London's Uber Ban Is a Big Brexit Mistake(bloomberg.com) |
London's Uber Ban Is a Big Brexit Mistake(bloomberg.com) |
What happened? Their was a flourishing of new ride share companies, including a local nonprofit, RideAustin. Yes, at first, these apps were nowhere near the level of Uber/Lyft, but they quickly improved, especially RideAustin. The prices were slightly higher, but it seemed those prices reflected the actual cost of the service without the VC subsidy.
I dread taking a taxi and I'm no friend of the formerly entrenched taxi companies, but this idea that making some sensible regulations that these multibillion dollar VC-subsidized tech companies need to follow is "anti-innovation" is BS.
[1] https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/14/15803138/austin-uber-lyft-t...
[2] https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2017/06/06/uber-lyft...
This (crappy Buzzfeed) article from July seems confirms what locals say... they're all still there: https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/uber-lyft-austin-t...?
If anything (as mentioned in another HN article I saw today about the slowdown in new business formation), these huge, "winner-take-all" tech companies may be a net negative for innovation in the long run.
So much for the will of the consumer, eh?
But, hey, that's what "DISRUPTION!" looks like nowadays, right?
Is an outright ban "anti-innovation"? You can't do sensible regulation once you've banned entrants in favour of the taxis.
Uber is able to continue business while it appeals. As long as the appeal process is continuing (and it may well continue for years to the High Court) Uber can continue business as usual.
Uber can change its processes during the course of the appeal, and if they match what is required, the ban will fail.
This is a high-visibility, high-impact method of regulation that Uber can't ignore. Given Uber's habit of ignoring regulations it doesn't like, it seems entirely appropriate.
One of the largest problems that the UK has had with the EU is that EU-mandated regulations are not implemented by some EU member countries. This is against all the rules of the EU, but there's no enforcement.
In the UK, regulations are implemented and enforced. This is that enforcement in practice. One of the reasons London has flourished as a financial centre is because the regulatory agency doesn't mess around and does its job properly. This gives certainty, stability, and engenders trust in trading partners.
The article is entirely wrong, completely misunderstands what's happening here, and why.
Private companies don't subsidize. Private companies invest.
This isn't the end of some libertarian utopian dream of innovation, but rather uber's continued blatant disregard of local laws.
The goal is to kill the competition and treat their drivers and customers like crap in doing so.
Then again, if the argument is that in a pure libertarian system consumers would drive out bad actors like this, I'm not sure that this line of thinking would hold. The convenience of a cheap ride would seem to be worth the cost of the seemingly small chance that a user might be assaulted if the world worked this way.
Snip: Transportation authority didn't ban because of job security or localization. It didn't renew Uber license because Uber is not following local authority guidelines.
I'm calling you a liar!
Two options: You provide reputable sources to back this assertion of yours. In which case I will profusely, unconditionally and publicly apologize.
Otherwise my assertion that you're a liar stands.
Note that no English tabloid product, nor anything Breitbart counts as a reputable source in this context.
Translation: if you were from Blighty, you'd know that the previous poster was being sarcastic.
Brexit is UK's "Donald Trump": a manifestation of projected socioeconomic angst in a self-defeating manner that doesn't address inequality at the policy level. It's like suggesting California secede: good luck with trade policies, printing a currency, forming a military and so on. It's civilizational "reorg" churn that accomplishes nothing, eg, mob nonsense. If people collectively possessed integrity and moral courage, they would directly call out what they felt was inequity instead of scapegoating this group, that trade arrangement or a startup.
Ultimately, it just means I set my life up such that neither Uber or Lyft can hold me hostage with insane spikes in pricing. Thus I bike and drive more than I'd like.
In any case it was not very sarcastically phrased. And given the bullshit people believe nowadays such things really need to be called out.
In any case, next time this happens, I recommend that you just respond with the classic, "[citation needed]".
I really took your comment at face value. It's just that the current trend of Obama being a muslim terrorist sympathizer, Hillary Clinton running a child porn ring out of a pizza parlor and other such utter shit (and a significant amount of people actually believing that) makes me want gnaw off the wall paper.
Mea culpa!
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
I think demand is a better proxy for the will of consumers than any law or legislation. If the citizens of Austin refuse to use Uber or Lyft they will disappear without any legislation.
These [1] are the results of that election. Austin has a population of 950,000 residents with a voting age population of about 741,000 [2]. In total about 5% of the resident population voted to maintain the fingerprinting law and 4% to soften it. A 1% margin on a voter turnout of less than 12%.
I fully appreciate that that is a 'democratic republic in action.' I'm certain you can understand one might find it distasteful, just as one can easily understand your distaste for state level 'democratic republic in action.' I'm certain our systems made all the sense in the world hundreds of years ago. But these sort of things do not feel right today when we live in a country with counties that now have greater population than the entire country did when these laws and systems were developed.
[1] - http://traviselectionresults.com/enr/contest/display.do?crit...
[2] - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/austincitytexas...
If you have suffered something that you think is a crime, call the cops (in the UK they are pretty okay for these things).
If you had a very bad experience, but maybe not a full blown crime, you might decide to make a 1.0 star rating and complain to the company.
There could be systemic problems (racial discrimination), but even in those cases, there are concrete victims, that can report it to authorities (to the TfL for example).
Reporting an Uber driver doesn't necessarily mean any action is taken.
https://www.londonreconnections.com/2017/understanding-uber-... has a story about a driver committing a sexual assault, being reported to Uber who didn't report it to the police -or- fire him, and he went on to commit another which Uber -also- didn't report to the police.
> In total, Uber had failed to report six sexual assaults, two public order offences and one assault to the police. This had lead to delays of up to 7 months before they were investigated.
This is why MetPol are arguing strongly against licensing Uber.