where did you get this 50,000 housing units number from? This article quotes that New York got 15,000 units from their ban. Are you saying that Montreal has 3x as many short term rentals as New York?
The article quotes has a 15,000 unit delta after closing a loophole, not after banning short-term rentals. The article also claims enforcement on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, etc. is still lacking.
As a person from a country similar to Romania, I can empathize with him. When you lose trust in the state and how they spend your money, even a 1% tax is too much.
I think the countries where you actually get your money's worth when it comes to taxes is very small, and even then, it's not clear whether it's due to good policy or merely luck and riding off previous successes that are being eroded by short-sightedness, stupidity/incompetence or corruption (also known as "lobbying" in the West).
The problem for me is not having to pay that tax. The problem is that we as Romanian citizens never see anything good done with them. And that's why I feel the need to complain.
We're out of communism for more than 30 years but the mentality of officials has barely changed. People are dying in dirty hospitals of infections that they didn't have before getting there (see Colectiv 2015). Analphabetism is higher than in previous years. You will choke and get lung pain if you want to take a walk on the street in most villages because of the coal being burned by poor people.
Education and healthcare are in dire need of money, and we're always on a tight budget and raising taxes.
If the tax rate is so low, it's no surprise there's no money for education and health care - given that Romania isn't Switzerland. Sure there will be corruption but it can't all go to corruption.
I am puzzled how little people know outside of CEE region. Of course it can. CEE is not high trust society it's been decimated by years of communism and the oligarchy got reinforced with the coming of western european investments.
CEE politicians are crooks that believe cattle (the voters) are to be exploited and they cant compete with the developed world anyway.
3m out of 20m of romanians have left the country and there's no way investments in education and health care would make a dent in this.
I'm sure there is corruption but I don't think it's so black. Where did all the smart Romanian emigrants I know go to school? How come there's 10x more fibre internet than in Germany? Things definitely could be better, but I don't think it's all bad in Romania and all great in say Germany.
Dont picture schools in Romania or anywhere else in CEE as backwards places where gopniks teach about loving mother Russia. That's far from it. CEE education system is not bad especially when it comes to hard sciences. Investment in education in CEE basically means renovating buildings, buying more modern equipment, paying teachers well and establishing more international cooperation.
When it comes to internet it's kinda the result of deregulation compared to Germany and it's relatively simple business that brings monthly recurring revenue.
It's not all that bad in Romania and all great in Germany but then again you can't really compare them. As I said a lot of wealth in Germany is built on the foundations in the old industries where German companies (and the people) hold the added value. It's impossible for Romanian companies to capture this value in construction, banking, pharmacy, insurance, consumer goods.
> At least 13 of the victims that died in hospitals were killed by bacteria, probably because the disinfectant used was diluted by the manufacturer to save money.
(From Wikipedia.) That's so sad to read, considering they had actually survived the fire.
Btw, Ceausescu was executed on this very day, December 25, thirty-four years ago. I was in the 3rd grade and our very distressed primary school teacher told us that some bad people in Romania have overthrown the Communist Party rule! That was the first political information session I ever was put into, and, luckily, there weren't much more of them later due to the dissolution of the USSR.
It would be fitting to have an equivalent of Fugitive's :Gbrowse to see a file on github and :Gblame to see the blame inline. Never understood why would your editor should be aware of git until I used that.
Yes! Gblame is fantastic. Xcode also has some pretty good git blame, git log, and version comparison support directly in the editor. I find that kind of thing fantastically useful for understanding why a section of code is the way it is.
I see your point but it has to be more than that. These protestors must see that it's better to share these stops than to have extra cars on the street, or more crowding on the already shitty public transit.
In previous stories it was mentioned that the private bus would in some cases stop at the public stop and prevent regular public transit buses from using it for some period of time, forcing people to board the public bus not at the proper position and so forth.
Sharing a system of public bus stations requires some coordination, which it seems is just starting now.
The sentiment is that they are taking away housing options from people who have lived in SF for years and not only contributing to the gentrification of the community, but not even giving back or participating in it as well.
That comes back to the idea that people have the right to live where they like.
People who oppose gentrification believe that the government (or the "community") should try to influence who lives where. While it's absolutely true that people impose externalities on one another, this doesn't give the government carte-blanche to determine how people live their lives, or who should live where.
In the case of SF, the reasons range from the plausible (people of differing income levels living together contributes to the overall wellbeing of the city) to the discriminatory (artists are more valuable to the city's social life than tech works) to the downright nasty (tech nerds are bratty privileged rich kids)
And those people that complain are probably google users. I say fuck em! Google owes SF nothing, people live there by their own choosing, not because of anything google did, but just that SF is a great place to live (no polar vortex for one!) As for Oakland, I can only imagine that the injection of wealth by google employes spending some of their income in the east bay would be a good thing, it sure needs it.
Same with "Security at <something>" meaning something bad happened. There's another story on the HN homepage right now where I assumed it was a break-in, when in fact is was a preemptive strike.
With a growing startup ecosystem (500 startups being officially here, for example) and very few payment solutions (for example, Paypal only offering Payments Standard), I thought I'd just drop in to inquire about Mexico on the short list for expansion.
