Technology

It's not all black or white, those startups brought some good things like breaking highly profitable monopolies and creating well designed apps that provide a much better service which ended up being picked up by the former monopolies, overall the quality of service often improved and we sometimes have more choice now, like picking the less human exploiting alternative that still has a usable app.

Ah yes, the “local taxi lobby.” Uber helped show a lot of us what a fucking joke that is, not just in Ottawa.

Innovation, choice, quality and freedom are the choice spices for capitalism soup. These shit-cook-legislators kept sprinkling in taint like protectionism, cronyism, extortion and corruption thinking nobody would notice. Well guess what? Now it’s just taint soup.

Why does it matter who’s serving you taint soup? The problem is there’s no other soup and they keep telling you it’s fine.

It totally depends of the jurisdiction. In some parts of the world calling up a ride sharing app with get you a totally normal taxi at normal metered taxi rates. In other parts of the world its pretty much they do it and nobody can stop them. A private citizen can pick up anyone they want and the laws all assumed that a taxi would have to find passengers and handle money in person. By the time politicians get around to doing anything about it they've already taken over the market and voters would take it personally if they had to go back to regular cabs.

Because people don't hail them on the street when they're passing, they're not legally a taxi service.

So they don't need medalions, cab licenses or whatever the system is in that country and, more importantly, don't need to obbey the rules for taxi services both for the vehicle (most noteable the rules about the colors of the vehicle and in some countries even the kind of vehicle itself), clear transparent predictable upfront pricing, and for the actual cabbies (for example, in London they don't need to have "The Knowledge" - which is basically having memorized all the streets - which cabbies do have to have before they get a license or obbey any of the other legal requirements for licensing of the actual drivers that cabbies have) so operation is much cheaper.

From what I've seen they're generally operating under the local legislation of "rental driver cars" (i.e. cars rented with a driver) and the arrangement of getting, for example a Uber via their app, is treated in legal terms as a booking not as a hailing, even though it is pretty close in de facto terms to hailing a cab.

It took a decade for states to catch up on this loophole into providing the same service as a taxi services whilst not legally being one (as they're not hailed, they're "hired") made possible by smartphone technology, and by the time they did Uber and similar were so big that most (like Portugal, as mentioned by somebody else) just made those low-regulation quasi-cab services legal without converging the regulations for taxis with theirs (i.e. they simply legalized the competitive advantages that services like Uber got by finding a loophole in the law), and said legalizing of the much (much, MUCH) lower regulatory requirements on them whilst kepting taxi services high-regulation, maintained the uneven market playing field that had allowed the explosive growth of Uber and its ilk.

Well, I'm not sure about arresting a bunch of graphics cards, but under American civil forfeiture laws, they could be sued, sort of. "United States vs. Approximately 7000 Computer Graphics Cards" has a certain ring to it.

When we aren't drinking craft beer...

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Turning a profit and making a lot of money for yourself are 2 different things.

Seems like a fair description of many who would call themselves "libertarian", even if not the going definition.