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Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

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Re: Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

#71

Presumably, the taxi industry is "heavily regulated" for the benefit of the customer, then shouldn't customers flock to this excellent, regulated service on their own? Why are those artificial and arbitrary limits necessary?

"BART drivers earn six figures. Why do they even need a union?"

Re: Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

#72

France is one of the most frustrating countries a young entrepreneur could ever work in. As soon as you find some way to bypass the rigidity of the system to create something new, to make life easier for people and actually create wealth, the octopus grows another arm to strangle you with. It just sucks the energy right out of you... The UK may have its problems, but it's a breath of fresh air by comparison. It's no…

And no wonder that tens of thousands of Britons own second homes in France and many more holiday there.

Re: Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

#73
post #50
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a regulated industry cannot compete with an unregulated one, but people are still better off with the regulated one. Can you please give one example?

Leaded gasoline. Using it allows you to increase the compression of your engine, which improves fuel economy. The total cost of lead in the environment by far outweighs the economic benefits, which is why it's banned, yet for each individual person it makes economic sense to use leaded gasoline if you can.

The libertarian argument here would be "burning leaded gas is a tort against everyone else breathing the air", right? You clearly have to special case it because the harm is so diffuse; you could presumably either have a government ban it, or have some objective standard where non-compliance is itself taken as a tort, and then something like class-action. There's the California option -- Prop 65 has this weird way for private people to find violations and be paid for them, although the enforcement action is taken by the state.

I can't see "someone with a $0.0001 harm files suit against the aggressor" x 7b being a scalable solution without some kind of optimization. Maybe you could imagine some kind of little automated lawyer-agent which sues behind on your behalf, with everything happening at a micro-transaction level, but that seems kind of silly.

Re: Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's precisely the tragedy of the commons - there is no "someone else" when it comes to things like water and air pollution, so without government regulation, there is no incentive to protect the commons, only use it in a manner to maximally improve one's own economic self interest, in a manner that harms all in an aggregate manner more than the community has been benefited. It's a net-loss without some form of gov…

It's only a market failure, because it's publicly owned. Oceans and air is tricky, but rivers and lakes can certainly be privately owned. But, regulation is also a public good and therefore also a market failure... so you end up with regulations that harm 99% of the people, like in the case of Uber in France.

For someone asking for evidence earlier, it's odd that you so like to toss around '99' like it's a factual number.

Re: Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

#75
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a market failure, because it's publicly owned. Oceans and air is tricky, but rivers and lakes can certainly be privately owned. But, regulation is also a public good and therefore also a market failure... so you end up with regulations that harm 99% of the people, like in the case of Uber in France.

For someone asking for evidence earlier, it's odd that you so like to toss around '99' like it's a factual number.

It's not a literal statement. Customers lose and taxi companies benefit. 99%/1%.

Re: Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the taxi industry is "heavily regulated" for the benefit of the customer I get your point, but people decry the regulation that Uber is fighting against...until Uber implements free market "surge pricing". Then people are more than happy to leap back into the yellow cabs, which have their price regulated. Just read through some of the fallout. In other words, all the free market vs regulation talk is lip service. P…

until Uber implements free market "surge pricing". Then people are more than happy to leap back into the yellow cabs, which have their price regulated That is assuming they can find one. Surge pricing incentivizes drivers to actually show up and compensates them for tougher conditions and additional risk.

>Surge pricing incentivizes drivers to actually show up and compensates them for tougher conditions and additional risk.

I get it, and I believe it's well within their right, and also an interesting strategy. I'm not really knocking Uber, I'm knocking some of its supporters.

Again, read through some of the comments on mainstream articles regarding the surge price kerfuffle. Filled with people saying, "Suck it Uber and your dynamic pricing! I took a regular taxi!" Meaning, they'll support the unregulated market, as long as it's cheaper.

People want more de-regulation, but fail to see the seemingly "good" that comes from regulation; in this case, predictable pricing when you're trying to get somewhere.

Re: Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

#77
post #10

"Back in October, the French government mentioned this piece of legislation as these new services would hurt traditional cab drivers." So? That's how the market and progress works. If a service can't stand up on it's own, it doesn't need to exist.

>If a service can't stand up on it's own, it doesn't need to exist.

Ask the people who were priced out of transportation due to surge pricing what they think of the situation. Now imagine if Uber had driven all regulated taxis out of business and people were forced to pay exorbitant surge-pricing fees.

I'm not really against Uber or this strategy, but the "market" doesn't always sort things out fairly.

Re: Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

#78
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone asking for evidence earlier, it's odd that you so like to toss around '99' like it's a factual number.

It's not a literal statement. Customers lose and taxi companies benefit. 99%/1%.

This really gets tiresome. Somebody states something pretty obvious, like the fact that the massive environmental harm of leaded gasoline outweighed the minor benefit to drivers, and you're right there asking for evidence without doing any work yourself. But when you make a much more precise and much less obvious claim about a specific set of regulations harming 99% of people, then "it's not a literal statement" and we should, apparently, not even think about asking you to back it up.

Re: Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

#79
post #72

France is one of the most frustrating countries a young entrepreneur could ever work in. As soon as you find some way to bypass the rigidity of the system to create something new, to make life easier for people and actually create wealth, the octopus grows another arm to strangle you with. It just sucks the energy right out of you... The UK may have its problems, but it's a breath of fresh air by comparison. It's no…

And no wonder that tens of thousands of Britons own second homes in France and many more holiday there.

Exactly. When the system allows you to create wealth, and keep enough of it to make it worth the effort, more people can afford to buy second homes in sunny places.

Re: Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

#80
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone asking for evidence earlier, it's odd that you so like to toss around '99' like it's a factual number.

It's not a literal statement. Customers lose and taxi companies benefit. 99%/1%.

Anyone who works with demographics in a serious manner is aware that a 99% split is extraordinarily difficult to achieve.

You're actually saying that the regulations on Uber hurt 99% of the people of France. Children? The mentally ill? Prisoners? Soldiers stationed overseas? Farmers? People too poor to afford taxis in the first place?

Hell, people outside the Uber areas of service, which is apparently just Paris?

Each of these demographic segments pretty much wholly have no interest in something like Uber, and slice off percentage point after percentage point. And even when you take your twenty/thirty/fortysomething urban parisian with the money for car hire, plenty have life patterns that don't need a taxi or uber - they walk or cycle or bus or train it about.

'99%' is utter, utter tosh, both in the literal, and more importantly, in the contextual figurative sense it was given.

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