[eevilspock]

From another article on the front page of HN today[1]:

"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.

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[1] http://cjohnson.io/2014/tesla. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7886266.