[illegalmemory]

" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life."

This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.

[rchaud]

Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists. Throw enough lawyers and lobbying money at the problem and the laws can simply be re-written to be friendlier to your business model.

[DebtDeflation]

The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price. In the world of tradable goods, pricing below cost with the intent of putting competition out of business so you can raise prices later is known as "dumping" and is itself illegal.

[johnebgd]

I rooted for Uber to smash the Taxi cartels. Let us not forget that Taxi Cartels were also insidious beasts. Taxi drivers abused their walled garden with their price gouging by taking longer routes, refusal to take a credit card, and extremely poorly maintained fleets of vehicles. I have had mostly good experiences with Uber, whereas I had experiences that mostly bordered on general condescension toward me whenever I took a ride in a Taxi. I am glad the political will to block Uber never materialized.

[burningion]

This argument ignores the fact that there were other alternatives to Uber at the time, ones that didn't break the law! Believe it or not, there were multiple ride hailing apps on the iPhone, but none were as great at accumulating capital or breaking the law without recourse.

[AnthonyMouse]

The laws they allegedly broke were the taxi medallion cartel laws, which were the things keeping taxis terrible by limiting supply and competition. And those laws in general apply to the drivers rather than the ride hailing service. There is also a lot of ambiguity there, e.g. if you have a ride sharing service where people go on the app to find people to carpool with on a trip they'd be making anyway and then contribute gas money, is that a taxi service?

But the taxi services obviously hated the competition and waged a continuing media campaign to paint the renegades as the villains.

[burningion]

No, these are not only the laws they allegedly broke.

They created a project named Greyball to identify law enforcement and mislead them.

They created a kill switch for the event of a government raid to gather evidence.

They ordered and then canceled rides on competitor apps.

They tracked journalists and politicians...

The list goes on and on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber

[WorldMaker]

Taxi Medallion laws were also a Reputation Engine that was publicly queryable, subject to FOIA laws and generally had easy to search public databases for them, with detailed notes. Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a "friendly" 5-star UI, but do you have any idea what data contributed to that star rating? Do you always trust the algorithms that compute them from a bucket of metrics you can't directly request?

Sure, Medallion laws had problems, and got Regulatory Captured in some cities to also become terrible Trusts controlling prices that needed busting. But the answer to "fix the Regulation" isn't always "break the Regulation", and the Regulation had a lot of good intent of having public accessible information about drivers and that data not just owned by a single company and locked in their opaque algorithms. It might have been nicer to fix the Regulatory Capture and Bust the Trusts.

[averageRoyalty]

You understand they're a global company and broke many laws in many countries, right?

[mikepurvis]

The only alternative I remember is "black car" services, eg airport limos and the like. But there was very little automation around it; you had to speak on the phone with someone to book, and it was always like 24+ hours out rather than "go to the place now" the way a cab is.

[kmoser]

Most taxi services will send a car to your address immediately, no reservation required. Problem is, you have to know the exact address where you want to be picked up, which can sometimes be difficult to determine if you're new in town and/or standing on a street with no obvious sign or address, e.g. on the edge of a large university campus. That's where GPS-driven apps really shine, plus the ability to see the car's location in near real-time, and why I will never be sad at the demise of traditional way of having to call a cab.

[wand3r]

> This argument ignores the fact that there were other alternatives to Uber at the time, ones that didn't break the law!

Yes, and they owe their current existence to Uber paving the way for them.

[thatcat]

Political will shouldn't be required to enforce existing law. If i started a 1 man illegal taxi service it would be shut down even though it has little effect on the community, but saudi vc funded startup wasn't shut down even though it violated laws in every major city. That is a weird asymmetry as a us citizen.

[AnthonyMouse]

What's really happening here is that the laws are supposed to reflect the political will, i.e. the will of the people, but in many cases they don't, because the lawmakers have been captured by incumbents.

Then if a little guy comes in and tries to challenge them, they don't have the resources to resist the incumbents' pocket government officials and get destroyed. But if a big fish does it, people actually notice if the government tries to enforce stupid laws against them, and then government officials are afraid to do it because the public would not only not like it but actually notice the unreasonableness of the law.

But the problem here isn't that the law isn't being enforced against a well-heeled challenger, it's that those laws exist to be enforced against the little guy, when they should instead be repealed.

[thatcat]

i will simply disagree that the dominant social dynamic leading to this favoring of foriegn capital over us law is not systemic corruption.

[slashdev]

Uber definitely improved things.

When traveling it’s also so much safer than taxis.

My brother was robbed at gunpoint in a taxi. My wife had to jump from more than one moving taxi to escape. My ex girlfriend too. My Swiss friend had his camera and wallet stolen.

You can have issues with Uber too, but not as frequently because there’s a digital audit trail, you can report them to the platform and the police. The threat of those consequences lead to better behavior.

[kmoser]

Were these acts committed by the drivers or somebody else?

[slashdev]

Drivers

[cookie_monsta]

Here's another data point: I have taken literally thousands of taxis on 5 continents and none of this has ever happened to me

[leshow]

It didn't improve things for the drivers

[slashdev]

That’s not universally true

[walrus01]

What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre. The pendulum has swung back the other way. The only thing they have going for them now is the app based convenience, which is eroding as more "yellow cab" type traditional taxis band together and get set up with their own sort of city-specific app.

[phil21]

> What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis.

Sure, agreed.

> And the experience is equally mediocre.

Absolutely not. I regret using a taxi nearly every time I opt for the cheaper option. It's only the "better" choice if you happen to be standing right in front of one. This experience is nearly universal no matter where I travel.

I think people really forget how utterly terrible Taxis were pre-Uber. I have no idea about competing apps these days, maybe they are similar to Uber, but the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US.

Uber/Lyft certainly has gotten worse - but at least I can fairly reliably get a car when I need it with reasonable reliability. The rest of the "soft" product or pricing I really care far, far, less about than that simple fact.

[haswell]

> the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US

It seems impossible/problematic to generalize the taxi experience to “The US”.

If you’re in a city center, cabs can be far easier. The number of times I’ve ordered an Uber or Lyft and regretted it while watching taxi after taxi drive by has been increasing. But I expect the Chicago loop experience to be quite different from say, the suburbs.

[Supermancho]

> Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis.

I doubt that.

I double checked, just to be sure since I paid for taxis for years for a specific trip, each way. Uber is still cheaper TODAY than taxis were when I switched 10 years ago. One way 5 minute trip, Friday 6pm in orange county, ca still under 20$ today.

20$ was a good deal (or ripoff, depending on your attitude) for a taxi in 2015, for the same distance and a variable waiting time. Let's just say it's about equal for sake of discussion. There was no app, but there was a dispatcher you could call. There was no incentive to improve, until then.

Companies have had to adapt and prices have come down. It would no doubt be 30$+ today for taxis, if not for rideshare companies.

[gardnr]

I remember calling a taxi 3 hours before my flight to get to SFO. After an hour and four different phone calls to the taxi company, I took BART and barely made it before the counter closed.

The feedback system incentivizes drivers and riders to behave.

[GuB-42]

This is getting off-topic, but I am curious, why didn't you go with BART in the first place? If you had an hour to call the taxi company and still arrive in time, presumably, you had more than enough time.

I know there are reasons for not going with public transport, but preferring to take a taxi/uber when a train line can get you there in time maybe has more to say about public transport than about taxis. Well functioning rail is typically one of the most effective and reliable way of getting to an airport, and often much cheaper than taxis.

[ryandrake]

I’ve waited an hour for a Lyft while driver after driver accepted then canceled the ride. Ridesharing does not have great reliability either.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not really that surprising when the cities are passing laws to try to turn Uber back into the taxi cartel by e.g. making it harder for them to use part-time and on-demand contract drivers. The way you get the price down is by reducing friction, increasing flexibility and supply and taking advantage of efficiencies like people willing to do a dozen rides a week during surge pricing without making it a full-time job. Pass bad laws that make things more rigid and they get more expensive.

[immibis]

You think that workers having certainty of their work hours is a bad law? What are your work hours?

[rangestransform]

Last time I used curb, the cabbie told me that the curb payment wasn’t working and I had to Zelle him, ended up needing to report the driver to Curb to get my money back. Shoulda taken an uber!

[oremolten]

It does always seem like a race to the bottom.

[potato3732842]

The price people are willing to pay sets how nice a cab fleet can be while still turning a profit.

Same reason you don't see landscaping crews filled out with stellar employees.

[cratermoon]

> What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre.

That, of course, was the plan all along. Such august figures as JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller,and Andrew Carnegie all made their fortune by undercutting the competition, putting them out of business through means legal and otherwise, and finally monopolizing the markets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

[rzz3]

You should look at what’s going on in Cancun Mexico with Uber and the taxis right now. Your description in the first sentence is quite accurate.

Your comment also points out the power that regulation has to enforce and protect monopolies. I’m not saying all regulation is bad obviously, but I think we can see exactly what effect it had on the taxi industry, and I’m sure glad that Uber managed to disrupt it.

[consteval]

The problem with Uber is that it's a lose-lose-lose money pit scenario.

Customers pay significantly more, drivers make significantly less, and Uber is still running hundreds of millions in the red. Turns out hiring thousands of devs and dumping absurd capital into... driving people around... doesn't really work.

[arp242]

It really screwed over a lot of regular working-class people. In some European cities getting a taxi license was a serious monetary investment. People took our huge loans for this. This was now suddenly worthless. It's like being told your very expensive university education is no longer accredited, but the student loan still exists. kthxbye.

I'm not saying the existing systems were always good (they weren't), but you need to be willing to overlook a lot of real-world suffering to be "rooting for Uber". Phrases like "taxi cartels" sound nice, but they're hardly neutral phrasings that simplify things to the point of being useless phrases.

And "I'm just going to willingly and knowingly ignore laws I don't like for personal profit" is not a great take-away either. This isn't Aaron Swartz breaking a law as a matter of "civil disobedience" – it's just a plain "how can we make money?"

And where does that leave competitors who are NOT willing to break the law? It's an unlevel playing field; there can be no free market if some people don't need to follow the same set of rules. Uber's actions are fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-free market.

[6510]

I always tell the story of this restaurant 18 km from my house. If I order their cheapest 6 euro hamburger they deliver it for free within 30 minutes. If I take a taxi to the restaurant I may have to wait for an hour and it costs about 100 euro and another 100 to get back.

[arp242]

I took a ~20 minute 12km taxi ride just last Monday, and it was about €22. That's in Ireland. Considering fuel, the drive back for the driver, and that taxis have a lot of downtime, that seems like a reasonable price.

You live in Netherlands according to a recent comment; I can't believe taxis are almost 4x more expensive, unless you're stuck in traffic for a long time, but then your burger can't arrive in 30 mins?

And free delivery on €6 food item is almost certainly netting them a loss.

[decimalenough]

There is no way anybody is making a profit on driving 36 km to deliver a hamburger for 6 euros, and it's a matter of time until whatever faucet of VC money subsidizing this runs dry.

In much of the world the price of food delivery has risen to the level needed to make it profitable, and it's not cheap. I paid around $10 in fees plus Uber's 30-50% markups on the food itself to get a couple of burritos yesterday from a shop a mile down the road.

[twelve40]

> getting a taxi license was a serious monetary investment. People took our huge loans for this

it was a terrible system that sucked for everyone involved. For all of Uber's flaws, would you rather go back to that today? really??

[arp242]

> would you rather go back to that today? really??

I absolutely said said no such thing. There are good ways to change things and bad ways to change things. Allowing a private entity reap huge profits by blatantly breaking rules and screwing people is not a good way to change things.

[Forgeties79]

Unfortunately now Ubers are exactly the same experience but more expensive/unpredictable. It’s only nicer if you spend more on black and such, which makes it easily double a standard cab fare.

[brisky]

It is possible that digitization and improvement of taxi services was inevitable anyway

[rangestransform]

They still haven’t properly digitized, curb sucks ass, I had to report a driver to curb when he made me Zelle him because “curb payment wasn’t working”

[clarkmoody]

Possible, yes. Probable?

[ToucanLoucan]

Not only was it inevitable, if we were so inclined and willing to use the regulatory pen, we could've simply written into law that for Taxi's to operate, they must be well maintained and must accept all major forms of payment. And yeah, the Taxi industry would've fought it because every company ever has fought every regulation ever no matter how much it stands to benefit both their customers and they them-fucking-selves but companies having a say in how they are regulated is both how a Taxi company would fight this, and how Uber, AirBnb, OpenAI, Meta, etc. blatantly and flagrantly violate the law and instead of consequences, they get fines, and court hearings. So maybe we just shouldn't be allowing that?

It drives me up the goddamn wall how people will say shit like "the Taxi industry needed to be upended" when like... I mean, maybe? But on balance, given all the negative externalities associated with these companies, are they really a gain? Or are they just a different set of overlords, equally disinterested in providing a good service once they reach the scale where they no longer are required to give a shit?

Just... regulate the fuckers. Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all. Make whatever consequence the government is going to dispense immeasurably, clearly worse than whatever the business is trying to weasel out of doing, and boom. Solved.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Not only was it inevitable, if we were so inclined and willing to use the regulatory pen, we could've simply written into law that for Taxi's to operate, they must be well maintained and must accept all major forms of payment.

That was frequently already the case. They were required to accept credit cards but then the card reader would be "broken" and it wasn't worth anybody's time to dispute it instead of just paying in cash.

You also... don't really want laws like that. They're required to accept "all payment methods", which ones? Do they have to take American Express, even though the fees are much higher? Do they have to take PayPal if the customer has funds in a PayPal account? What about niche card networks like store cards accepted at more than one merchant? If not those and just Visa and Mastercard, you now have a law entrenching that duopoly in the law.

> Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all.

It's not rocket science, it's trade offs.

Is there a $5000 fine for a breakdown? You just made cab service much more expensive, because they're either going to have to pay the fines as a cost of doing business and then pass them on, or propylactically do excessive maintenance like doing full engine rebuilds every year because it costs less than getting caught out once, and then passing on the cost of that. And even then, there is no such thing as perfect. The cabbie paid to have the whole engine rebuilt by the dealership just yesterday and the dealer under-tightened one of the bolts when putting it back in, so there's a coolant leak? Normally that's just re-tightening the bolt and $20 worth of coolant, but now it's a $5000 fine on top of the $4000 engine rebuild.

The way you actually want to solve this is with competition, not rigid rules and onerous fines. If someone is always having breakdowns then they get bad rating, customers can see that when choosing and then opt for a different driver that costs slightly more -- but only if the cost is worth the difference to them. Maybe it's worth $2 for the difference between two stars and five but it isn't worth $50 for the difference between 4.7 and 4.8. Either way you shouldn't be deciding for people, you should be giving them the choice.

[drdaeman]

> Just... regulate the fuckers.

That's true, however we must also keep in mind that Uber (and alikes) happened because regular institutions failed to do this for some reason or another. I won't try to speculate why, because I have no idea (and of course it looks obvious in the hindsight).

There was a demand for safer and more reliable taxis. There was not enough supply for that. Government haven't paid enough attention to the sector. So, naturally, someone came and used that whole situation to provide supply for this demand.

Of course it's not this simple, and there were a lot of other things going on. But if we narrow the scope down to just this, then we can see that the core problem here wasn't Uber, it was that that governments were too slow to react in time.

[rangestransform]

I would rather ruin the taxi livelihood than have to argue with my driver about turning on the meter again

[mschuster91]

The solution to that would not have been rabid capitalism just bulldozing over laws because the laws suck and further entrenching that "laws only matter for the poor".

The solution to the pre-Uber state of the taxi industry would be to actually have the regulations authorities enforce the regulation. But it seems across the Western world that having regulations authorities do their job and regulate is like the devil and holy water.

Additionally, in some cases the regulations themselves were crap.

[Domenic_S]

Let's not pretend that the taxi situation was hunkey-dory before big-bad-tech came onto the scene. There's no regulation that says if I call dispatch to request a taxi one has to show up, and "we'll pick you up when we pick you up" was (and is still) a common mode of operation.

In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.

[mschuster91]

> In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.

That's precisely what I meant with "in some cases the regulations themselves were crap". But that doesn't imply the idea of regulation is bad - it is saying that maybe voters should make their voice clear to lawmakers and parties to get stuff changed. Regulation can only be as good or bad as the voters allow it to be.

[buran77]

The reason is that everyone who was supposed to do something about it was "subsidized with VC money".

[grepfru_it]

Or in Ubers case, used to actively hinder those doing the investigation

[_heimdall]

Speed had a lot to do with this as well.

VC funding allowed them to move quickly enough that they got to a scale where they could afford legal and lobbying protection when challenges eventually happened.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price.

That's just a trope. They were initially losing money because they had high fixed costs (developing a platform, spending enough on advertising to get a critical mass of people using it), which are long-term investments. If you only spread the cost of the long-term investment over the short-term sales, they were "losing money" in the early years, but that's how all long-term investments work.

Dumping is when you sell below the unit cost, e.g. paying drivers more than you charge customers, which isn't what they were doing in general. And as long as they weren't doing that, the incumbents could have responded by lowering their own prices (and therefore margins) without themselves losing money on each sale, which is competition working as intended. Unless the competition is too hidebound to accept a reduction in profits in order to stay competitive or otherwise insists on using a less efficient method of operating, in which case they go under.

[lupusreal]

Part of the reason Airbnb got a pass must be how profitable it was to people who own many properties, despite the harm it does to the communities of people who only own one property.

[harrison_clarke]

shouldn't there be a lot of political will from the traditional hotels and taxis, and their lawyers? i can see that the answer is "no", but i don't know why

especially with hotels, i would have expected there to be small enough oligopoly to overcome the freerider problem (taxis are more regional, so i don't expect them to be able to fight an (inter)national company very easily)

plus the president owning a hotel chain

[rangestransform]

> shouldn't there be a lot of political will from the traditional hotels and taxis, and their lawyers?

Yes there is, I am reminded of this every time I take an uber by the yellow cab medallion buyout fee that I’m charged because of the lobbying power of the TLC lobby in NYC

[lupusreal]

There are a lot more people who own a few properties as investments than there are hotel owners. Even if these people don't plan to rent through Airbnb, the way Airbnb distorts the housing market is still beneficial for their investments. Also, by the time Trump became president Airbnb was already entrenched for years.

[hylaride]

The traditional taxi industry was rife with corruption, bad experiences, and poor service in many jurisdictions before uber/lyft. As terrible of a human being that I think Travis Kalanick is, it was only going to take lawbreaking to overcome such a tainted system.

Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat. Many drivers didn't own their own medallians then had to rent from owners, often making little money. In my city (Toronto) cabs were often dirty, broken, refused short distance fares (illegal) and smelled of cigarette smoke that was obviously from the driver.

Examples (paywalls, but you get the idea):

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/nyregion/amid-a-heritage-...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-li...

[nayuki]

Moreover, I believe Uber fundamentally solved two problems with taxis:

The driver can't scam the passenger. The driver can't set the meter wrong, drive an unnecessarily long route, or just be an outright unlicensed taxi. Instead, the driver maintains a relationship with Uber, and the passenger can preview the fare before committing.

The passenger can't scam the driver. In a traditional taxi, you could theoretically just walk out ("dine and dash" style). The passenger can also make a call to dispatch and not show up for the ride. Instead, the passenger maintains a relationship with Uber, and the driver doesn't need to handle any payments.

> Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat.

And thus medallion owners collect economic rent on their artificially scarce resource, distorting the free market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent

[andrewaylett]

Meanwhile, in places with sensible rules about taxis and private hire, the only thing that Uber did was make it easier for people to break the rules. And rack up an enormous tax bill that they somehow believed they'd be able to get out of paying.

https://www.londonreconnections.com/2021/uber-loses-appeal-a...

[cratermoon]

> The driver can't scam the passenger

> The passenger can't scam the driver.

Progress! Uber scams both passenger and driver. Hooray for Free Markets™!

[nayuki]

> Uber scams both passenger and driver.

Then why do people keep using it? It seems like a pretty transactional relationship to me. If drivers aren't getting paid as much as they wanted, they should find another job with a higher price. If passengers are paying more than they wanted, then they should find another way to call a taxi with a lower price.

[umanwizard]

Under what definition of “scam” is that the case?

[TeMPOraL]

It sucked, but not everywhere equally. Meanwhile, Uber rode their one-trick pony (an app), which everyone quickly replicated, all the way to upending taxi businesses worldwide, thanks to their infinite money supply letting them survive long enough in any new market to get the public behind them, which took away support from local regulators trying to keep the market from being gutted by what at this point was a multinational corporation (and technically a criminal enterprise).

Sure, taxi services aren't usually known to be paragons of virtue, but then they weren't that bad everywhere; Uber is just another case of an US org trying to address an US-specific problem and then bludgeoning the entire world with their solution, whether the rest of the planet has such problems or not.

[ChadNauseam]

That seems a little dramatic. They never forced anyone to take an uber right? If taxis were so amazing in other countries why would anyone be interested in switching to uber?

[mrguyorama]

Uber was able to subsidize prices, that's why.

[theshackleford]

> It sucked, but not everywhere equally.

Ok, but “everywhere” isn’t my problem. They sucked everywhere I had to use one which is my problem.

> they weren’t that bad everywhere

They were beyond a joke where I am from, which is not the US. Even today, they remain a worse option.

> US specific problem

There was nothing US specific about it.

[slices]

I've never been a huge user of either, but my worst Uber ride was much better than my best taxi ride.

[ses1984]

The last time I dragged my family into a taxi because of my anti Uber ideology, the driver stank to hell of body odor, asked me to input directions on his phone covered with dried snot from him sneezing with his mouth open, he drove dangerously under the speed limit on the freeway, and it took twice as long to get home as normal.

But at least I didn’t give Uber any money…

[derektank]

I'm immediately reminded of the Slavoj Zizek quote,

"I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology"

[jamespo]

Strange, my last Uber driver had BO. Normally they are fine however.

[harrison_clarke]

in my experience, taxi quality varies wildly depending on where you are

in bay area, it absolutely makes sense to invent uber, because the taxis were awful. and in vancouver (canada), they're also awful, and deserve the disruption: they would often tell you it'd be a 40 minute wait, and then just not show up

taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine. you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with no hassles or apps. i've been in an uber/lyft a handful of times in nyc, but they're just worse (possibly cheaper, but the subway also gives them stiff competition, and i don't care that much if i'm in enough of a hurry to take a cab)

[selectodude]

>taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine. you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with no hassles or apps

Unless you weren't white, or you wanted to leave Manhattan (or even go north of 96th street). Otherwise, yeah I guess they were okay.

[avidiax]

Vancouver was a great example of the corruption inherent in monopolies. Vancouver had neither Lyft nor Uber until 2020. I heard (internally, when I used to work for Uber) that the reason is that some politicians there had a personal stake in the taxis, so they got a $50 minimum fare passed for all booked rides.

The thing that Uber and Lyft really provided was a surveillance economy to keep both the drivers and riders somewhat in-line. Without it, every ride is an almost anonymous one-shot transaction with almost no recourse on one side, so the game theory suggests that service only has to be good enough that the police aren't called.

https://www.urbanyvr.com/uber-lyft-vancouver-launches/

[umanwizard]

> taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine. you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with no hassles or apps.

This is only true in a small subset of New York.

[dboreham]

When it's not raining.

[AlexCoventry]

Uber is still undercutting taxis in Boston, FWIW. I looked up a ride on Curb (a taxi app) and Uber today, and the prices were $17 and $12, respectively.

[umanwizard]

Taxis and hotels suck compared to Airbnb and uber even at the same price, so I find it hard to be upset.

[elzbardico]

Every time we talk about VC money in the last 20 years, we’re really talking about a wealth transfer from workers and the middle class to the rich via the Cantillon Effect. Cheap money enters the system through banks, funds, and corporations, not through wages. The people who get access to it first (asset holders, investors, VCs) deploy it into equities, real estate, and startups before inflation devalues the currency for everyone else.

Post-2008, ZIRP and QE pumped trillions into financial markets, making capital nearly free for those who could borrow at scale. That money didn’t go into raising wages; it went into inflating asset prices. If you owned stocks or real estate, you got richer. If you earned a paycheck, you watched housing and living costs go up while your wages stagnated.

VC was one of the biggest beneficiaries. With bonds yielding nothing, institutional investors had to chase returns, flooding venture funds with capital. That’s how we got an era of insane startup valuations, SoftBank-style mega-funds, and entire sectors built on free money. Growth-at-all-costs became the norm because the cost of capital was effectively zero.

Then COVID hit, and the Fed doubled down—more QE, more stimulus, even lower rates. Another massive wealth transfer. Money printer go brrr, asset prices moon, and suddenly we have SPACs, meme stocks, and a startup funding frenzy. Meanwhile, workers got a couple of stimulus checks, and by the time the dust settled, everything from rent to food to cars was way more expensive.

Now AI companies are running the same playbook that cloud megascalers ran before them—monetizing open-source work while locking out the people who actually built it. Cloud providers took open-source databases, infrastructure, and developer tools, turned them into managed services, and extracted billions in profit without meaningfully compensating the people who did the work. AI companies are now doing the same thing—scraping open-source repositories, academic papers, and public datasets, building models upon it then slapping on proprietary fine-tuning and charging for API access all the while blatantly raising capital by promising to make the same workers they stole from obsolte. All of it built on the backs of researchers, engineers, and artists who never see a dime, but also on the backs of everyone else via the cantillon effect.

Now rates go up, the bubble deflates, and who gets left holding the bag? Not the VCs who cashed out early. Not the bankers who took their fees. It’s the workers, the middle class, the open-source devs, and the late-stage startup employees who thought they had something real. The cycle repeats.

[mapt]

Is it? Really?

Or is it just "illegal" for an overseas competitor to a domestic industry, in trade disputes?

What is the fine? How many days in jail does the company spend? What portion is its stock diluted by?

We remember the tale of Jeff Bezouis the Wise, who tragically lost his company when he decided he didn't want to buy diapers.com at the offered price, and instead wanted to dump 200 million dollars into selling diapers well below cost until their site folded.

[hammock]

You're right. Dumping refers to international trade. I believe parent commenter was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

[pdntspa]

This has always been the case. Laws are only as good as their enforcement. This is why the business class is so aggressive about tearing down regulation until they can wield it as a weapon. Do as I say, not as I do, etc etc

If you as an individual can prevent the enforcement of a law, or be sure that it will not be enforced against you, then it does not apply to you.

[deegles]

I've also heard the term "regulatory arbitrage" to describe this.

[turtlesdown11]

its a term used to describe "corporate criminal acts" yes

[cpursley]

The hotel and taxi industry were legit terrible before those two disrupted them.

Laws are ment to be broken. Especially in cronist systems where incumbents write the laws.

[999900000999]

Hotels were just fine.

Taxis were discriminatory and "uncool" to the point were Uber has saved thousands by preventing drunk driving.

Now if you go out with the boys and get drunk, it's a 30 second casual call to get an Uber and get home.

Live in a neighborhood Taxis are afraid to service，you can either make some extra income working for Uber or use it yourself. When Ubers used as its intended purpose, to basically make a quick buck, it's a lifeline to many low income people .

Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen. It's not really a career though...

[Marsymars]

> Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen.

Maybe... I really don't get how the economics work out here though. If you look at the numbers, it mostly just seems like you're converting car equity into cash via depreciation.

But also, I'd guess that for a big chunk of people who are going to have trouble paying rent with any regularity, they'd have to overpay for their car in the first place to get something that's Uber-appropriate. My car's a couple years too old for Uber now, but is still perfectly functional, and there's just no way the math would work for me to buy a newer car so that I can convert its capital cost into cash via Uber.

[4ggr0]

> Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen

that sounds so incredibly dystopian, not sure if that was the intention :(

[verall]

It's super dystopian and it creates bad incentives (the harder the underclass is squeezed the better a product it is for the middle class), but I have to agree that gig work is often a lifeline for poor people.

I consider it similar to access to unsecured credit that way - it's easy to feel like "wow this industry is scamming these people it should be illegal" but people without any other backstop will probably need access to unsecured credit sometime and it's better than losing their house/car/job/pet/family etc..

[gardnr]

maintaining a precarious class benefits those in power

[999900000999]

I forgot to mention, Jitney cabs( unlicensed cabs primarily serving minority neighborhoods)came long before Ubers. They're more of less gone now though.

What's better. Taking out a 300% APR payday loan, getting evicted or working an extra 20, 30 hours of Uber.

[BrandonM]

Maybe to you, but I was broke during and shortly after college. If I could have picked up some gig work when I needed it, that would have been a huge help.

[__loam]

The level of casual criminality in this industry is astounding sometimes.

[dboreham]

Not terrible everywhere.

[CamperBob2]

Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists.

Laws matter to the extent that they don't interfere with actual progress. Laws that would have prevented the LLMs we have today from being developed should be ignored, as should laws requiring us to pay tribute to taxi and hotel cartels.

Respect for the law is going to be an increasingly-hard sell going forward, and that's mostly the lawmakers' own fault. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.

[classified]

That's what makes a banana republic, and for all intents and purposes the U.S. are exhibit A.

[infamouscow]

The purpose of having an executive branch of government is explicitly to apply the law based on subjective opinions.

There's no purpose of having an executive branch of government separate from the other two branches if not to cushion the inflexible and glacial nature of the other branches of government.

[mrguyorama]

>The purpose of having an executive branch of government is explicitly to apply the law based on subjective opinions.

What? No, the purpose of having a separate executive is separation of powers and checks and balances.

[infamouscow]

You haven't explained why there is an executive branch in the first place.

Why does the executive branch exist at all if it's simply to enforce written law?

Why do we elect the executive at all if they are merely to enforce written law?

Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when a court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law?

[Dylan16807]

> Why does the executive branch exist at all if it's simply to enforce written law?

Someone has to be in charge of enforcing things.

> Why do we elect the executive at all if they are merely to enforce written law?

Do you have a suggestion of another way to do it that doesn't put congress in charge?

Also the president has some other very important roles.

> Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when a court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law?

That one is definitely subjective by its nature, but also the average number of pardons is around two thousand, a very small fraction of cases.

[mrguyorama]

The executive exists to enforce the law the legislature writes primarily to make sure the legislature isn't in charge of enforcing the laws. It's a check on the power of the legislature.

You could still have discretion with the legislature in charge of executing on their own laws. I think countries exist like that, but I don't know enough to say which.

A separate executive is not necessary to have discretion or pardons or flexibility in law. A separate executive is necessary if you want physically different human beings controlling the organizations who enforce the law (DOJ, FBI, etc)

Consider that Judges and the judicial branch of the government ALSO gets to use subjectivity and their own opinion in adjudicating cases. Another check.

The entire point of the Constitution was to put the power of a King in a bunch of different hands, and then tie some of those hands with specific constraints, and then give a couple different options on how to change those constraints over time. Leeway and discretion goes both ways, so Congress does have the ability to further constrain such discretion. A previous president tried to argue he could choose to not spend money congress told him to spend, so they wrote up a bill saying very clearly, Uh, no, if we say spend, you spend. They have that power as a check on the power of the executive. All three branches are ostensibly MEANT to be vying for power. It's an antagonistic system, like the court system. The founders loved that shit. In reality, it probably is a dysfunctional system that modern systems engineers would not like, and other countries get that "system fights and moderates itself" effect by encouraging coalitions between parties in a strong parliament. IMO those have demonstrated better stability. I'm not convinced the US would have survived getting it's whole shit blown up like the UK did.

Checks. And. Balances. 5th grade civics class.

[veggieroll]

Wilhoit’s law:

> There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

[TeMPOraL]

Is that a prescriptive or descriptive law?

[qup]

He left out part of the quote, which is misappropriated as well. Wikipedia:

> This quotation is often incorrectly attributed to Francis M. Wilhoit:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

> However, it was actually a 2018 blog response by 59-year-old Ohio composer Frank Wilhoit, years after Francis Wilhoit's death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit

[diogocp]

A restatement of Orwell's "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others".

The irony must have been lost on him.

[TZubiri]

Lol, that's clearly a descriptive law/maxim not an actual law.

[rahton]

The legal system is built to favor large corps and capital owners. See Katharina Pistor books for instance.

[cheschire]

I think it’s the other way around. Those large entities break all the same laws and rules as others and then get to the point where they can influence the creation of a regulatory moat around themselves to prevent competitors from taking the same path as them.

[ttoinou]

True but lets take examples one by one to see what we can learn : Spotify was doing illegal things until they made a deal to become legal and not to be trialed over what they done. Seems like business deals is what saved them, not regulatory capture (the regulations around IP for music pre existed Spotify)

[cheschire]

Sure that is what saved them initially, but following that early 2010’s period of hemorrhaging money and eventual recovery, then they started digging that moat.

https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lo...

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/issues?...

[ttoinou]

Very interesting thank you for the links. I'm not knowledgeable in the Music Modernization Act, but maybe some of this lobbying is to avoid being sued rather than building legal long term moat

[TeMPOraL]

Same would be the case for YouTube. Google case was different in that AFAIK there wasn't any obvious legal problem with indexing, and, back then, they were actually doing everyone a favor.

Hardly anyone had any issue with Google search until the time when news media screwed themselves over by going all in on ads, overdoing it, then trying to bring back the paywall, only to realize no one is actually browsing their sites but instead relies on Google to find specific articles. All kinds of legal and technical nonsense started happening (and then Google improved the blurbs under search results and added the "answer box", leading publishers big and small to collectively lose their minds...).

[nayuki]

And then news media in Canada got even worse a few years ago. They demanded the government make a law so that when Google or Facebook even links to an article, they must pay the news org. Google decided to pay the link tax. Facebook decided to block all news links. From talking to people, most think that Facebook is the villain, in reality it's the news orgs in collusion with state power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_News_Act , https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...

[gardnr]

Then Facebook complied with the new law which had negative outcomes for Canadians. The politicians then blamed Facebook for the negative outcomes: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-facebook-instagram-news-blo...

I do believe that large companies should be taxed to help improve society. This law was not the right way to do it.

[Workaccount2]

I guess I sort of understand where this idea comes from, and when I was young I was totally into it, but now being in the corporate world for a decade and having my own small business, I just don't really see it anymore.

Big corps tend to be extremely conscientious of the the law. The law may not be ideal, but they tend to be hyper aware of it and have lawyers to ensure it. Small companies on the other hand are the wild fucking west, and tend to be overflowing with "turn a blind eye to that".

What big corps love is regulation that is expensive for small shops to overcome. They can drop $500k on a product cert no problem, be legally in the clear (and graciously compliant!), while making it near impossible for small guys to compete.

[jamesbfb]

RIP Aaron

[arp242]

If you do something wrong then you, as a person, are held responsible and accountable.

If you do something wrong as "part of your job" then you're typically not held responsible and accountable but the company is (the exceptions being spectacular fraud: Enron, VW diesel).

It's not hard to see how this can go off the rails.

[toomuchtodo]

“The revolution will be incorporated.”

[nico]

> the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it

It’s because the legal system is not about justice, it’s about money

Most people can’t afford lawyers or expensive legal battles

On the other hand, individuals and organizations with a lot of money get to weaponize and exploit the legal system to their advantage

“To my friends, anything; to my enemies, the law”

[btown]

At the risk of wading into politics - consider a legal environment, in any country, where laws become increasingly strict, but where prosecutorial discretion, pardon powers, and a justice system designed to allow well-resourced law firms to delay cases indefinitely, are all transparently used for political purposes. Such an environment could easily exhibit a feedback loop that allows justice to be arbitrary and opposition voices to be silenced.

I'll refrain from value judgments on the above - but for heaven's sake, we're on a site called "Hacker News." We should understand that a machine like this could turn on any one of us in an instant for any reason.

[artyom]

> the legal system only punishes general public.

In more general terms, the legal system punishes what can be made a profit or an example when punishing.

Also, I don't think the legal system itself wants to get too much into "big institutions against the work of others", save for the fictional TV representations of smart lawyers and clever arguments, 99.9% of the legal system output is copy/paste.

[jimmySixDOF]

> MIT

I think Aaron Swartz went to Harvard, not MIT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

[xemoka]

Yes, he went to Harvard; the laptop was plugged in at MIT using his Harvard Fellow credentials to access JSTOR.

[meeech]

At this point, I think it's safe to say it doesn't 'feel' that way. It is that way. Sorry if you were being facetious and I didn't pick up on it.

[censorfree]

>This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.

Welcome to the modern day aristocracy. Not only what you mentioned, this world is also divided into a group of insider who can get capital from 0 - 2%, while rest of us has a cost of 17%, 22% or 30%?

[isaacremuant]

It doesn't "seem". The entire system in most countries works, by design, that way because the people in power trade in influence at a different plane.

That's why democracy often feels "failed" in that no change can be achieved because "it's just more of the same". Few Lobbyists representing the interests of a few people have more power than millions voting differently.

[vladms]

What happens in US right now shows that change is achieved through voting. There are other examples as well in Europe where things did change because of how people voted. If the change is good or bad depends on your perspective.

For me the annoying part is that people vote for a guy because of a couple heavily advertised issues, ignoring all the other plans or the fact that he might not keep his word. Then they are unhappy that things "fail" for them.

[isaacremuant]

Yes. US and places where people can elect a democracy have a higher chance of some change than European countries with parliamentary systems where a sudden populist candidate won't make it through that system.

I'd argue that, even if some change does happen in the US. Most change (see healthcare, military spending, etc) won't happen because big money will beat the majority of the populace every time.

[brookst]

I like your optimistic take. My more cynical one is that what’s happening in the US shows that real change is achieved through corruption and lying: honest policy discussions and iterative improvement stand no chance against a charismatic populist who will say anything to entrench an oligarchy.

[vladms]

It's not primarily optimistic. I just think that education of the people can bring the best improvement on the long run, and not adjusting democracy, demonizing rich guys or another "new" system.

While I hope iterative improvement is the way, I think there are people that have it (or feel) so bad (due to various reasons) that they would take a 50% chance to die for the chance to live better.

The charismatic populists are not supported only by people that are well off, without any worry (neither in US, nor in Europe). (ex: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1535295/presidential-ele...)

[amanaplanacanal]

It's unclear yet whether anything will really change. It is a perfect example though of how the rich are above the law.

[daedrdev]

USAID has already been shut down

[amanaplanacanal]

What I mean is that people are going to sue, and they will go to the courts. It's unclear how much will really stick.

[jmount]

They may have just been the friendly step A. We didn't end up seeing where that was going to go.

[G_o_D]

Money speaks ! Money buys !

[yoyohello13]

It's not "almost" like that. The legal system IS that.

[TZubiri]

How so? It is still illegal if meta does it, they will face trial.

[quaintdev]

I read the same thing earlier today on Reddit, weird!

[devwastaken]

if you get a group of people and call it an llc then criminal elements are largely eliminated.

[bayindirh]

As Venus Theory elaborates the issue on his video [0]:

"This problem will be solved in the favor of the (party) which has the most money to throw into the problem" (paraphrase mine).

So, yeah.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrkAORPiaEA

[kordlessagain]

When individuals are assigned heroic status despite clear evidence of mental illness and crimes, such as “breaking and entering”, it prevents society from having rational discussions about both law enforcement and mental health support. This dynamic repeats across multiple high-profile cases.

People often elevate deeply flawed figures to heroic status when those figures seem to challenge authority or "the system." This happens especially with individuals who present themselves as outsiders fighting the establishment, have a compelling personal struggle narrative, or voice grievances that resonate with public frustrations

Trump fits this pattern - his supporters overlook concerning behaviors and statements because they see him as fighting a system they distrust. Like Manning and Swartz, his mental state and fitness are often ignored in favor of the "hero against the system" narrative.

This dynamic creates a feedback loop where legitimate criticism becomes harder to discuss rationally.

[jeffwask]

Welcome to the two-tier legal system of the modern world. Why obey the law when the penalty is a rounding error?

[ossobuco]

It's an oligarchy, always has been. I don't know how colossal the pile of evidence supporting this has to get before people finally accept it.

[rixed]

Conscious life in general seems possible to me unless our brain tells us a better story than reality.

A story in which we are the hero, in which we are not mortal, in which we are important, in which people care about us, in which we are intelligent and our perceptions rarely fail us, in which our life has a meaning and also in which the social game we play is determined, or at least influenced, by some just principles. We would despair if we were aware of the full extent of our meaninglessness and powerlessness.

I believe that it is the core reason why we love to believe that God/Nature is good, that the king is legitimate and that the laws are fair.

[52-6F-62]

They are paid, handsomely, by it. Or otherwise brainwashed by it. And pummelled into ignorance by it, as they are told that to understand is stupid or delusional, knowledge ends at STEM, and the world only exists for efficient production of capital products.

The poets write laments about such false ages. Prophecies were written about such ages thousands of years ago.

The cycles are larger than us all.

One stable insight is that the chaos breeds possibility, and thus hope. In the meantime, however…

[gscott]

It is more a money thing. Meta can pay x billion like pocket change. Regular people are run through the ringer to teach the plebs to not get out of line.

[bmitc]

It's not a feeling. It's exactly what happens. It's completely blatant.

For some reason, whenever you're a billionaire or company, things suddenly get so difficult that you can claim that it's impossible to be held accountable for anything. Murder, insider trading, laundering, treason, etc.

OpenAI complained about this, as did Google and everyone else. If your company can't exist without stealing data, then it's not a viable company. Companies don't have a constitutional right to exist.