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If this gets big enough, you will eventually need to keep some sort of record to comply with various law enforcement agencies.
I honestly don't see anything different than any other social networking site. Social networking sites are expensive to run and difficult to monetize.
Eventually you will need more money to keep the site running and when you do, privacy will go out the door.
However, we now having more people making less money for essentially the same job. It's a win for consumers, because it's more convenient and in some cases, cheaper.
But it's a lose for the people that actually made a decent living driving who now are competing with college kids that are doing the same thing in their spare time without having any of the same startup costs.
Uber and Lyft removed the barrier to entry by breaking the law and the monopoly the Taxi unions had over the entire industry. But the result is lower wages and benefits.
Why should the incumbents have security in their position, when as you pointed out college kids can do the same work at lower cost? It is unfair to the unemployed and to consumers to provide special protection to incumbents based solely on their position and earlier entry to the market. That is a classic case of rent seeking with governmental protection.
Good for Uber and Lyft for breaking the law and pushing us out of that local minima. Sometimes you have to harm a few privileged rent seekers to remove coercive monopolies and reduce regulatory capture.
It isn't just regulatory capture though - permits for taxis carry all sorts of protections for consumers. Those protections are guaranteed by law and I see no replacement for those protections from either Uber or Lyft.
We used to have the free for all we're building towards and we regulated to stop it. Why won't history repeat itself?
As a consumer, I strongly prefer the protections I get from Uber/Lyft/Olacab to those that I get from the regulated taxis.
For instance, some months back I got in an Ola to Delhi Airport. The guy took some crazy long route while pretending he didn't understand my broken Hindi (with very clear street names and pointed directions), and very nearly caused me to miss my flight. I took out the app and made a complaint while waiting for my flight. When I landed I got an email about my money being refunded.
(Similarly, in the US, try to flag a taxi while black. Uber solved this problem, have the US regulators?)
We stopped the "free for all" because the incumbent taxi monopoly captured the regulatory bodies. That's all. Rather than ideologically defending all regulation, why not focus on having good regulation?
First, I'm speaking of the US. I have no experience in India.
I'm certainly not defending all regulation, but unregulated taxis caused all sorts of problems in the past, which is why we regulated them. Background checks, improved guarantees of vehicle safety, minimum competency in English, etc. Why not have both? Break the monopoly, but create realistic and working regulations for all players.
Something rather big has changed since the regulations were put into place (sometimes fairly recently, my city didn't cap taxi plates until the mid-90s). It used to be most taxis were gotten by hailing, and some by phoning. Neither allowed you to verify anything about the cab that eventually picked you up. Apps change this greatly, and now when I ask for an Uber I have reason more reason to trust that the person picking me up is an Uber driver, and has met the standards they established and I can verify in some way, than I ever did that the cabbie who picked me up is the one I called, or that they're a legally sanctioned taxi if I hailed it.
This change is glossed over in this discussion a lot, but it is the single most important distinction between the old and new systems, and it definitely should reduce the barrier to entry when it comes to regulatory reasons.
I'm absolutely in favour of maintaining extremely strict controls over vehicles that can pick people up off the street with no prior arrangement. Loosening that is a bad idea, and it's not really at issue in the current debate.
Certainly, but Uber has Uber-controlled protections (however they're determined). It certainly appears as "vehicles that can pick people up off the street with no prior arrangement". I'm not advocating for a return to what was, I'm advocating for a reasonable set of protections in this brave new world that aren't controlled by the company. The company has no compulsion to maintain any protections beyond the minimum required to maintain profitability.
Profitability in their case does include a requirement of an expectation of safety (one that in my experience exceeds the expectation of safety I can expect with city-approved taxi services, incidentally). I am not, in general, a fan of appeals to the invisible hand (I fit somewhere on the socialist end of things, to be honest), but the truth is that the capitalism of uber is an improvement on the quasifeudalism of taxi oligopolies.
And no, it does not appear as that at all. The prior arrangement may only be minutes before, but it includes knowing the name, license plate, and location of the person who's picking you up, all of which can be verified before getting in the car. This is categorically different from a taxi hail. It baffles me that someone could assert they're the same.
The US is no better. Suppose a Vegas or Austin taxi cab takes the scenic route to the airport. What do you think the odds are of me getting my money back?
If I'm a tall black man, what do you think my odds are of successfully hailing a cab? (Hint: my black male friends in the US often ask me to hail them a cab.)
With Uber, I have full confidence that my complaints will be resolved to my full satisfaction. What regulatory regime do you propose to give me Uber levels of consumer protection if I take a yellow cab?
The fact is that technology + capitalism has solved the market failures that your proposed regulations theoretically address. Uber already does background checks. Uber inspects your car to make sure it's safe and comfortable. Perhaps taxi regulations were once necessary.
But with 2016 technology levels and current market environs, what is the specific problem that you think these regulations will solve, in either NYC or Mumbai?
I believe that Ubur and similar services are providing a more transparent review and protection process by bringing this in to a peer to peer social review layer.
Drivers are rated by passengers, passengers are rated by drivers. More data is collected and correlated, leading to stronger statistical correlations about bad actors on both sides of the system.
It isn't clear that the permits systems provided better protection than UBER's system, and there's at least theoretical reasons to think UBER's data rich system could become better than permits, especially if combined with stuff like background checks,etc.
Protections for consumers that apparently comes at a much higher price point, which some consumers may not wish to pay. How is that protection for them?
As a consumer, you don't get to opt out of regulation "because you want to". You then create a race to the bottom, negatively affecting your fellow citizens.
You don't want to pay for safe airlines? Non-rancid meat? Agriculture runoff regulation? Too bad.
Your comment isn't an argument that the level of regulation (and subsequent regulatory capture) for the taxi industry in most U.S. cities is appropriate and on the whole beneficial.
It's a much less controversial argument that some regulation is for the common good. Sure.
Isn't it obvious that some level of regulation is too costly for consumers to justify the benefits they receive? To me, that's the charitable reading of bsbechtel's comment.
> Isn't it obvious that some level of regulation is too costly for consumers to justify the benefits they receive? To me, that's the charitable reading of bsbechtel's comment.
I don't dispute this. If you want the regulation changed, vote on it. If you simply ignore it because you think it doesn't apply to you, I hope to see you go out of business.
Not sure why you're getting downvotes, this is completely accurate (except that the competitors aren't necessarily college kids, as a demographic they are closer to taxi drivers).
But I would add that on net this is a good thing, and the beneficiaries are not just consumers, but the new drivers.
The logic of the free market is fairly simple and intuitive. One reason people shy away from it is that they are subconsciously afraid of organized labor. The left have drummed it into people's heads that these people mean business, and if they beat you to a pulp it will be your own fault for threatening their livelihood [0].
"We do not allow individuals to negotiate their salary separately from their position. If you have the same position, you make the same salary."
This is great from a company perspective, but it essentially allows a company to get an employee at a much cheaper rate. Employees with more experience will get the same pay rate for the same job as someone with potentially much less.
Since all companies don't do this, I probably wouldn't ever work for your company knowing this is your policy. I bring much more value to a company with all of the experience and knowledge that I've gained.
At my last 9-5 job, I was able to get paid almost 20% more than many of my co-workers because of my negotiating skills and experience.
I just have to shake my head when I see so many people fighting for less power, rights, and inevitably less money and calling it a 'win'.
But, this doesn't really matter to me anymore. I've owned my own company for the last 5 years and don't need to negotiate my own salary.
I can't make any sense out of your argument. How on earth does this drive away people with experience?
I know what I can do and I know how much money I want to make. A company advertising a job with a salary attached would get some bonus points in my evaluation just because of their honesty and willingness to step out of the bullshit negotiation game, but I'd also know up front whether their expectations corresponded with mine. I'd only apply if it sounded like a reasonable offer, and if it sounded like a reasonable offer, why should I hesitate to apply?
Your perspective must be very different from mine, because I am totally failing to see this from a point of view where I can make your words make sense.
I think it was worse in the late 90s early 00s. There is this documentary called 'e-dreams' that came out in 2001. It documents a delivery startup that didn't charge anything to deliver products to customers.
They had virtually no business model (and lost money on every order) and got millions in startup capital. The whole company imploded within a year, but some of the interviews with the executives of the company are pretty telling: they never intended on making a profit. The intent was to either get bought out by a larger company or get an IPO and bank the proceeds.
E-dreams is a really good documentary for anyone interested in seeing a small sliver out of the early days of the first .com boom/bust.
I watch it once-a-year to remind me of the craziness.
This really doesn't show that the situation in the late 90s was more ridiculous than today.
First, this is a very carefully selected story, not a representative sample, so it's anyone's guess how bad a measure it is of the absurdity of the overall situation in the late 90s. If we are selective we can find similarly crazy stories from last year, so that it is only a matter of selling the story that the craziest stuff is representative.
Second, the problem is not merely that people take silly risks, the problem is when too much is staked on those silly risks. If everyone thought the market was wacky and outrageous, they wouldn't stake very much. The really serious situation, where too much is staked, is one where everyone is saying things like "can't lose" leading to a system which is structured for catastrophe.
Third, to say it was worse back then implies that we know how bad it is now, which really drives us to the heart of the issue - what evidence we have today. It doesn't really matter about how crazy we think it was in the late 90s.
I haven't seen e-dreams but the documentary sounds somewhat similar to Riot On which is actually from 2004 I believe. It is about a company called Riot Entertainment that took in millions in funding from a bunch of high profile sources, made a ton of fairly dubious decisions before imploding.
We had virtually no airline security in the 1970s and there were hijack attempts every couple of months..including innocent people dying and a plane that was eventually blown up with no passengers on board.
I sure as hell wouldn't fly if this was going on now.
The real problem is that we aren't allowed to profile.
Because we can't focus on a specific subset of travelers that are suspicious (based on data or behavior), everyone is treated as a threat and we get long lines as a result.
They probably have more terrorist threats than anyone else in the world and have prevented nearly all attacks without the long lines. Mostly through a combination of profiling and hiring specially trained agents instead of $10/hour rent-a-cops to handle security. There's a reason why European Airports are targeted for attack, even though Israel is the main target.
At some point we need to make a choice: political correctness or safety.
Tying profiling to political correctness means you want racial profiling or similar, which would have such a huge false negative and false positive rate as to be worse than useless. Besides, I'm sure the TSA already de facto does it, because sentiments like yours are so common.
If you want to profile, ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin.
This x1000. I generally concur that there will need to be sacrifices in terms of false positives inconveniencing people by "profiling" them, but I seriously doubt that race, religion, and/or national origin is the best metric we can come up with for profiling reasons. Honestly, I think there's a strong parallel with the way we see neural networks "play" games without following the heuristics that work best for our brains (which we have seen historically that human generated heuristics are not optimal heuristics).
And what else is the intention of profiling except to create a good enough "heuristic"? Let's strive for a better heuristic please.
Let's look at the terror watch list: I can bet 9/10 people on the list are from similar middle eastern countries, similar skin color and are from the same or similar religion.
Profiling based on this information isn't profiling based on any of these things, but based on risk factors and previous history.
The problem is that you can't even profile based on obvious history without also being accused of profiling based on religion or skin color.
This is what I'm talking about when I refer to 'political correctness'. Suspicious people can't be singled out without the PC police coming out in full force.
"ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin."
I wish the terrorists bombing planes and killing innocent people were from different countries with different religions, but it's just not reality.
It can't possibly have a higher false positive rate than literally treating every person the same. When the first old white lady commits an act of terrorism, then let's screen them, but until then, let's not.
That's an extreme example, but if you agree that we don't need to look at old white ladies, then we both agree that profiling is preferable. All that's left to discuss are the boundaries.
So why, I asked, are we still allowed to board airplanes at Ben-Gurion International Airport with bottles and tubes of liquid brought from home, while in Heathrow or JFK they confiscate our face cream and toothpaste?
"Oh, that's simple," he answered matter of factly. "We use racial profiling, they don't."
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/in-israel-racial-profiling-doesn-t-wa...
This is exactly wrong. Profiling does not increase safety whatsoever. Bruce Schneier argues it much better than I would:
> If the choice is between random searching and profiling, then random searching is a more effective security countermeasure. But Dunn is correct above when he says that there are some enormous trade-offs in liberty. And I don't think we're getting very much security in return.
"This is exactly wrong. Profiling does not increase safety whatsoever. Bruce Schneier argues it much better than I would:"
You may say it doesn't 'increase safety', but Israel is a great example of it working. The attacks, hijacks, and deaths have nose dived to nearly 0. They have a hybrid system that involves both random checking and profiling.
I'm not saying we should lock up anyone that fits a specific racial profile. The problem is that when we use data and risk assessment to question specific people that may be suspicious, it's seen as racist if the person is anything but white.
The two articles you linked mention hijackers that happened pre-911. I don't think people are hijacking planes and diverting them to central america nor do we have IRA militants bombing planes.
We need a hybrid system between random checking and profiling. Random checks work so far, but will not help with long lines because everyone needs to be checked equally.
To reduce long lines, we either need to scale-back security (which is a bad idea) or use information and data to make the process more efficient (IE: profiling).
Some profiling is a good thing, but we can't completely rely on it.
Israel is also a fairly close ethnicity, nothing like the diversity here in the US. And they are engaged in a struggle with a specific ethnicity that they can identify.
The US has so much more diversity in population and enemies that profiling would be less effective, more annoying/discriminatory, because the "us/them" divide is less clear here.
Israel profiles single white young European women as higher risk than "middle-eastern" young men based on past experience.
Israel is also very diverse ethnically even if you take the Jewish population, N. African, Black, Arab, European, Asia, Indian all Jews of various ethnic backgrounds.
The vast majority of airline related attacks against Israel were not perpetrated by Arabs, and the only one on Israeli soil was executed by a Japanese.
While I'm sure Israel's profiling metrics do take in ethnicity by all accounts it has little to no weight and metrics based on past attacks, your behavior and more importantly your general background and travel history play a much bigger role.
But that said the US can't adopt the Israeli approach, the security check at Ben Gurion might look fast but it's because they have more security staff than JFK and a 3 (4 if you count the fact that Israeli security gets the passenger manifest before any flight takes place) layered security screening that starts way before you even reach the terminal.
Israel's approach can work in the US and everywhere else but it would cost billions to implement and bloat the size of the TSA to rival the size of the US Armed forces, the TSA is already about twice the size if not bigger than the FBI, it's bigger than the CIA and NSA combined but it's not even remotely big enough to do the same thing Israel does given number of passengers US airports handle each year.
V interesting, thank you for your comment! It sounds like you have some knowledge in this area. Anything you'd recommend for me to read in the 30 minute timeframe that would level my knowledge up?
My GF used to be singled out on every flight to Israel, so I did some checking; the last attempted attack on an Israeli airline was a when a Syrian agent got a British woman pregnant and convinced her to fly to Israel not knowing that she had a bomb in her suitcase, in the majority of previous attacks European women often disguised as pregnant were used to smuggle the weapons past security (allot of Arab terrorist organizations of the from the 60's till the 80's were socialist and were aligned with the various left wing terrorist organizations in Europe).
About 5 years ago when I was living in Israel I've had an encounter with airport security myself I flew out to Amsterdam for a project, the project was canceled but as the flight was at 4am and the news arrived over the weekend I wasn't notified until I've actually landed.
So I didn't even leave the airport I just went to the KLM counter and booked a flight that left 3 hours later. When I landed 3 security agents were waiting for me at the door of the aircraft they had my details and they pulled me aside and questioned me about why did i book the flight last moment and why did i book the flight one way and some other details and it took me about 15 min to clear everything up.
To me this shows that they get notifications of last minute changes to the passenger lists as well as flag anyone who buys a one way ticket, both combined with potentially the fact that I flew out less than 12 hours before I got back probably raised enough red flags to come and question me immediately.
On that flight my carry on was searched after I landed and I was notified that my checked in baggage was not put on the flight and will be delivered to me later that day or the day after.
My personal theory is that they've suspected that I went to another airport that might have been compromised to get something that could be used in an attack at Ben Gurion.
The airline security is definitely top notch but the entire intelligence apparatus behind it won't be sustainable on any larger scale.
The TSA can't afford hire 200,000 agents, the TSA can't afford to hire agents from elite military units and US intelligence and the TSA can't afford to have a college degree as a requirement for all but the most entry level jobs which them selves would require a hefty LEO/Military service background, and I don't think that running a background check on virtually every passenger in the US would be doable on both practical and legal grounds.
It's because programming has evolved. More business owners are also already tech savvy because they grew up with a computer, Ipad, and phone.
In the beginning, programming was more fun. No oversight, bosses that don't really know what you are doing, programming at one point in time was treated like magic.
You glue together other pieces of code because in most cases, because the wheel has already been invented. This really was the dream of open source and with all of the free software and libraries out there, it's becoming a reality.
It's also going to drastically reduce the wage of a programmer over time. Most businesses don't need to hire an engineer to create a complicated library. They can hire someone with much less skill to use an already existing library to get what they need done.
Since the skills to get the job done will decrease, the supply of potential developers will increase and wages will decrease.
I suspect that the jobs are just changing, without a significant impact on wages, at least for the average Joe. Consider this analogy:
If everybody has to re-invent the wheel, you have to put all your resources toward getting someone to invent the wheel for you, so you can compete with all the other businesses using wheels.
Once everybody can re-use an existing wheel, you can aim higher, and put the same amount of resources toward getting someone to combine existing wheels and other parts to make something much more efficient and tailored to your business. And you need to do this to compete, because it's what everyone else is doing now, and a simple wheel just wont cut it.
So yes, someone with the skills required to invent the wheel becomes less in demand, but I would argue that someone who can turn existing parts into a working and customized whole requires just as much, if different, skills, with a roughly equal supply and demand ratio, thus able to demand a similar wage.
My argument that it requires as much skill stems from what others have pointed out. There may be a tool for everything, but it takes a lot of experience and ability to find an acceptable tool for each task amid a sea of tools of varying use, quality, documentation, etc. And it is rare that you can get maximum business efficiency from something cold off the shelf, without someone skilled modifying, configuring, tweaking, combining, etc.
If only there were wheels available. I like wheels, and I know what to do with them. I trust that they will work as specified. The problem is that with software nowadays, the components available are far more complex, and the true costs of using them are not obvious at the beginning of the process. More like Takata airbags.
Heheh, fair enough. I was intending my analogy to refer to high level tools in general. But yes, this illustrates my point, that there is and will continue to be a demand for highly skilled engineers who can identify and dismiss the Takata airbags and locate the parts that best match their employer's business.
Particularly outside startup world. Established businesses in competitive fields are constantly trying to maintain or gain their edge, and don't have time to build from scratch.
This isn't showing to be true despite proliferation over the last twenty years. Most kids don't want anything to do with programming because to most kids, it's a lot like doing math all day. Even as programmers become more enabled to solve more problems, the pace of problems being created is far outstripping the human race's ability to create (or inspire, whatever) programmers to solve those problems. I am willing to put a paycheck on a bet that no sane, knowledgeable person will ever be able to say that "we have enough programmers in the world".
When the "boring" parts of programming can be automated, so can the "fun" parts, and AI will have "taken our jobs" just like they did down at the toothpaste factory. I'm not concerned about that. When it happens, that's fine by me. I have other skills to fall back on.
It won't happen all at once. There will be a long process of elimination of more and more layers, leaving more and more developers available for the work on the less automatable (more fuzzy and chaotic) side of spectrum. It will take years. At the end all of them will go home and do something else, of course.
I've had this experience with remote teams and sadly had to let many 'gamers' go.