Electromagnetic locks are better suited for gateways that are open by default. I can't imagine why someone would create a vault dependent on electricity.
That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of crimes that would go easier with no power. Perhaps taking down cameras.
That being said I'm sure it's a bug. I'm sure whomever made this security thing accounted for power outages. But I'm sure some loop hole appears during that power outage that the builders didn't anticipate.
Also yes, obviously it's some security thing that has to do with power not necessarily a vault door. That was just an example.
My nextdoor neighbor sold their house last year and now it's an Airbnb. Despite the fact that I live in a house in a normal residential neighborhood, I'm now forced to live next to a hotel. And I have no say in the matter. Super frustrating.
I've read people talking about how Airbnb screwed the host or the guest. But few people talk about how it screws the neighbors.
My next door neighbor also rents out her house. She has 5 others she does the same in. These are long term rentals, which means when the tenant is bad it's bad for me long term. We got new neighbors last year, and while they struggle socially they're respectful and it's a huge quality of life improvement.
Our neighbors on the other side, unfortunately, own their home. This means I'm forced to live next to (depending on the day of the week), a live concert venue, a muscle car engine noise appreciation celebration, frat parties, and/or a farm (they had a goat for a week ?).
There's nothing anyone can (or will) do about any of these things, and no one's checking their papers to determine if ignoring the noise is your only recourse. The only way to attempt to improve the situation is show respect and hope it's eventually reciprocated. This is just part of living around other humans. The systems in place to mitigate these kinds of petty conflicts aren't taken seriously, whether the rental is long or short term, or the property tax kind.
For every HOA that gets a Reddit post complaining about unreasonable behavior, there's a dozen others that just effectively keep people from turning their front yard into a wrecking yard, and probably a hundred others that don't enforce anything at all but just keep the common areas mowed.
One of the problems is that you don't know what you're buying. You might end up with a reasonable HOA or a terrible one. Even if it looks reasonable today, it might change tomorrow.
Another problem is that HOAs are the worst possible size of a government. They're large enough that you're in the minority, but small enough that they don't have anything else to preoccupy themselves with but how you're using your own property.
I've heard that "just imagine what kinds of horrors happen without HOAs" argument many times over, but... I live in the Bay Area in a densely-packed but older neighborhood without a HOA, and I'm yet to witness the terrible consequences of my neighbors' supposed recklessness. Yeah, the houses are painted in different colors and picket fences have different styles and heights, but I think I can live with that.
Most people are reasonable. When you bump into people who are truly unreasonable, a HOA is unlikely to save you. How peaceful and pretty a neighborhood is depends largely on socioeconomic factors (not just wealth, but also the prevalence of problems such as addiction). It just so happens that many new and expensive neighborhoods have HOAs, but that doesn't mean that HOAs are to be credited for good outcomes - or that they will be able to prevent the decline of such communities if the economic climate changes.
The associations are often mismanaged horribly because they are mostly lead by people that just want to use the power to get the changes they want to their property, and sometimes (this is not rare) the board will use lawyers to write letters coercing behavior which may be against the HoA constitution, also sometimes to save a buck they will operate based on policy which was voted by the board that is unconstitutional and has not been amended by owners. The only way to rectify this is to put your real life on hold and create a political movement against the board and/or hire attorneys to get them to settle, litigate, or start a class suit, which might I remind you will probably retaliate against you and waste more of your time. Meanwhile the HoA's liability insurance premiums will go through the roof from hiring attorneys to defend themselves and so will your HoA fees. Lawyers love HoAs.
Have heard about this from friends and family more than once.. it would be comical if it didn't impede their ability to live so much.
My county has laws about turning your front yard into a wrecking yard...def should look into it if you experience severely unmaintained yards or overloaded with trash with unmovable cars.
But whether I cut my grass every 2 weeks or every 3 weeks, or god forbird I decide to have a vegetable garden on the southern side of my house (covenance says must be backyard)...that's HOA realm.
I have 113 potions. 100 are just Gatorade in a fancy bottle, 12 de-age you by a year, and the last one turns you into a vegetable forever. Should I be allowed to give people one at random to drink?
Specifically chose this neighborhood because there is no HOA. The goat/sheep/whatever was hilarious and was gone within a week. The point is that just because I don't live by an AirBnB (that I know of) doesn't mean I'm guaranteed to have no noise from neighbors. The renters before honestly did suck a lot, but if they wouldn't turn down their bass, and the cops couldn't be bothered to do anything about it, I doubt an HOA would have helped. I'd rather invest in quiet windows than live out the many many horror stories of my friends who live in HOAs.
>"The only way to attempt to improve the situation is show respect and hope it's eventually reciprocated."
With who? I don't have a neighbor, I have an endless string of rotating strangers. I understand that bad neighbors have always existed, but that's not what's happening in my specific situation.
Anyone and everyone has potential access to the house 30 feet or so from which I sleep. Anyone and everyone at any time. It's a big change.
The house next door to you was de facto rezoned from residential to hotel.
In the US, and California specifically, any kind of zoning change is met with pitchforks. If your neighbor tried to build an apartment and you didn't like it you could have easily held up the project for years.
Airbnb figured a way to rezone property without invoking the wrath of local busybodies. Kudos to them. But at the same time, if you live in a place that takes zoning seriously then Airbnb shouldn't be allowed.
But few people talk about how it screws the neighbors.
This so much.
There's a neighbor on the street with a 'unique' house who decided the way she would make money is AirBnB'ing it to film companies. So...a weekend or two a month (usually Th-Mo), we would have 50-60 cars parked wherever they wanted on our narrow street and sidestreets. We would have vans and delivery vehicles block our driveways and sometimes the whole street for as long as they wanted. They would drive over lawns to position trucks because the street is too narrow for a 20+ foot cargo truck to back into the driveway to unload. They would film until 3, 4, sometimes 5 in the morning with loud noise, dozens of people and floodlights. If we said anything, they would mob us and start filming us trying to get us to lose our tempers. Whenever the cops showed up, they would shut down and play nice until they left, and then crank back up. And every one of them didn't get the required city permits until after we complained.
Lovely people in the film industry. /s
The city has regulations against such abusive behavior but not the resources to enforce, and no real recourse when the film companies basically gave the city the middle finger. They're going to be gone in a couple of days so screw those pesky neighbors. So we became the squeaky wheel to get some action. We eventually had to get a lawyer to get this shut down. And you bet there's a bunch of us at the city council meetings lobbying for better enforcement. It looks like we'll get some new regs passed with more teeth.
Come to Amsterdam. Its city wide hobby to shit on Airbnb by residents and complain to newspapers and city. They even had an official city sponsored online participation board dedicated to complaining about airbnb. And it was pretty successful. Now so much registration is required to rent on Airbnb and max days that pretty much only professionals are left. They also gave like 10k fines to citizens who forgot a few things or days in the registration process. So the pendulum swung the other way here.
No, I own a property that I exclusively rent long-term. So I don’t have an interest in short term rentals, except as a traveler that likes to use them.
I am the opposite and I get asked about this a lot. I bought a condo in a building (and neighborhood) that is almost all STR's (near the beach). I'm the only person who actually lives in my building full time.
I enjoy the fact that I get new neighbors all the time because, quite simply... in the past, I've lived next door to people I didn't like at all. When that happens, what can you do, move? This way, if there is an unruly renter, I just call the owner of the condo and they deal with it (only happened once in the last year). Worst case, they leave on their on in a few days.
You have a say - go to your town’s planning and zoning commission, find others with similar concerns, and force votes on the legality of a full-time hotel next door.
In my town, stays of less than 30 days are illegal, and there's a 10% tax. And yet, AirBnb and VRBO show dozens of listings. So if the rental contract itself violates city code, surely no tax is being paid either.
This puts me off the idea of ever renting out my own place, because I would then have to choose between feeling like a sucker, or being a criminal.
Same situation here, and I was surprised to learn that my city doesn't seem to have any rules against this.
So far most renters have been friendly or kept to themselves. Some were noisy, and some left dozens of cigarette butts on the sidewalk and street, and for the past couple weeks the place has been empty. No one has even come by to put away the trash bins.
The owner has over a dozen houses like this, and I really think it's a bad thing that these houses are not available to people who want to live in them.
You absolutely have a say in the matter, but it’s possible that on one will listen. Talk to your local city council person (or local equivalent) and see if they are willing to ban short term rentals in areas that are not zoned for it. My city did that and it’s pretty great.
I used to live in a 4 unit apartment in SF. One of the units in the building was a full time Airbnb. On several occasions, the different Airbnb renters parked in the wrong spot in our small garage, which disrupted the parking situation for the non-Airbnb tenants in the unit. On another occasion, a renter got locked out of the front gate. I watched from my window as they bent the gate bars so they could open the gate without using the key. When I went down to the gate to ask them what they were doing, they denied damaging the property.
Where I live now is area of all single family homes. One house on my street is also a full time Airbnb. There have been fewer issues, but there was one occasion where some people rented the house, threw a party in the house, shots were fired, and bullets went through a neighboring house. There have never been issues at this level in the neighborhood, so this was out of the ordinary.
Not all short term, full time Airbnbs are disrespectful. Not all long term, non-Airbnb neighbors are respectful. But IMO, with non-Airbnb neighbors, you have a better chance of working something out since they are there for the long haul.
Is it difficult to imagine? Living next to a regular long-term rental has some of the same issues, AirBNB short term rentals just magnify that. Personally, one of the best things I ever did to improve my quality of life was move to a newly constructed mid/upper neighborhood where all houses are owner-occupied. It's amazing how much better people act and treat their property when it's actually their own.
Yes, it can be difficult to imagine for some people, based on their lived experiences. Those who have observed little or no unwanted behaviours from short-term renters wild tend to assume "It works." or "It works the vast majority' of the time.". Some combinations of hosts, their rules, and guests can be successful and completely non-problematic. I, having lived some problematic places long before AirBnB existed, sympahise with your experience. I've been fortunate to see primarily successes.
Gee, how about having a parade of random people showing up at all hours of the day/night just to start? The erosion of community. Further commodification of housing so that only the rich and upper middle class can buy a house in any city?
Instead we have social mobility so that we can move anytime when better opportunities arise. That may be a good or a bad thing depending on which side you are.
Moving every time a better opportunity comes up is a privilege enjoyed by a small section of the population. The vast majority of people move rarely, and when they do move it's usually within the same locality.
Even for people who can, family (spouse, kids in school, nearby relatives, etc.), friends, and so forth tend to make moving cities a pretty significant decision at some point.
Th trend line has been toward significantly less mobility relative to past decades--though you'd probably want to correct the numbers for demographics given that 20 somethings move the most (as one would expect).
Exactly-- the number of young people still living at home has surged in the last decade. This is not surprising given that "starter homes" are one of the main targets of housing speculators. People who would buy their first house rent longer, driving up rental rates and putting the transition from family to independence further out of reach for many.
Without home ownership you are throwing away a large portion of the money you may make in your life. Even if you move frequently it still makes sense to buy so long as you’re not hitting the tip of the market.
That last point - that housing is too expensive - is not something that airbnb causes or can fix. That's a supply side problem and the solution is housing construction. It may marginally exacerbate the symptom by providing liquidity.
The United States is short O(10M) housing units[0], primarily due to anti-construction policies. Airbnb has O(100k) listings[1] in the US. Banning short-term rentals is a 1% solution. That's a policy distraction, not a useful lever to pull.
There are plenty of empty luxury condos in every major city. They mostly serve as bank accounts for foreign investors. There's plenty of construction, just the wrong type.
Maybe so, but can you show any data that it's a significant or meaningful problem and not a visible scapegoat? The data I found (above) makes clear that deleting the short-term rental market would not even dent the housing shortage problem in the United States.
I could believe (and maybe someone in this thread has data!) that in some extremely over-constrained markets that units are disproportionately used for short-term rentals. But I haven't seen any numbers. And in those cases, you still should be building homes to solve the root cause problem.
Americans persistently seem to want to find any reason at all to absolve themselves of responsibility for the housing crisis. It's investors! It's short-term rentals! It's corporate landlords! But it's never the locals who oppose construction.
It's amazing how lazy the supply siders are on this argument. Of course there's no good data-- real estate interests fight to prevent that data from even being collected. You only have to drive around major cities at dusk and see how many units have no lights on for weeks on end to recognize the magnitude of the problem. There may be data from Vancouver BC and other places that have passed vacancy taxes to address the issue. Further, the amount of construction resources that go into building luxury condos and other useless units are resources that CANNOT be used to build good housing. There is a limited supply of labor and supplies for that.
Adding more houses to the market certainly will decrease pricing pressure. Nobody said banning Airbnb was suddenly going to make housing affordable but decrease prices.
And my question remains, which is more valuable to society, short term rentals or homes?
It's not a zero-sum game. You can have both, but you need to build enough to have it. Regulating the use of a thing is a mark of market failure. How would you feel if the government told you that you could only use a pencil for writing because that has more social value than its use in making a model log cabin?
You're also failing to process my point: that banning short-term rentals is an ineffective lever, not that it won't have an epsilon of impact. Yes, you will increase supply by a tiny amount relative to the shortage. It will have near-zero pricing impact because the magnitude pales against the problem.
No, we have been ignoring your point because it’s one of those Econ 101 world views based on assumptions that have no basis in the real world and actual human behavior. You can’t look at the number of Airbnb rentals and conclude it’s not having a significant impact on the market simply based on the raw number of units. What we know from all systems theory is that a small portion of things has the majority of the effect. In this case, short term rentals are very likely setting the upper bounds of the pricing range.
"At the median owner-occupancy rate zip code, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018% increase in rents and a 0.026% increase in house prices."
Clicks on "actual research," finds the usual econometric voodoo. Even better, the use of instrumental variables to supposedly "isolate" effects. Totally representative, I am sure.
PS: the author's own words contradict your claim that the effect is tiny, although again I think this is a serious undercount resulting from a poor model and ever worse availability of data nationwide:
"This means that, in aggregate, the growth in home-sharing through Airbnb contributes to about one-fifth of the average annual increase in U.S. rents and about one-seventh of the average annual increase in U.S. housing prices."
https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c...
A cabin across the street from me was an AirBnB rental: very loud parties all weekend, running long after midnight. Then COVID came, and now AirBnB has gone down the toilet, so the problem has not returned. Yet.
Good luck finding a bylaw officer to enforce it, I've made many complaints in my city only to be told there's only one person and they never showed up... and this is in a city of 700k.
Aside from the annoyance of the lifestyle of tourists vs residents, you miss out on having a normal neighbor who you can build a relationship over time with. Our neighbors keep a key, water plants while we're away, babysit our kids, generally look out for each other.
Long-term rentals getting converted to short-term rentals in a constrained, inelastic market drives up prices, prices are set at the margin. You don't publications for that, that's just a basic fact.
Work with your municipality to pass an Airbnb ordinance. We have one; it limits the number of nights you can list your house for, requires a shall-issue license, an insurance certificate, and inspections, forbids rentals of less than 24 hours, and charges a fee for non-owner-occupied buildings.
I've read they're taken very seriously in some places like Germany and Japan, but in my experience, a lot of people in the USA won't bother reporting noise violations because they know the chances of them being enforced and/or investigated in a timely manner is low.
Enforcement in Germany is quite funny. Lived there for some years.
If you have a problem with noisy neighbours you basically must make a "noise diary" with date/time/description of the noise over a period of time before anyone will give a shit.
Even then, enforcement varies wildly. Seems to depend where you are, etc.
The best person to complain to is building management, but even then, they vary.
The next best thing to do (and the most German solution) is leaving passive aggressive notes on the buildings noticeboard.
It depends, of course, but yes, I have had noise complaints addressed by some kind of code enforcement officer (i.e. unarmed, but able to write citations.)
Here in Romania there are different rules if you rent your house this way (hotel style). You have to pay much more for the administration/utilities costs, which has some compensation effect
Cities and etc have zoning laws because it does matter what kind of activity happens next door.
I lived in a town house association where the unit’s being rented were the source of noise, trash, crime, etc.
People renting often don’t care as much for the neighborhood/ locals and they can move on at will. And you'd be surprised how much random citizen land lords are terrible at just being land lords.
After the numbers of rentals were reduced (and background checks required) the neighborhood improved greatly. It was like turning off a light switch on noise, litter, crime, etc...
I generally agree with you. But unless you're allowed to knock down your house and build a 10 story apartment in it's place then the argument kind of falls flat.
Would you oppose a smelly wastewater treatment plant being built on the previously residential property right next to you? That's why they should get a say.
Is it not? I think it's very comparable, you attempted to appeal to the freedoms of property owners but there are laws the govern the use of land wherever you go.
The average person doesn't host a pool parties 100+ days out of a year as an Airbnb unit might. Filing complaints against a single noisy neighbor would also be a lot easier than doing it against people who will be gone by the time anyone looks into the matter.
There's a big difference between dealing with something from a neighbor's property once in a while, trash ending up in my property, guests not following neighborhood rules for parking, etc., and having to deal with it every single day.
Neighborhoods have a lot of societal norms, my house has frequently been referred to as "the rental" even though I've lived here for years and the prior tenants also all had long runs here... even being a rental house in the neighborhood is considered strange here.
I assume this violates the EULA of most retailers and subjects your account to possible deletion. Not saying that it's likely, but DRM restrictions seem like a matter of principle to some people. Even if you can strip the DRM you still don't legally own the product.
And if they ask about it, you simply lie, but they'll never ask. I get your theoretical concern, but I don't understand what practical the concern is, because there doesn't seem to be one. They can't peer into your hard drive or running processes, and they aren't going to track down the accounts of random internet commenters.
First, fuck those retailers for putting such conditions on things you bought to own. They're yours, so who cares.
Second, strip the DRM using Calibre, and store the books off any cloud-based platform and on your own drives, as you always should in any case given the proclivity of many content companies to just flagrantly bullshit their way into excusing themselves when they frequently steal back their customers access to stuff they ostensibly own.
Once a piece of digital content is actually yours, in your own device drives, it's only then really yours.
Keep the on-device cloud-based versions around if you like the user interface of your platform or reader, but your own digital copies elsewhere. The retailer doesn't even need to know (though I personally wouldn't give a tin shit if they did anyhow).
Yes and no. There's an important distinction between _having_ something and _owning_ something. You can have possession of figures carved from contraband elephant ivory. But if anyone who was inclined to care about such things decided to take action, a court could compel you to destroy it. Same thing with any illegal item.
But these are all "ifs and buts." Hence why it's a matter of principle and not practice. At the end of the day, most people are fine with "buying" a book that they don't own as evidenced by the sales.
Now you're just engaging in silly semantics. Yes, in all practical sense, you absolutely do own the DRM-free books you've stripped of their rent-seeking garbage. You could even take that to court and quite heavily argue that because you bought them as claimed property, they're yours. You might not win, but a case could be made and in any case, you could move digital copies anywhere you want. The ones doing wrong here are the companies that try to impose DRM on things people are buying under a notion of ownership, That these also randomly erase or reclaim things they claim to have sold only makes the wrong worse.
Yes, but the concern is not a legal one, it is a practical one.
"You have been found in violation of our EULA and we have therefore permanently deleted your account. Please check our support page at <404> for more information." - Any Service, to Any User.
Now what, for Any User? Hope you're famous enough to raise a stink on Twitter to get your account back? Pay $1B in legal costs to sue them?
> On March 30, 2013, Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled in favor of Capitol Records, explaining that the transfer of digital data from one storage medium to another constituted a violation of copyright, because the copy was ultimately an unauthorized reproduction, and therefore outside of the protection of the first-sale doctrine
Yeah. That’s the reason for DJs there is a license for “working copy” (bastard SIAE), especially if you’re downloading digitally and copying it to usb disk. If you are playing vinyl, they can suck my tonearm!
You need to proactively write your congressman (or local country equivalent) to make personal copies of media legal. Ideally make region locking illegal, and a dozen other things I can't remember off hand, but we have all been subject too at times.
> Just send them your own EULA at "purchase" if you think that unilateral terms no one reads should be binding on the other party.
I've heard, explicitly from lawyers, that sending an automated process (like a website) amendments to their EULA won't hold up at all in court. It's clear that the EULA is take it or leave it, and throwing changes at something that you know will ignore them doesn't accomplish anything.
It'd be nice if we could do it, but it doesn't fit into the reality of law.
The difference between that and sending your "modifications" back is that you have an explicit, intentional choice to make: accept the EULA or don't use the site.
I think that the walls of text do need to be reigned in in acceptance of the fact that it's absurd to hire a lawyer to review all of those contracts, but I also somewhat sympathize with courts' opinions of "So you think you could just use the product and the contract doesn't apply to you because you didn't want to... Read?"
Most of those EULAs are saying what should be common sense. The law should just give me those rights, but because copyright hasn't caught up to the digital age and software we need something that allows me to copy into computer memory.
Anything that isn't 'common sense' needs to be a contract that a lawyer reviews for me
In this scenario I think the biggest issue with losing an account is the ability to aquire future purchases. But like I said, it's more a matter of principle for some. You own a book, you don't own a digital copy of a book.
On a related note, there ought to be a law that forbids the use of "BUY", "GET", or "PURCHASE" for things you would not in fact own. Instead, they should say "SUBSCRIBE" or "LICENSE".
Those should be for licenses with an end date. "Subscribe" and "license" don't really imply there being a definite end date to your access, but nevertheless informs you that your access is contingent upon the continued existence of the business in question, unlike things you "buy".
This is the direction NFYs should have gone (could still go).
It would be great to be able to resell digital purchases, but that’s only on the consumer’s interest, so will never happen without an act of ${rule_making_body}.
This fundamentally does not work, because being able to copy is such an essential feature of electronic information. Think about it - you can never really "lose access" to information in the computer world unless you purposefully delete it completely, which cannot be realistically ensured.
And how, pray tell, are they going to find out that you stripped the DRM from the books if you don't distribute them, without violating multiple privacy laws and perhaps even more?
If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
I'm not trying to be controversial, but if you remove profit how can the business continue to exist? And if terminating the business is your goal, why? People seem to have a grudge against radio and I honestly don't know why.
It's my livelihood. I'm not seeking sympathy, but I am curious.
Here's the thing. In an where ads get the volume cranked up, this seems like the natural blowback to that.
Good, bad, indifferent, adtech has become so hostile that users (myself included) have found ever more measures to excise it, because it feels compelled to show no restraint in its own appetites.
I'm old enough to remember when radio and TV adverts didn't comprise more than 15% of the total media stream, let alone online, where the visual real estate and the mid-stream extortion racket of context-daftness has gone mad (e.g. I want to watch a quiet modal jazz concert, but every 10 minutes a jarringly loud ad for Grammarly or Tide is injected at near earbleed volume) makes it that I pretty much download the media, put it up on my media server to play it, because the ads just make me want to (and actually do in 95%+ of cases) blacklist any brand annoying enough to go this route.
No one wants to moderate because the stakes to get more marketshare/eyeballs 'demand' it, just creates the incentive to avoid it. Google succeeded for years on less intrusive, more directed ads...then they decided to stop 'stop being evil' and took the DoubleClick/Taboola turdscape route along with everyone else. Now there is zero sympathy from listeners/viewers, because I would argue, the advertisers offer them no reason to.
Is that a rationalization? Maybe. But it's also a sincere observation.
I thought I hated ads and that the personal recommendations were creepy. Then Instagram ads crossed the uncanny valley by showing me stuff I actually want to buy. (What a concept!)
Puzzlingly, Google/YouTube should know way more about me than Meta, but most of the ads I get from them suck.
If radio ads weren't full of yelling, car-honking, sirens and overly attention-grabbing things, people wouldn't care as much. Same as websites putting up huge, 5MB-big popup ads and not liking that people want to adblock them. Especially worse, is when the ads are far louder than the content itself.
Some podcasters seem to have have realized this problem and are curating ads better. Also with almost all the ones I listen to, the ads are presented live by the host, not pre-recorded by an annoying voice actor, which makes them a bit more bearable. There are also a couple of youtubers who've found creative ways to integrate and connect ads to what they're presenting, one channel has perfected this to the point that I actually enjoy watching the ads because he finds really funny ways of presenting them. So it's definitely possible to make it better.
> There are also a couple of youtubers who've found creative ways to integrate and connect ads to what they're presenting, one channel has perfected this to the point that I actually enjoy watching the ads because he finds really funny ways of presenting them. So it's definitely possible to make it better.
Corridor Crew on YouTube does this very well.
They are a lovely gang of VFX people. Highly recommend watching some of their videos to anyone who hasn’t.
Yeah. Some Youtubers have gotten so sly with their integration that once I realize that I'm in an ad I also realize that they started teeing it up 30 seconds earlier. I admire the craft of that type of transition.
And then I skip it. Unless the presentation is compelling and interesting for it's own sake.
It's a social issue and you should petition for the change you'd like to see.
For example in the UK, advertisers must comply with the Advertising Standards Authority code [1], and section 4 includes:
> Radio only – Advertisements must not include sounds that are likely to create a safety hazard, for example, to those listening to the radio while driving.
Which while open to interpretation, this would likely include any sirens likely to be confused with a genuine siren.
Or:
> Television only – Advertisements must not be excessively noisy or strident.
( That one might raise an eyebrow to anyone familiar with the long running "Go Compare" campaign! )
Of course these codes are always written in a way that's woolly and often adverts are only banned after complaints have been made.
But the framework is there for standards to be written and upheld. It relies however on people being willing to put in time and effort to complain when standards are broken, and there needs to be effort made to tighten those standards in some areas to stop standards slipping, although in general standards have been tightened rather than loosened over the years.
If your experience is very different, consider that it may be worth spending time organising a campaign group to lobby the FTC (or FCC?) to tighten their rules, or organise a group to put in complaints to organisations which have similar "voluntary" codes such as the BBB and also pressure the BBB to tighten their rules to have guidelines prohibiting such noises.
Change doesn't happen for change sake, it requires organisation and action, but even a handful of people can effect huge change with a concerted effort.
Nice, yup that's a great point. Here in Canada it would be the CRTC. Yeah, I could write them. I've reported spam and related stuff to them before but got no response. Perhaps things are different in the marketing/advertising side of things. Guess I'll just have to find out! :)
Looking at the script, it's just lowering the volume, possibly so it's at or below the average volume of the rest of the content (on a Sonos speaker using TuneIn).
One of the things wrong with our industry, inspired by legislation made by people with no technical background, is that the peak volume of a commercial can not be louder than the peak volume of the surrounding program.
So some in the industry processed the commercials into audio bricks, with the peak audio level at or below what's required. But the average audio of the commercial was much higher than the average audio of the programming. While it's legally lower volume, it's perceived as higher volume.
While this script is made for TuneIn via Sonos, I think the philosophy of louder average volume has migrated as a regular feature in streaming. I also think it's why many artists on ad-supported sales/streaming platforms process their tracks into bricks, so their track is not perceived as lower volume and less energy.
I can't speak for the person who coded this, but I think they are just correcting the legacy exploit, and not trying to outright remove the advertisements. (The example they give lowers the volume to "15", not "0")
Radio is famous for very annoying ads that are often louder than the program's content. Every time I hear that 1800 Cars for Cash song, I turn off the radio. As far as DJs go, around here SF Bay Area, a lot of the stations are part of that male/female first name radio stations (Alice, Dave, Bob, etc) and the "DJ" is some recorded person saying like "How's it going, [fill in city name]. How about those clowns in congress huh. Here's some more music hits of the genre you are listening to."
> If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
Unless the broadcaster cares about their show and wants people to hear it. If enough people care enough, someone (perhaps the broadcaster themself) will fund the cost of broadcasting.
There are broadcasters that don't have adverts and apply this model successfully. Crucially, the definition of “success” is that the audience and broadcaster can continue to enjoy the show, not that the broadcaster makes a huge profit.
To invert a Rule of Acquisition: “Anything worth doing is worth doing at cost”.
I spent 12 years at KMFB FM on the Mendocino coast (show host & Control Op), and it was a rare commercial station that had specialty shows where the host would have to get their own advertisers to be on the air.
The problem starts when ads are significantly louder than the rest of the content in order to be an "ear catcher"..... Now radio is much better than other forms of media (looking at you cable... and now some streaming services that are on the take from both sides) but its also the fact that ads have become steadily more intrusive over the last decade(+).
My real hope is that there is a movement back to "sponsored content" and more subtle ads... with less ads overall.... i.e "this hour is sponsored by <insert Brand>, check them out on <insert text>". This is probably never going to happen as there is now a constant need to sell and more expensive ads does push out smaller businesses.
Not sure there is really an answer here but I think moderation can help here
> i.e "this hour is sponsored by <insert Brand>...
Commercial station KRKQ in Telluride, CO, does this, and it sounds amazing.
WDRE (now WPTY), WLIR-FM and WBON on Long Island, NY, tried it in 2005, and it did not generate the revenue they were expecting. But it's 17 years later-- I think they were trying an idea that was ahead of it's time.
I will remove ads whenever it is technically feasible to do so. If it's not technically feasible to do so, then I'll avoid the ads by simply not engaging with the content at all. There are no circumstances where I find media existing with ads to be superior to the media not existing, so if ad blocking were to kill radio, then I'm perfectly fine with that.
Yeah, there was a YouTube channel I'd watch, but the guy started having sponsored ads in the middle of his videos. I just stopped watching the channel. Oh well, missing out on some cool content, whatever. I'm not going to listen to some propaganda about some VPN or Grammarly or counseling services or whatever other stupid crap I have zero interest in.
I just hit the "L" key a few times and forward by 10 seconds for ads that are part of the content. uBlock origin blocks all of the youtube ads that aren't part of the "broadcast."
I don't want to be advertised to. I think ads are unethical and consider that business model to be unacceptable. I suggest you find a new one because it's become increasingly clear to me that I'm not alone.
> If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
How is this any different than changing the tv channel (...or radio station) when an ad comes on, which has been the de facto consumer behavior for over half a century?
We process visual and audio data differently. No website or or magazine is going to trick me into thinking someone’s at the door by playing a dry doorbell sample over reverb for the rest of the ad.
Radio (and TV) are uniquely obnoxious in their use of instinctive audio cues to demand attention by making us go on alert.
How is not? There is a commercial I've been seeing a lot during sporting events. I think it's some sort of insurance but I have no idea. All I know is multiple times a day the ad plays the default iPhone text message alert and it pisses me off.
That sort of shit needs to shut down. I think only sirens played on radio ads might be worse.
I thought the claim was that all ads are obnoxious, so singling out radio for ad-killing efforts is, IDK, morally wrong.
My point was that radio ads are uniquely obnoxious because of a combination of the way we process audio signals and radio stations’ apathy about intentionally irritating ads.
I’ll grant it’s not a moral failing on the part of sound waves. It’s 100% the broadcasters who see short term profit from “more effective” ads, who then have no right to complain when people are irritated enough to develop filters for the ads.
Something I'm honestly curious about....I can understand the need for advertising, but why do DJs talk so much? I would much prefer radio to have only music and ads. Living in Japan in the 1990s, I completely gave up on radio because the talking:music ratio was about 2:1.
> Each year, ASCAP processes trillions of performances of ASCAP music. Whenever it makes sense economically, we conduct a census survey, or complete count, of performances in a medium. For media that fall under our census surveys (for example, the large majority of network TV performances and over 2000 broadcast radio stations monitored by Luminate Data, LLC, formerly MRC Data, LLC), ASCAP seeks to pay on every surveyed performance.
> Where a census survey is impractical, we conduct a sample survey, meaning that we pay royalties based on a representative cross-section of the performances on that medium.
This suggests to me that for major radio stations, the strategy of "more talk, less music" will reduce royalties—and that your strategy might only work at a smaller station.
Also, ASCAP seems to govern only the rights to the composition. Most radio stations play from recordings. Do the record labels (or whoever collects for them) also utilize a similar sampling strategy?
I'll be honest I love radio as a medium but I'm either listening to a BBC station like Six Music which are ad-free to begin with or enthusiast-run stations like Radio Caroline which tend to air adverts which are more subtle and pared-back, I genuinely can't enjoy anything with anything more than the bare minimum of adverts in it having enjoyed advertising-free forms of radio.
It wouldn't be as bad if half the ads didn't have all the obnoxious hyperactive qualities of a toddler with a recorder but 'irritate your audience until the fact your ads are irritating becomes a meme among the general public' seems to be the go-to strategy with a lot of radio advertising in my neck of the woods.
It’s been a while since I listened to commercial radio, but it seemed like commercials were at a higher volume than music. Adjusting volume can be useful to keep ads from being jarring.
(Also used to work as a DJ, but not since the nineties…)
If your business model involves annoying us, we'll find a way around it. This is YOUR problem, not ours. Find a better business model or go out of business.
I subscribe to a local community radio which is completely funded by listener subscriptions (but I think they got a nice big injection of cash a couple of decades ago when they sold their 'name' to a commercial station, and they've been able to do a lot with that lump sum over the years).
I actively dislike commercial radio, it just pushes junk music, junk lifestyles, superficial bullshit life distraction. It's worthless and if advertising money dried up and they died it would be a net gain to society. I'm sure, however, some are less gutter trash than what I've described, and I certainly hope yours is too.
The number of people even capable of using this, let alone the number likely to use it, is infinitesimal.
People seem to have a grudge against radio and I honestly don't know why.
Can't speak for the radio in your area but in mine it's a total waste of spectrum. Terrible audio quality, eaten up with ads or utterly inane bumpers, and playing the same garbage every single day. My choices are rap that sounds the same as it did twenty years ago, rock songs that are literally the same as twenty years ago, the morning show with the two stupidest people I've ever heard, or NPR where I get to learn for an hour about how the new constitution of Nowheristan now has a section on water usage rights vis-a-vis goats vs sheep.
Theoretically - this script doesn't actually impact your ad rev; in fact you'd be more likely to have longer listener time, given the listener isn't switching it off or to a different frequency when the ad roll hits. So, more ads overall.
Technically speaking, I really shouldn't have a problem with ads.
But between the actual psychological tricks that often come across as trashy once you acquire a distaste/realization of them, and the general unenforcement of false advertising law, monopolistic conditions favoring ads campaigns/brand awareness over quality or reputation, refusal of companies to turn down lowest scamming denominator dollars, ads are effectively venom to any average consumer.
One of the major contributing factors to market inefficiency, I'd argue. Advertising shouldn't be such a blatantly untrustworthy, scammy method of extracting wealth from people for questionable valued services/products, but it usually turns out that way.
I think one problem is the known/unknown? practice to lower the overall gain by a few dBs on the broadcasters side when playing music to be able to regain attention for advertisment.
Radio is different due to the safety issues it raises. If they crank up the volume or engage in similar practices in an attempt to get attention, they by definition are distracting the listener. That's not the worst thing if you're watching TV, but much of the audience for radio is driving or working. It should be obvious what's wrong with practices designed to distract drivers in heavy traffic and workers carrying stuff up ladders.
Oh man, I have a story to tell here. Some years ago my favourite radio station started airing a new commercial for a car glass repair shop. Commercial started with a loud tyre screeching noise followed by a loud car honk and finally loud car crash noise. Every effing time I panicked, usually immediately put my foot off of gas pedal and probably once or twice started to brake. Idiots 100%.
If you are the type of person who only does something when it benefits you, I can understand why you would see things this way. Profit and personal gain are not the only motives that other people have for their actions. Sometimes people do things for the sake of enjoying them. Some really crazy people actually do things to help improve the world, at their own personal expense, with no tangible benefit to themselves.
If I want to come at this from a capitalist perspective, you are not entitled to other people's time, attention, or money. You are not entitled to a job as a radio broadcaster supported by revenue from advertisements that people find obnoxious. If the market won't support your business model, it's on you to find another business model, it's not on the market to support your failed model.
> If I want to come at this from a capitalist perspective, you are not entitled to other people's time, attention, or money.
Yup - This is a result of making the advertisers your true customer rather than me, the listener. In the meantime, that complete willingness to sell me as a product, and the lack of any existing contract, means that I am utterly entitled to remove any/all ads that you might embed in your product. I don't have to listen to the trash - you're yelling into the void, I can choose to cover my ears.
I understand that mass broadcast communication (radio, OTA tv) started going down that route because it's hard to limit the audience of a mass broadcast to charge a fee - but I'm not all that sympathetic to where the industry has ended up.
Frankly... I don't really know that I would mind if most of the commercial stations went out of business. It would be nice to make space for more content outside of the "top hits of [____]" and a blathering DJ. I'd like to see more stations act like NPR or college radio stations.
Do I love the NPR donation campaigns? Nope.
Do I donate? Yup. Because it means I'm still the customer.
Would I throw a couple bucks at a station to play curated playlists in different genres with no ads or interruptions? Probably. I used to throw donations at grooveshark DJs back in college for exactly that - I found a boatload of good music (mostly older titles) that way.
I stopped listening to the radio about 15 years ago because of how obnoxious the ads had gotten. I haven’t started up again. I can get ad-free content in numerous ways (paying, ad blocking, creating it myself, etc.). This reminds me of people in areas where tobacco is grown moaning about how laws limiting public smoking would put them all out of jobs. Yeah, that doesn’t really make the case for why we should keep it.
I subscribe (i.e. pay a yearly fee) to a local community radio station (which has an amazing range of music, and is 80% of my music intake). I generally like the announcers, and the sponsorship announcements are often things I'm interested in. But sometimes I just want music (like when I'm exercising). So there's a use case for you.
CBC Radio doesn’t have ads and it’s just the best ever. But it also doesn’t have expensive hosts or music to license.
I wonder if radio stations can become much cheaper to run if all the expensive hosts become podcasters and music gets played on Spotify or Apple instead.
I recently retired after a 42 year career in broadcast radio (at six different stations), and the two non commercial stations I worked at had "underwriting" which is kind of like a commercial, but legal under FCC rules.
I listen to a station that speaks calmly and carefully. The music is louder and any advertisements are spoken by the DJ without yelling. That is my goal to have more like this. I donate to them.
I was a treasurer for a not for profit radio station. We made the money to cover our costs through other services and we had special licensing arrangements that made it cheaper for us to broadcast.
Of course, when a right wing government got in they halved the number of frequencies available to the community and sold our frequency to a for profit who was marketing to young women and teens.
1) The statement "you matter" (call it X) is not the same as "you deserve a job in radio." (Y)
2) I expect (but do not have proof) that the readers of Hacker News, or a sample of western society generally, would more strongly support X statement than Y.
I did not say, but I will say now: I agree with X and not Y. I also don't believe that you deserve not to have a job in radio.
I initially wrote that out because it seemed to me that you were equating X and Y. You contested someone's apathy towards a threat to your job with a statement that you exist. Because I think that (1) and (2) are distinct, I didn't find your reply convincing. I hoped I would convince you of the same, or that you would respond with some insight I had yet to consider, which might change my own perspective.
I mean, is it worse than a traditional Hollywood type model for low level creators? Aren't traditional media firms famous for shenanigans like making entry level work so underpaid that you basically need wealthy parents to get your foot in the door? Or crunching visual effects artists because their whole craft was born post-unionization? The elites ultimately win everywhere, (in this case it is Google instead of say, Disney) but at least with YouTube it is ostensibly meritocratic to climb the career ladder from the bottom?
But I definitely can see the dystopia in an algorithmic platform seeking content hegemony at highest possible profit as opposed to how traditional firms work which is... not too different to me. But I can see a higher ceiling to the gray goo problem in the notoriously willing-to-be-bad-at-customer-service Google.
Idk necessarily if the issue is 'who are you paying' as much as it is 'what are the people I'm paying actually contributing.'
And in the case of YouTube the answer seem to be: we created and refined some amazing video compression and streaming techniques. Now that that's done we just want to profit indefinitely?
I have just about zero warm and fuzzy feelings towards big corporations. But to claim that Youtube's giant infrastructure its development and maintenance has no cost (zero overhead) is totally wrong.
first link below estimates that YouTube's total storage needs for all of its content are roughly 10 exabytes. It goes into a lot of detail that you can check for yourselves, because it's a bit too much to copy over here, and though I can't say it's correct for sure, the description of how they reach their calculation is quite robust.
Anyhow, if we assume storage costs for YouTube are the same as what AWS charges per month (roughly 2 cents), this would mean that it costs YT about $2.4 billion per year just to store those 10 exabytes. I'm assuming that Google can cost its storage at quite a bit cheaper than 2 cents per GB at the immense scale it operates on, so let's halve that. This still means simple storage costs of $1.2 billion per year.
These of course don't include hardware replacement, other capital costs, or the bandwidth costs of all that video being uploaded (and downloaded).
Youtube's revenues for 2019 (so a bit out of date) were nearly 16 billion (2), so while they certainly have lots of costs beyond what I described above, they're also wonderfully profitable it seems.
>It feels somehow like you're paying the middle man for nothing?
They also promote your content and find and auction off ads for you. Unless if you're an advertiser, you aren't paying YouTube anything. If you have a problem with it, you're free to host your content on another platform. Keep in mind that that YouTube has to serve the hundreds of millions of videos that get a handful of views, and if you're a monetized YouTuber, it's only fair to be taxed to pay for hosting these videos as everyone starts in that position.
It pays for all their food expenses, plus some extra stuff. As I said, the stream has a higher amount of people who donate than usual.
Several years ago, I watched a gaming streamer, even smaller. She lived in Croatia, and just the subs and irregular donations were enough to pay for most of her daily expenses.
Neither of those mentioned is on YouTube, and neither of them could survive on that alone. The Croatian streamer didn’t have to pay rent (her parents owned the apartment), and the Australian one has a partner with a job (but his job alone would not be enough). The Australian one would be closer to make a living wage, though (again, unusually high donations).
A big part of streaming on Twitch or Youtube streams is donations from fans and subscribers/members (regular payments from fans). Royalties from advertising is a part of it, but a lot of the money comes in from donations. Another common approach is merchandise in the from of stickers and clothing, people love that stuff.
You can do well even as one of the smaller streamers if your community and other monetization is strong. I've never really gotten why people donate, especially to the bigger streamers since it's clear they already have money. But it's a big part of it. You can easily watch hundreds of dollars in an hour get donated to even to a smaller or mid level streamer.
The other stream I watch, most donations actually pay for the food of college students in Moscow, Idaho, USA, as the stream is a food truck in that town ;)
I don't know what you consider an average person vs royality, buy yes, there's quite many people I'd consider "average" that makes their living from Youtube - most seem to be starting at around 50k-100k subscribers before it becomes feasible.
Is there any service that presents an elegant solution to managing actual identities on the Internet? If not, it seems like a real problem that needs solving.
I understand people value the ability to express themselves anonymously, but I've also been locked out of legitimate accounts--
If everyone is anonymous nobody can be verified. If everyone's identity is tied to their handle there's no anonymous expression.
If somebody could provide a way to both have and eat the proverbial cake, that seems like real winning proposition in my eyes, something worth paying for...
There is the Notary Public service for physical documents. I did a quick search a while ago out of curiosity, and there appears to be an eNotary service that uses X509 certs to notarize a digital document. I've never seen this used "in the wild", but if it is rooted in the traditional Notarization services, and is based on open standards, why wouldn't tech companies utilize this as a last resort identity service?
Something else I thought about is if someone could come up with a CA service that specializes in personal / client side certs. They could then indicate what fields they have verified (name, address, etc). Also an option to indicate if they have that information on file but not disclosed. And if someone wants a truly anonymous cert, have variable pricing for those. The cert would tell how much someone paid for it. That way services such as message boards could allow anonymous users but set a nominal threshold for certificate cost that they would accept -- high enough that it would limit duplicate spam accounts, but low enough that it would not be much of a burden for a typical user.
Italy has SPID. It’s a federated login system based on your fiscal code (every Italian has one). You can use it to log into any government service and potentially banks and such. If you do lose access to your 2FA (required, it’s your phone), you can:
- re-verify yourself with the provider, with a real ID
- get a new ID with another provider, which still points to the same fiscal code
As a global solution, it would be great to have a “real identity provider” that offers this but also allows me to log into services without giving them too much information.
Apple ID seems relatively good for this given that it lets me hide the address and change my name during registration.
The parent poster, a 99.99%ile brilliant engineer (seriously) and entrepreneur has a long history of posting libertarians talking points on any vaguely related topic.
Frankly, I've haven't read much of any libertarian literature, nor touchstones like Ayn Rand. My opinions come simply from reading lots of history and economic books.
A seminal experience for me was touring East Berlin in 1969. The contrast with West Berlin was stark.
That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of crimes that would go easier with no power. Perhaps taking down cameras.