231–240 of 321 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is (legally speaking) a difference between "algorithm deducing how much you can pay" from taxi driver looking at your face and setting their meter accordingly to their feeling of how much you can pay? Is this legal?
Except that cab drivers randomly setting their meters isn't a thing in any of the cabs I've ever been in, and I've lived in both NYC and London.
I'm from Romania and a taxi/Uber ride is somewhere between $2 and $5, which is pretty cheap compared with other countries. I used to ride with Uber and Bolt a lot, however they've been raising pricing during rush hour and I'm not stupid enough to not notice the bill at the end of the ride and these costs add up. So several months back I stopped taking car rides altogether. I walk a lot, I don't mind walking 3 Km on f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is (legally speaking) a difference between "algorithm deducing how much you can pay" from taxi driver looking at your face and setting their meter accordingly to their feeling of how much you can pay? Is this legal?
Except that cab drivers randomly setting their meters isn't a thing in any of the cabs I've ever been in, and I've lived in both NYC and London.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don't understand how you reached this conclusion. Set X= negative value to society of an action we want to discourage, and Y= probability of getting caught. If a fine is set at X/Y, then the expected cost of doing this action is X (fine times probability), and so it will be done if the value of doing it is above X and won't be done if the value is below X, which is efficient. Any value other than X/Y is inefficien…
The model you've presented doesn't account for a lot of other effects which we want as a collective want to account for. Let's break it down. We can't assume perfect humans, so we must assume that sometimes, some of the people will act irrationally or make mistakes. Introducing this "error rate" into our actors means there's an un-removable noise floor of cases where we issue fines to our actors for breaking the law.…
This is manifestly untrue, as I showed above.
If you're concerned over extremely poor people being unable to pay the cost, you can waive that or subsidize it. That's far from sufficient to justify scaling.
When the investors stop propping up Uber and Lyft, both will collapse like they've never been, leaving both investors and drivers high and dry. While the company managers laugh all the way to their banks.
a) the algos don't collude, but simply adjust driver "supply" in particular geos across each other's platforms via surge adjustments until they act like they are colluding; or
b) the algo designers try to make their algos not collude and they inadvertently use data from the other platform that is nonpublic or in a way that can be determined to harm consumer welfare.
Both a) and b) create a situation where every pricing decision by the algorithm - in every city, across every driver/rider interaction - has to be done in a way that is not collusive. All the DoJ has to do is find an anomalous pricing pattern - which isn't hard - and then pin both these companies with a fine and onerous compliance regulations. Ironically enough, this may be what kills them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>already carrying the fixed costs of owning a depreciating vehicle Except depreciation and other costs are pretty heavily a function of miles rather than time. (Especially outside of the snow belt where the number of winters plays a big role in salt damage.) >They also don't have to front the capital cost of a medallion. That's true but how many places is that a big factor? We can argue the details and you're right t…
> Except depreciation and other costs are pretty heavily a function of miles rather than time. this isn't really true of most mainstream cars. as long as people perceive the 2020 civic as an improvement over the 2019 model, a 2019 civic with zero miles will be worth less (you can verify this by visiting any dealership that still has the outgoing model in inventory). this is even more true of high-end cars until you g…
But if I already own a car, how long I will continue to be able to drive it is far more determined by the mileage than by how old it is within reason. This is admittedly from the perspective of someone who basically drives cars until it's no longer economically sensible to do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where did I claim you're more likely to get in a car accident with a billionaire? There should be a punishment for traffic violations big enough to discourage the offender from repeating it. Since a couple of thousands will not cause such an effect on an ultra rich person, the punishment should be calculated in such a way that it actually does. Calculating it based off of income achieves just that.
what I'm saying is that it just doesn't matter how billionaires drive (on the rare occasion they even drive their own vehicle). billionaires speeding does not meaningfully affect your safety on the road. hitting them with a huge fine just indulges your jealousy.
Billionaires should be allowed to speed wherever they are not, because then their speeding won't affect the people there. However, if a billionaire is found to be in the area they're speeding, they get hit with a scaling ticket, because their speeding does affect people around them.
> ...the company’s upcoming pricing algorithms, which they hinted might be able to more precisely predict what riders might be willing to pay for a ride. I hate the whole idea of this. If they track you around, maybe realize you order from fancy places on uber eats, then they will raise prices on something that costs them the same. There's something that strikes me as especially awful about automating the "how much i…
A policy like the one you're imagining would have the effect of punishing those individuals who are willing to pay premiums and unwilling to "shop around" or use alternative services.
That is, it is a policy that in practice rewards the frugal and the poor at the expense of the wealthy and spendthrift. Is that... a bad thing? It sounds like a good thing to me.
This article’s a couple months old, so it misses what I think is going to be a lot more definitive against Uber/Lyft. That is, workers are starting to successfully unionize. Both companies have delayed it as long as possible, but it’s going to happen. And when it does, it will either burn more of their cash or up the customer cost.