hoopd

The price vs. users graph[0] is hopelessly wrong, dangerously wrong even. So wrong I can't take anything the author says about economics or markets seriously at all. I think they're trying to make the argument that Uber will achieve economies of scale but that would be cost vs. users, not price. Price and cost are different things.

The graph also implicitly makes the assumption that there are an infinite number of users and Uber has competitors. In reality as the number of users increases Uber looks more and more like a monopoly and the price approaches whatever maximizes Uber's profits as opposed to "free". The bigger Uber gets the more they become the government they're fighting against.

In a healthy free market price will approach marginal cost, but Uber isn't fighting for a healthy free market. It's the last thing they want.

> While zero car ownership will undoubtedly and unremittingly be a net social good—can’t wait until driving is something one does for fun, ban cars!

Can't tell if the author is for or against regulation.

[0] - http://cdn.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/price.jpg

> interesting statistical information like police violence per capita,

Or maybe the violent crime rate in general?

> violence against minorities normalized by population

What about violence by minorities, or would that information be racist?

We give police the job of dealing with the most violent members of society, perhaps we should figure out to what extent they're just doing their job.

I suppose I gave him too much credit in assuming he would avoid this topic entirely.

This map was designed to cause outrage, not to inform.

Your "partner" may have three other sexual partners that you know about but that doesn't prevent them from having a forth that they keep hidden from you because they know you'll flip out.

You're not immune to this kind of scandal unless you're in a sexual relationship with somebody and you have no expectation to be made aware of their other sexual activities, in which case you're not in a healthy relationship.

I doubt Bertrand Russel would be very fascinated by polyamory - it's just another concept that works great in theory but becomes endlessly complicated in reality.

Of course piracy better solves the distribution problem, distribution is easy. Copyright helps solve the problem of artist compensation. That problem's hard but ask any artist* who isn't living off a trust fund and they'll tell you how important it is. If you skip the hard part by definition you've made things easier on yourself.

If the community of music listeners took better care of musicians then they wouldn't run to the arms of the music industry. Unfortunately music listeners want and expect free or near-free.

> It's remarkable that progress can be achieved mostly through breaking regulation theses day

Not to be offensive but I think it's completely uninteresting. Human decency has always slowed progress. Which empire obeyed the laws of the lands it invaded? Think of how our medical knowledge would progress if we abandoned all ethics, or how efficient our criminal justice system could be if we abandoned due process, how much oil we could drill or ore we could mine if we abandoned environmental regulations.

We don't do these things because local actors pursuing locally optimal solutions don't always benefit the group. In fact it's possible for the opposite to happen like in The Tragedy of the Commons.

IOW I dislike regulations too but they solve problems we don't have better solutions for.

*who you know well enough to ask personal questions

> Are you saying that people whose career or reputation depends on not harassing women should be allowed to get away with harassing women more than others?

Not at all. I'm saying the only evidence provided from the author is a flirtatious text where the "harasser" was attempting to engage in consentual intercourse with another adult. Was it inappropriate? Apparently, but reaching out for human contact is a normal and healthy part of life.

The person I was responding to was fantasizing about destroying this person's livelihood and the livelihoods of others who refused to take part in this destruction. One person fantasized about a natural and healthy human activity and the other fantasized about crucifiction. There may have been some vague power dynamics in the (alleged) harassment but that doesn't measure up to active and aggressive threats.

The Clarkson sacking was the result of a police investigation and regardless of whether the ass-kicking was deserved or not there was a physical assault with evidence that it happened. Why we would even compare a woman having to say no in a clear and adult way to a man being physically assaulted is beyond me.

You're bieng more of a bully than the author's harasser.

Look at your language, you want to crucify people because they didn't destroy somebody's reputation and possibly their entire career when a member of your group asked them to? That's scary.

> Not if the preferred way to become a "perfect student" is to go only after the easier/safer challenges.

That's nowhere near becoming a perfect student and it isn't even high on the scale of parental pressure.

> Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities.

What? If you want to be an engineer you can go to a state school, work hard and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year for 1/4 the price of a private school.

Half of the top ten engineering schools are public: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

The top ten liberal arts schools are all private: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

> ....for our willingness to put their long-term developmental and emotional needs before their short-term happiness. For our willingness to let their lives be just a little bit harder today so they will know how to face hardship tomorrow.

Isn't decreasing the pressure to be a perfect student the exact opposite of letting their life be a little bit harder today?

We've seen how careless and illogical the mob is when they remove people from non-profits or other businesses.

Voting may not be perfect but it's a better decision making process than the Twitter alternative.

They'll compete by taking losses their competitors can't handle until they go out of business.

I suppose I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out WalMart's competitors are one of the costs they aggressively control :)

It wouldn't be the first time.

What happens to the disrupted sector is the people who work there go find new jobs. Then when the giant monopolizer fails the sector can't return to the way it was before, too much knowledge has been lost.

Example: if WalMart closed tomorrow most of the thousands of small and medium sized businesses they put under wouldn't come back.

If Uber's model turns out to be unrealistic long-term the intellectual capital lost from the global taxi cab sector will only be partially recoverable.

When a company grows based on money they've earned it's the normal process of scaling. When they grow based on money they've borrowed it's no longer the market giving them the thumbs up, it's a couple of dozen investors. By the time WalMart was rapidly expanding it was clear their business model worked, might be evil but it works. It's not clear that Uber's business model is even legal.

> Children die in elementary schools because there isn't enough funding for a school nurse.

You mean there isn't enough funding for the number of students there. There's plenty of funding for fewer students.

Destroying a robot isn't an act of resistance because the robot wasn't oppressing them nor was it responsible for their situation in life.

edit: as always feel free to engage in discussion instead of drive-by downvoting

Yeah downvote that one, too.

I'm starting to interpret the "don't complain about downvotes" guideline as "don't shed light on how this community misuses downvotes to quietly marginalize contrary views while maintaining the illusion of civil discourse."

Lost another 10 karma overnight for trying to join this discussion without going "hoo, haaa, obviously the whole world is racist and sexist and that disgusts me..." before voicing contrary opinions.

This is a bit of a non-sequitor.

"21 times greater" is a great sound-bite but I honestly don't know what you'd expect. Take white males, make them 10 times as likely to be killed in general, 5-10 times as likely to be murderers, make them stronger, more likely to come from extreme poverty, give them a 50% high-school graduation rate, increase their rate of illiteracy, increase the rates at which they carry deadly weapons, increase how often they are violent in general, increase their sense of despair and hopelessness, break their family structure so many of them turn to street gangs for acceptance and give them a culture that openly glorifies violence against the police.

Now they're still white males, how much would their chances of being on the losing end of a violent confrontation with the police increase?

In other words there are many other causes and conditions that are at play here and assuming it's because cops are racist is absurd.

Only if the market goes up enough vs the other neighborhoods and what would have happened. Which maybe you can argue it does. I'm not racist enough to believe that the presence of people with black skin is that detrimental to property values. It seems clear that redlining is about class more than race.

You still have the problem that subsidies are generally thought to cost money. If redlining makes the city money it goes from "this is evil and doesn't work economically" to "this is evil but it makes money."

Perhaps a de facto or indirect subsidy, but the cost of moving into those neighborhoods went up while the cost of housing for those being excluded went down. It's also arguable that cities made money with these practices (it would take some work to figure out.)

So the subsidy argument falls apart. If it doesn't cost the city money overall and white people end up paying more both for housing and in taxes then the problem with redlining lies elsewhere. (I am not trying to defend redlining, by the way.)

Then you misinterpreted what they said. The point was that white people don't get to run away from traffic stops and knock tasers out of cops hands without getting shot. But when a black guy does it it makes the cover of Time magazine because it's so racist.

> Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.

Wait, wouldn't it be the other way around? Inflating property values would increase tax revenue. Even if they were subsidizing white home ownership they may have come out ahead.

It's one of the driving forces of gentrification: if investing X gets the city X + Y in tax revenues then it's an economically sound decision.

I don't think any of it's extreme, it's just an opinion. Still he might not want it coming up when a hiring manager googles his name 5-10 years down the road.

If HN let us delete our names and/or comments it would be different.

Have you considered an anonymous account?

You should know that what you've said is considered totally racist these days and you'll have to write an article like the one you just criticized if you ever want to clear your name.

The reason I accused you of hating Japan is you seem to idealize American business while focusing on Japan's weak points.

From what I've seen and experienced 60+ hour weeks and not knowing your family are common if you're trying to climb the corporate ladder in America. Forced overtime and working yourself into a heart-attack happen here, too. And here the company has no loyalty to you beyond what's forced by the threat of lawsuit.

No offense but maybe RTFA? A lot of it's about how through NUMMI GM learned from Toyota how to treat its employees better. Ctrl-f for I saw a guy fall in the pit, and they didn't stop the line. So much of the article is about how the Japanese auto workers received more respect and how that translated into better cars.

If you want to be an activist why focus on the metrics you're focusing on? In Japan 72% of suicides are men, in America it's 78%. You mention maternity harassment but the alarming gender disparity in suicide is left out, and it's worse in America.

Japan's judicial system may be flawed, but we have 12 times their incarceration rate. In America about 1 in 100 men is in prison, in Japan it's less than 1 in 1000.

We can cherry-pick numbers all day, but I think it's safe to say Japan's engineering excellence is not simply a product of worker exploitation. They're doing some things better than us and we should learn from them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

First, a lot of countries have protectionist trade policies but few can make cars like Japan. They have an excellent engineering culture.

Second, who cares if they had favorable policies during the mid 1900's - they were also rebuilding after a nuclear war. We had a massive head-start in auto engineering back in the 1960's and then we stopped trying. They're the tortoise and we're the hare.

Look at our race series, what NASCAR tech is trickling down to modern cars? F1's out there with hybrid systems and energy recovery devices on the absolute bleeding edge of technology and NASCAR has only recently lifted their 55 year ban on fuel injection. It's laughable. Technology shouldn't go from foreign racing circuits, to Japanese and German family sedans, to American family sedans, and then finally to our race cars.

The notion that a auto-racing is used to fund R&D is apparently lost on us.

To put it bluntly we have nobody to blame but ourselves and we're lucky to have somebody like Elon Musk come along.

I've never seen somebody hate Japan so much!

> Furthermore, Americans can exit and enter the job market. If you are unhappy with how things are going at your company, you can quit and work somewhere else.

If you're an auto-worker you have two competitors to go work for and they probably do business in almost exactly the same way. Other than that you have to leave the industry.

> In America, a new CEO digs up all the wrong things that the previous CEO did and “cleans house”. In Japan, new CEOs are the previous CEO’s proteges and continue to hide their predecessors secrets

In a Japanese auto-company the new CEO is likely somebody who's worked many of the jobs in the company and has an engineering background. In America the new CEO has an MBA and little idea what their new employees actually do. This is often stated as a bad thing.

> Lastly, in America, corrupt CEOs get send to jail

In America corrupt CEOs usually get golden parachutes. It takes extreme corruption or political enemies to go to jail.

In all of this you've failed to explain why the American auto industry, with our superior company culture, can't make competitive cars.

Yes, it helps demonstrate our current inability to have important conversations is nothing new.

edit: Downvotes again. I'm tired of trying to bring different viewpoints to these conversations. When you look around and find that everybody agrees with you don't assume it's because you've found the truth, it's simply because you've driven away everybody who disagrees with you.

> “I don’t think it veered into opinion,” Mr. Isaac said. “It was analysis, backed up by reporting, and written under tight deadline.” He’s probably right.

The piece opens up by lamenting the similarites between facts and opinions and then sidesteps the issue by calling their opinions "analysis". Clever.

Maintained properly but also driven softly. When you drive for money you drive hard plus stop-and-go city driving is hard on a car by itself.

A used car with 100k Uber-miles on it will be worth considerably less than the same car with 100k highway miles, and rightfully so.