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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

#171

Post by Malician »

stephenr wrote: post #159
ars wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should a taxi service have to perform a regular vehicle inspection and a an uber driver be exempt from it? All cars in MA have yearly inspections. Any extra inspection for taxi is total nonsense, probably invented by the taxi companies themself as a barrier to entry by others.

regular basic inspection/maintenance (in Australia it's once a day from memory) of taxis mean a customer is much less likely to get stuck somewhere because their taxi had a mechanical failure. Taxis drive a LOT more km/miles than regular cars - more driving, and particularly more city driving === more wear and tear on the cars systems. Yet again it seems to me that the fandom around uber in the USA is because your ta…

Except this doesn't actually happen.

I have always had much better cars riding in Uber, much better service, and felt safer, too.

There is nothing good about cabs. I have a list of cab horror stories long as my arm.

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

#172

Post by madgar »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #38
maverick_iceman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, if liberals are so pro-business then why Bernie has so many fans?

Because he's a democratic socialist? I love tech as much as the next person, but disrupting wide swaths of the country's working populace and drastically increasing income inequality and increasing unemployment in an unsustainable manner, due to the leverage tech provides, and we step in with laws to override the marketplace. A government exists for all its citizens, after all. No man is an island.

On HN, all men are islands looking to dominate their island's native population. Nobody on this website wants to share wealth. It's about finding the product-market fit to achieve subjugation.

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

#173

Post by BurningFrog »

tro2102 wrote: post #109
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…

how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? I don't necessarily disagree with this sentiment, but this doesn't really address the question, which is about what happens to an industry when it's made redundant by technology. Cab drivers competing with self-driving cars can't "suck it up". "what if they don't want to" in regard to people working? Again, I feel you haven't read the spirit of this comment accurately. What ha…

> what happens to an industry when it's made redundant by technology

We have over 200 years experience of countless industries being made redundant by technology. It's not a new scary thing that has never happened before.

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

#174

Post by hx87 »

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…

Low socioeconomic mobility is a problem because the potential for any individual to contribute to the good of society is at best loosely correlated with their previous socioeconomic status. If people who could have been top-notch scientists, engineers, civil servants and entrepreneurs were prevented from doing so because they couldn't move up the ladder (and inversely, rich rent-seekers couldn't move down), society is deprived of their contributions and is worse off.

P.S.: The rapid change in up and down votes is probably caused more by your confusion of socioeconomic mobility and equality (you seem to be using the two interchangeably) than anything else.

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

#175

Post by chillacy »

tomdell wrote: post #125
maverick_iceman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The medallion owners were making an investment. Every investment carries a risk. If they were profiting from their investments then they were not going to share those with anyone else. Why then should others share their losses?

Imagine you want to open a restaurant. You know that it will be successful - you've done your research, whatever, yadda yadda. The government charges you a hefty initial tax to open your restaurant - it's a steep cost, but you expect that you'll be able to pay it off, because you know your place is going to do well. Seriously, you've paid attention to history - these kinds of things - the way you're doing it, anyway…

Yea, investments are risky. They're supposed to be risky to make up for the potential rewards.

Sometimes you can pay to remove risk, in the form of insurance, which can be expensive. But if you aren't paying to remove the downside, someone else is.

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

#176

Post by chillacy »

cloudjacker wrote: post #20

During periods of extremely high surge pricing, I take regulated taxis instead. At first I think, 'wow I love competition its such a good thing this alternative service was around' but then I try to pay the cab driver, here is the experience in 2016: - The meter system is broken - The cab driver presses buttons frantically on a black box before resorting to hitting it in hopes that it responds to external stimuli - T…

Also in Las Vegas, where taxis reign supreme, you get the pleasure of being blasted with ads on giant screens.

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

#177

Post by raquo »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #130
raquo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With rising income inequality the difference between the average Joe and the 1% Joe is growing larger and larger. This seems increasingly unfair to more and more people. Eventually all those disillusioned poor people will act on this by bringing to power some radicals who will bulldoze the current system much like the Bolsheviks bulldozed the Russian empire. If you need evidence that income inequality is itself a bad…

Haven't we heard this same spiel for the last 150 years? The revolution is always one week away and this is a time-invariant statement.

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".

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

#178

Post by stale2002 »

Trundle wrote: post #114
dsacco wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'll bite although this isn't the most researched of my opinions that's for sure. Humans happiness isn't concerned with absolute standard of living but more comparative standard of living. I don't mean just conscious comparison in a competitive manner, I mean in setting what counts as normal to our brains. Consider the standard of living we've obtained compared to what humans had for the vast majority of our 200 000…

No matter how much money you have, you can't buy a better coke.

Income inequality is a misleading metric. I would argue that equality has vastly increased over the years.

The rich don't really live much better lives than the middle class.

Rich or poor we all have roofs over our heads, we all have access to relatively affordable methods of travel to get anywhere in the world in a day, we all use the same IPhones, watch the same movies and drink the same Cokes.

The things that the rich have access to aren't really that much better when you compare it to the old days when you contrast Kings living in Castles to the 90 percent who are just worrying about their next meal.

The world has never been more equal.

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

#179

Post by dsacco »

hx87 wrote: post #174
dsacco wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Low socioeconomic mobility is a problem because the potential for any individual to contribute to the good of society is at best loosely correlated with their previous socioeconomic status. If people who could have been top-notch scientists, engineers, civil servants and entrepreneurs were prevented from doing so because they couldn't move up the ladder (and inversely, rich rent-seekers couldn't move down), society i…

Where did I conflate socioeconomic mobility and income equality? I didn't intend to do that.

More to your point - I respond by asking whether or not the socioeconomic standing of a scientist matters for the societal impact of their work.

I don't see an easy conclusion here. The scientists driving innovation in industry are generally paid very well (this is relative, but we can probably agree they are paid higher than a median salary). The scientists driving innovation in academia are not, as a rule, paid as well as their counterparts in industry, but that doesn't stop them from contributing valuable research to their fields.

So how do we conclude that socioeconomic stance matters for a scientist's research impact, if they have grants or corporate sponsorship?

To reiterate my point - if reduced socioeconomic mobility can't be demonstrated to be a net loss for society, why does it matter if income inequality causes it or not, and how does it demonstrate income inequality as a net loss for society?

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

#180

Post by hx87 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #43
MicroBerto wrote: post #39

Sounds like time for some politicians to get voted out of office. Voters may not care about certain things, but they definitely care about their transportation.

Working class folks care more about their jobs than Uber's profits (rightfully so).

If their jobs exist only because of rent-seeking, they shouldn't in the first place.
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