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The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

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Re: The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

#71

Post by AnimalMuppet »

dragonwriter wrote: post #70
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know we had advisors there starting in 1950 (under Eisenhower). I was dating from Tonkin. Still, those were (mostly?) advisors rather than front-line troops. Per Wikipedia, ground combat troops first came after Tonkin, which means under Johnson. Still, in no case is it reasonable to say that Truman started it.

> Still, those were (mostly?) advisors rather than front-line troops. Initially, but that stopped being true well before Tonkin. > Per Wikipedia, ground combat troops first came after Tonkin Not sure which Wikipedia page you got that from but see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Assistance_Command,... Which discusses, among other things, the 1964 MACV/MAAG-Vietnam reorg due to the scale of combat deployments…

I was at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War, which said:

> By 1964 there were 23,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, but this escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. In response the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave Lyndon B. Johnson authorization to increase U.S. military presence, deploying ground combat units for the first time and increasing troop levels to 184,000.

"Ground combat units for the first time" was the phrase that, to me, said that the US was now there in a full war condition.

Re: The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

#72

Post by onething »

dragonwriter wrote: post #66
onething wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> wasting money to require registration for the draft But... that's a bipartisan thing, not a Democratic thing: no Republican Administration (which could do this alone, as an executive action) or Republican majority Congress has proposed ending registration since Carter reopened it as an executive action to prepare for potential war in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In fact, bipartisan legislation cr…

[flagged]

Re: The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

#73

Post by 8bitsrule »

whoeveryouwant wrote: post #61

Is the article really about the sharing economy, or rather about discrediting Lessig and the people who believe publicly funded research should be public? Seems a little odd the way it relates Uber and AirBnB with Lessig.

Exactly. To me 'sharing' means barter and what happens in villages and Creative Commons. Not LSC dressed-up in 'sharing' clothes.

You can fool some of the people ...

Re: The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

#74

Post by ryanwaggoner »

dbt00 wrote: post #52
mkirklions wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason these were illegal was cronyism. And before you get excited about the safety we get with regulation. Capitalism has proven with billion dollar companies, we don't want regulated taxis.

Taxi licensing was not cronyism, it was simple economics. Taxicabs can either have x drivers all at a subsistence level, or 0.5x drivers with a reasonable standard of living. Licensing with a cap and fixed rates becomes a policy decision driven by the public interest.

Why is this not true for every type of market? Taco stands, barbershops, web designers, attorneys, parking lots, dog walkers, etc? Couldn't you just replace "taxicabs" and "drivers" with any kind of business or industry?

Isn't the collective end goal of the competitive marketplace supposed to be razor thin margins due to competition? I live in NYC and prior to Uber, 1) taxi medallions were valued at high six figures, 2) service was terrible, 3) prices were too high, and 4) actual drivers still made shit money.

I think Uber and Lyft and others have improved all of that, to be honest. Competition is a beautiful thing.

Re: The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

#75

Post by ryanwaggoner »

pesmhey wrote: post #7
jandrese wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or: "This is just an unmarked taxi." "Except hailing/billing isn't stuck in the past so you don't have to get lucky to find an empty one on the street or call a surly dispatcher and wait 45 minutes. You also get the bill up front so you know how much it will cost before you even say yes. You can always pay by credit card too, you'll never arrive at the destination and then only be informed that the credit card reader…

It's definitely better, no arguments here. My point is that Silicon Valley has branded everything it does as 'tech' when in reality, it's just a better taxi company, a better hotel company, etc. unencumbered by the old ways. Like, the reality would have been good enough, 'We're a taxi (or insert whatever industry you want) company doing things way better than before." Instead, it's 'We're using algorithms and this sh…

I think that's really unfair to what Uber has built. I routinely take UberPool in Manhattan for 30-40 minutes during rush hour for around $5. Along the way, it's not uncommon to share the car with another 4-6 passengers, as people are picked up and dropped off along the way. That's not just a better taxi company, that's a whole new modality of transportation that's only possible because of technology.

Re: The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

#76

Post by ryanwaggoner »

RHSeeger wrote: post #53
jandrese wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or: "This is just an unmarked taxi." "Except hailing/billing isn't stuck in the past so you don't have to get lucky to find an empty one on the street or call a surly dispatcher and wait 45 minutes. You also get the bill up front so you know how much it will cost before you even say yes. You can always pay by credit card too, you'll never arrive at the destination and then only be informed that the credit card reader…

Your experience is almost exactly the opposite of mine. 1. Without fail, taking Uber costs me more than taking a taxi, same trip, same time of day. 2. The bill up front point is fair 3. As far as paying by credit card, know the rules of your city. In many cities, they must take credit cards or are not allowed to drive. As such, if they tell you at the end of the trip that you must pay cash, just tell them you can't.…

I live in NYC and Uber / Lyft are sometimes cheaper and sometimes more expensive. Their premium is correlated with how hard it'll be to catch a cab. So if it's raining, it'll be hard to catch a cab. Uber / Lyft will be more expensive than a cab, but easier to take.

UberPool and Lyft's equivalent are basically always cheaper though, and I've found they work very well in Manhattan.

Re: The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

#77

Post by digitaltrees »

onething wrote: post #44
digitaltrees wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't. You are just presenting false equivalence while ignoring the magnitude of the reality distortion field that republicans push with no close equivalent from democrats. - Name a 10 year war democrats have championed... - Name a democrat that questions the legitimacy of employment numbers or the objectivity of the data being provided... - Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming (and b…

[flagged]

>... I think the OP might have been referring to the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office. What changed, other than the POTUS? We ended up leaving Iraq at the same timetable that Bush had proposed.

I recall many democrats complaining about not closing Guantanamo, or leaving Iraq faster. I don't recall any saying that it should continue and using going to war as a tool for pseudo-patriotic posturing.

>... Well the unemployment numbers don't include the long term unemployed who would still like a job, etc so I would assume everyone should look beyond the simple number reported in the press.

I am not talking about the subtlety of the different measures of unemployment and whether we should quote the U6 or U3 numbers when we speak about unemployment. I am talking about large parts of the Republican Party calling all unemployment data fake, rigged, designed to help Obama and all of the other demonstrably false descriptions used to support their agenda. If you want me to dig up some news articles I will, but it was basically how republicans said hello for the last two years of Obama's administration.

>... Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming

Democrats don't reject that it is scientifically possible to genetically modify food, or even that any assertion that is is totally safe is false. Rather, there are three main arguments against GMO: 1. The risk posed to humans is still uncertain and poses an outsized risk, 2. Allowing a company to patent food, along with monopoly rights, is a dangerous social policy, especially when farmers are being sued out of business by GMO crop contamination (even when they take great pains not to use GMO seed), 3. Consumers should at least be notified about the presence of GMO in food so they can make an informed choice.

Democrats are not saying nuclear fission is fake, but the severity of an accident makes even a very low risk of an accident a very asymmetric harm that should be weighed carefully. Further, we don't have a legitimate storage facility for nuclear waste.

I don't see how these two issues represent a "rejection of the science".

>...No economist has ever proposed a policy called "trickle down economics". The pejorative is simply used by people to attack someone else's economic polices. Using a perjorative is simply an attempt to poison the well and prevent discussion. In terms of policies that don't work. but still get support... A couple that come to mind:

- Umm President Bush gave a speech describing his supply side policies as trickle down...that is not me being pejorative, that is, and has been, the common descriptive phrase first suggested by a republican president. It has become pejorative because the policy has never delivered the outcomes it predicted and seems to also be casually linked to a large increase in income inequality. You can question the causal relationship, but when a policy is predicted to have a certain outcome, and seems to have a different, and seemingly negative outcome, it seems expected that it would get a bad popular opinion.

>... - wasting money to require registration for the draft - war on drugs - DARE program - three strikes (voted in CA, a heavy democratic state)

All of these are republican policies, I asked for one example of a zombie policy that democrats keep pushing in the face of overwhelming factual evidence that such policy doesn't work.

Re: The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

#78

Post by onething »

digitaltrees wrote: post #77
onething wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>... I think the OP might have been referring to the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office. What changed, other than the POTUS? We ended up leaving Iraq at the same timetable that Bush had proposed. I recall many democrats complaining about not closing Guantanamo, or leaving Iraq faster. I don't recall any saying that it should continue and using going to war as a tool for pseudo…

>...I don't recall any saying that it should continue and using going to war as a tool for pseudo-patriotic posturing.

It isn't hard to see that opposition to the war dwindled drastically after the president had a D after their name in 2009. Why was that? We only left Iraq at the time proposed by Bush (and even then Obama tried to extend it but couldn't get agreement from the Ira government)

>...Democrats don't reject that it is scientifically possible to genetically modify food, or even that any assertion that is is totally safe is false. Rather, there are three main arguments against GMO: 1. The risk posed to humans is still uncertain and poses an outsized risk, 2. Allowing a company to patent food, along with monopoly rights, is a dangerous social policy, especially when farmers are being sued out of business by GMO crop contamination (even when they take great pains not to use GMO seed), 3. Consumers should at least be notified about the presence of GMO in food so they can make an informed choice.

Right - and the above is a rejection of the scientific consensus.

>...Democrats are not saying nuclear fission is fake, but the severity of an accident makes even a very low risk of an accident a very asymmetric harm that should be weighed carefully.

Even including Chernobyl (which was an unsafe design that would have been illegal to built anywhere other than the Soviet Union), the scientific consensus is that nuclear power has been the safest form of power generation.

The positions of the conservatives on global warming is disgusting, but the refusal to accept the science on things like the above is also bad.

>...Further, we don't have a legitimate storage facility for nuclear waste.

It was a democrat who stopped that. Though next generation reactors will be able to use nuclear waste as fuel, so keeping the spent fuel around above ground might turn out to be the best approach. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

Unfortunately it was a democrat who stopped work on that design.

>...President Bush gave a speech describing his supply side policies as trickle down...

Let me guess, this was at a charity event or the white house corresponds dinner where you are expected to make fun of yourself.

>...that is not me being pejorative, that is, and has been, the common descriptive phrase first suggested by a republican president.

No. The first use of this was by William Jennings Bryan at the 1896 democratic national convention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

>All of these are republican policies,

Well let's see... It was libertarians like Milton Friedman who helped end the draft after the Viet Nam war. The registration for the draft was put back into place by Carter who was a democrat. Influential democrats like Charles Rangel have argued for actually implementing the draft:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/this-democratic-congressm...

A republican tried to insert language to end the registration but failed as democrats pushed to add women to the registration:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06...

Same goes for the rest - as I said in my original message, conservatives support many if not all of the programs I've listed. If you want to argue that democrats don't support "zombie" programs that don't work and waste money, then either show democrats have ended these programs or that these programs are not "zombie" programs.

Re: The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

#79

Post by onething »

dragonwriter wrote: post #62
onething wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I think the OP might have been referring to the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office. IME, The regular anti-war protestors continued the same recurring protests at the same locations during Obama's term that they had been carrying out under Bush (the same ones are, in many cases, still carrying them out under Trump.) Media focus may have changed, but that's about alignment of…

Were there protests at Obama's residence, like Bush had when president?

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/politics/mother-takes-pro...

According to wikipedia, there were a couple of anti-war protests after Obama took office, but nothing compared to when Bush was president:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War

Re: The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival

#80

Post by eli_gottlieb »

api wrote: post #19
dragonwriter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of funny that most of the people that recognized that the headline unemployment number wasn't a complete picture of the job market when Obama was President have somehow forgotten that since late January of 2017.

Every time the ruling party switches, followers of both parties warp into parallel universes with entirely different realities. Same thing happens for Democrats and their opinions of foreign military adventures. It's an unnecessary war when a Republican is in office, but it's a "peacekeeping mission" or a "humanitarian mission" when a Democrat is in office.

>it's a "peacekeeping mission" or a "humanitarian mission" when a Democrat is in office.

Bull-fucking-shit. The Boston Commons tankies were out every Saturday protesting "illegal war" this and "unconstitutional" that through all of Obama's term.

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