Not necessarily and only after the fact. A hotel chain has a reputation to maintain and generally they are operating as ongoing concerns. AirBnB users (both guests and renters) are under no such long term pressures.

I think that is overly cynical. The government and its elected officials generally do care that the people under their care are safe and happy, even if their ultimate motivation is just to get re-elected rather than some deep level of humanity. And a government being concerned about attempts to circumvent their powers of taxation shouldn't be terribly surprising. Taxing travelers is a great way to bring money into the area from outside without having to tax the people that elect them. Shouldn't shock anyone that such an easy taxation target would be valued highly by government officials who want to get re-elected.

That is true but not really relevant. If someone is considering a long term stay, chances are they are going to look the place over in person before any money changes hands. Not so with a short term hotel-style stay where you will be in and out in a short amount of time. I'm not saying AirBnB is a bad thing but what you are saying is a false equivalency in most cases. There are some serious issues to think about here is all I'm saying.

So clearly we can extrapolate from your experience that no one ever has had or will have a problem... [/sarcasm]

Look, most people probably will never have a problem because most people are decent law abiding sorts. Those aren't who we are worried about. It's the few really bad ones that hurt, steal from or defraud or otherwise harm someone. If your experiences have been great, that is wonderful but that doesn't mean it isn't worth worrying about both for the visitor and the host. If you want to take the risks involved in using a service like AirBnB I have no problem with that but that doesn't mean there aren't some very important public health and safety considerations to address.

When we get to any actual science or engineering then I will pretend to care. Until then it really is not important in a forum like slashdot to anyone but a few overly pedantic people who don't know when to pick their battles. Just because people here generally care about science and engineering doesn't mean we can't deal with a little obvious imprecision in a description of a shape. No one will be negatively affected by the fact that it isn't truly a torus and most of us are well aware that it isn't actually a torus by the proper defintion. It's like pointing out that the Saint Louis Arch is actually a catenary instead of a parabola as is commonly assumed. Interesting but ultimately not genuinely important 99.999999999% of the time.

In some cases the answer will be yes. If I found my out my neighbor had turned his house into a de-facto hotel, I would likely be pretty upset and rightly so. That potentially affects me and my property so you better believe I'm going to want a say in the matter. Furthermore there are various important liability, safety and taxation concerns that need to be addressed before any sane person should give a blanket go-ahead.

The (probably few) customers who don't get scammed by shady "hosts". The neighbors who don't have to put up with living next to a de-facto hotel which the property is almost certainly not zoned for. The taxing authorities and by extension the local citizens who are probably not receiving the benefits of tax revenue they would otherwise receive. The normal hotels and their employees who lose revenue they likely otherwise would have received.

Just because something is new doesn't mean it is necessarily good. I don't have a problem with Air Bnb and I actually do wish them the best of luck but just because they think their product is "innovative" doesn't automatically mean it is a good idea. I can see potential problems with the service that are serious and need to be addressed in a more adult way than screaming "KILLING INNOVATION" to anyone who will listen.

Their well deserved reputation isn't relevant for once I think. Microsoft doesn't need to sell at a loss here to gain market share at Dropbox's expense because they almost certainly have a huge cost advantage. Like for Google, storage space for Microsoft is a by-product of their other product offerings such as search or Office in the cloud. I'm certainly no fan of Microsoft's (and have 20 years of postings to prove it) but I really don't think there is a credible case for predatory pricing to be made here. Dropbox has a flawed business model and as you point out they should have sold the company when they had the chance. Now they will get crushed by any large firm that has storage space to spare (specifically Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc) and a desire to slap a friendly interface on it because by-products are by definition cheap.

Probably not applicable here because storage space to Google is a by-product, not a loss leader. By-products by definition are generally very very cheap which means that Google's cost for the service is pretty close to zero - at least far closer to zero than it is for Dropbox. Otherwise the unused storage space would be a cost (waste) rather than a revenue stream. Google doesn't have to sell it for a loss because they have a huge cost advantage over Dropbox. They can sell it far below Dropbox's cost and still make money doing so because storage is not their primary business. Storage to Google is a by-product.

This is very similar to the problem Microsoft has in trying to compete with Linux. Companies that develop for linux have their primary line of business elsewhere -services, hardware, etc. For example IBM sells services so they don't actually have to make money on linux. Microsoft on the other hand currently has to make money selling the software so they can't just give it away. This puts certain constraints on Microsoft's business model.

You are almost certainly mistaken in your presumption that they are selling at a loss. Storage space for a company like Google or Amazon is a by-product. It would otherwise be waste to them so they can sell it profitable very very cheaply. They aren't dumping here because they have a genuine cost advantage.

Frankly, Dropbox has a rather dumb business model that I really don't think has a bright future. I say this as someone who actually uses Dropbox and generally likes the product. But I really don't see them being successful as a stand alone business. They have the same problem Microsoft does when competing against Linux. The costs for the competing products are just genuinely lower.

It's not illegal when the company pricing lower has a genuine cost advantage. Google and Amazon and Microsoft have VAST amounts of surplus storage space due to their other businesses and data storage to end users for them is a by-product. By-products are almost by definition extremely cheap because if they don't have any marketable value then they are waste. Google and the others are simply selling something cheaply that would otherwise be nothing but a cost to them. That's not predatory, that's simply smart business.

I use Dropbox but its business model is dumb and they should have sold the company when they had the chance. At the end of the day they are selling megabytes of storage which is an undifferentiated product. Putting an easy to use interface on that isn't all that hard to do and any sufficiently well funded competitor can easily replicate what they've done. Why you think companies like Google should try to replicate a flawed business model like that is a mystery to me.

Who says they are selling at a loss? Storage space is a by-product for Google, Amazon and Microsoft. They have a lot of storage space that would otherwise go to waste from their primary businesses. They can afford to sell it very cheaply because otherwise it would be nothing but an expense (waste) for them. Also bear in mind that just because they offer it to end consumers (sometimes) for free sometimes doesn't mean it is actually free. As a user of Google Drive I'm not their customer unless I actually pay them - I'm their product. The customer is the one who buys the advertising. Their product is (theoretically) my attention for advertisers and storage space (like email and search) is just another way to get me in front of them.

It is sort of but the real purpose of Android is so that Google doesn't get shut out of mobile advertising by Apple, Microsoft or others who own their own mobile platforms. It's not really intended to be a profit center to Google but rather to keep others from shutting off Google from future revenue streams as mobile becomes increasingly important. Don't think for a moment that if Google had to go through Apple or Microsoft or Blackberry that those companies wouldn't take their pound of flesh or even simply keep Google out altogether if they could.

Please define "unfair" in this context. Exactly what do you think is "unfair" about what Amazon and Google are doing? You think they should have to replicate Dropbox's (probably flawed) business model to be "fair" to Dropbox? Amazon and Google can afford to offer storage space very cheaply because for them it is a by-product of their primary business. By-products can be sold very cheaply because they would otherwise be considered waste. Dropbox is selling a mostly undifferentiated commodity product - specifically data storage capacity. While they've made their product friendly and easy to use, that doesn't change what it is and if someone is willing to offer a similar product for less profit then I think Dropbox and Box and the rest are probably doomed.

I use dropbox as well but if they go out of business it isn't terribly hard to replace them. I use Google Drive at work and it is quite easy to use as well. Frankly if I were the owner of Dropbox I would be looking for a deep pocketed company to sell to because unless they can expand beyond their current offerings they are almost certain to go out of business eventually.

If you spend your life studying something that allows you to be replaced for $10/hour then you are frankly retarded. Nobody owes you a comfortable living. You need to earn it and part of that is having the foresight to see what might be valuable to employers.

Who is suggesting that you do? If you provide enough value for the wages you command then you should be able to live very nicely. But if your job can be done by someone willing to work for $10 per hour then you better reconsider just how valuable what you do actually is. Furthermore, just because someone does a "blue collar" job doesn't mean they are an idiot. Stop looking down your nose at people who don't work in an air conditioned office typing on a computer. You think you are too good to get your hands dirty? Are you really that arrogant?

Americans ARE competing on price at all times and the movement of certain types of jobs proves that fact. You could not be more wrong. Anyone who thinks price doesn't factor in is delusional. That includes competing for wages. You can ask for whatever you want but that doesn't guarantee the market will bear your asking price.

Furthermore the per-capita US income is in the top 5 in the world. How sustainable do you think that is? I suggest you learn about regression toward the mean. There are 5 people in China for every 1 in the US. Do you think Americans are smarter or harder working or more deserving? Do you think Americans are somehow special so they don't have to compete with the other 95% of the world? Grow up. The US has had a good run since WWII but that doesn't guarantee it will stay on top without a lot of hard work and sometimes some belt tightening too. Some jobs are going to move to where they make more economic sense. If you want to keep high paying jobs in the US then there is a lot of hard work to do. Better get busy because the rest of the world isn't going to wait for your lazy ass.

Nothing has killed US manufacturing. I work in manufacturing in the US and have for most of the last 20 years. I run a manufacturing company. The US manufactures over $3 Trillion in goods each year. The US manufacturing sector alone would be among the 10 largest economies in the world by GDP. Manufacturing in the US is alive and well and anyone who says otherwise has no idea what they are talking about. The number of jobs in US manufacturing has fallen just like it did in agriculture a hundred years ago but that is not by itself a bad thing. Would you prefer that 50%+ of the nation's workers be employed on farms like they were 150 years ago? What has changed is that the US predominately manufactures capital intensive rather than labor intensive goods.

You can find all sorts of weird correlations if you look for them but the mere existence of a correlation is meaningless by itself. In this case my first question would be about money. States with more money will be able to afford both faster internet and better schools. Other factors that need to be controlled for include population density, local industry, demographic makeup, etc to be able to put some meaning to this.

Basically this is a meaningless correlation which provides no context to draw useful conclusions from. Obligatory XKCD.

You are free to work wherever you want. Plenty of US citizens work outside the US. I have at times in my career. They are called expatriates and it's quite normal. If the opportunity for you is in China or France then go there and stop whining about it. Maximizing your own income may require you to look outside the town where you grew up and also may require some actual sacrifice on your part.