> experience from many other cases shows that economics will take what it wants
No such thing. Regulations work.
> Scenarios
No need to 'imagine' things. Wherever they implemented regulations here, they worked. From rent control to airbnb bans. Regulations work as long as you enforce them.
> Spain is suffering a multi-centralization process. Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga are increasing their populations. The rest of the cities are losing inhabitants. Why? Because the job opportunities are not there.
The depopulation problem of MOUNTAINOUS regions of Europe, including Spain, has little to do with jobs being available elsewhere. The depopulation in those mountainous regions is due to those regions being undesirable for human habitation all the way, and the recent advent of technology and infrastructure making it possible for people to go to other places. These regions were inhabited only because people had to live there and the human society's infrastructure could not carry millions of people in a central location.
I don’t think that’s true even less true in a digital economy we are all in.
Poorer regions like Extremadura and Andalusia have been neglected for centuries and now the economy is so dire we are seeing a mass migration from south Spain to other regions.
And yes, the locals want more authoritarianism to keep away the overcrowding tourists, rich foreigners, and people who think like you. That's what the problem needs and what people like you understand.
We have to ban accounts that keep doing this, so please stop doing this, and please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle.
(I suppose I should add the standard disclaimer that no, we don't care about your views. We care about your following the rules and using the site as intended, same as with any other user.)
Under this post and in every single post you referenced, people are taking the largest swipes at entire countries, even peoples/races without any repercussions.
> please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle
All the threads you referenced are filled with people using the site in a political and ideological manner. There are people who are literally doing propaganda against entire countries and people.
> no, we don't care about your views
If you don't care about the views of the users, don't care about them in an egalitarian way. So far the rules seem to be getting applied selectively.
> We have to ban accounts that keep doing this
Feel free to do so. I'll get me coat myself. No need to contribute to a platform that not only does not care about its users' views but also applies its rules selectively and in an exceptionalist manner.
I'd need links to specific posts to say anything about them, but you're right that other people also break the rules. That doesn't make it ok for you to break the rules! It's not ok for either you or them to break the rules.
> the rules seem to be getting applied selectively
Every commenter with strong passions feels like the mods apply the rules selectively and must therefore be on the other side. The people you disagree with are just as sure that we're secretly on your side. I say that with confidence even though I don't remember anything about your views at this moment, nor which side any of you are on.
The reason is sample bias. Everyone notices other people breaking the rules, but which cases you notice depends on your pre-existing views. What we (I mean all of us, i.e. humans generally) notice is governed by what we dislike [1]. We assign the most meaning to the cases that feel most unfair or offensive to us. Since everyone selects these based on their own feelings, opposite feelings lead to different samples and opposite conclusions.
When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted. Also, I'm the only moderator who responds publicly and I can only write so much—not just because I have other responsibilities to worry about, but also because if I make even a slight mistake, it can (and often has) made a situation worse. It's a little bit like writing software in, I don't know, Agda as opposed to JS or something. You can't do it as fast or as much.
Which posts I respond to vs. not is determined by two factors: (a) what has been brought to my attention by others; and (b) randomness. If you or anyone sees a post that ought to be moderated, you can bring it to our/my attention by either flagging it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag for how), or in egregious cases, by emailing [email protected].
Moderation can't be consistent in any way that would require reviewing all posts, but it can be relatively [2] consistent as long as we work with random-enough samples and handle them in a principled-enough way. That's what we aspire to. We're not perfect at it, but we do at least have years of practice.
This works well enough to signal to most of the community that (a) HN is moderated, and (b) that it's moderated reasonably fairly [3]. But it leaves many cases that don't get moderated all, which means there are plenty of data points which people can select to draw whatever conclusions they want to about HN moderation—and believe me, they do!
We've all had this experience in other contexts. Take cops and speeding tickets. There's always a "me? why me?" reaction when you get pulled over. Plenty of other cars were speeding faster! The cops must have ulterior motives for picking on me [4]. Even if my brain knows about random samples, the feelings still work this way. Another example is sports and referees. The passionate fans are the quickest to feel that the refs are making calls unfairly, and it always feels like the calls are unfair against your team.
One last point, in the unlikely event that you read this far... when I said "we don't care about your views" I did not mean to belittle your views or to imply that they're about something unimportant. On the contrary, the divisive topics are extremely important—far more important than most things that appear on HN. I just meant that we don't (or at least try our best not to) consider your views when making moderation calls. And of course by "you" I don't just mean you personally, I mean everybody.
[2] I say 'relatively' because this is a complex problem with lots of failure modes, but they don't change the important point above.
[3] Wait, haven't I just contradicted myself, after talking about all the users who feel we're unfair? No, because the driving factor is the passions of the perceiver. The more passionately you (i.e. anyone) feels about a topic, the more this dynamic kicks in. Most of the community doesn't have strong passions on a given topic, so even when they see the same data points as you, they won't select them as evidence of unfairness. They'll also be more likely to notice cases of the mods scolding the other side as well, and to assign equal weight to those. In other words, the very things that indicate unfairness to you will feel like fairness to them. This is how the same moderation approach can both reassure the majority while at the same time convincing passionate partisans (on any side of any topic) that the system is biased against them. For a couple collections of vivid examples, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
[4] And maybe they do? This argument doesn't prove there's no bias; it just shows that any system, even the most unbiased, will produce strong feelings of bias no matter what you do.
Tourism is lucrative only for a handful of major tourism corporations/agencies, a few local businesses/shops that can cater to locals, and a few among the locals who can use their real estate for things like airbnb. Only 6% of Spaniards have more than one house. So only 6% of them could actually benefit from this situation even if airbnb was a good thing.
The reality of the matter is that what's happening in Barcelona ended up resembling more a colonization when tourism got combined with golden visas that allow rich foreigners and investment funds to scoop up local housing and the recent digital nomad wave. There are now more foreigners in the city center than locals and you are hard pressed to hear Spanish or Catalan being spoken around the place.
"I was born and raised in Barcelona, no longer live there however. I didn't remember how bad it was until I went to visit my family last summer. Me and some friends went to walk around the center and the girl that took our orders at a Pans&Company didn't even know Spanish or Catalan, only English. It was honestly quite depressing. She was surprised we didn't open the conversation with English."
Spain is not the US. Barcelona had been building a lot of housing. Its not enough as they get converted to airbnbs or get scooped up by rich foreigners or foreign investment funds.
Real estate is only a good investment vehicle because the western world refuses to build shit. why on earth would you expect investors be enticed to buy a fundamentally depreciating asset instead of equities?
Lol what? Maybe back in 2007 before the crash that ruined tons of Spanish construction companies and investment in real estate. Otherwise the US builds a lot, and apparently Barcelona still doesn't build enough.
> This is a distraction for an easy target. It won't help and it will make the quality of hotels worse.
Its not a distraction - its just a start. And hotel quality is still what it was before Airbnb and it will stay like that after airbnb goes away. The standards that national and international tourism institutions apply to the hotels has not changed one iota because of airbnb.
No. You just tax the living daylights out of the empty houses so that they will have to utilize or rent them. That is ALREADY the law in Spain, by the way.
> Forcefully seize their apartment because people need it?
The needs of the many come before the needs of the few. Someone said it somewhere across the ocean. But the country where it was said does not heed it at all. The rest of the world does.
It would work, but it also requires curbing the extra demand that is generated by foreigners moving into the city and scooping up the housing from the locals.
> I might be naive, but I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply instead of curbing the demand?
Spain is not the US. Neither Spain nor any other Mediterranean country has large surface area that could accommodate housing demand at such high levels - there is already scarce land that you can build on across the Mediterranean as there are limited shorelines and deltas that were created by rivers etc, and the rest is immediately mountainous or hilly landscape that is very difficult to build on.
These countries could easily cope with their local demand, but allowing foreigners to buy housing caused a large influx of foreigners exacerbating the demand for housing and crowding out these places way beyond their capacity. The investment funds that scoop up housing to profit worsen the situation.
Maybe the US could handle such a demand with its gigantic surface area - solely Texas is larger than ENTIRE Western Europe, mind that. Or Russia. Or China. But other countries in the world, especially the Mediterranean ones, don't have the space to even start comparing with those.
The only solution is to limit the demand to the carrying capacity of each locale, province and country.
> The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket. The entire impact of AirBnB + all housing built in the last decade does not offset the last half decade of population growth.
The population growth is largely due to rich foreigners moving into the city:
"I was born and raised in Barcelona, no longer live there however. I didn't remember how bad it was until I went to visit my family last summer. Me and some friends went to walk around the center and the girl that took our orders at a Pans&Company didn't even know Spanish or Catalan, only English. It was honestly quite depressing. She was surprised we didn't open the conversation with English."
People say that it has become difficult to hear Catalan or Spanish being spoken in the city center and there are waitresses who don't know Spanish. Some started to say that this is not a case of gentrification, but a colonization.
No such thing. Regulations work.
> Scenarios
No need to 'imagine' things. Wherever they implemented regulations here, they worked. From rent control to airbnb bans. Regulations work as long as you enforce them.