
Obama Discusses Airbnb's Success in Cuba [video] - edward
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP6TH3pBPi8
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unfamiliar
"It used to be, if an American or a German or anybody wanted to come to Cuba
they could come to a hotel and that was it"

This isn't remotely close to the truth. When traveling to Cuba it has always
been advisable to stay in a casa, which is basically a room that one of the
locals is renting out to tourists. Some of these casas have their own website,
some are just found by word of mouth or by networks of hosts built up across
cities (you want to go to Havana next, there is a decent chance your host can
"recommend" someone there to put you up and organise it for you. It's a mutual
agreement between hosts to bring each other business). The idea that AirBnB
has somehow created this market is not true, it was always there. Now it is
just sanctioned by an American "social network" instead of the pre-existing
Cuban actual social network.

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spoiledtechie
I don't understand this president. Just a few days ago, he saus there isn't a
difference between communism and capitalism and you just have to choose what
you want. Then he decodes to praise capitalism in an off narrative about
Airbnb. He makes no sense. I guess he's a politician, as it just matters who
he's talking to.

~~~
frenchfried
That's not quite what he said, though. Here's the full quotation:

"I guess to make a broader point, so often in the past there's been a sharp
division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or
socialist. And especially in the Americas, that's been a big debate, right?
Oh, you know, you're a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you're some
crazy communist that's going to take away everybody's property. And I mean,
those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation,
you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don't have to
worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory
-- you should just decide what works."

His point seems very straightforward and noncontroversial - why should we
marry ourselves to ideology when what we truly care about are solutions to
problems?

What would you call a CEO or an executive at a company who rejects a solution
simply because it doesn't match their rigid ideology regarding the matter at
hand? Bad - very bad.

There is much to be said for the flexibility and wealth of options that a free
market can provide, but is there truly nothing that other systems can offer?

Cuba is in many ways far behind us, and I am glad that we aren't in their
situation. Havana looks just as it did in the 1950s.

But at the same time, the Cuban health care system has far better coverage
than ours. You can decry waiting lines and shoddy doctors and so on, but there
is objective truth to my statement. Cuba has a lower child mortality rate than
we do - 4.83 per 1000 compared to 6 per 1000. Just last year, Cuba became the
first country to eliminate mother to child transmission of HIV. The first!

When we talk about the world (I guess economic systems in particular) as
simply a matter of capitalism vs. communism vs. socialism and so on, we limit
our ability to solve problems and make progress. That's all Obama was trying
to say, I think.

~~~
spoiledtechie
You say these medical advances would be true, but do you really consider them
to be correct? Coming from a communist country, they do in fact control the
media. They do in fact control what is disseminated and what's not.

On that note, comparing a government to a company is generally wrong. Why you
ask, because companies have the ability to run as a dictatorship, but if a
country did that, it would be denying of someone's rights, to compare a
company to a government, is simply and fully incomparable and quiet frankly
scary.

~~~
frenchfried
Well the facts about health are true because they come from the World Health
Organization of the United Nations, which compiles health-related data on all
countries. It's a reliable source.

You're right about not running countries like companies - I was just making a
point about management style. It's important to consider ideas from all
sources and toxic to tie yourself to ideology. Free market, socialist, etc. -
fundamentally, these are all methods of solving problems for people, and there
is nothing wrong or controversial about borrowing the best ideas and practices
from each. I think most people would agree that a government should marry
itself to finding solutions, not ideology.

[1]
[http://www.who.int/countries/cub/en/](http://www.who.int/countries/cub/en/)

~~~
icebraining
Ideology is the lenses through which we decide what the problems are and how
we can evaluate the solutions. It's meaningless to say that a solution is
better than another; it just has different tradeoffs. Ideology is what gives
weights to those tradeoffs and makes the choice meaningful.

People who say we should just ignore ideology and "choose what works" are just
passing off - consciously or not - their own ideology as the 'natural' state,
which doesn't really exist.

