It makes sense if you use realistic occupancy rates. Apparently they’re up to 70% in many cases. But even 50% occupancy changes the numbers completely. The thing to remember is it’s not all about weekends. People book week-long trips all the time. And AIrBnBs cater better to those longer vacations than hotels do. It’s nice to have some room to spread out if you’re going to be there for a week.

The other thing is that many of these properties were bought before the most recent property price boom, and the owners have low interest rate mortgages locked in. That property you stayed at might have been purchased for $300k with a 30 year mortgage at 2.75%. In that scenario, the owner put $60k down and has a payment of $980/month without taxes and insurance. Maybe $1300/month with? So that would be $15,600 per year. And if they manage a 50% occupancy rate at $100/night, that would be $18,200 per year in income. They would need some for maintenance and cleaning, but the property could still easily be cashflow-positive or nearly so. Even if they get no net monthly income on the property, they now have an expensive appreciating asset that they’re not making net monthly payments on. And in the few years since they bough the $300k property, it’s now appreciated to $500k, earning them $200k in pure profit. If they bought five years ago, they might have turned their $60k investment into $260k in equity in just 5 years. That’s one hell of a rate of return.

Eh. I think it’s quite hyperbolic to cite that hotel regulations are written in blood, when talking about rental cottages. Hotels are heavily regulated primarily due to their scale. A single hotel burning down could kills hundreds of people. If the cottage catches on fire, you just walk out the door or break a window. A poorly managed hotel can also turn into a source of substantial blight to a community. You can end up with drug dealers using hotel rooms as storefronts, sex traffickers using them for involuntary sex work, etc. But a cottage? There’s only so much blight that can fit into a tiny cottage. A cottage intrinsically needs far less regulation than a hotel.

Is it possible an owner will neglect maintenance of a cottage and let it go to hell? Sure. But we’re talking about cottages rented on vacation sites where people can leave reviews. And it’s not like anyone is going to get stuck in a year lease living in one of these things. If it’s a rat-infested hellhole, you’re only there a short time. Short-term rental owners have a lot more incentive to keep their properties in decent maintenance than regular landlords do.

Paragon works, but it’s not really a title. Could we make “Paragon” a title? Instead of “Saint Stephen of San Jose,” we have “Paragon Stephen of San Jose.” Sounds odd, but maybe?

Because it has more gravitas!

Can we make “secular saints” a thing? Why should we reserve the title of “Saint” specifically for the Catholic Church? I think we should just get in the habit of referring to any unambiguously good person, who has performed great acts of generosity and selflessness, as a saint. They don’t even have to be religious. If someone wants to interpret it religiously, they can say that anyone so good is almost certainly bound for Heaven, but it need not be religious. Why can’t we have secular saints? Why can’t we have Saint Stephen of San Jose or Saint Fred of Latrobe?

You can’t practically “trust but verify” with LLMs. I task an LLM to summarize an article. If I want to check its work, I have to go and read that whole article myself. The checking takes as much time as just writing the summary myself. And this is even worse with code, as you have to be able to deconstruct the AI’s code and figure out its internal logic. And by the time you’ve done that, it’s easier to just make the code yourself.

It’s not that you can’t verify the work of AI. It’s that if you do, you might as well just create the thing yourself.

It makes sense anatomically. Women store fat on their hips/butts, men store fat on their stomachs. Everyone undergoes swings in weight over time. If you’re wearing tights or trousers, they need to fit your butt and thighs reasonably tightly. Men have to undergo a much greater degree of weight change before their pants size changes than women do. A skirt or dress meanwhile much more easily accommodates changes in hip size. Oh, and this is before you consider changes in hip size that come with pregnancy.

It was only really with industrialization that it became practical for women of ordinary means to wear pants or trousers. When clothes are so expensive that you can only afford two or three outfits, and each outfit has to last many years? It wasn’t practical for women of ordinary means to afford to wear pants. Men could buy a set of pants and wear them even through ordinary changes in body weight. Men could make it through ordinary swings in body weight with the same set of pants, while women would require many more pairs of pants to cover the same magnitude of weight swing. Skirts and dresses were simply a lot more practical to handle the changes if female hip size that come from ordinary body weight swings.

But with industrialization, clothes became a lot cheaper. It then became practical for women to actually wear pants. If you can practically afford a large number of pants, then you can simply have an assortment of pants to handle swings in hip size from changes in body weight.

Huh? Are you asking if the phone should be replaced regularly?

What I meant specifically was the phone verification. You’ll need to get an actual burner cell phone for that. Get a tracphone or other similar prepaid plan, something you can buy in cash. Keep that phone powered off and in a faraday bag. Only take it out of the bag in a location other than your home or workplace, and only for the purposes of phone verification. Have the social media phone be a smart phone that you only use via wifi connected through a VPN.

You would have to get a burner phone to enable this.