(details are from memory, so let's not quibble and argue over them, my autistic friends)
Back in 1906, after the Big Earthquake happened in SF, the US Congress took pity on the city of SF and built the Hetch Hetchy dam to provide the City with reliable water supply (so the City wouldn't burn down again in the next one). The dam would also generate electricity, and that power came free (except for transmission costs, because the City owned the generation infra). So they started to lay the power lines from Hetch Hetchy to SF.
But, as it just so happened, they ran out of wires and poles just before they could reach SF. So PG&E got the contract to finish off the last mile to the City.
And after it was all over, someone found the missing materials lying in some warehouse, rusting away...
Electricity does not have to cost so much in SF, given that generation is free. And yet we pay over $0.50/KWh in the City.
I really need a source for this story. How did PG&E get wires and poles if the city couldn't get them? Was there a country-wide pole and wire shortage?
I'm all for hating on PG&E but this just sounds like a Reddit-style meme.
What are you guys complaining about? "17.8¢ a kilowatt-hour at investor-owned utilities" ?? Here in San Francisco we're paying close to 50¢ a kilowatt-hour!!
These are all self-inflicted wounds by AirBnB. I have used AirBnB a few times in the past, but these days opt for a hotel instead if I can.
They could take user feedback seriously, but chose not to. Case in point: we booked a place in Hawaii. We (2 people) arrived the day of, tired as heck from the beach activities. Place looked fine, except for the crumbs of food in the nooks and crannies of the kitchen. No big deal. We crashed almost right away, too tired to do anything else. An hour later, my wife jumped up, claiming some insect was walking on her legs. I turned on the lights sleepily, and lo and behold, there were cockroaches on the ceiling, scurrying about (and one had fallen and landed on my wife's legs). In the middle of the night, I contacted AirBnB help. They wanted proof. So I took a video and sent it, along with photos. Finally around 2AM they agreed that we should get out of there. We packed up and left for the beach, to wait things out.
My first reaction was: I should leave a review telling people about the roaches. But guess what? AirBnB cancelled our reservation, so there was no way to rate the place or leave a review! They did refund me, but we wasted a day trying to catch up on the lost sleep.
After that experience, I stopped booking AirBnBs if I could help it. They (and VRBO) are a last resort for me (no pun intended).
We stayed in one last week in Seoul, only because hotels are prohibitively expensive. (We book last minute.)
On leaving, the host offered us a discount on future bookings if we left a 5-star review. This 'beg for a 5-star' practice is common in every Asian business. We got it from a Hilton in Vietnam. (It's probably global. Our recent experience happens to be in Asia.)
In fairness, hotel ratings are the same. My SOP now is to ignore all 5-star ratings. Simply don't read them. Instead, sort by lowest and that gives you the true measure of a place.
My experience in Japan is quite the opposite. A good place gets 3 stars because it's up to expectations, while any perceived slight from staff can easily get that down to 2 stars. Reviews of 4 stars or more from locals tend to correspond to some special experience.
Japanese customers are very harsh with ratings on Google as well. When I was living in Japan I learned that restaurants with like 4.2 stars were often really good. It's calibrated differently inareas with a lot of foreign tourists though.
I got this once when visiting an airport lounge in Asia. Like beyond begging, the person asked for a review and wanted to stand there until I finished it.
I remember once in India I took an Uber, and the driver asked for a good rating. He had been nice and I wanted to give him a 5-star anyways. But as I took out my phone, he helpfully grabbed the phone from my hands and proceeded to enter the 5 stars himself: "click this, and then this, and this ...". Just made me chuckle. He knew what needed to be done, and proceeded to do it.
I rated a place 3-star overall after a subpar experience. The review stood for some time, but has since been edited to a 5-star, presumably at the request of a host. Totally broken indeed.
I forgot about my other Airbnb experience. The place was mediocre, I rated it so. The guy called me and offered me money, just cold hard cash, to change my review. I refused.
They really are. Across every platform. Ratings are 90% cheating of one kind or another. There's just no way to have people leave honest feedback that isn't subject to begging by the parties whose KPIs those ratings are, or prone to lying/exaggeration/sabotage by people with an axe to grind :(
There seems to be the same by symmetrical issue going on as well. where guests who lie without proof can leave a retaliatory review when not getting a refund. For problems that never existed of course.
It happens to host with hundreds of spectacular reviews.
You really take your chances with AirBnb. I have so many stories where I got burned by Airbnb. As a customer they are pretty lousy about handling snafus. From Airbnb’s perspective they are a marketplace so their users and both the buyers and sellers. These two groups interests naturally conflict. They need to balance this tension and they don’t want to burn the renter who make the platform work. That said they do a lousy job of building trust. You can never be sure a listing will have what you think it will and Airbnb does very little to investigate what a property offers. Having a kitchen and decent WiFi is nice, but hotels win in terms of reliability and service and often price.
I've had success with airbnb in the past. Lately, however, I am using booking.com more. AirBnB isn't reliable to handle issues. My wife, her kid and some friends tried a few places a couple of years ago. Most were fine, I had to book them a hotel in Italy from the US (they were tired and not really super focused) because 2 adult and 2 teen women felt extremely uncomfortable and the "room" wasn't as described.
You hit the nail on the head with the problem. It’s not actually that interesting of a problem, it’s classic incentive misalignment. Airbnb is going to continue to not give a fuck as long as it makes them money. And why wouldn’t they? It’s the American way
I'd argue that it is that interesting of a problem because it gives outsiders (us) insight into AirBnB's marketplace dynamics.
It has long been obvious that many scammy hosts exist on the platform, and it ought to be easy to detect such hosts if they bother to try. Yet, that never happened until now.
So what changed? I would bet that until now they have always worried about having enough inventory to sell, and that now they are noticing they have too much inventory. That changes the dynamics from "be extra nice to those who bring the inventory, and even tolerate a little fraud from them" to "be extra nice to those bringing the dollars".
I do wonder if this is an early sign of a coming recession.
Airbnb has the incentive to not tank their marketplace and they seem to be slowly responding to the increasingly negative sentiment to their brand. I somewhat suspect that their leadership lives in a bubble that insulates them from how lousy their brand is these days. I’m sure they have thought of lots of things but these would all cost money and require them to admit that their product is basically seen as a sketchy black market with a lot of sleazy behavior.
Yeah it’s not really an interesting problem, it’s basically how America works these days. Will it affect shareholder bottom line? If so, then we care. If not, we don’t. Pretty simple. America creates stuff that encourages this behavior and then acts all surprised pikachu when all of the beautiful incentives that were set up play out exactly as expected. The beatings will continue until morale improves
While AirBnB might be bad, my mom booked a place using Agoda. It was a NIGHTMARE. Admittedly this was in Egypt, but the unit was filthy and seemed to be owned by a company in the UAE.
If it was just the filth, it could be like any other terrible experience, but this mid-rise was standing next to the rubble of a razed building beside it and there was literally an open gas pipe hanging upright two floors down with people smoking above. The doorman who showed us the unit seemed unconcerned and it was nearly impossible to get our money back until we literally threatened to sue Agoda. We had sent them all our evidence (we took pictures) and even had the doorman talk to them on the phone and it was still like pulling teeth to get them to refund us.
To add insult to injury the place was more expensive than nearby hotels and I just checked and the place is still listed (we went a year ago)!
Prices for higher-end lake homes/cabins/vacation homes etc., for AirBnB and VRBO are roughly equivalent where I live. This is pretty much the only kind of AirBNB I'll consider, and it is usually more about the the location of the home (on a lake, near skiing, etc) and it being large enough to split amongst others. Also many are managed by property management companies and list across multiple platforms. If I can track down the company I'll directly contact to see if there are cheaper rates.
IMO this is basically the only category of AirBnb that's worth considering and it doesn't seem like a big growth area.
The property management companies are great - you can even haggle with them. I love how clearly they identify themselves on both AirBNB and VRBO. You just have to be willing to give up the (false) security of booking through AirBNB.
I've had a similar experience. Everything looked okay until I found rat droppings, and not just a few either. Customer support was insisting on minimizing it, though I got a refund too. I know it doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it sours everything and reminds you that you are taking a gamble.
Toward the tail end of the pandemic, well after vaccines and the average person even remotely cared about it, I stayed in a small studio apartment.
The cleaning fee was $200.
The host gave me a list of at least 30 things I needed to do, including vacuum the floors & washing all the dishes and returning them to their exact initial positions - along with photos of where everything should go, exactly, along with a list of fines as high as $100 PER ITEM for each infraction the cleaning crew could find.
I have never stayed in an AirBNB since outside of hosting a large group, and I never will again.
They've banned this now.
What about all the hosts using AI to pretend guests trashed their place?
No thanks.
Hotels are just fine. I hope all these get-rich-quick scumbag AirBNB speculators get wiped out by high interest rates and lose every penny they have so that people who actually need housing can afford it, and people who actually know how to run a hospitality business can keep doing that correctly.
I tend to agree, nothing of value would be lost if AirBNB disappeared tomorrow. Vacation rentals have always existed anyway, and the cheesy operations that do nothing but rent out each of the bedrooms in a random house in Daly City are just converting normal rental homes to mediocre hotel rooms, a service literally no one was asking for. Enough normal hotel rooms already exist.
Google should just spin out DeepMind as an independent company and get out of the model building business: just sell tents and shovels as they say, and leave the actual (gold) mining to others.
Google Search is still a large fraction of Alphabet's revenue, and Alphabet needs to be able to deliver AI results for people's searches if it wants to stay relevant in the search game.
I imagine it's much easier to have fine grained control over AI search results if you develop and own the AI yourself.
Can you give an example of a search query with a terrible AI Overview? Or even better, a class of search queries that produce terrible AI Overviews? Would really appreciate it!
I was thinking about them fine-tuning the results for marketing purposes. But I just did a bit of research and it seems that would probably actually be illegal. So never mind, maybe?
I have a feeling that the thrust versions (with thrusters) will find huge markets in the Middle East (UAE, Kuwait, Saudi, etc.), and maybe some other "few legal restrictions" jurisdictions (maybe the cartel bosses, African dictators, etc).
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