Month: August 2017

The Compleat Airbnb Host(ess)

We’ve just returned from traveling to the Pacific Northwest, where we stayed a few days in an Airbnb in Portland. It started me thinking about the amenities I’ve come to expect in someplace I rent—not a list of criteria I came up with on my own, but a list drawn from what we’ve encountered at places run by good hosts. Given that, here’s my list of what a makes a good Airbnb (over and above the comfortable bed, clean and convenient bathroom, etc.):

  •  A Roku hooked up to the TV—even better if there’s a Netflix subscription already connected to the Roku’s channel. This amenity is critical if you’re someplace that doesn’t have good TV reception, like the farm in Marin we stayed at one weekend—not that we wanted to spend time watching TV anyway, but sometimes you do find yourself in for the evening before you’re ready for bed.
  • WiFi, of course. That goes without saying.
  • Some kind of upscale coffee-making system. The place in Portland had an electric kettle and a French press (with ground coffee in the cupboard), the Novato farm had a Nespresso, and the Santa Cruz cottage had a Keurig machine. Even Mr. Coffee doesn’t have enough panache for the Airbnb crowd, and instant coffee is right out. Bonus points if there’s also a decent selection of tea; our place in Sydney set the bar for that one, unsurprisingly.
  • A way for guests to play their own music. The Portland place had a headphone cable plugged into the A/V receiver, and the New York place had a UE Boom Bluetooth speaker. This option isn’t that common yet, but it’s welcome when it’s there.

How about you? What do you like to see when you’re paying to stay in someone else’s house?

Clickbait and its discontents

An online friend of mine, an avid supporter of single-payer healthcare with little use for mainstream Democrats, recently linked to an article titled “Al Gore Breaks With Democratic Party Leadership to Support Single-Payer Healthcare” from a site called Splinter that claims to offer “news coverage for a new America.” Unfortunately, new America seems to enjoy sensationalistic news coverage, and it seemed unlikely that Al Gore would publicly go against the Democratic Party, so I decided to look further.

The Splinter story says, “Breaking with ranking Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi…Gore told the audience that private health insurance has failed to provide accessible coverage for all Americans.”

I hadn’t heard that Nancy Pelosi had come out against single-payer, so I took a look at the Huffington Post story the Splinter story is based on. It reads, “House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi…flatly said ‘no’ when asked in May if single-payer health care should be part of the party’s 2018 platform.” Hm, “flatly said no,” eh? I wonder if there was any context left out.

Turning to the New York Times story the Huffington Post vampirized, I find

“At a briefing with reporters last month, the House minority leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, replied with a flat ‘no’ when asked if Democrats should make single-payer a central theme in 2018. She said state-level action was more appropriate, though she said she supported the idea in concept.”

So Nancy Pelosi answered a narrow question about political tactics surrounding single-payer, saying that she supports the idea but doesn’t think it’s something to run on in 2018. Separately, Al Gore also expressed support for the idea, without offering his opinion on what political strategy the party should adopt next year. But after being passed through two clickbait filters, with the context strained out to leave only the essence of conflict, it’s presented as a major dispute in the Democratic Party.

And that’s how they getcha. Sites like the Huffington Post and Splinter rely on stoking outrage for their traffic. This story is a good example of how that works.