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

reuters.com

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

#131

Post by throwaway049 »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #15
intopieces wrote: post #12

The weird thing is they don't even have a solid plan for what to do with the money. Or a plan at all, it seems. The least they could do is create some kind of MassTrans App that shows a user options for navigating the state (uber/lyft/cabs/transit/greyhound etc). Otherwise it seems like collection for the sake of it.

I've never seen a successful government app, certainly there must be one. Does anyone know of a reasonably useful government app? It's hard enough for normal tech to create useful apps, let alone the over expensive bogged down government.

Transport for London's real time API makes lots of third party apps possible. Their own route planner website is good too.

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

#132

Post by morgante »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #69
acidburnNSA wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it. For self-driving trucks, someone suggested to me once that we could give all the truck drivers promotions to "logistics supervisors." They ride along and do paperwork and the trucking companies stop hiring for that position. I just feel like it's more likely that the trucking companies see that they can save money by firing them and tell them goodbye.

They will always need drivers just to stave off banditry and handle emergencies. What is likely is a single manned truck leading small convoys of automated machines.

> They will always need drivers just to stave off banditry

This is an argument I have never understood.

Do you really think the only thing preventing highway robbers is a driver? If anything, self-driving trucks would likely be able to respond more effectively as they can call police without fearing for their lives.

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

#133

Post by cookiecaper »

edko wrote: post #53
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.…

When self-drivers become the norm, taxi and truck drivers, and their families (a significant section of the economy) will be the first to suffer, but it will not end there. The knock-on recessive effect on every other sector of the economy will be huge. Anyone thinking lightly along the lines of "truck drivers should adapt to the new economy", feeling safe for being in another industry, should remember how the housin…

We can't keep going with this type of attitude; it's blatantly anti-change. The government's job is not to ensure that everyone has comfortable finances. The government's job is to provide a framework that makes it possible and a structure that removes nefarious actors. As long as that's occurring, the economy is self-governing, and we shouldn't be propping up legacy economic sectors just because we feel bad for the people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck in them.

The competitive virtue of capitalism is neutered by measures like this one and the affected sectors grow rancid, just as a gangrenous organ would.

We have to allow the economy to work. If we believe in our people, we believe that drivers will be able to find something new that fits into the contemporary economic conditions instead of being dependent on state subsidies and political benevolence for survival. That new thing may be a massively beneficial development, that we'll never get to see if we insist on paying them a stipend for continued participation in an obsolete function.

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

#134

Post by dsacco »

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…

In response to your main issue regarding socioeconomic mobility - why is this, in turn, a problem?

If you can demonstrate that reduced social mobility is an issue, and that this is increased by progressively greater income inequality (the latter of which I probably agree with on cursory inspection), then it seems income inequality is a net loss.

However, from a utilitarian perspective, I don't see a reason to care about social mobility if quality of life increases for everyone, not just the upper classes.

Keep in mind that I am working on two axioms:

1. Income inequality is a mathematical certainty in a functional society with more than n participants, where n is the maximum number of people who can be personally and honestly cooperative with each other, and

2. Income inequality refers to differences in an individual's absolute resources available for consumption, not their quality of life (exceptions granted for luxury consumption goods, not basic utilities that are available across all social classes).

As a very simplistic example that I'd enjoy having holes poked in, Apple has generated wondrous income inequality for many of its engineers and management. However, it has also leveraged economies of scale and competitive forces to manufacture a mass market product that is, statistically, enjoyed by even the poorest households in America and which affords its users with the most powerful innovation since the printing press in their pockets.

EDIT: This comment has had a rapid change in up and down votes. It's fine to disagree with me, but I don't think it's unreasonable to question whether or not a lack of social mobility is actually a bad thing, as a Socratic baseline.

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

#135

Post by morgante »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #32
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.…

Hmm, if liberals are so pro-business then why Bernie has so many fans?

Why do you think Bernie is inherently anti-business?

A lot of things he proposed, like single payer health care, would actually be great for small businesses.

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

#136

Post by zaidf »

gaius wrote: post #116
xname2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Citation needed. If you were right, you wouldn't have employed baristas etc. quitting their jobs to drive uber.

To make your claim without acknowledging well-established upside of not being employed by Uber is disingenuous at best. Many drivers I talk to enjoy not having fixed work hours and the general flexibility not usually offered when you become an employee. Your argument speaks for none of these Uber drivers.

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

#137

Post by morgante »

tomdell wrote: post #125
maverick_iceman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The medallion owners were making an investment. Every investment carries a risk. If they were profiting from their investments then they were not going to share those with anyone else. Why then should others share their losses?

Imagine you want to open a restaurant. You know that it will be successful - you've done your research, whatever, yadda yadda. The government charges you a hefty initial tax to open your restaurant - it's a steep cost, but you expect that you'll be able to pay it off, because you know your place is going to do well. Seriously, you've paid attention to history - these kinds of things - the way you're doing it, anyway…

Regulatory risk is an investment risk which companies face all the time. I might spend billions on developing a nuclear power plant and then have the government outlaw nuclear power. That doesn't mean I'm entitled to a share of the profits from solar power plants, it just means I made an investment in a business which went badly.

Taxis were part of a cartel. Any time you buy into a cartel, you should absolutely consider the risks of the cartel being broken up.

That MA is passing this is a huge mark against them and really lowers my opinion of the state. They're basically being bribed to stop innovation.

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

#138

Post by flamedoge »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #126
tro2102 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? I don't necessarily disagree with this sentiment, but this doesn't really address the question, which is about what happens to an industry when it's made redundant by technology. Cab drivers competing with self-driving cars can't "suck it up". "what if they don't want to" in regard to people working? Again, I feel you haven't read the spirit of this comment accurately. What ha…

What happened to the drivers of horse-drawn carriages when automobiles arrived?

What happened to the horses?

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

#139

Post by zaidf »

giaour wrote: post #95
karma_vaccum123 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs. Yet the government watches small businesses fail all the time with nothing more than an offer of unemployment insurance. Why should the government have a special care for taxis but no special care for a pizza parlor that goes under? Do they offer to retrain the workers with more advanced appliances? In this…

Unlike an individual pizza parlor, the taxi fleet in a given city plays an important role in policy planning. Public transit planning takes taxi service into account, and taxis are barred in many locales from refusing medically necessary transportation. Taxis have obligations that go above and beyond those imposed on a generic livery provider, and as such governments might be reluctant to let a few livery providers o…

Isn't that just kicking the can down the road? Wouldn't the government be better served revising the plan to take new innovation into account than instituting a tax purely to slow down innovation?
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