Which is why if you are cited for a traffic violation, it makes no difference if you claim that you "really wanted to not go through the red light, but a voice in my head made me do it". You did it, it endangers others, it's against the law, you're guilty.
Same thing with the recent article about recording someone on the phone without their knowledge. If you seriously think that people should be able to do that on some silly presumption that it must be "innocent by default", then I think you need to get your head examined.
Unfortunately what thousands of years of recorded human civilization has taught us is that people are self-interested by default and given free reign to exploit others, they will exploit others with regularity. In many cases a law that occasionally inconveniences upstanding people is far preferable to no law (assumes everyone is innocent, or clueless legislators don't pay attention to new developments in society and/or technology) and which in turn creates more victims every day.
Seems obvious to me. I tend to dislike easily avoidable damaging, maiming and killing of people.
They can always build up, but the people there are apparently dead set against that.
Plenty of that has happened too, it's just a much bigger deal to do that here than it is in some sprawling suburb where they can just raze a field or a parking lot and start building.
And San Francisco has a deserved reputation from an aesthetic POV (which is also critical for the tourism business here), they don't approve any old junk building. We also have high standards in areas like seismic measures, since we'd rather not have half the city burn to the ground in the next 1906-scale earthquake. ;)
Have you ever been in San Francisco? It's one of the most densely-populated cities in the US. There's just not any free space here to build new housing, for the most part. Almost anything you build will require tearing something else down.
But I do agree in part - the government could have been more aggressive about building residential housing. Even now after anyone with two brain cells to rub together can figure out we have a housing shortage, they keep approving these large projects where they only require something trivial like 10% of the total to be affordable or "market rate" units. (Which in SF means "exorbitant".)
I suppose you've never witnessed a place which has gone from a decent place to live to a dangerous, crime-ridden slum, eh?
"Increasing property values" is often just a codeword for "making our communities more pleasant and desirable". Nothing wrong with that. You can't increase the general appeal of anything in this world without increasing its perceived value.
That said, the property values in SF are ridiculous. But that's mostly down to poor urban planning and an addiction to property tax inflation.
San Francisco could stop real-estate speculation dead in its tracks by simply imposing a substantial transfer fee on real-estate properties, particularly for short-term ownership. But they are too addicted to the property tax inflation.
So now we have a city where workers increasingly can't afford to live, which in the long run will undermine diversity (it already has) and, despite what the wealthy think, undermine the quality of the city as a whole.
AirBnB, like the majority of the trendy and ironically-named "sharing economy" companies, is just another opportunist carpetbagger looking for regulatory loopholes they can exploit to make boatloads of money.
The PROBLEM in San Francisco - where I happen to have lived for many decades - is that real estate and rental prices are ridiculous - the highest in the USA. We have a huge shortage of rental property here, and AirBnB greatly exacerbates the problem by allowing people to essentially act like hoteliers without any of the traditional legal obligations that innkeepers and hoteliers have had to comply with, yanno, for dumb reasons like protecting the health and welfare of their boarders and the community around them. (Just like the rest of the "sharing economy" companies have turned their workers into powerless serfs while destroying the business of companies that actually pay their workers a living wage)
AirBnB also didn't like it very much when a study was released recently that demonstrated what many of us had been saying all along: the majority of AirBnB properties in SF had essentially become nearly full-time businesses rather than poor little Joe Sixpack trying to earn an occasional extra dollar to help pay for his kid's Pampers. In short, it's just another way to make an end-run around ordinances designed to protect the public, in order to make a quick buck. (And in the process - in this city - keeping even more residents from being able to find affordable housing)
SF had been giving AirBnB a pass for too long, this was the FIRST time a rule had been voted-in to put them on a tighter noose.
These companies could just accept reality and stop thinking that they are an endless money-printing machine and accept that their business will have a limited scale in order to not create economic and social chaos. But they are too self-righteous and drunk with eager VC money to get a grip on that reality.
Bollaert's websites did not simply "enable" harassment, they were expressly designed to foment, encourage and profit from it.
I really don't think that the internet ecosystem and community deserves to have the incredibly important and already tenuous safe-harbor exemption put in jeopardy for the sake of a scumbag like Bollaert.
I hope he rots in jail.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Omnitech.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
No emoticons noted, assuming was not sarcasm.
In which case: :-|
"Intent" is rarely provable and making laws revolve around it is a VERY slippery slope
Same thing with the recent article about recording someone on the phone without their knowledge. If you seriously think that people should be able to do that on some silly presumption that it must be "innocent by default", then I think you need to get your head examined.
Unfortunately what thousands of years of recorded human civilization has taught us is that people are self-interested by default and given free reign to exploit others, they will exploit others with regularity. In many cases a law that occasionally inconveniences upstanding people is far preferable to no law (assumes everyone is innocent, or clueless legislators don't pay attention to new developments in society and/or technology) and which in turn creates more victims every day.
Seems obvious to me. I tend to dislike easily avoidable damaging, maiming and killing of people.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Plenty of that has happened too, it's just a much bigger deal to do that here than it is in some sprawling suburb where they can just raze a field or a parking lot and start building.
And San Francisco has a deserved reputation from an aesthetic POV (which is also critical for the tourism business here), they don't approve any old junk building. We also have high standards in areas like seismic measures, since we'd rather not have half the city burn to the ground in the next 1906-scale earthquake. ;)
Re: Re: Re:
But I do agree in part - the government could have been more aggressive about building residential housing. Even now after anyone with two brain cells to rub together can figure out we have a housing shortage, they keep approving these large projects where they only require something trivial like 10% of the total to be affordable or "market rate" units. (Which in SF means "exorbitant".)
Re: Re: "increasing property values"
"Increasing property values" is often just a codeword for "making our communities more pleasant and desirable". Nothing wrong with that. You can't increase the general appeal of anything in this world without increasing its perceived value.
That said, the property values in SF are ridiculous. But that's mostly down to poor urban planning and an addiction to property tax inflation.
San Francisco could stop real-estate speculation dead in its tracks by simply imposing a substantial transfer fee on real-estate properties, particularly for short-term ownership. But they are too addicted to the property tax inflation.
So now we have a city where workers increasingly can't afford to live, which in the long run will undermine diversity (it already has) and, despite what the wealthy think, undermine the quality of the city as a whole.
Carpetbaggers
The PROBLEM in San Francisco - where I happen to have lived for many decades - is that real estate and rental prices are ridiculous - the highest in the USA. We have a huge shortage of rental property here, and AirBnB greatly exacerbates the problem by allowing people to essentially act like hoteliers without any of the traditional legal obligations that innkeepers and hoteliers have had to comply with, yanno, for dumb reasons like protecting the health and welfare of their boarders and the community around them. (Just like the rest of the "sharing economy" companies have turned their workers into powerless serfs while destroying the business of companies that actually pay their workers a living wage)
AirBnB also didn't like it very much when a study was released recently that demonstrated what many of us had been saying all along: the majority of AirBnB properties in SF had essentially become nearly full-time businesses rather than poor little Joe Sixpack trying to earn an occasional extra dollar to help pay for his kid's Pampers. In short, it's just another way to make an end-run around ordinances designed to protect the public, in order to make a quick buck. (And in the process - in this city - keeping even more residents from being able to find affordable housing)
SF had been giving AirBnB a pass for too long, this was the FIRST time a rule had been voted-in to put them on a tighter noose.
These companies could just accept reality and stop thinking that they are an endless money-printing machine and accept that their business will have a limited scale in order to not create economic and social chaos. But they are too self-righteous and drunk with eager VC money to get a grip on that reality.
Screw them.
Put the publisher/safe-harbor exemption in jeopardy because of this asshat??
I really don't think that the internet ecosystem and community deserves to have the incredibly important and already tenuous safe-harbor exemption put in jeopardy for the sake of a scumbag like Bollaert.
I hope he rots in jail.
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