If you'd been following this thread, it was never about someone renting out their single-family home -- it started with PrinceOfCup's friend subletting out her Oakland apartment, then OzPeter asked about insurance that covers guests (a normal renters policy won't cover paying guests), and you said that it's only a problem for the women that was renting out her apartment. I suggested that it's actually a problem for the renters since they have none of the liability and consumer protections that they'd normally get from a landlord/hotel, and you responded with "you're too stupid and need the State's protection". So you're the one that suggested that normal consumer protection laws are only for the stupid, I was just pointing out the folly in that since if you're not going to hold short-term rental landlords to the same legal standards as other short-term rentals (i.e. hotels), you've already entered a world where consumer protection laws don't apply.

So you'd rather get rid of all of those pesky consumer protection laws and live in a world where you rent a room in a hotel, a fire sweeps through the hotel killing your family, and all the hotel says was "Sorry, we found that fire sprinklers, smoke detectors, and even liability insurance were too expensive, so here, we offer you this mint as a showing of our condolences. Oh, and you owe us $30,000 to remove your family's charred bodies and rebuild your room since you had possession of the room when the fire started. You agreed to that on page 47 of the rental contract you signed when you checked in last night... didn't you have your lawyer review it?"

I think you have it backwards -- simplicity is dealing with one company - you can tell them put their panels on the roof, deal with all ongoing maintenance and service, and charge you less for power than the utility. Penny pinching is "Hire Company A to install the panels, Hire company B to maintain them, when something breaks, mediate the fight between Company A, Company B, and the company that manufactured the equipment while in the meantime you have no power since your grid-tie inverter blew up". When one company does it all, you can hold them to their SLA to fix the equipment regardless of whether it was a manufacturing defect, an installation error, or lack of preventative maintenance.

You get to keep more of the rewards with the second scenario, but it's not simpler.

That's true as long as you stay within the pure digital design constraints that the computers were designed for, but if you give them to an overclocker and ask him to tweak them to give the very best performance (such as you'd expect a professional violinist to do - get the best sound from the instrument), you'll find that each one behaves slightly differently. One might have a faster CPU clock speed, while another one might be tuned for faster memory timing and/or latency.

That's what I was thinking too, but they said that the instruments were identified by numbers -- is a Stradivarius obvious to a causal observer?

I can see why they didn't go truly double-blind with goggles on the researchers when dealing with a 10 million dollar instrument.

Looks like thet did the test in someone's living room -- shouldn't they have rented a concert hall or someplace more appropriate to where the instruments would be played on tour?

Why isn't lower utility bills also an incentive? As long as the lease company charges you less that utility market rates, then doesn't that make solar more appealing? Not everyone wants to own and run their own powerplant, they are happy to let someone else own it and run it even if it costs them more money.

That's an operational cost, not a capital cost -- which many people find to be more affordable (which is why many people will happily pay their cell phone carrier much more than the price of a cell phone since the carrier gives them the phone with little upfront cost and makes up the cost in monthly fees)

Well yeah, I thought that part was obvious. You've contracted to live in it for a while, not sublet it, which is prohibited by most rental contracts.

Well no, it's the problem of the person renting the unit when they find out that after some incident happens that the person that rented them the place has no liability insurance and no assets to recover damages from. A short-term renter shouldn't have to do a full background check and insurance coverage check before they rent a place for the night -- that's why we have consumer protection laws like required liability insurance for commercial establishments. The same thing should apply to ride-share services, patrons of such services should be able to rely on the drivers having adequate insurance to cover them in an accident.

It's not the Tourists that are renting the units that are in violation of the lease clauses and short-term rental laws, it's the tenants that are renting them out that are responsible.

Market value is whatever price people are willing to pay -- somewhere around $3000 for a one bedroom apartment in a decent area of SF. Long-term tenants with Rent control are paying far below that. When I moved out of SF 5 years ago, I was paying around $1000/month for a one bedroom, if I'd kept it, I'd probably be paying $1100 for it now, while new residents would be paying far more.

If you're renting it from your landlord, it's not "private property". If a landlord wants to go into the short-term rental business, he can follow the legal process to do so.

It's also to benefit the long-term residents. Living in a short-term rental facility (i.e. a hotel) is much different than living in an apartment building with long-term residents. The new guy who moves in down the hall is only going to have to ask you once where the recycle bins are and isn't going to continually dump his trash in those bins because he "didn't know" they were for recycling only, he's not going to come into the building at 1am with his loud talkative family and loads of luggage rolling down the halls, and likely has a 9-5 job just like you so he's probably not staying out late every night to take in the sights.

Well before AirBnb, I lived in an apartment building where one tenant rented his apartment out for short-term stays (and his tenants were guilty of all of the above) -- the long-term residents complained to the landlord and he put a stop to it.

Of course, it would also put a lot of web designers out of a job if they no longer need to spend hours working around quirks in older browsers, so be careful what you ask for.