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

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

#161

Post by [deleted] »

ucarion wrote: post #147
Trundle wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

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

#162

Post by civilian »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #6
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…

Cab drivers don't become homeless drifters, they become your next lyft pick up. And the quality of service of Lyft and Uber have gone down the more and more cab drivers become drivers. It's starting to not feel like much of differentiation.

I don't think that's the case?

My worst drivers are usually people who just don't have experience driving. They drive slow, they don't know the city, or they get confused other ways. Or they're just timid and don't know how to take a right on red. I'd much prefer a cabbie who's in an Uber.

But I'm also someone who judiciously gives people lower stars. The rating system works for us! People just need to be willing to give 1-stars and file reports.

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

#163

Post by stephenr »

zaidf wrote: post #154
stephenr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you understand what an analogy is?

You said people are leaving existing jobs to drive for uber.

My response is that people make bad decisions all the time. That doesn't make the decision any less bad.

Also, based on most research, driving for Uber is generally nowhere near as well paying as they imply it is, when all costs are taken into account.

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

#164

Post by phamilton »

dsacco wrote: post #134
HillRat wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ab…

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

It depends on the end goal. If the end goal is scientific advancement, for example, mobility into the educated and academic class is important to provide intellectual diversity. If we bifurcate society into the educated and uneducated, it would likely restrict the flow of new ideas and discovery.

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

#166

Post by wvenable »

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…

Overall quality of life is improving but if you look at the shrinking success of middle class, I believe the reason is income inequality. The economy is health when money is changing hands and more and more money is in fact locked up and not providing any economic activity. This is way the so-called economic recovery hasn't really been felt on the ground. We have a literal handful of people with more wealth the entire rest of the country. And the real sad part, is that wealth is just a number in a computer somewhere. It doesn't contribute much. Those who have that wealth can't spend enough of it to make a significant economic difference.

That inequality could be taxed and provide, for example, infrastructure which is a benefit itself but also provide jobs and generate a cascade of economic activity, like consumer spending, that simply isn't happening now.

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

#167

Post by Dylan16807 »

dsacco wrote: post #157
Dylan16807 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The way I see it, "100%" and "completely" serve the same purpose, and there's no problem with either. It's not something that actually involves math. You can treat it as a non-number.

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

#168

Post by BurningFrog »

ucarion wrote: post #147
Trundle wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

> Taxis are a dying industry, but taxi drivers are not adapting.

How do you know? My impression is that most taxi drivers are very busy adapting. But I don't know either.

Let's be clear: The people hardest hit by Uber/Lyft is taxi company owners.

> Clearly, asking them to adapt overnight would be too demanding

Uber has been around for half a decade. How many decades does it take?

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

#169

Post by dsacco »

edko wrote: post #153
dsacco wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume you're getting your data from here[1].

I'd counter by asking which modern society does not have homeless citizens. Particularly, which countries that rank more highly than the US in the Quality of Life or Human Development Indices?

The other challenge I have is that homeless in America enjoy a quality of life patently superior to that present in nearly every class virtually everywhere else in the world. Sure, homeless in the US are not as well off as the middle class in Switzerland, but they're certainly better off than the median individual in India, Peru, Pakistan, Syria or Zambia (to name a few from what would be a long and saddening list). The resources consumed by, and available to, homeless citizens of the US make them look like citizens of Elysium in comparison to those nations.

To flesh out one example - the bottom 5% of Americans are about as wealthy as the top 5% of Indians.[2]

[1]: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/How_Many.html

[2]: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...

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

#170

Post by cookiecaper »

edko wrote: post #150
cookiecaper wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Truck driver is the most common profession in most states. Self-driving trucks will make their jobs obsolete overnight. Imagine the immediate effect of all those people being without a job. What will happen to retail when those truckers buy less or stop buying? What will happen to wholesale shortly after? What will happen to all other industries? That truck drivers keep their jobs, or that they are gradually able to…

>Truck driver is the most common profession in most states.

You'll find that "software engineer" is becoming the most common profession in many states where truck driver previously was. [0] If truck drivers become software engineers, that's a big quality of life upgrade. You'll also find that prior to the computer revolution, "secretary" was the most common job, because it took a lot of people to coordinate normal business. Computers optimized that away and everything went fine.

Capitalism doesn't work if we fret over the losing side in every competitive accomplishment. It's a competitive world out there, and some hustle is required.

>Self-driving trucks will make their jobs obsolete overnight.

It won't happen overnight. I personally don't think automated driving will be available to the masses half as quickly as most HNers seem to, but that's beside the point.

Adoption will be cautious and gradual. No trucking company wants to risk their cargo or their reputation on tech that hasn't been proven ridiculously reliable. Small portions of fleets will be converted at first, and probably tested for at least a year before they're expanded out. Different companies will adopt at different times. Specialized trucks will have different requirements and may not be immediately available.

There are regulatory issues that haven't even been broached as the technology is not fully realized yet -- I believe it will probably take a decade or more after the tech hits mass market before autonomous driving is a smooth legal process in all 50 states. Full adoption won't be able to occur until autonomous driving is universally legal.

The point is that the whole industry is not just going to wake up one morning and find themselves replaced.

>What will happen to retail? What will happen to wholesale shortly after?

Nothing, because trucking companies won't disrupt service to their clients in the process of converting to an autonomous fleet. It'd ruin their business if they allowed technical upgrades to disrupt their schedules.

>That truck drivers keep their jobs, or that they are gradually able to transition into new ones, is not just necessary not to feel bad about them, but to keep the whole economy running.

They are able to gradually transition as the move to autonomous will be gradual. Nonetheless, companies do go belly up with little warning sometimes. It doesn't seem to stop the economy.

Let me float this idea. A lot of truckers are owner-operators, which means they own their own cab and hook up someone else's cargo. Clients pay per job. Perhaps the fleet will become autonomous as owner-operators upgrade their cabs, at which point they'll make a lot more money because they can just dispatch their cab to get hooked up to some cargo and then be free to engage in other productive activities. Just one possibility that would be impeded by a government program to subsidize non-automated trucking.

There is no need to be alarmist here. The transition will be gradual enough, and people will innovate as necessary to survive, as they have for centuries.

[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...

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