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by unishark 2135 days ago
Illegal taxis and rental housing (whether short or long term) have been around forever though. And they weren't just a fringe thing. College students and immigrant groups may predominantly use them in many places. If there's a current increase in such things, I'd blame it on the factors and regulations restricting the legal supply of these things rather than on airbnb/uber.
2 comments
piva00 2135 days ago
Illegal child pornography, terrorism radicalisation and other modern issues have also been around forever, it doesn't mean that the scale and leverage of the internet haven't made it worse, at least in tooling.

The same applies to illegal taxis and housing, yes, they were problems before but you didn't have a centralised global network of rentals (many illegal) connecting to the market of people looking for accommodation. The scale is the problem here.

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unishark 2135 days ago
> Illegal child pornography, terrorism radicalisation and other modern issues have also been around forever, it doesn't mean that the scale and leverage of the internet haven't made it worse, at least in tooling.

Ergo I can't disprove causation with my argument? I certainly concede that. For one thing it's a negative, not to mention the fact that you can't prove causation either. But then I don't concede it should be assumed true unless proven otherwise. Further, I can make arguments against it of course. And I made not one, but three: that it existed already, it was not a fringe activity (like, say, terrorism or child porn), and three that effects blamed on uber/airbnb can be explained by larger cultural changes. I think there's a bias in these arguments towards the experience of a certain group of people who actually travel the world and use apps to do so.

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maccard 2135 days ago
> If there's a current increase in such things, I'd blame it on the factors and regulations restricting the legal supply of these things rather than on airbnb/uber.

Curious, do you live in a city that's affected by this? I live in Edinburgh, and it's a massive problem here, almost entirely due to AirBnb. It's widely reported on pretty much every news source in the UK that the cause of this issue is Airbnb's (and other short term holiday lets), in a massive number of cases operating illegally (last number I saw was that <100 of the 7000+ lets in the 100sq miles of Edinburgh were legally registered)

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