Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are they profitable though?
In the US, yes. They were using that to fund expansion into China/India.
Uber is, I don't know about Lyft. Does anyone here knows about Lyft's profitability?
Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis
151–160 of 539 posts
Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis
#152Earlier 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…
Again, I feel you haven't read the spirit of this comment accurately. The comment specifically talked about those people not wanting to do another form of work. It wasn't a generic "lets talk about mass automation induced redundancy" which appears to be what you're trying to discuss with me. As you'll note, I'm pro basic income. I just don't think it's fair to say I'm not properly addressing the spirit, when in this…
I didn't say they don't want to do another job. I said they don't want to go back to school. They either hated school or were bored sick of it. So they'll generally look for other jobs available at their skill level. That's why inequality grows. Disruptive tech creates jobs for educated ambitious people while displacing people who are less so. Yeah we as a society can tell them it's their problem, but there might be a lot of them, and they might be a force to be reckoned with politically. Will it escalate beyond Trump, Brexit, etc.? Who knows.
Telling people to get more school is something educated people often do, but it's sometimes a bit self-serving. It makes themselves feel like they're a winner and they deserve it when often their circumstances positioned them better to be able to get that education in the first place.
Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
Every year, 3.5 million people in the US experience homelessness.
Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> If you were right, you wouldn't have employed baristas etc. quitting their jobs to drive uber. Right. No one ever took a job without knowing the full effects of said job. Everyone is 100% aware of the situation of their employment and of the inherent consequences of that job. Next up: obesity is just a media circus, nobody actually eats more than they need to survive.
So working for uber is just like obesity? Got it!
Ironically, OP is the one arguing as if he is 100% aware of job of driving an uber and his awareness leads him to argue that it is categorically bad.
More realistically, it is good for some, bad for some...like basically any other job.
Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis
#155I think that this makes sense in concept if not in implementation. Taxi medallions were sold and traded under a certain set of laws which defined their value. The government decided to change those laws, so "buying out" the medallions at some fair price, paid for by the beneficiaries of the change in law, makes sense.
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?
Investments carry risk but if the person selling the investment doesn't carry out their end of the bargain it a a breach or contract. Medallions were sold by the city with the understanding that you had to have one in order to drive taxis. Now the city let's anyone drive a taxi.
It's a bait and switch on the part of the city. The city should pay them back.
Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis
#156This 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.…
> What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.?
Just share this link with all these people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
It's all the same old story: opposing the progress leads to the extinction.
Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly my point. There is no reason to use an arbitrary percentage. More to the point, if you're "100% for something, except for [whatever]", you're simply not 100% for that thing. Why even use a percentage at that point, let alone 100%? It's just involving numbers with no purpose.
Inside the category, it's 100%. It's a good way to signal that it's not a vague thing. Let's take the statement "I'm 100% for punishing people that deserve it". That's a perfectly good statement, and the "100%" shows certainty across the category. Reinterpreting it as "I'm 40% for punishing people" is just being bad at discourse. The scope is not arbitrary, and shouldn't be treated separately.
Technically speaking, you're correct.
But would it not be linguistically simpler (and maybe less taxing for the reader) to use emphasis without resorting to percentages? The fact that 100% can be mapped to an unqualified boolean ("Yes, in favor, no buts.") and 40% cannot be doesn't mean that either are appropriate.
It's not elegant to parse sentence structure as categories to contrive percentage use as correct, even if it's technically sound. I understood the parent's sentence, but I had to read it several times because it just came across as a bit odd.
Honestly, when we start using category theory to analyze whether or not someone has appropriately quantified their stance on something, we've gone pretty far off the reservation.
I suppose my overall point here is that we shouldn't use percentages to quantify our opinions in place of emphasizing in a more linguistically elegant way. Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree?
Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis
#158Earlier 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.…
Many of them don't want to go back to school or get technical training... What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.? Uhhh, how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? I know plenty of people on hn are all about the "making the world a better place" shtick and would work anyway/for the sake of it but for the vast majority of people work straight up means doing things you otherw…
Sadly, the reality is that most people seem to side with your perspective. And, like that, the great middle class boom that drove the golden age of the 20th century is over.
Recently, I've had the jarring realization that for Humans (and maybe nature, in general), the stable equilibrium point is inequality. And, like the cab drivers, a lot of us have to 'suck it up' and realize that the 20th century (and perhaps the whole post-enlightenment period) is not coming back. So, better to brace ourselves, tighten up our finances, and ready our families for the 'low-growth' future.
Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis
#159Well, 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.
> Why should a taxi service have to perform a regular vehicle inspection and a an uber driver be exempt from it? All cars in MA have yearly inspections. Any extra inspection for taxi is total nonsense, probably invented by the taxi companies themself as a barrier to entry by others.
regular basic inspection/maintenance (in Australia it's once a day from memory) of taxis mean a customer is much less likely to get stuck somewhere because their taxi had a mechanical failure.
Taxis drive a LOT more km/miles than regular cars - more driving, and particularly more city driving === more wear and tear on the cars systems.
Yet again it seems to me that the fandom around uber in the USA is because your taxi regulations are just stupid. I've never heard of "the card machine was broken so I was forced to pay cash".
Re: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of them don't want to go back to school or get technical training... What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.? Uhhh, how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? I know plenty of people on hn are all about the "making the world a better place" shtick and would work anyway/for the sake of it but for the vast majority of people work straight up means doing things you otherw…
You identify most of the difficulty of this scenario: 1. Taxis are a dying industry, but taxi drivers are not adapting. 2. As a result, taxi drivers are suffering. Their livelihoods, which have brought food to their families' tables for decades, are being taken from them by forces they could not anticipate or control. Of course, 3. We care about these taxi drivers. Suffering is bad no matter what industry you work in…
To this end, we should br taxing self driving cars to create a pension fund for taxi drivers. Taxing one cab company to pay another doesn't seem to address your listed concerns at all.