I live in Canada as a US expat. US allows ISPs to control the last mile so Comcast and such prohibit any competition for service to your house. Ontario, at least, requires Rogers, Bell to lease their lines to anyone. So I contract with VMedia and get cable with a couple of premium packages and 35 mbit down for about CAD$70 a month, much cheaper than what I was paying in the US ($70 a month for 1.5 mbit down. Really. Try living in Qwest territory.)

OTOH the US prohibits telcos from owning cell towers, and the cell tower operators must lease to anyone so competition is fierce. As a result there's lots of competition and mobile prices are reasonable. In Ontario, Rogers owns Rogers towers, and no one else can use them. Each telco has to build its own tower network, decreasing competition and driving up prices.

What the numbers in the report don't show is that in the US you can get family bundles that substantially lower the bill; I have 5 lines and pay about US$120 a month for the service; the first line is $60 and then each additional line is $10. If I was to contract with Rogers, I'd pay CAD$60 PER LINE with no discount. Sure I can share data, but I have to pay full freight for each line.

That's happening here. Lots and lots of people have entered the rental pool, mostly renting out short term on weekends and holidays and when they're not home; these people typically rent very low. While people like us have a full-time rental and we actually need to have a return on investment. AirBnB wants us to rent at low prices to keep their fees rolling in, while we want to rent high to maximize profits. We stay booked about 80% of the time which is about what we want.

You do understand how AirBnB works, right? The guests pay AirBnB to find hosts. The hosts pay AirBnB to find guests. AirBnB makes sure everyone gets paid. No different from Orbitz, or Ebay, or Amazon. Or are those all passing fads too?

And how does anything you said have anything to do with crowdsourcing and a sharing economy? We get paid to provide a service. The guests pay to use the service. We pay an agent to make it happen.

This is funny. No host wants their houses to be turned into party house.

The vast majority of hosts pre-screen their guests; we have turned down people who have bad reviews. We do not allow parties. We comply with zoning codes.
As do most hosts - it's impossible to get insurance otherwise.

The problem is that a few cities do not have effective regulations of bed-and-breakfast operations, and tend to enforce on a "complaint" basis. The fault lies with the cities, not with VRBO or AirBnB or whoever else.

We looked at opening an AirBnB in another city; they require that the property be owner occupied, no more than 2 rooms rented, and no more than 25% of the square footage used for rentals.

Other cities have limits on how many unrelated people can stay at a house - another jurisdiction we looked at limits it to 3 unrelated people under one roof without a commercial hotel or apartment permit.

You really have no clue how airbnb works, do you?

Try being a host. You'll discover that pretty much everything you said is wrong.

And yes we have overhead. We pay ourselves. We pay for the space, the utilities, replacement sheets, towels, soap, etc.

But the bottom line we make a tidy profit at the end of the month on a nice apartment. Why else would you stay in business?

I support restrictions. AirBnB shoild.be owner occupied, and limited to a few rooms. Many cities have this already.

It really is a problem where cities don't have effective laws regulating bed and breakfasts as opposed to hotels.

And children died of mostly water-borne diseases like cholera and dysentery. Water borne diseases were quite common (and still are.)

A bit of research will bear out what I said. The AVERAGE expectancy in the Roman Empire was 20-30 years. Sure, the wealthy lived a long time but those in the countryside died young. The wealthy always live longer.

The reason we can drink the water from rivers today is because of stringent surface water regulations; as recently as 60 years ago rivers burned quite regularly. I went to high school in New York City; if you fell into the Hudson River they would take you to the hospital and pump your stomach, as even a small bit of river water was extremely hazardous.

I worked in surface water for 30 years. You could not drink surface water from the dawn of civilization and city building to about 1980.

and died at 22-25.

A lot of what we do when we cook dates back to preserving health. Most of kosher and halals techniques are used today in commercial kitchens, without the religious overtones.

Beer, or any boiled substance, is sterile and thus less likely to kill you. People who drink boiled water live longer, and have more children who survive to have more children. It's simple, really. Once agriculture started, and cities started to form 7,000 years ago, people had to have some form of sanitation.

Those personal choices - and the luxury of demeaning others - rely on the functioning of the underlying system. The people who are at this moment foaming at the mouth about how all those leeches are sucking at the public teat can only do that precisely because they have a well-functioning society that all of us pay for.

For those of us who have raised children so much of the hyperbolic rhetoric today is much like a toddler screaming NO while relying on mom & dad to keep them safe and fed and housed.

You can only focus on your personal choices when society takes care of all your other needs.

Yeah, this. OK so I know it's 8AM on the US west coast where my daughter lives, and in Japan where my MIL lives, and in the Czech Republic where my parents are. That still doesn't tell me a damn thing about what time it is over there - can I call them? Are they home? At work?

This is an idiotic solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

It's like the Tennessee legislature passing a law that pi equals 3.

Listen to Fox much?

Most Euro-based software companies won't take contributions from Americans because of the absurd US laws on encryption. The US has warrantless wiretaps, Stingray, Gitmo, etc. etc. etc. Basically, all the US has to do is to listen to your "free speech" without a warrant, proclaim you a terrorist, and ship you off to Gitmo forever without a trial.

It used to be the Gulag.

So... There are many, many other countries with greater privacy protections than the oft-ignored First Amendment.

Although I have to wonder about a "spec" or "standard" that allows damage to core hardware if the fricking cable is bad.

Seriously? What about component failures in the cable as it ages?

Didn't the engineers think this through?

This brings me back to the Apple Mac stroke of genius non-standard DB9 serial port when you could short the Mac power supply to ground by plugging in a standard null-modem cable,

Reduce your browsing? Turn off your phone, just like you turn off your appliances?

What you're saying is that your big expensive light shines in the corners of your house, and you don't use that light so you don't want to pay for it.

Good grief. Any society depends on cooperation and sharing of resources. You can manufacture outrage that your "unlimited" plan is actually limited, and demand that your carrier provide you with your own dedicated cell tower everywhere, for the "agreed upon price" but that's bullshit. What's more you know that's bullshit.

Of all the carriers, TMobile is about the most generous with bandwidth per dollar, and most reasonable with its terms of use.

Seriously, there are greater abuses out there.