[marcell]

Quoting the article:

"I don't know if this is legally feasible, but my inclination would be to allow Lyft here a long time before Uber," the commissioner of Portland's Bureau of Transportation, told the Times. "Lyft seems like a respectable company, and Uber seems like a bunch of thugs."

It is a bit shocking to hear a public regulator talk like this. A regulator's role should not be to pick and choose winners between two (essentially identical) companies based on personal preference.

[buro9]

It's a quote, quotes are usually lacking some context and this doesn't appear as bad as you make it out.

What if a few missing/implied words were added in that related to earlier parts of the conversation?

> my inclination would be to allow Lyft here a long time before Uber

becomes

> my inclination based on the legal interpretation of how these companies have operated would be to allow Lyft here a long time before Uber

His quote remains an opinion, the only missing context is whether this opinion is based on the legal arguments in the case or a purely personal opinion or external set of information that would show a bias away from the legal arguments.

He even said in the prior sentence "This is about one company thinking it's above the law". Again, implying that Lyft are following the spirit of the law as well as the letter, and Uber are following the letter and not the spirit (and thus working as many loopholes as possible to 'win' in-spite of the wishes of the people of the affected cities that they do so in accordance with the wishes of the people of those cities).

I think this is not shocking at all, it's how it's supposed to be. Shocking is how some companies wish to ignore the codified will of the people of a city (or state, or country) purely to turn a dime. And yes, it's also shocking that some representatives of the people are corrupt as hell and that the written law has enough holes in it to fly a 747 through.

But a representative of people's tax dollars standing up to ask for companies who operate within a city to do so in accordance with the wishes of those who pay the tax dollars is not shocking, it should be the norm

[yummyfajitas]

He even said in the prior sentence "This is about one company thinking it's above the law". Again, implying that Lyft are following the spirit of the law as well as the letter, and Uber are following the letter and not the spirit (and thus working as many loopholes...

By definition, the codified will of the people is the letter of the law. The "spirit of the law" is what politicians kind of want to happen, but never actually passed a law for.

Also, the "will of the people" is a nonsensical concept by Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

[BrandonY]

I don't necessarily agree that the "spirit of the law" is quite so nebulous. If a law is like a computer program, the "spirit of the law" is the program that you are trying to write, and the "letter of the law" is the program that you have written. If you've written a calculator and dividing 2 by 2 produces negative infinity, nobody will argue that this is a bug and not what the programmer intended.

The spirit of the law is the programmer's intention, the design document, the thing the customer wants you...to...build.....

Right, okay, I've changed my mind. That's nebulous.

[desdiv]

Arrow's impossibility theorem only applies to rank order voting systems, not democracy in general.

[yummyfajitas]

At it's core, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says that there is no ranked preference a group larger than 2 with at least 3 policy choices.

I don't know what "will of the people" means if not a ranked preference. Maybe you can explain?

[anextio]

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem only applies in cases where ranked preference is the only information in the vote.

The "people", not being an individual or an AI or whatever, has a more complex preference vector than a ranked list. The real world is more complex than that.

So can we now agree that Arrow's Impossibility Theorem doesn't apply to all of democracy, that these things are nuanced and there is a long and deep conversation about this kind of topic that has been going on in the human race for centuries, and that frankly, pointing to technical flaws in established, stable enough systems that were set up by people with a hell of a lot less information about anything than us hundreds of years go is not going to do anything to prevent that system from operating in the way that it does or to convince people who have vested interests in it remaining stable?

[desdiv]

Let's say I like party A 10 times more than I like party B. In a preferential voting system, there's no way to precisely express my preferences using the ticket. I'm forced to choose between "1. A" or "1. A, 2. B". Someone else who like part A 2 times more than party B will end up voting identically to me, despite the huge difference between our preferences. Any preferential voting system is necessarily flawed because how limited its input is.

That's basically what Arrow's impossibility theorem says. Due to its limited inputs, a preferential voting system will necessarily fail one of the three fairness criteria.

There are far better voting schemes out there, none of which are affected by Arrow's impossibility theorem.

[yummyfajitas]

What does it mean to like party A 10x more than party B? What I'm questioning here is the existence of cardinal preferences, which are necessary for a "will of the people" to be defined. The only way I can make sense of cardinal preferences is to treat them as dollars spent on private goods [1], but I doubt that's what the OP meant.

As it applies to this situation, it's moot - Portland did not express any cardinal preferences.

[1] Non-private goods introduce other incentives that prevent spending from tracking desire.

[thaumasiotes]

What is an instance of "democracy in general" that you think Arrow's theorem doesn't apply to? It will apply any time "society" (i.e. more than one person) makes a choice among more than two options.

It won't apply if you can assign cardinal numbers to the options, but I doubt that's what you have in mind.

[desdiv]

That's actually exactly what I had in mind. Range voting[0], for example, doesn't suffer from Arrow's impossibility theorem, Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem, nor the Condorcet's paradox.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting

[thaumasiotes]

You know, I had a long comment here pointing out many problems with range voting. Instead, I'd like to observe that it really takes balls to defend range voting as "not suffering from the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem" when it's easy to show that range voting exhibits one of the failures that the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem guarantees in pure-ranking voting systems. Sure, the premises don't hold, but so what? If Gibbard-Satterthwaite did apply to range voting, that would guarantee no other problems than already occur.

Theorem: Hitting your thumb with a steel hammer, instead of hitting the nail, hurts like crazy!

Problem: The pain of a smashed thumb is bad.

Solution: Use an iron hammer. The requirements of the earlier theorem don't apply.

[baddox]

The Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem and Condorcet's paradox still apply.

[cmdkeen]

You'd be queuing up to praise a financial regulator that cared about the spirit not just letter of the law. Just in this instance the spirit of the law is going against a disruptive tech darling.

[gobengo]

its his personal preference on what sort of businesses to allow in his city.

In my opinion, this is actually one of the only points of accountability for a corporation growing unchecked (which has this many varying complaints against them and some think act like thugs)

[blfr]

He's not a feudal lord. It's "his" city, sure, but not in that sense.

[onewaystreet]

Picking winners and losers is the definition of progressive (liberal) government. Welcome to Portland.