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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

#441

Post by iRobbery »

chillacy wrote: post #184
AndyNemmity wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't, never used it. So it's an app that hails you a taxi. Does that make Uber a taxi service?

No, unless they're paying the drivers. They're basically providing an interface to find taxis. Just like how Amazon can sell you a pack of Coke without being a food manufacturer. Or blogs can bring affiliate traffic to Amazon without being PCI compliant. Kayak and Hipmunk can get you a plane ticket without being an airline company. Etc.

sending referrals to a site or handling payments are quite different.

There are plenty of definitions of the word taxi in many languages that simply mean a person transporting you from a to b exchange for money.

Doesnt say it gets exchange with the driver, nor are you saying that uberdriver drives around for fun and games. He does get paid to transport people from a to b. The typical business of a taxi service :)

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

#442

Post by AnthonyMouse »

eropple wrote: post #284
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no bottom. The less things cost the less difference there is between having money and not.

Oh, there most certainly is a bottom. Uber being cheaper for more people doesn't make rent cheaper for the person who's had their income slashed--or for everyone else that you would blithely reduce.

Obviously because Uber has nothing to do with housing. Are you asserting that there is no possible way for technology or government policy to make housing more affordable?

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

#443

Post by adrusi »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #331
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…

> Uhhh, how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? You have it backwards. Humans have always had to suck it up because this is the default, natural state. But one would think in XXI century we could do better. That we can show some civilization, some compassion, instead of telling the unfortunate among us that they should suck it up. They're not our slaves to be forced into productive jobs, or resources to be used up a…

I appreciate the desire to transcend the exploitation of labor, but even ignoring the fact that this specific case goes about doing that in one of the worst possible ways, I don't think that it's fair or wise to offer bailouts in reaction to specific economic shifts. By bailouts I mean any kind of intervention to cushion or shield individuals from financial collapse.

I say this because it creates an incentive to move with the herd. Only economic shifts that effect a large class of people will ever see bailouts. This means that it's safer to to do something that a lot of people do, like drive a taxi, than to do something more exotic, like opening a pastry shop. If you drive a taxi and some large corporation deploys a fleet of self driving taxis in your city, then you have a chance of a bailout because there would be enough people affeced to make it worth legislators' time. If some starts delivering oven-hot 3d-printed pastries by drone, then there's not enough pastry shop owners for legislators to address it. That's not fair to the pastry shop owners, and it makes it less attractive to open a pastry shop.

If you want to avoid destroying lives and families when major innovation occurs (or in other circumstances) then it has to be via means that are available to everyone. Proposed systems like basic income or negative income tax make the loss of a job less damaging, but are not without their downfalls. Similar with traditional liberal welfare programs.

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

#444

Post by Cozumel »

pfisch wrote: post #295
chrisbennet wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a thought exercise, what will/would software developers do once 90% are made redundant by A.I. or something? Maybe "suck it up" and go back to school to become nurses?

Well, if software developers are made redundant by AI then we have already transitioned to a new type of economy because virtually every other job has been replaced except service industry. If we are in some impossible world where that isn't true then I would say they should maybe go into medicine, engineering or law I guess. Your question is too open ended to answer really. I have like 10 follow up questions to unde…

> I would say they should maybe go into medicine, engineering or law

There's already an AI lawyer:

http://www.rossintelligence.com/ http://www.techinsider.io/the-worlds-first-artificially-inte...

and Watson played doctor:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ibms-watson-cracks-medical-mystery-...

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

#445

Post by sanderjd »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #239
raquo wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't we had revolutions in the last 150 years? Not in the US, but other countries had a few. But that's not the point. You don't need an armed uprising when you have elections. You need populism. Trump / Brexit / far right parties are not "revolution".

> Haven't we had revolutions in the last 150 years? Not in the US, but other countries had a few. Yes, and it worked out so wonderfully for them. :)

And that's the point! Armed revolution is really bad, and massive inequality is one piece in a puzzle that can lead to it. It seems really odd to me to shrug this off as at least part of the answer to the original question of why inequality is bad.

We have been more or less immune to this in the US for a long time because of our large and strong middle class that has had way too much to lose. But that's the same middle class that the elites are eroding by short-sightedly capturing an ever larger portion of the modern economy's output.

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

#446

Post by aidenn0 »

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.…

We are never bringing manufacturing jobs back without becoming completely isolationist. A lot of manufacturing has started to move back to the US in the last decade, but it hasn't created very many jobs, because the product lines that get moved back to the US are the ones that can be automated; i.e. those products for which the cost of labor is very small relative to the margins for the product.

We would have to drop out of the WTO and impose some form of tariffs or limits on imports from countries with inexpensive labor if we really wanted those manufacturing jobs back. Lots of politicians say they want these jobs back, but none of them recommend such a policy, so they are either divorced from reality or just pandering.

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

#448

Post by yummyfajitas »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #418
TeMPOraL wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Uhhh, how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? You have it backwards. Humans have always had to suck it up because this is the default, natural state. But one would think in XXI century we could do better. That we can show some civilization, some compassion, instead of telling the unfortunate among us that they should suck it up. They're not our slaves to be forced into productive jobs, or resources to be used up a…

Well said. Its part of the 'enclosure' trend going on for 300 years. When folks can't live independent of capitalist job-seeking, they are essentially wage-slaves. Used to be you could just trap a brace of rabbits for the pot, weave your own cloth, wait for a better paying job. Society changed. This is why I favor a GBI - its reinstating the idea of the 'commons' where folks could say no to low-paying jobs.

Why can't you still do that? From what I can tell, land in Detroit or Appalachia is pretty cheap - nothing prevents you from trapping rabbits or weaving your own cloth there.

The reason people don't do this is that as wealth has increased, being a wage slave or welfare queen (the modern equivalent seems to be disability fraud king) has become vastly more attractive.

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

#449

Post by brownbat »

angry-hacker wrote: post #347
zigzigzag wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, either prices float to their natural level and there's no problem (i.e. Uber's profits are reasonable), or a competitor comes along. Come on, keep some perspective. Uber is a taxi app. We're not talking about a Manhatten Project of software here. Duplicating the Uber experience is easy . 99% of the effort they're putting in there is the fights with all the governments, regulators, taxi unions etc.

And how those new apps get traction? They either need VC money or they die. Facebook and Twitter are not Manhattan projects either, but there's no real competition. Right now Uber is using the VC money to break or ignore laws and create itself a monopoly. If we really wanted to disrupt the Taxi business, you need to destroy all the regulation for everyone. Collecting tax pennies and giving them away does not help, of…

> And how those new apps get traction?

In a world where Uber is charging monopoly rents, they compete on either price or features.

Monopolies work when there's a barrier to entry beyond name recognition.

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

#450

Post by taxicabjesus »

chillingeffect wrote: post #447

Serious question here: how come taxi organizations haven't leveraged uber/lyft tech by now? Seems most kinks, tech and laws are figured out now. Why not upgrade using capital since the returns are obvious!?

> Serious question here: how come taxi organizations haven't leveraged uber/lyft tech by now?

They have, but only the largest taxi companies have the financial resources to do it well, especially in an environment of collapsing revenue. There are off-the-shelf apps for taxi companies, but these aren't very polished. Large transportation companies have existing dispatching systems to work with their existing contracts (Medicaid transportation, etc), and they can't just 'start over' with a new dispatching system very quickly.

The company that I used to drive for bought the software company that provided its Electronic Taxi Dispatch v1.0 [1] phone app, and spent a couple million upgrading it to v1.1, where the passenger is given instantaneous feedback just like duper's app. It took several months to work out most the bugs - I frequently filed reports with the developers.

[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/p/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.html

They were going to replace all the in-cab computers with tablets, to better interface with their new app, but I don't know if they've done that yet...

Discount Cab's apps: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.treeline.g... https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/total-transit-prev.-discount...

VIP Taxi's apps: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vip-taxi/id1076304288?mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vip.taxi

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