Flagg wrote: ↑2017-09-23 03:16pmI’ll give that the people may not all be stupid. But what they are doing is very, very stupid.
It's stupid in the same sense that Third World fishermen who dynamite coral reefs so they can catch enough fish to feed their children
right the fuck now are "stupid" because in a few years' time they won't have the option of doing that anymore, on account of the reef being blown up. It's hard to think about the long term or the broader social consequences of your actions when you're faced with immediate personal disaster for failing to carry them out.
One of the problems with the free market is that it can force
everyone to individually do a thing that is bad for
everyone else, and if you decide to be the lone dissenter who opts out, the market will screw you over horribly. If the market creates a situation where the only way for you to feed your family is through unsustainable business practices, refusing to engage in unsustainable business practices will not magically save you or your family from the consequences.
Is that "stupid?" I don't know, is it "stupid" to not be the one who jumps on a grenade to save a bunch of strangers?
Patroklos wrote: ↑2017-09-23 03:35pmSimon_Jester wrote: ↑2017-09-23 02:55pmYes. As I mention above,
this exact problem happened during the Depression:
-Swarms of "part-time" unemployed taxi drivers unable to make a living.
-Increased traffic cluttering up urban streets.
-A race to the bottom in wages that is now made worse by the fact that Uber can charge high prices per mile and skim a large fraction off the top because the app disconnects what the passenger pays and what the driver receives
None of which are catastrophes, and we are not in an way shape or form in a Depression environment. I can understand, though they are generally still a bad idea by the numbers, instituting a price floor in 1934 (or whenever they did it) but desperate times call for appropriate measures. These are not desperate times and we should not predicate normal operation regulations on drastic solutions to unique circumstances.
Except that we're seeing exactly the same problem now that we did then, for the same underlying reasons:
1) High unemployment- it may not be a depression according to the economic statistics, but a large number of people are unemployed or underemployed.
2) High car ownership- higher than in the 1930s. Potentially, almost
anyone can be a part-time taxi driver, so the problem arises even more easily now than it did in the Depression on that account.
3) High competition to drive down driver wages, because of (1) and (2). Only
then it was just that it made taxis cheap. Now, it doesn't make taxis cheap, because Uber can significantly overcharge you for your driver's services and pocket the difference very inconspicuously.
Are these problems "catastrophes?" It depends on what you mean by a catastrophe. Is having billions of dollars gradually funneled out of people's pockets and into the hands of a clever few who routinely break laws, abuse the public trust, and overcharge for their services a catastrophe?
See, I totally get that in a lot of situations, regulating a market makes things worse. But there are also a lot of situations where regulating a market makes things
better, or at least better for 99% of the people involved. Markets are like evolution. They can do amazing things, but there's no guarantee that they will do the amazing things that people
want.
If a combination of market failures and perverse incentives says "turn the taxi industry into a system that runs on a cell phone app and a bunch of homeless people driving their cars into the ground for food money," then we may reasonably be entitled to say "fuck you, free market, we didn't sign up for this."
In addition to this you have outcomes that are inherently unlikely but have high potential for harm if they occur. Like "Well, THIS time your college-age daughter climbed into a stranger's car for their Uber ride, and they turned out to be a serial rapist. One that Uber trusts to drive people around, because Uber didn't actually cross-check their name against the sex offender registry."
Again, there are lots of business that have equal opportunity to introduce people to harm but they don't seem to get this level of scrutiny. If anything taxis or any sort now a days, traditional or Uber, are the worst possible venue for people to commit crimes in given you are literally tracked from request to drop off.
The driver is tracked from request to dropoff. They are also alone with the customer, who may be intoxicated or otherwise impaired. There is a significant probability that the ride begins or ends with the driver finding out where the customer lives. Crimes happening in the car might not be the problem. Crimes happening later might be.
Does anyone have statistics regarding the probability of an assault for the ride share industry over others? If not then this is just scare mongering. You are certainly right that background checks might stop a handful of assaults here or there, but this is probably true for every service job imaginable. Why is ride sharing so special in this regard?[/quote]Among other things because Uber actively resists gathering statistics on such things, from what I recall? They're not exactly open about this kind of thing.
It is one of a
cluster of related issues that all boil down to "there are reasons we put certain regulations in place on taxi drivers." Uber drivers are behaving in ways indistinguishable from taxi drivers. Allowing Uber to become an international taxi company that ignores all these regulations will have a very wide variety of consequences, including
all the problems the regulations were originally set up to prevent.
AND you have more subtle effects that will inevitably occur, like "well shit, the Uber drivers are getting in more accidents but not paying higher car insurance premiums, which means the rest of us have to indirectly subsidize the cost of their car accidents through our own higher premiums, whether we use Uber or not." Much less severe costs, but also a 100% probability of happening.
Why would they not be paying higher costs for their insurance premiums? This would work for exactly ONE accident, and then their premium would go up.
Yes; their premium would go up for the accident, to the same level as a private driver who had one accident. Now they're being charged the same rate as someone who drives the average amount and has had one accident in the past N years. They still drive more than that person and are still a higher risk. Only after a period of several years with the driver's true accident rate becoming clear does this factor balance out.
It won't happen until the insurance company wises up and spots the pattern of how frequent a driver the Uber driver is. Which requires them to know who is driving for Uber and who isn't among their clients, which is exactly the information Uber doesn't want them to have.
As far as I know people who use their private vehicle for work don't have to pay higher premiums unless they insure it through their business, and that is not the case for millions of small and home business people. Uber drivers are no different.
Ask the insurance companies themselves. If they know an Uber car is being used as a taxi regularly to a significant degree, would they charge a different premium? If so, Uber is making part of its profits on every frequent Uber driver by defrauding the insurance companies, or by tacitly encouraging the individual drivers to do the same. If not, we're all subsidizing the Uber drivers' higher accident rate.
To be fair, they're not morons. They're doing something that makes perfect sense in context, namely using their only remaining valuable asset (their car) to make enough money to survive.
The problem isn't the individual desperate drivers trying to make a living being 'stupid.' It's that this is one of the roughly eleventy jillion situations where having every individual person do what makes sense for them, in the middle of a fucked up system and situation, leads to a fucked up outcome.
The only way to avoid the fucked up outcome is to unfuck the system and the situation... but that requires government action.
Again, why are we applying an extreme outlier from 80 years ago to dictate policy now?
For the same reason that we cite the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, as the reason we have laws governing factory fire safety, limiting hours worked in sweatshops, and forbidding employers to lock their workers inside a building to stop them from taking breaks.
A lot of bad shit happened in the early 20th century. Not just the World Wars and the Depression, but a huge number of specific individual cases of disaster and suffering. In many cases, people died or were crippled or spent their whole lives in misery. In many, many cases, we learned institutional lessons from all those disasters. We learned how not to do things. We learned about laws that could or should be put in place to keep things from going to hell. And those laws were implemented.
And now, generations later, almost no one left alive has personal experience of what it was like before occupational safety laws, before unionization, before business regulations as we know them. People start talking about repealing these very laws and practices.
Many of these people are mature, confident, intelligent adults... But they have lived all their lives under the protective shield of a system of laws erected in the time of their parents and grandparents. And it's easy for them to forget why that shield is there. Or to assume that the problems the shield was put up to defend against have disappeared.
...
But the problems haven't disappeared. The same market forces that caused the Triangle Fire in 1911 would cause similar disasters today. The invisible hand of the market operates
consistently; if people cut corners a hundred years ago, they will cut similar corners today if given the opportunity. You'd see it all over again if employers had the same incentives, and if worker protections were as weak now as they were then. Bosses would lock their workers in the building, and skimp on safety codes, and sooner or later a hundred people would die in a fire.
Thus, history remains very relevant when we talk about deregulation. The famous conservative principle of
Chesterton's Fence applies. Those regulations were put in place for a reason, and if you don't discuss and understand why they were in place, and what problems they exist to prevent, you aren't equipped to talk meaningfully or honestly about whether they should be repealed.
Its not like we can't implement that solution again if the same situation materializes. But lets be honest here, given modern technology and changes in culture and economics that same situation in the particulars is not going to happen again (there might be equally desperate modern manifestations, but they ain't going to look the same), and even if it did the solution now is not going to look like the solution then.
Let's be equally honest, Uber isn't actually talking about what might happen, or about similar situations materializing as materialized in the past. Uber isn't working with city leadership to make sure that bad things don't happen to the city. Uber isn't interested in any of this.
Uber has a consistent business model of quietly moving into new markets and ignoring taxi regulations while running a taxi service, then complaining that their business model is being oppressed when someone tries to force them to obey the laws on the books. This is not a unique thing they do only in London, they do it in a lot of cities, over and over.
Will the
exact nature of Uber's unethical business practices, and the negative consequences of such, be different today than the exact unethical business practices that motivated all those laws and regulations to be passed in the first place? Probably. Will they be enough different, or better? To the point where it's worth giving Uber a free pass to ignore laws governing taxi companies? Because it insists it's actually
not a taxi company, but is instead a "shmaxi shmompany" or whatever?
There is no evidence that we are dealing here with anything other than "same shit, different decade."
And lets be honest here, the taxi industry line on why these rules are good is not what you say was the actual justification for these rules in the first place. Its LOCK OF YOUR DAUGTERS!!! Standard fear mongering, devoid of any statistics to support it. That right there really tells us all we need to know about the motivations of those most forcefully fighting against share riding.
There's a massive array of different lines and arguments and reasons that all interlock here. Because what it comes down to is Uber saying "I should get to ignore all the laws I don't like because they endanger the profitability of my business."
EVERY reason, separately and independently, why
ALL of those laws were put into place is an argument against allowing this to happen.
