I'm no fan of Uber but come on, this is so stupid, and dangerous for Lyft, because now they are stuck into this kind of pandering. Do they really think these customers will be loyal? at the first political blunder, with enough outrage, they are done. They are pandering to a crowd that is never happy with political posturing. They'll learn it the hard way. Uber absolutely did the right thing here. They chose not to play with fire and play the long term game.
In the end, what really differentiates these companies? There aren't many reasons to pick one over the other. Any opportunity that Lyft has to say "Hey! We're different" is good for business.
Banks hardly lose money on loans, they have an infinite capacity to go after delinquents. Try to default on your loan and see what happens to you. You'll be a slave of the bank for the rest of your life.
Of course, individuals bear no such power. So please don't use banks as an example.
"Usually" is quite correct. You basically have to prove there would be no hope of being able to pay it back without severe financial hardship, and the bar for hardship is fairly high. Even when some student debt is discharged in bankruptcy, it's often a partial discharge.
A license shouldn't be sold. I cannot sell my driving license. A license should be acquired through a standardized test and a reasonable amount of people should be able to pass the test each year. The current medallion system which works in a majority of western countries is just corruption.
People would take the taxi way more if it was cheaper, thus buying less cars and polluting less. This is especially true in Paris where a ride to the airport is 70€ ! unbelievable (Uber is 50€).
A license shouldn't be sold. I cannot sell my driving license.
There are different types of licenses. The driver is still licensed: e.g. in NYC they need a "New York State DMV Chauffeurs License" and they can then apply for a "New York City Taxi Driver license", which includes a standardized course and exam [1].
The taxicab medallion licenses are separate: they are not a license to drive a taxi, they are a license to operate one.
The licenses relating to peoples' competence cannot be sold, but the ones relating to operating a taxi can be.
Nonetheless, if the purpose of a license is to verify that a particular person or business entity has satisfied some regulatory requirements that allows them to engage in the licensed activity, the ability to sell that license to other unverified persons or entities would seem to defeat the purpose of having a license in the first place.
If there's no regulatory requirements, then license is basically just an access fee to gain entry to a market artificially closed off by the government. It's just cronyism. What is the benefit to the public if the license is not providing some assurance of suitability of the license-holder?
if the purpose of a license is to verify that a particular person
or business entity has satisfied some regulatory requirements
That's not always the purpose of a license. In some instances, the license is to regulate access to a particular activity or device (e.g. gun licenses, or driving licenses).
In some instances it's simply a tax on an activity (UK TV license, UK road fund license).
In some instances, it's to manage a resource (fishing quotas).
then license is basically just an access fee to gain entry to
a market artificially closed off by the government.
That's not necessarily a wrong thing. In the case of fishing quotas, it's to ensure that use of the resource is sustainable.
I wouldn't argue that it's correct to apply that thinking to the medallion system - after all, I'm not sure the NYC population is going to be 'fished out' by an oversupply of taxis - and if it's to ensure a floor on taxi income so that the taxis meet a certain quality, then there are better ways (e.g. regulation) to do that.
I don't see that the sale of medallion licenses is an issue per-se, but that critiques of license-sales are essentially critiques of the medallion system itself.
I think throwaw181ay is making a different argument, which is essentially that you should license the people (e.g. like a driver's license, which indicates proficiency) and not the thing, which is (basically) the car.
And they do -- you acquire the taxi driver certification ("this guy has good eyesight, isn't a criminal, knows the taxi rules") independently of the medallion ("no more than N cabs may be operating at any given time"). The two regs accomplish different purposes.
As the parent notes, in certain setups (like cap and trade) the tradeability of the license is important for ensuring that the restricted resource is used efficiently: the most economical emitters of carbon get the rights, and the most economical drivers get the medallions.
> the medallion ("no more than N cabs may be operating at any given time")
The whole point of this is to ensure that the price for taxi rides is higher than what the market-clearing price would be. In other words, it's a scam to rip off gthe consumer.
(Similar arguments apply to zoning regulations and house prices, of course)
There are good motives and bad motives behind every law. I don't find it productive to assert, as fact, that the malicious stuff is only kind, without addressing the good that they're ostensibly accomplishing.
You might as well dismiss all cap-and-trade proposals as being "just another scheme to raise energy prices".
As far as I knew, taxi licenses were there specifically to certify that the driver was trustworthy. After all, the service involves getting into a stranger's car...
A cap-and-trade scheme is a reasonable option if your goal is to limit the quantity of something (like carbon emissions) while allowing the market to behave as normal otherwise.
But there's no direct reason to limit the number of taxis. People suggest that limiting the supply ensures drivers make a decent living, but if you want that, employment law (e.g. enforcing minimum wage for drivers) is a more direct solution.
Considering the negative externalities of taxis on their environment (noise, pollution, congestion, and of course occasionally killing people) there are quite likely reasons to limit the number of taxis.
>(noise, pollution, congestion, and of course occasionally killing people)
Again, if we want to limit these things, we should make laws about them directly, rather than arbitrarily limiting one of their causes. Solutions to negative externalities should be primarily based on internalising those externalities, so the market has an incentive to seek alternatives.
What happens if someone invents a more expensive, but quiet and non-polluting taxi? (Which of course, they have.) If you limit the number of taxis, everyone uses the cheaper ones to maximise profit, and you still get some noise and pollution. Whereas if you tax the noise and pollution and it becomes cheaper to buy electric taxis, you've eliminated the noise and pollution entirely.
How so? I'd say it's opposite. Today when you pay a taxi ride you're not only paying the driver and the maintenance of his cab, you're also remunerating the capital the medallion's owner. If medallions were not tradeable, you wouldn't have to pay for them.
The market price of a ride is based on the supply and demand of a ride. Not being able to sell a medallion will reduce supply. Holding demand constant, price will increase as supply decreases.
If a medallion owner is happy driving 10 hours a day, but a potential owner would be happy driving 12 hours a day, the current owner should sell to the more eager driver and supply of rides will increase. If the owner cannot sell, then supply of rides is stuck at a lower level.
If the number of medallions in circulation is constant, the market price of a medallion is not a causal factor in the cost of a ride. The causality goes the other way around.
> Object-Oriented programming doesn't have a place in our hearts,
Go is object oriented.
> I hate to say it, but I just don't trust Microsoft.
But you trust Google? well known for discontinuing products or abandoning them ( GWT?,... )
> It's a statically typed language that treats functions as first class citizens
Without some form of generics/type classes you can't fully take advantage of Go first class functions to do classical functional programming.
> It's not object oriented
it's completely object oriented, it has methods on values,composition through struct embedding and implicit interfaces for polymorphism. It ticks every box of a OO language.
> is easy to deploy (compiled & doesn't depend on a runtime like JVM or .NET core)
Go actually has its own runtime, it's just included in the binary resulting from the compilation.
> doesn't have exceptions (yay)
Go has panics which are exceptions.
I personally find Go useful but don't like the limitations of the language. And they are showing already with more and more untyped API ( context.Values(interface{})interface{} ). Go relies way to much on runtime behavior like type assertions for a so called statically typed language. Go basically asks the developer to do the compiler's job. Because the compiler doing its job would make it slow (?!?). So you find yourself doing a lot of copy paste, writing your own parsers, code generators and manifests to use go gen, use tricks that make code ugly, or just say "fuck" to types and use "interface {}" when you are tired of all that.
.net core isn't ready for production, but when it does it will support both F# and C# + a vast ecosystem of libraries useful for web development, gaming (unity), mobile and desktop apps (Xamarin GUI libs ...), while Go users will be stuck with that poor type system writing extremely verbose code because they believe that generic programming is bad.
The backend for running half a million apps doesn't look anything like the backend for running a single app. Open-sourcing the actual Parse stack was not an option, and no one would've put in the effort to actually run the dozens of components involved. I started from scratch because that was the only way.
The hosted parse.com service is meant to support hundreds of thousands of apps. It was not really meant to be self-hosted by individual developers serving a couple of applications.
A lot of EU countries have programs that do not tie the work visa with a specific job, at least for engineers. On the top of my head, Portugal,Sweden,Germany and Belgium do and France with implement some form of "tech visa" like that. Canada does too AFAIK. I think it's fair. "H1-B" should be paid as much as their local equivalent and shouldn't fear being fired.
i sincerely hate when people from anywhere say that. During the second half of the 20th century, the american government was directly or indirectly responsible for at least half of the conflicts on that planet. Americans need to wake up, they are as much the beacon of tyranny than they are the beacon of the "free world". It's just that most Americans don't care about what their own government does abroad. And it didn't start with Bush II.
> And we do it by taking the higher moral ground,
I absolutely hate that too, this is so arrogant. There is really a disconnect between how some Americans view themselves and how the rest of the world see them for what their government actually is: playing war-games on a constant basis and selling the PAX AMERICANA as something just.
I'm sorry but i'm extremely disappointed by Jeff here, this is just wrong and insulting for the rest of the world.
For all the bad that Trump does, I hope that at least it will tone down this sense of superiority coming from Americans, because that's the source of many problems.
> how negligent and dangerous Trump is as the leader of the free world.
You're not the leader of the free world, not according to most of the rest of the world, because of your foreign policy post WWII. You supported dictatorships, rigged democratic elections, trained death squads in south america, killed millions in Vietnam, spoiled their land with agent orange, invaded countries like Iraq that did nothing to you, all in the name of "freedom" ... freedom for whom?
Because HN is a community where people have discussions with each other. Pseudonyms are fine. The community benefits from consistent accounts that others can relate to as members of the community. Otherwise there are effectively no users and no community, which is a very different place.
You should care about the message itself not who is saying it.
There are SJW mobs who downvote every comment that hurts their narrative. You can write factually correct and appropriate comments, they will still downvote it if they disagree. If you don't want to lose your HN points, you either self censor, and let the SJWs win or you make your statement from a throwaway account.
If you're worried about points, I think your focus is wrong. They're just points (as far as you don't lose so many you can no longer comment).
That said, you can use them as a tool to figure out how to craft your comments in a way that's actually read and understood, rather than reflexively responded to. The point should be discussion, not speaking the truth, brutal as it may be, you just have to listen to me.
Please don't read that as me assuming that's what you're doing. I do see a lot of people complain that they're getting down voted when their tone and word choice is very abrasive, or at least not couched in a way that's easy to respond to. Looking at your comment above, labelling people as SJWs is going to create a reaction, just as labels like racist or misogynist are likely to. For example, your comment would be just as effective if you had reworded it "There are mobs" and remove the "and let the SJWs win". Those parts are needlessly inflammatory (even if you think they're true).
Factual and appropriate may be fine for neutral topics; for contentious ones it's not enough. This is all assuming you're not just here for ideological battle, but rather to understand (though perhaps not agree) and be understood.
Believe me, this is something I struggle with myself, and remind myself of nearly every time I write a comment on a contentious topic. Two references I return to from time to time are:
As for crappy voting behavior, I see that happen on all sides. Not a lot you can do about it, other than shrug it off and try to write even better comments. Any time I get dinged I reread my comment and ask myself how I could have written it better. While there truly might be no way I could have prevented it, the only thing I really can control is how I write the comment.
Anyway, I hope you find this useful. It's intended to be. I want HN to be a place where people can talk about difficult topics constructively and positively.
