This is awesome, I absolutely adore the idea and implementation. Couple of small points in terms of feedback:
* A new tab with no notes has a height greater than 100% of the browser window, and adds a scrollbar. Small point, but annoying for people like me :)
* There are some issues with links: clicking could be more intuitive, and highlighting is inconsistent with certain characters. (Try pasting a YouTube link.)
It must really suck to lose your livelihood like that, but its kinda inevitable. On the flipside, there will be jobs created for people to fix these machines, write the programs that run them, all the sensors and safety features that will be required before they can hit the road.
The UK is currently 50k short of drivers, same as much of Europe. There is a fear in logistics circles of this getting worse with fewer new entrants into driving - even with good pay.
By saying things like "Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave" you're completely overlooking the human costs and implications.
Things don't just change overnight. It's an slow, painful, eventual decline. Things shouldn't need to be pushed to a breaking point for us to make necessary changes to alleviate these problems.
Empirically, all historic efforts to alleviate the heartlessness of market forces with centralized planning ("us" making necessary changes) have resulted in even worse and more heartless outcomes for even more people. Talk to some Cubans, Russians, North Koreans, or East Germans about how that whole process turns out.
It's not that the free market solution is great. It's that all other possible solutions are even worse.
"Everyone rides an Uber" is great for the Uber drivers. "People spend too much on organic produce" is great for the farmers. "Even bad engineers are in high demand" is great for the mediocre engineers.
Housing is a problem, but this post didn't mention it.
So before we start making changes, what are the problems in your opinion?
Well the problem is the people who haven't been included in the tech boom and are living on salaries that can't afford those things and are being forced out of their neighborhoods. You can say it's just free markets again but there is a huge human cost.
Being forced out of their neighborhoods is a housing issue. I think I agreed that housing is a problem. I totally agree we need much, much more housing in the Bay Area. Of course reasonable people can disagree about whether rent control and restrictive zoning helps or hurts the situation for the poorest neighbors. But no one was talking about housing.
"the people who haven't been included in the tech boom" ...are living on salaries that are supported by the people who have been included in the tech boom. It's exactly their expensive offerings to the tech people that is supporting their good income, BTW!
The changes I'm proposing are actually changes to our collective values. Namely, that we shouldn't worship economics and the power of the invisible hand to the point where we think about "market correction" before the well-being of the people around us.
Rose tinted glasses much? Have you ever been to a poor area in your life?
Even mentioning Uber, organics, bad engineers and mediocre engineers ignores places like the south side of Chicago and any gradient between. It's not as pretty outside as you think it is.
I forgot to answer your question. Yes I've been to a poor area before.
I also forgot to apologize for mentioning Uber, organics, and engineering. You're right, but acknowledging the existence of those concepts I'm totally ignoring the South Side of Chicago.
But by bringing up Chicago, you're completely ignoring sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh. It's not so pretty there, either. Are you going to apologize for that?
Let's just remember that we should always mention regions of extreme poverty whenever we discuss something.
Because these areas are part of the nuance that allows SF-like mentalities to exist. Ignoring that nuance ignores the larger problem on how these bubbles can happen.
I really can't make any sense of this. Is it supposed to make sense? How can something be part of a nuance? What is the nuance you're talking about? And if ignoring the nuance means ignoring the "larger problem," how is it that it is a nuance at all? Is nuance just supposed to be a word for something you don't care to explain?
To me, 'nuance' is just a word to describe "the sub-surface stuff that has no immediate and apparent effect within a local system." So, when I say "ignoring the nuance ignores the larger problem", I'm suggesting that there's a large set of problems occurs when you ignore the lon-local effects - ideologically and physically.
It's a complicated problem with many, many components. Nuance is more relevant than you think it is. Think of fractals and weather patterns.
"We can solve all of the world's problems!" - Bay Area
"What about us?" - The world
rant.
Maybe I'm a bit naively bitter on the subject, particularly after spending some time at Chicago's opengov hack nights. Something about it got very, very turned me completely away from modern civics and its problems solving. Much of it seems to stem from the same vain as high school grads building unmaintainable schools in "primitive" cultures many miles away.
My problem isn't that Uber, SF etc exist. Individually, "fuck yeah!". As a whole, though, they take the focus away from the nuance of actual problems and create comfort for those who can afford it. The poor, the mentally sick and the fringe simply aren't accounted for to the level that they can be. Especially after walking through SF streets earlier this year. It was infuriating to see so much homelessness and prosperity of achievement condensed in the same place. Chicago and NY have nothing on how sharp that difference was (although, I admit it might be selection bias).
Many techie-type folk my age tend to complain about the large economic/social problems. Very few of them ever take action - yet they complain about inaction! If that feeling is as pervasive as it seems, then maybe the problem just might be within some nuance that's not being addressed. When skill's diverted from that nuance towards Bay-like areas and their functions, then YES, they are part of the problem. Just maybe not directly or in an intuitive way.
Thanks, it's interesting that I simply asked "what are the problems?" and that offended people so much that they downvoted -- but then I got three different answers.
One person says "collective values, worship of the free market." Another person says "there are poor people in Chicago." Finally there's a third person who says "people can't afford to live in their neighborhoods because cost of living got too expensive."
So they haven't agreed on the problem, but they agree on the enemy - it's the spoiled engineers and their high salaries.
"They"? The people who responded to you aren't part of some larger conspiracy to oppose you, or even advocating on behalf of the same people or ideas. The fact that I'm commenting here doesn't even mean that I agree with the article.
Could it be possible that there are several problems at play here, at once? You can't look at situations as if they are black or white, or "us vs. them".
Very true. With the low Canadian dollar, investment dollar will go way, way farther. Like probably 50% farther, given lower wages compounded by the lower dollar.
Websites are art, the same way that any other creations are. You wouldn't giggle at the idea of a song, a magazine, or a photograph being "emotional experiences", so what makes websites any different?
I shudder when I think about the strain that will be placed on millenials when we inevitably become our parents' safety net. It's a perfect storm: a housing bubble that will pop when everyone tries to sell their house at the same time, unreliable pensions, non-existant retirement savings, high levels of undischargable student debt, and dwindling job prospects for young people.
The children will likely end up moving into their parents' homes and paying off their parents' medical bills with reverse mortgages leaving the once young at mid-life or later with nothing to inherit and no job prospects in these areas typically away from major metro (and increasingly, employment-availability) areas. This will leave most Americans in the positions before WW2 about given there will be few assets in the hands of most Americans again.
I'm seeing housing prices in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas dropping as lack of viable jobs in these areas combined with crushing commutes to cities makes these locations terrible for those still needing to work. There's an alarming number of people I've heard of commuting from West Virginia into DC and from Richmond into DC enduring 3+ hour commutes as cities that used to be self-sustained economies now become suburbs of the largest cities, and the trend is going to continue with a few deviants that buck the trend like remote workers or homesteaders.
Where I live, the local economy is driven by two demographics - tourists and local retirees sprinkled with some of the wealthiest households in the US living here part time to avoid paying state income taxes. Much of the US is eerily similar to this pattern and it's extremely depressing to think of a way out of the spiral where almost all of our money will go into paying outrageous mortgages / rent with lower-paying jobs and the few in the middle class are in finance, tech, or healthcare.
Whats even more fun is there other major problems approaching on roughly the same timeline...
- Less developed nations will be transitioning to a population crunch (WSJ 2050) with huge ramifications on global economics/politics
- fossil fuels (especially oil) reaching depletion or becoming too expensive to extract
- climate change impact in full swing, serious disruption to even domestic agriculture
- Ubiquitous AI, and all the associated social unrest of a deprecated generation of workers
Ultimately there's just too many people. Society doesn't need 8 billion humans anymore, the US doesn't even need 300 million... Arguably what youre describing is an emergent solution to that problem. Now we've reached the point where the next generation will need to support their parent's slow death instead of raising the next generation of children... That's going to wreck society's ownership of the future in a big way.
It think it's more like, human society is collectively deciding that optimum human population size is less than current size, and adjusting reproductive behavior accordingly.
It is still increasing, but the slope of the curve is decreasing. It will peak in the next few decades and then start to decrease if current reproductive trends continue.
Right, the issue of overpopulation is huge. It's going to need a different kind of society with very different values than the ones we have today. Capitalism can't grow like it has been once we realize the issue of overpop and work to reduce it. We have a crazy new world coming. And the transition has be fast.
Or alternatively human ingenuity adapts and overcomes - Malthusians have been consistently proved wrong in their constant cries of overpopulation. There is still plenty of land, plenty of ability to grow food to feed us and plenty of advances being made in areas which will allow that to increase. We've already seen a vast decrease in the number of people living on less than $1 a day across the world enabling many countries to start reaping a demographic dividend.
If the pessimists can quote fossil fuel depletion then surely I can optimistically promote fusion, carbon capture etc. Capitalism has been one of the greatest success stories of humanity.
I never understood how one could embrace prophecies of doom in this day and age. We live in a near golden age of plenty, and the train hasn't slowed down yet.
"We live in a near golden age of plenty, and the train hasn't slowed down yet."
If by "we", you mean "citizens in the most prosperous cities of the world", then yes.
If you mean "people in most of the USA", then I have some news for you: the train's wheels are locked, and sparks are flying while everything skids to a stop. It's absolutely shocking how much of the country has declined in prosperity in my lifetime. The smaller cities near where I grew up -- places that were thriving small towns as recently as the 1980s -- are nearly all trapped in downward spirals of poverty, debt and addiction.
If you mean "the citizens of this planet", well...for most people, the train never left the station. Even in modern "success stories" like China, you don't have to try very hard to find appalling levels of poverty and despair. A few have become incredibly wealthy, but mostly, people are struggling to keep up. In the third-world? Forget it. Yeah, people can pay for cellphones now, while they're dying of preventable diseases due to filthy water.
Optimism is one thing, but it takes a Silicon Valley (aka Leibnitzian) view of the world to claim that this is a "golden age". Mostly, a select group of people are getting richer, while everyone else stagnates (or just barely inches forward).
> Mostly, a select group of people are getting richer, while everyone else stagnates.
Actually this isn't true. Middle classes in the developed world are doing poorly relative to the richest in the developed world, but global poverty is on a steep decline.
"Middle classes in the developed world are doing poorly relative to the richest in the developed world"
This, I believe. Part of the driving force of the trends in global poverty is globalization. And despite what I said earlier about middle-class America, I don't necessarily cry for the loss of overall wealth in this country, if it means greater equity for the rest of the world (I just wish the richest people in the world were paying a greater share).
"global poverty is on a steep decline."
This is highly debatable. The data you linked to seems to be mostly based on the World Bank data -- a single, rarely modified, global metric of $1.25 (now $1.90) a day, using self-reported statistics. Meanwhile, regional context is critical -- for example, sub-saharan Africa has actually seen increases in poverty. In India and China, there's good reason to believe that wealth inequality is increasing [1]:
"the benefits of economic growth in many developing countries often accrue to the rich. In India and China, inequality has been increasing in recent years. From 1981 to 2010, the average poor person in sub-Saharan Africa saw no increase in their income even as economies expanded. Because there is no household data since 2012, it is impossible to know if these trends towards greater inequality have since changed."
Meanwhile, the metric itself is questionable (ibid):
"Someone living today at the new poverty line does not necessarily enjoy the same standard of living as someone at the old line did in the past, however....Looking at national price indices rather than PPPs, half of the world’s population live in countries in which $1.90 buys you less now than $1.25 did back in 2005, according to a paper released this week by Sanjay Reddy of the New School for Social Research in New York."
Even the World Bank itself acknowledges that poverty is on the increase in sub-saharan Africa (a region, which, by the way, has over a billion people, or 1/7th of the world's current population) [2]:
"However, despite its falling poverty rates, Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world for which the number of poor individuals has risen steadily and dramatically between 1981 and 2010. There are more than twice as many extremely poor people living in SSA today (414 million) than there were three decades ago (205 million). As a result, while the extreme poor in SSA represented only 11 percent of the world’s total in 1981, they now account for more than a third of the world’s extreme poor. India contributes another third (up from 22 percent in 1981) and China comes next, contributing 13 percent (down from 43 percent in 1981)."
In other words: it's great that more people are self-reporting as living on more than this bottom-of-the-barrel income metric, but it isn't really a counter-argument to my point, except to say that we've made the absolute poorest of the poor a bit less poor. Maybe. And mostly in China.
We've made over a billion of the poorest of the poor less poor - that is a massive achievement. The crucial thing about that being less poor is that they are then not in subsistence mode and able to consider things like educating their children, engaging in capitalism, i.e. economic activity which can increase their wealth further rather than merely trying to stay alive.
Your quotes highlighting the problems of SSA move quickly into using percentages of an overall number that has decreased - it acknowledges that in all other regions in the world poverty has fallen dramatically, especially in China where their middle class is now around 340 million.
"We've made over a billion of the poorest of the poor less poor - that is a massive achievement."
That's a pretty meaningless claim. Again, the data you're leaning on to say that is using an exceptionally low bar, and it doesn't really take into account regional economic differences. The whole reason the World Bank had to raise it to $1.90 a day from $1.25 a day was because in many parts of the developing world, $1.90 a day buys you less than $1.25 did at the start of the measurements!
More importantly, $1.91 a day still makes for a pretty miserable life anywhere in the world. You're not magically on a trajectory to the middle class. You may be dying of waterborne illnesses and malnutrition, but you're not absolutely poor by World Bank standards!
The claim that there are far fewer poor people from 1820 to present is more reasonable, but the problem there is that the gains mostly came from things like "industrialization", which were big, one-time gains that, again, accrued mainly to the winners.
Bucky Fuller outlined the problems facing us in his book Critical Path.
To quote Abebooks's description: "Critical Path is Fuller's master work--the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern--as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation--at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.
The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future."
In 1981 since when we've moved on from the Cold War (political crisis), massively decreased world poverty (economic crisis) and moved from an era of 14% inflation in the West being considered something economics couldn't address. On all of those measures we're doing much better than in 1981 - surely that demonstrates our capacity to improve and overcome problems.
In the US, the median retirement age keeps rising, and it's rising far faster than median life expectancy. My idea of a Golden Age of Plenty isn't one in which people punch a time card until they drop dead.
You know that famous YC question "What is something you feel most people are wrong about?"
Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, believes the answer is overpopulation. He says it would be a disaster to stop population growth. Read more here:
The WSJ 2050 series of articles supports that. However population is shrinking in many parts of the world, despite government attempts to force growth... This is going to have a tremendous impact on the global economy and political unrest.
On the other hand, thats a good way to reduce humanity's contribution to climate change
> This is going to have a tremendous impact on the global economy and political unrest.
Why do you associate the decline in population numbers with political unrest? Are you referring implicitly to the phenomenon of immigration to make up for the falling numbers and the typical and usual problems that come along with this development?
I wasn't referring to the US with that line. We'll suffer but we're just along for the ride.
What do you think is going to happen when China finds itself with > 1 senior for every working age citizen, with a male-skewed population? Worse yet, what happens when China's heavy investments in AI/automation pay off? A dictatorship of 1 billion that has it's jobs permanently filled by machines while it's citizens struggle to raise their parents, working in overcrowded cities, with little hope for their own future? A country that's already rapidly depleting their agricultural resources through poor management, with dire projections ~20-50 years out?
That alone isn't a pretty picture.. But then remember that India's next door with similar problems, and the two aren't exactly buddy-buddy. Inevitably both countries will have to lean on regional allies to power through, but that might bring in the US (via S.K./Japan, today). And then we've got Russia upstairs, their future is a bit harder to see but today they're the nuclear-armed wildcard oligopoly... one that's not on friendly terms with the US's sphere of allies.
Then there's the middle east. If you think today's bad, wait until their oil money starts running out as climate change keeps turning up the oven. That's just adding fuel to the fires, millions of culturally alien people flooding relatively homogeneous societies already under pressure from their own needs.
And then Africa... yet another wild card. Today the various countries are in various states of development with mixed weak alliances to the East/West, but there's a massive population boom coming. No one is really certain where that's headed. Maybe it becomes the next China (selling environmental degredation and cheap labor), or maybe we'll end up with an under-developed continent of high unemployment/desertification. I'm really curious to see how the various countries land on that spectrum.
Taken alone, the Americas don't have a particularly risky looking future. South American drugs, guns, immigration, revolutions, old news for the US... though mass deforestation/desertification will be a tragedy with serious climate impact. Europe might build some walls but they're not going to war with each other again either. Australia probably won't play a big role unless it gets invaded. But the other big continents? I can't see the future, but today there are many red flags of something much worse.
Or the kids will say, "I'm sorry, but I'm moving where the jobs are, and I'm going to have a life of my own. I'll come visit you once a year, but I'm not giving up my life for yours."
The good parents will say, "Good! Don't sacrifice your chance for happiness for me. I'll make it through."
This is a terrible comment in hindsight given I made it on Christmas but spending the holidays in rural Appalachia for years makes me ponder how oblivious people in tech are to the realities of their countries. Enjoy the holidays, folks and go talk to everyone - get out of your comfort zones and experience something completely crazy perhaps. We have the best living standards worldwide in the history of the planet but we have a long way to go before we can achieve the humanist dream of providing the opportunity for each person to work hard for their dreams and realize them. I hope that during the holidays as a time of reflection we look for our common struggles and work towards creating human consensus rather than the every day popular rhetoric of creating division and controversy out of their own desperation to put food on the table.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head here. It really is alarming to think that we have not started to plan for this almost inevitable scenario in ~20 years time. We need to begin re-thinking our role as humans in an economy which increasingly does not require us.
Start by having level-headed discussions about the value of life.
I know a lot of families taking on massive debt to help pay for their parent's old age. Five-Six figures here and there to extend their parent's lives by a decade or two, saddling themselves with debt and leaving the next generation with no assets... Likely after moving the entire family to a decaying suburban city. All so the previous generation can stick around with a much poorer quality of life.
Health care has a far larger impact than the number on the bill. We need to openly talk about life and accept the inevitableness of death.
I'll fight tooth and nail for every minute of my own independent life... But I would never dream of crippling my children's future just to exist in an "assisted-living" retirement home. Personally, that's an undignified life that's not worth living... modern day vampires.
Again, this is just my personal position regarding my life's value vs my descendants. I'm advocating the questions, not my answer.
This is a hard problem, which means the questions are hard to ask and the answers are difficult to accept... Death has never been easy. However it's a conversation that families and society at large need to have.
Culturally, we are lagging behind what science can do... We can do so much but never stepped back to ask if we should. Society needs to make conscious decisions instead of blindly following our biological instincts.
The first step is to invest, as communities, into producing as much food as possible locally in order to lessen our dependence on the global economic system. We have the technology to turn all those shuttered Targets and malls into indoor farms powered largely by renewable sources. An ironic side effect would be the creation of jobs and a reduction in the net cost of feeding a city.
Locally grown food is an unsustainable luxury that doesn't work for large portions of the US because there is not year round farm worthy land close enough by to sustain the population.
You could do what people always did, and grow crops that keep through the winter. You're not going to be eating fresh kale and tomatoes in January, you'll be eating your turnips and beets and potatoes and apples out of cold-storage, and making bread with your oats and corn and wheat that you harvested in the fall.
What's the difference in energy cost from farming indoors in an area that can't support it normally and growing things in season in areas that can and transporting it? Got any studies to link? I'm curious. Heat is incredibly energy costly so I'd be interested in seeing a calculation.
The crop yields from climate controlled agriculture can be inferred a bit from the results that are coming in from Japan. This is not economical in rural regions like much of the US only (IMO) because locals make so little capital. But if we treat it a lot like subsistence farming and communities pool together capital to start indoor farms, this could help.
My skepticism is mostly around not the economics but the sheer accumulation of desperation in these small communities creating high corruption and theft rates ruining the efficacy of the concept.
I don't have any links to studies - I'm relying on the idea that renewable sources can contribute significantly to the overall energy requirements.
When you take into account the amount of energy required to grow food, refrigerate it, ship it halfway around the world, and distribute it to stores, surely the amount of energy required to grow food locally is inconsequential.
I'm just thinking about all of that aluminum/steel and glass you have to get to build the green houses, which you then have to heat, and wonder with the payoff term is for it.
You're still going to have to refrigerate and ship the stuff locally; Train and ship shipping are relatively cheap compared to the last mile shipping.
Oh, I assumed we were talking about a post-jobs era. The idea that growing food to sustain a community can be done as a after-hours hobby sounds a little naive.
Yep, not to mention these people who are struggling to take care of their parents are dealing with medical bills and debt slavery of their own. They can forget about owning a home or car. They can forget about having children, as the money is needed to care for the old. They can forget about retiring, as they have no savings. Wages have been stagnant since their parents' careers were at their start.
The banks will be extracting wealth from the fading boomers until their last breaths, leaving their children with no inheritances and a large debt of their own.
I hear this "inherit housing riches" a lot and I'm glad to see you aren't fooled by it. Housing isn't wealth. The value of land represents the ability to make use of it.
If the support ratio slips (ratio of working to non-working) then if we are to maintain the living standards of the non-working we either have to have a big productivity leap or lower living standards for those in work.
Reverse mortgages aren't going to cut it. And as you say, what then when the millenials have to hand over the keys to their parents' house?
Land isn't a thing of value in and of itself if we can't work it.
The only use ramping land value has is as an inflationary tax by private banks on workers.
My $0.02 on this is we give the boomers+ a massive haircut right now. Just pull the rug right out from under them, their politicians and their banks.
your statement implies a conflict-ladden connection with your parents.
Family can also mean: safety net, love, time. My wife's family comes from a mid-sized town where grandmothers, aunts and cousins live in vicinity. This means houses where built without any loan from a bank and parents could go to work with their children being watched and cared for when they were sick. On Christmas eve family gathers at a large table and there is more food than anyone can eat. We are the only ones who live abroad and need to spend a good chunk of money to buy the services we would get from a family for free.
Sometimes I think we should de-economize our lives.
I agree with your conclusion, but disagree with your suggestion that you have any insight into my relationship with my parents. I also advocate a shift back to "family-orienting" living, and live my life accordingly. I'm just looking at big picture trends and simple demographics.
I am still forming my opinion on this as a Gen-Xer, but I hear a lot of people concerned about when millennials become the majority/the responsible ones and have a greater impact than the baby boomers on this country (the US). On the other side, I also hear people talk about how entitled and shallow the baby boom generation has been and the enormous burden this group will bring upon the social net (social security, etc) because they didn't plan (in general), don't have the savings to survive major health issues, etc.
I hate labels, but as someone from Gen-X, I've already got obligations supporting family, pretty much plan on making sure my immediate family is not dependent upon others, etc.
For saving up, moving to Europe isn't really an option (in another thread, someone indicated the huge difference in upper end engineering salaries between Europe and the US); however having an EU national spouse, we are definitely looking at retiring in Europe down the road.
It is going to be interesting to see how it plays out over time.
That seems like a pretty gross overgeneralization. An entire generation that hasn't saved any money for retirement? Seriously? I guess I can count almost every one of my family members as "unique" then. I can think of only 1 of them I would expect to be in financial trouble post retirement.
I would say your family is unique in this case based on this article I read earlier this year.
"Approximately 62% of Americans have no emergency savings for things such as a $1,000 emergency room visit or a $500 car repair, according to a new survey of 1,000 adults by personal finance website Bankrate.com. Faced with an emergency, they say they would raise the money by reducing spending elsewhere (26%), borrowing from family and/or friends (16%) or using credit cards (12%)."
That says nothing about whether or not they have a retirement fund. When I was fresh out of college for the first few years that described me to a T, but I still had money going into a 401k every month.
Nope. Retirement savings are typically in 401k and IRA accounts, which are untouchable (without enormous penalty) until age 59.5. It's entirely possible (though irrational) to have six or seven figures in retirement savings but no emergency fund.
People who go broke if they had a $1000 emergency are not the same people maxing out their 401(k)... plus about half of Americans have no retirement accounts at all.
Not maxing it out, but many people have an automatic 5-15% payroll deduction that may even be on by default. That money is already out of sight and out of mind, same as tax withholding. Whereas not draining the checking account requires more deliberate discipline.
I could argue that making the opposite claim is a pretty gross overgeneralization. It's good that your family is prepared for retirement, but most people aren't.
The big lie sold to us is that there is such a thing as a "self-sufficient" man. The people who make it the furthest are the people with the most extensive and powerful networks.
I'd wager that most AirBnB stays are one-offs on vacation. Home cleaning is recurring, making it more vulnerable to the "here's my phone number" weakness.
AirBnB's that business now. They used to claim they were only a matchmaking service and any risks were to be worked out between the homeowner and renter, but after some really bad publicity c. 2011, they've really doubled-down on customer service and insurance. Everyone I've known whose had a bad experience with AirBnB lately has had it turned into a good experience.
"Everyone I've known whose had a bad experience with AirBnB lately has had it turned into a good experience."
Minor nitpick on this... it's doubtful that it 'turned into a good experience', as much as "AirBnB was able to compensate, monetarily or otherwise, for the bad experience (which still exists)".
AirBnB goes to a lot of lengths to make sure you at least have to book through them the first time. They filter out phone numbers and email addresses in messaging, even if you try and get clever (like spelling out phone numbers).
Problem solved.