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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what to say. These people made a bet that the future would look like the past. They were wrong, and it's costing them significantly.

Yet... what are we supposed to do about it?

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If the medallion is the only way you can be a taxi, then enforce it. If Lyft and Uber are legitimate, then lose the medallion and pay this guy back his $250K.

A medallion is not and never was the only way to be a "taxi."

Yes, there is little difference between street hailing and dispatch these days. But the law never guaranteed them immunity from dispatch innovation.

No one was scammed. But you can still feel sorry for the guy.

If there is one thing to learn - DIVERSIFY YOUR INVESTMENTS!

fair enough, but it's often hard to diversify your time and employment.

How do you diversity your investment in your employer?

By renting out the medallion from owners, instead of becoming an owner. So you'd pay more for the medallion per unit time, but have the freedom of moving onto other services when they become more popular.

Local governments could pay money to buy them back? It does seem unfair to charge such high amounts of money for something now worthless.

By that logic apple needs to give me back my $600 for my iPhone3GS

He made a bet that value would stay

He was wrong

Sucks

Sad? sure. But not anyone's fault

Why? it still works. It would be more like buying a 2 year contract up front and getting a phone and then 2 days later the phone no longer works.

That example doesn't seem parallel to me because it lacks a sudden deregulation of a very tightly controlled market (or in this case, a newly exploited loophole or lack of enforcement of law or whatever you want to call this).

I think Uber / Lyft etc should either have to play the medallion game (which obviously wouldn't work) or local govts should just do away with medallions and the cities should buy them back from the people they sold them to ... as it is now, it just seems like selective enforcement of taxi laws on the guys with the yellow cars.

If only a handful of iPhones were sold and those iPhones were the only phones that could make calls in SF, then yes -- I think Apple would need to pay you back $600.

Nope. By issuing a medallion, the city grants the right to participate with known rules of competition in a specific market and it also has the obligation to protect the licensee from unfair competition.

The cities have failed to comply with their duty and so, in my opinion, owe damages to the holders.

How exactly did the city fail to comply with their duty? It was always legal to call a (non medalian) car to your location and be driven somewhere. The medalian merely gives you the right to pick up street hails, and that rule is still enforced. The city is doing exactly what it promised.

It's not a right, it's a privilege. And the competition is in no way unfair, the only thing that makes it "unfair" is that they did not pay to the city for the privilege. There's nothing "fair" in being forced to pay exorbitant sums to the city in order to do business. I could get it if the price was commensurate with the service one gets from the city - after all, roads must be maintained, cops and street cleaners must be paid, street lights must be fixed, etc. - but 250K goes way beyond that and is clearly just made to extract money "because we can" and to limit the access to the market.

If the city has an unfair practice of restricting business and charging for the privilege of doing something that should be a basic right available for everyone, and somebody relied on that unfair practice to extract rent, and it stopped working, I don't see how one has a claim for damages anymore than Mafia racketeer can claim for damages when a racket victim refuses to pay protection money, or one victim could claim damages because the other victim does not pay anymore and thus has "unfair advantage".

SF sold them the medallions with the promise that SF is going to limit the number of cabs and now it isn't doing that. That is different from Apple selling you a piece of electronics with a single year warranty and no promise that it's going to be useful in the future.

Was there ever an explicit promise?

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