| All of this depends on the "size" of the picture we're looking at. Certainly we're free to act in an individualist way, but we need to take into account the social and environmental factors, and especially the latter gets more and more stringent. If you use a car, you're polluting my lungs and the environment. If in 50 years from now, cars will be emission free, well, great, but the situation now is what it is. If you use a car, you're contributing to putting at risk bike users and children. If you use a car, you are traffic. So again, you're certainly free to do whatever you want, but we should extend the analogy with books, to a world where, say, paper is limited, and books wrappings are thrown into my private garden. I understand the blogger concern, even if it's difficult to agree with such statements. It could be translated less angrily that it's disappointing that SF people are failing to take into account communal factors when thinking transportation, under the assumption (that he makes) that people in SF is supposed to be culturally more aware of them. |
"I believe our unfortunate heritage with capitalism, and our steadily decreasing trust in other Americans, is exactly how we end up with these intractable tragedy of the commons-type situations, where no individual party is willing to be vulnerable enough to move toward cooperative solutions in lieu of safe, selfish solutions. The longer this cultural feedback loop persists, the harder it becomes for any one party to make any meaningful move toward a Pareto optimal solution without inviting an equal-but-opposite increase in skepticism toward the first mover. And it's been persisting in this direction for quite some time. This explains, at the very least, why rampant partisanship is an inevitability in a large Democracy, despite it being worse off for everybody (including politicians themselves).
Essentially Uber and Lyft are moves toward a Nash Equilibrium solution, each person cynically and selfishly optimizing on the assumption that everyone else is cynically and selfishly optimizing.
--
[1] http://cjohnson.io/2014/tesla. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7886266.