Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis • Hacker News Board

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#111

Post by dmichulke » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 5:38 AM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #14

rev_bird wrote: post #2

This is a pretty surreal move: >The law says the money will help taxi businesses to adopt "new technologies and advanced service, safety and operational capabilities" and to support workforce development... [Larry Meister, manager of the Boston area's Independent Taxi Operator's Association] said the money could go toward improving a smartphone app his association has started using, or to other big needs. I'm not an…

I mostly agree with you, and I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I just read a book ("Listen, Liberal" by Thomas Frank) that makes some interesting points about how liberals have shifted from representing working people to representing professionals, and to worshiping innovation. While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality.…

> it inherently increases inequality.

As does every successful start-up. But please note it only increases inequality because a handful of people get comparatively more rich in the process, the rest gets salary and everybody gets better (more efficient) services.

The latter point means also reducing inequality because other people can now afford these services who couldn't do so before.

> but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs.

By this logic the industrial revolution shouldn't have happened (or at least it should have happened more slowly). The fallacy here is that "things to do" are finite. In fact, they aren't, the things to do just move up the hierarchy of needs. In the old days, "things to do" meant just "build basic housing, hunt and gather food", nowadays they are "build efficient and large houses, build smart phones, TVs, computers, Pokemon Go apps" and there will be other things to do once transportation is taken care of.

> Many of them don't want to go back to school or get technical training.

Unfortunately (and this holds for all of us) this is not sufficient. I also just want to have some income and be with my family and friends, yet in order to get that I have to return something of equal value to someone else. If my services are no longer needed due to technological advance, I cannot just sit on it and hope that people in power force others to give me more for less.

Finally, the taxi industry is only as "rich" now because of the constant regulation in many states/countries. If it weren't for this regulation, salaries would have been much lower for years already and many more people would have chosen other jobs to begin with. The problem is just exarcerbated now because of this and it's definitely not the fault of the "disrupting company or industry" nor is it its responsibility to care.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#112

Post by ars » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 5:39 AM UTC

function_seven wrote: post #77

maverick_iceman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One Bus Away was developed by University of Washington students, not government bureaucrats.

That's not really relevant to the GGP comment, though. The government can take the tax money and contract out the development work on an app. Or use cheap student labor.

Of course it's relevant. The "government" doesn't make apps directly ever.

The difference is who speced the project, or came up with the ideas.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#113

Post by gaius » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 5:39 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #107

acidburnNSA wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with you, and I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I just read a book ("Listen, Liberal" by Thomas Frank) that makes some interesting points about how liberals have shifted from representing working people to representing professionals, and to worshiping innovation. While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality.…

> While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality. You seem to be asserting this without any explanation, but it's pretty clearly wrong. Do the math. Cab driver making $30K is displaced and has to take a different job making $25K, with the result that $30K of value is captured by cab riders via lower fares while the former cab driver suffers $-5K. But…

Sure, anyone can do equality as a side effect of a race to the bottom. But that's not a great outcome nor one a country should aim for.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#114

Post by Trundle » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 5:40 AM UTC

dsacco wrote: post #52

acidburnNSA wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with you, and I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I just read a book ("Listen, Liberal" by Thomas Frank) that makes some interesting points about how liberals have shifted from representing working people to representing professionals, and to worshiping innovation. While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality.…

I like your comment as a contribution to discussion, but I'd like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself. I see this implied quite a bit on Hacker News. Usually something along the lines of, "But doing this will increase income inequality" stated as a counterpoint. If overall quality of life increases, I am personally unconcerned with income inequality. I haven't seen definitiv…

I'll bite although this isn't the most researched of my opinions that's for sure.

Humans happiness isn't concerned with absolute standard of living but more comparative standard of living. I don't mean just conscious comparison in a competitive manner, I mean in setting what counts as normal to our brains.

Consider the standard of living we've obtained compared to what humans had for the vast majority of our 200 000 years. Regular hot meals, basic medicine, and being able to fall asleep without fear of waking up to tigers ripping you and your family apart should have resulted in us all walking around in pure bliss 24/7 if advancement in standard of living was all that was important in absolute terms. But we're not. Some of us are happy. Some not. Some so unhappy that we straight up kill ourselves. Neither do I think past generations of humans, or any other animal that hasn't achieved our current standard of living yet, are all walking around in misery.

Instead we care about comparative measures. How am I doing compared to how I was doing before. How am I doing compared to my peers. How am I compared to the guy down the street. How am I doing compared to all of those people I see on the internet/tv. Again, although phrased as if it's a conscious mental decision here, it's about subconsciously setting a 'normal' that's greater than we have. Think of the whole facebook making people feel inferior thing because they only see their friends highlights reel making life seem like it should be one long maldives vacation, except with inequality it's not an illusion and you actually are being exposed to better lifestyles.

So inequality isn't fundamentally detrimental, however exposure to it is. At its most extreme it shows you fantastical lifestyles you could never realistically imagine to live. More realistically it's your neighbour buying a nicer car than you have. Either way it takes the great thing you have going and puts it in to a context within which it can't compete.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#115

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 5:41 AM UTC

ricw wrote: post #93

This is unbelievable. Never have I used a more corrupt and unfriendly taxi service as the one in Boston / Cambridge. And they are supposed to be subsidised?! I have 1) been driven round crazy detours to up my cost 2) been forced to drive a detour because the card machine was broken and they only accepted cash 3) been turned down because my destination wasn't far enough 4) been shouted at because I was watching the fr…

[deleted]

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#116

Post by gaius » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 5:42 AM UTC

xname2 wrote: post #62

acidburnNSA wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with you, and I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I just read a book ("Listen, Liberal" by Thomas Frank) that makes some interesting points about how liberals have shifted from representing working people to representing professionals, and to worshiping innovation. While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality.…

Are uber drivers "working people"? Are some uber users "working people"?

Uber drivers are like employees, but without employee rights. This is great for Uber and its investors, but not so much for "working people".

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#117

Post by morgante » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 5:42 AM UTC

HillRat wrote: post #92

dsacco wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your comment as a contribution to discussion, but I'd like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself. I see this implied quite a bit on Hacker News. Usually something along the lines of, "But doing this will increase income inequality" stated as a counterpoint. If overall quality of life increases, I am personally unconcerned with income inequality. I haven't seen definitiv…

>I'd like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself. One main issue is that income inequality decreases socioeconomic mobility by inflating the cost of scarce goods that improve earnings capabilities. So 4K TVs are cheaper but college tuition becomes unaffordable, because good universities and grad programs are valuable, scarce goods that the wealthy can outbid everyone else on. P…

> So 4K TVs are cheaper but college tuition becomes unaffordable, because good universities and grad programs are valuable, scarce goods that the wealthy can outbid everyone else on.

Except that such goods are increasingly not priced via the market.

If you're smart enough to get into an elite university, you don't have to worry about the cost. Full stop.

That being said, I do think we have a societal responsibility to set things up so that this applies across the board. Personally, I think income inequality is fine and maybe even good if we can also have:

1) Basic income, so that even if your parents aren't wealthy you still have all the necessities.

2) Well-funded and high quality public education (from pre-K up through college)

Personally, I actually think income inequality can make these things easier to achieve for 2 reasons:

1. Each individual dollar matters a lot less to billionaires, so they're a lot more willing to give away a huge percentage of their wealth. This trend is very evident with tech billionaires. If Warren Buffet had his wealth spread amongst millions of families, would each one be willing to give up 90% of that wealth?

2. The winnowing of the middle makes redistribution more palatable. A large part of current politics is moderately well-off people feeling morally superior to slightly less well-off people. If society becomes more bimodal, it's a lot more possible to pass aggressive redistribution policies.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#118

Post by orblivion » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 5:43 AM UTC

quickben wrote: post #3

Well, things should be equal. Why should a taxi service have to perform a regular vehicle inspection and a an uber driver be exempt from it? Either make the Uber driver go through regular inspections or cancel the regulation for the cabbies.

Nobody should have to do any of it. That the taxi industry is stuck doing it is not Uber/Lyft's problem.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#119

Post by dsacco » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 5:43 AM UTC

edko wrote: post #88

dsacco wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your comment as a contribution to discussion, but I'd like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself. I see this implied quite a bit on Hacker News. Usually something along the lines of, "But doing this will increase income inequality" stated as a counterpoint. If overall quality of life increases, I am personally unconcerned with income inequality. I haven't seen definitiv…

Rather than start a dialectic, let's consider concrete examples: is there any society with a large income inequality that also has a world-class standard of living for all of its members?

Yes: the United States.

EDIT: This answer probably comes across as cavalier and perhaps dismissive without some sort of effort to substantiate my claim, so I'll edit this in:

The United States ranks sixth in the world for median cost-adjusted household income. It ranks highly, along with many European countries, for overall quality of life, according to the Quality of Life Index (2016) - countries like Switzerland and Germany are higher, while countries like the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan are lower.

Quality of life can be a vague and murky measurement, but pretty much every index attempting to measure it presents the same set of countries topping the list. The US is not perfect, and I'll accept arguments that it would be better off with less income inequality, but I'd like to see evidence that this is the case.

Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

#120

Post by giaour » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 5:44 AM UTC

a_c wrote: post #64

If this logic make sense, perhaps AirBnB need to be taxed to support hotel industry, Iphone should pay to nokia and internet should be taxed to landline

Landlines all have a fee that subsidizes service in rural areas. Hotels have to pay hotel taxes in addition to property taxes, which are often earmarked.