of code to do what other engines nice you for free vs. spending that time on your game, many developers will opt for the more mature engine.
(I say this as someone who is not a game developer, I've never used Unreal engine, and I have no idea what this morph operation is, but this is the shape of the issue at play here)
This sounds to me like an engine issue, it has nothing to do with it being in Rust. Same can apply to engine in any language. I.e. whether it provides certain features for you or not and you need to implement them yourself.
This is a massive amount of work before animators can make any use of it. Teams or indie devs that want to use modern animation in their games can't make use of Bevy/Fyrox(/Ambient?) until they develop these tools, which may take years at this rate.
Tickets for more modern animation have been filed in both projects for quite some time, but they lack the staffing and engineering headcount to work on it.
These engines are in a place where they can do rigid bone animation, but that's it. No faces, no breathing, no talking. You can hack your way forward with bones, but it's not as good and it's hard to build/maintain.
I'm doing my part by donating to many of the engineers building these systems in Rust, but I can't expend extra engineering help from myself or my team - we're too busy building things, and sadly I'll probably have to start launching web-facing stuff with Godot due to its incredible maturity. Our entire stack is almost entirely Rust, so it's a bit sad for us.
1) Yes, we're currently working on this and progress is good, so stay tuned for that!
2) We actually built a collaborative editor for this, which we've been using in-house for a year now. We choose to not release it right now, as there's still some things we need to work out with it, but it's coming too!
3) We plan to monetize services around this, such as game server hosting and tools for people to monetize what they create.
4) So the runtime is completely open source, so anyone can look into the code anyway. If you build something on top of this, you will also be able to choose if your own code should live on the server, client or both. If it's server only it won't be sent to the clients.
5) We've experimented with partial html UIs, but support for it on Rust native isn't great yet. We do have a fairly decent UI implementation (see examples here: https://github.com/AmbientRun/Ambient/tree/main/crates/ui/ex...) though it's not exposed to user code yet, but yeah I hear you that there's a lot of people who know html based UI tech. We'll see exactly where we end up there, but most likely the first step will be to expose the UI library we've built already to users.
>1) WebAssembly, but no native web player? One of the most powerful things a game dev can do is provide a link to a game and just let people play it on itch or other space. Having a binary you have to download to play is a major turn off for small time games. It looks like it's on the roadmap, but without a clear target?
Appstores, antiviruses and gatekeepers of every sort. Employees want to play games without installing.
>HTML...
The problem is with CSS and the ever evolving HTML standard. Feels a bit heavy and the implemented features will always be incomplete.
There's this small one called Farmville. Though granted I don't know if it's still printing cash the way it used to. It's possible smartphones killed that sort of game.
My wife has been playing the same farmville farm for 12 years, since I met her. Hasn't spent a penny, but they release updates all of the time. I'm amazed at her dedication and theirs to this game.
> Yes, this is performant enough for games. Yes, it's being done in AAA games.
Every time someone says something mildly controversial about weird technology being used for UI in games, I like to point out Skyrim used Flash for its UI. Bunch of .swf files inside the packed data file. It used some weird non-100%-standard player, but it was still Flash.
Probably used scaleform. It was used by many games. It was a massive headache for engine programmers. The thing really had very very poor performance... I think it was always heavily hacked so that it could run decently, both the actionscript side and the scaleform side. At least that's what a programmer did for a year to get something decent. I can't believe it could have ended up anywhere else with that tech. Still, it was amazing for artists.
Arena Wars was one of the first games using .NET already in 2004, years before Managed Direct X or XNA came to be, with direct bindings to OpenGL. [0]
Then we have quite a few sucessful ones in XNA, some of them them ending up as quite relevant IP franchises.
Minecraft being a success, regardless of being written in Java.
Runescape, a plain Java applet that kept legions of gamers occupied.
Or for that matter the 1990's game development literature trying to move the ecosystem from raw Assembly to C, and how long C++ needed to gain traction over C in most studios. Even today many of them rather code in "C with C++ compiler" style.
Which shows that even C++ had quite an uphill being adopted by the industry.
Tech doesn't matter if game design and IP is compeling enough to make people enjoy the game.
A great engine, with a top language and bad game design, doesn't go far.
These are folks who are wealthy enough to own excess housing stock, and they are using it not to house people but for vacationers.
Prices low for short term rentals? Good. Hopefully they'll enter the long term housing market (or be sold to home owners).