Yes, obviously, they have monopsony power because networks are natural monopolies. The problem is that they can extract rents because of that monopsony power... and they do.
Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network, that network has the ability to extract rents from the sellers. It should be trivially illegal to operate such a site in the US, given anti-trust laws, but we've decide in the last 40 years that we don't enforce anti-trust in the US anymore, so here we are.
The fact that sites like booking.com can charge hotels a commission of up to 25% per booking shows exactly the level of extractive power that a site this type of power, simply because they were the first to capture the monopolistic network. It doesn't matter that some of the smaller hotels and course will go out of business, even if customer as a whole are hurt, because the total market is more valuable to them by maximally extracting rents.
Sounds good, and it would make sense that OSM and I have some crossover at this point. Now that I've had more time, I can see that the extremely obscure courses are not in your dataset (Like Ulukhaktok GC: https://golfcourse.wiki/course/ulukhaktok_golf_course-ulukha...). Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of time to look through your site when I saw this post, so I’m sorry about that.
Just so we're clear, I'm effectively fine with sharing my data via Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses (say, CC BY-NC 4.0). Much of my site depends on fair use and not being for profit anyway. I'm actively losing money on the site every month (ha!).
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One personal note...
It looks like you're not using referral advertising by linking to Golf Now. I would say -- golf nut to golf nut -- as someone who cares about small, mom-and-pop golf courses, Golf Now can be incredibly bad for those courses. I understand that might just be Pollyanna-ish given "the internet," but I've talked to folks who operate small courses who feel forced give a big portion of their margin to those middlemen (even losing money sometimes). I actively avoided linking to them. My partner works in hospitality, and it's the same for sites like booking.com (if you can book through the business's website, your probably should).
I'm entirely happy to collaborate on this, I really just care about someone mapping all the golf courses even if it's not me. I'm happy to collaborate even if we're trying to build different things. Feel free to reach to me here, on GolfCourse.Wiki, or via the blog (for some reason most people contact me through the blog): https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/
So, I started https://golfcourse.wiki in 2020, and I see courses that basically only I’ve mapped.
It’s cool, I want it to be public, if you want to work together, do reach out.
I would also say what you are doing is almost certainly opening you up to liability if you are just scraping other sites and republishing their data. One paper town that you published and you might have a lawsuit on your hands.
I'd much rather have Vance right now. I don't like the guy, but he's clearly got a good education and isn't literally selling crypto-as-bribe tokens openly.
Trump made $1.5B off TrumpCoin. Literally a vehicle for bribery, and we know he made over a billion dollars.
The hell are you talking about. There's "corruption" which is pointing fingers, and then there is "we literally have the receipts of countries paying him off (Qatar), and we have the vehicle he created to do exactly that off the record (TrumpCoin)."
So don't pretend it's like "oh, everyone is corrupt." It's ridiculous. Trump is literally verifiably corrupt.
Maybe... maybe... if this were a discussion about only his protectionism on Chinese tech, yea, maybe you have a point. Literally everything is coming off the rails because Trump is so obscenely corrupt, so we'll never actually know. A new wall of tariffs, extreme oil prices, subpoenas on journalists for reporting on his Qatari (bribe) plane, the fact that he made about two and a half billion dollars last year somehow (1.5B in TrumpCoin bribes)... This shit just doesn't happen under Democrats or pre-MAGA Republicans.
Yea, if it were just some "big bad concern" about protectionism, sure. My point is that when you elect a corrupt idiot, the protectionism might actually be about protecting his (literal) friends and family's investments, rather than some dying American industry.
The President doesn't pass legislation. You can vote against socialism in the legislature, and vote against total incompetence in the executive. There was no reason to vote for Trump regarding "no wars" and "no boom/busts" because he's completely full of shit... exactly because he never cared about truth in the first place, which should have been abundantly clear to everyone by now.
>This is hyperpartisan bullshit that you obviously wouldn't say if someone were choosing between a red shirt and a blue shirt.
I voted for Dean Phillips in the primary. I'm extremely angry at the DNC. I thought they treated Mitt Romney and John McCain like garbage for absolutely no reason. I would have happily voted for Romney over both Clinton and Trump in 2016. I'm not some partisan hack. That said, it wasn't a difficult choice last election.
Donald Trump is an exceptionally corrupt, delusional, moronic President. He pretends that doing it out in the open makes it okay.
He's literally flying around in a Qatari bribe. This level of corruption and self-dealing is exceptional.
God, we're really going to have to start teaching philosophy much more broadly if we're going to have a sensible future. This thread is so full of crazy unknowable speculation and entirely novel ideas of the human condition.
High-trust societies are based in transparency. Ironically you get high-trust by actually not trusting people. We can have surveillance and transparency at the same time... the point is that people actually need to be accountable.
It's the lack of accountability, especially on the meta-level where the people that need to be held accountable know that there is no accountability, that can make surveillance dangerous.
We need both police, and we need the police to have police, and at every level, there ought to be an antagonistic relationship.
Just deciding, fuck it, no transparency and no surveillance is just going to lead to organized crime and cronyism... and surprise, surprise, that's exactly what we're getting in America.
>You could feasibly quadruple the population if you wanted to, I guess my question is to why? It wouldn't decrease rent appreciably
You live in a fantasy world if you don't think increasing the housing supply by 4x will do anything to prices. Austin is a near-perfect natural experiment... not that you likely care about good-faith discussion with a month old throwaway account.
What the hell are you talking about? I live in SF. Like half the city is literally single family homes. You could trivially double or triple the population of the city by just legalizing the cute, three-story Victorians they have in the Haight city wide.
People live here and would like to build a life for themselves instead of living with roommates into their 40s and 50s.
It's very obviously false advertising. You can't say "free flight to europe" and then in the fine print say "no free flight to europe." It's just blatant false advertising to have a "rent" next to a "buy" button you click to acquire what is effectively a long term rental.