While I don't want to seem like I'm wishing unemployment or hardship on anyone, the implosion of Airbnb is already causing a rent price correction that was sorely needed in many cities that have become severely unaffordable.
Wired published an article about this effect in London [1] and I've seen price drops as much as $500 for condos in the downtown core of Toronto on Zillow already.
It's pretty bold to claim any and all price drops are directly attributable to Airbnb when in the middle of a recession causing pandemic that is heavily impacting normal housing/rental market activity.
I admit that both my observations, and the ones in the Wired article I cited, are anecdotal. And it's certainly not the only factor driving those rent decreases. But it's oddly coincidental that the biggest and most immediate price drops seem to be concentrated in the areas that had the most Airbnb listings, at least based on what i've looked at in Toronto.
It's possible that while AirBnB increased demand for housing, the market could have responded by building and allocating more real estate to housing, resulting in an equilibrium. So it is at least plausible to me that an implosion of AirBnB might be good for renters in the short term as there is an over-allocation of housing, but that without AirBnB, market rates will increase to about where they were before as supply drops over time in response. The whole thing is complicated enough that there's no way I'm going to trust any single, non-academic article on the subject.
If the short-term rental market suddenly evaporates, and you have a chunk of the housing stock full-time serving that much more lucrative market (and not catering to locals), this is the first thing that is going to put downward pressure on rents. Support mechanisms are in place for most "normal" classes of renters and owners.
It feels like we're living through an accelerated version of the disintegration of the western Roman empire. In a matter of a few weeks, decades worth of globalisation has screeched to a halt. It's hard to imagine the borders reopening to anything like their pre-COVID-19 state until a treatment is found or a vaccine.
There are plenty of Italians, Chinese and Iranians in Switzerland - not at all clear why you'd choose to pick on eastern Europeans given how few cases there are in those countries.
It's true, when I was working there there were almost no Chinese people for example, but the office got more international since - not that it would really matter.
I'd just ask my tech lead to work from home from now on. It was never a problem at Google for me.
After reading the "Big Vitamin D Mistake" article on HN in 2017 I also started experimenting with larger doses of Vitamin D and can attest to life-changing effects.
It has been like a permanent +5 to constitution; I am now almost through my second winter without getting sick, something inconceivable for me as a kid growing up with asthma and a whole range of puffers, and always prone to debilitating sinus infections that told hold in January and never really let up sometime around April.
I initially started with 1000 IU of Vitamin D3, Costco brand, and eventually settled on 5000 as I noticed improvements in energy level as I took more.
I am at 43 latitude so I only start taking it in mid-November and start weening myself off it in late March (you never really know if/when spring will happen up here in Toronto :)
As you indirectly allude to, peak oil is an economic issue, not a geological one.
Due to a combination of technological ingenuity and externalities in the form of current and future environmental degradation, we've been able to so far avoid the point where oil cannot be profitably produced for a price that consumers can afford to pay.
This is a semi-serious suggestion as I am just a techie without enough background in the legal and political side of things, but it has always struck me that cities like Detroit and Buffalo struggle while they border the area that is the economic engine of Canada.
Could something along the lines of the schengen agreement be feasible between Canada and US border regions, making it easier for people and capital to flow between them? Not hard to imagine someone in Toronto trying their luck to start something up in Buffalo or Detroit where their costs would be a fraction of that in Toronto, but still allow them to remain close to home. People from those border cities that want to find better work in Toronto could do so more easily rather than having to move further away within the US. It would seem like a win-win for both sides.
> Could something along the lines of the schengen agreement be feasible between Canada and US border regions, making it easier for people and capital to flow between them?
Of course it could, even if states like California left the union similar cooperation can be formed
What I was thinking of is something along the lines of the agreements that some European countries have with each other, where residents that live within a certain distance of the border are treated somewhat differently. Or the special economic zones that exist in some Asian countries.
I find this odd because I am the opposite - one of my primary use cases for Jupyter/ipython in general is the ease with which I can get 'live' code introspection and intellisense. It's often my prototyping sandbox for python code that I then move into my IDE once it's close to being ready.
I also notice that developing in this way encourages me to create smaller, more testable functions that i can easily work with inside a single notebook cell.
Anyone more involved in the pgsql community able to comment on how this balance is being struck? It doesnt' seem like the release schedule has changed much, though the version numbers seem to be incrementing faster (no v10.1, 10.2, etc?)
This would have been my explanation too, but to my surprise, wood is only about 1/3 of the energy density of diesel fuel. I'm not sure why i expected it to be an order of magnitude difference.
I love using VSCode and find that I have less need for any other IDE with each new release. This one might finally eliminate one of my remaining needs for pycharm.
I can't help but feel sorry for Jetbrains though, who seem to be in a similar position to Opera back in the late 2000s, a small software company up against a behemoth that can afford to subsidize the development of an open-source alternative to their bread and butter.
Opera was a one trick pony, Jetbrains seems to be decently diversified in the products they offer that covers a large number of developer users and development stacks. That's not to say it doesn't hurt but their situation isn't as dire as Opera's was.
Visual Studio Code is a threat to Jetbrain's IDEs, but I don't see any serious competition to DataGrip yet. Their various .net tools are also very strong despite competing against the standard features of Visual Studio (the not-Core variant).
Back in the 90's Borland seemed to have no match for developer tools, then their management went astray.
And to be honest I never understood the complaint about lack of quality of their documentation vs what Microsoft, Zortech, Watcom, Nantucket and others used to have on those days.
Currently JetBrains is segmenting their products, for example native code languages are only supported in Clion/AppCode, even if you buy Ultimate, one needs to buy two IDEs from them to debug Kotlin/Native.
So lets see how long their management keeps on the right track.
Personally I don't care, because my experience with Borland has made me only use IDEs that are produced from the same companies as the OS SDKs that I use.
Jetbrains product segmenting is a bit strange yes. Right now as a full stack developer i have three options: 1. One instance of VSCode with a few plug ins for each language, 2. IntelliJ ultimate €499/year/seat, 3. Run four free IDEs from jetbrains simultaneously.
#2 is too expensive, #3 is too inconvenient and while #1 isn't as good as jetbrains it's too good enough to justify an upgrade to intellij ultimate. If you are saying native is not even supported in Ultimate this makes things even worse. Jetbrains should release something cheaper in between #2 and #3 that supports many languages but maybe hold back on certain premium features like profiling etc.
HN loves to hate Microsoft, but they haven't anything to do with Imprise and CodeGear, nor with the internal management issues.
Yes, Anders and a few others eventually moved into Microsoft, but that was a side effect of how bad things were at Borland. Anders refused the offer multiple times from previous team mates that went to Microsoft before he did, until he though that was time to finally leave Borland.
It'd be nice if you saved this stuff for when you're replying to HN, not to me.
Microsoft in the 80s and 90s were hyper-aggressive towards anyone they considered a key competitor and played dirty. The fact that some of these competitors didn't do themselves any favours doesn't change that (I think, quite uncontroversial) fact.
I don't think VS Code is this huge threat to Jetbrains and as a competitor, Microsoft is not quite the bugbear it once was. If anything, its Jetbrains that's outcompeted their direct competitors (Eclipse, Netbeans) to semi-irrelevance/coma.
Quick Pascal, Quick Basic, MASM, Microsoft C and the 16 bit versions of Visual C++ were hardly hyper-aggressive products, versus the competition.
They were aggressive with MS-DOS and Windows, their developer tools not really, even with VB and VC++ 32, they started to win when Watcom, Borland, CA, Zortech, Symantec Metrowerks stopped being worthwhile to spend money on.
We're getting a bit into the weeds here but I think it's a mistake to conflate the 'aggression' part of this with the quality of the products. In fact, the poor quality of the products was part of the aggression - Microsoft got to leverage its position as the platform vendor against its own ISVs. They even named them with Borland's own naming scheme!
You can probably make a decent argument that Borland's mismanagement was a misguided attempt to respond to Microsoft's pressure.
TeamCity in particular is loved by many enterprise shops, as well as IntelliJ and Resharper. None of those (even IntelliJ) are particularly threatened by VSCode.
Iunno. I'm finding that VSCode is rapidly approaching parity with IntelliJ in terms of features that I actually use, while at the same time being quite noticeably faster and less buggy.
No, but Visual Studio (not Code) is rapidly integrating R# features into VS. Many people are disabling R# because it slows down VS so badly and Microsoft has been closing the gap (see recent 15.8 release with EditorConfig features).
JetBrains still has some areas where they excel compared to VSCode, specifically Ruby for me right now. Maybe that will change as Solargraph[1] improves?
Wired published an article about this effect in London [1] and I've seen price drops as much as $500 for condos in the downtown core of Toronto on Zillow already.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-coronavirus-london