hoopd

This is a fairy tale.

> ...in order to compete in a free market...

The entire point of Uber is that the taxi industry is not a free market, therefore the things necessary to compete in a theoretical "free market" are not relevant and can't be assumed to be why Uber is successful.

Uber uses roads that were designed to comply with government safety regulations and their drivers drive cars designed to comply with a different set of government safety regulations. Those regulations exist because experience has shown that they need to.

Those aren't market conditions, they're technological advances.

> instead of being better to keep their business, they just want to keep their business by being the only players, leaving no choice to customers but to use them.

At least in the states it's impossible for traditional taxis to compete with Uber because they're so heavily regulated and Uber just like transportation laws don't apply to them.

You think market conditions will make taxis safer? Why do you think we have OSHA? Why do you think selling products with lead paint in them is illegal?

? The argument is that there are reasons other than inflating prices to regulate the number of taxis on the road. Cars have externalities that society as a whole pays for, it's reasonable to limit those externalities.

No.

The entire point of elected officials is that their decisions aren't based on who has money. If we depend on lobbyists then only companies big enough to afford them get a seat at the table. That's a plutocracy.

> Lobbying is a way of structuring administration of regulation that shifts responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to people.

Wait, are you asserting that corporations are people? Uber is not a person and the article suggests that they used their considerable power to take the decisions regarding their regulations out of the hands of the government officials of Portland and thus farther away from the people of Portland.

> most cities restrict supply of taxis to keep prices high and fix prices as the behest of the taxi industry

Why is it always left out that a limited number of taxis is good for society as well? Taxis operate on public roads, pollute public air, cause traffic congestion the public must deal with, cause car accidents and hit pedestrians. When you're not catching a ride taxis (and Ubers) are a nuisance and society has decided to limit their negative side effects.

But they were actually contractors.

Spoken like a lobbyist.

Government administers regulations on behalf of the people. If they're failing to do so then the political process is broken. Lobbyists do not fix broken political processes.

> Uber had been working on the council members for months. “They kinda run this,” Alpert said in February. “I keep feeling they will just wear you down. If we end up in court, we will have to lose just based on resources.”

This doesn't sound like they're simply informing legislators of new information nor does it sound like the legislators had the resources or the time to do anything but roll over.

Uber accounts for nearly half of the entire U.S. market of low-cost personal rides. They are not the little guy fighting the power, they are the power.

Isn't that missing the point?

The entire argument was that they were demanding rights to use the photographer's work in the future for free. There was a non-commercial clause but its wording was a bit strange (is publicity for a brand like Taylor Swift ever non-commerical?)

You're saddened? Why? As you say Rubin gets appropriate credit for her work within her field. Plus she doesn't even believe in Dark Matter, she made a very important contribution but now she's working on a competing theory that few care about.

Nobody knows who Kent Ford is, he co-authored Rubin's big paper.

What about Jan Oort? He came up with the idea of Dark Matter in the 1930's and some say found the first evidence for it.

What about Fritz Zwicky? Some say he's the one who found the first evidence and is the one really being left out of history.[0]

We're being taught to feel bad for women in science in situations where we don't feel bad for men. Science is full of forgotten men who made massive contributions to the world, this is about picking the woman and figuring out how to mythologize her.

[0] - http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/30-the-father-of-dark-m...

Let's just pick one of these at random and peak into it, Ida Tack discovering Technetium.

She was one woman on a team with two men who did an unreproducible experiment that "discovered" Technetium[0]. To this day the experiment hasn't been reproduced. Maybe they did find it, but if nobody else could make their experiment work that's just how it goes. Science can't start giving credit to people for unreproducible experiments just because they're women.

> It was she who managed to find two new elements, rhenium and masurium, that Dmitri Mendeleev had predicted would form part of the periodic table.

She was on a team! The author is doing to Tack's male teammates the exact thing he claims to believe is wrong, which is to leave people out because of their sex.

The fact that she was on a team with two men, and that a male was the top author on their paper makes sexism very unlikely. If her co-authors got credit and she didn't that would be one thing, but none of them got credit.

The whole article is filled with women who did things that wouldn't have made them famous if they were men. The cases that may have merit, and I'm sure there are some, are more difficult to take seriously because the level of bias of the author.

[0] -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium#Unreproducible_resu...

I'm not saying misogyny is rooted in reason, I'm saying the social justice movement has a habit of misclassifying opposing viewpoints as misogyny in order to dismiss them.

This is why you are part of the problem.

It's reasonable to say his personal life should be left out but in your anger you've moved that line to a point where it prevents important information from entering the discussion.

The reason to set a higher bar is this: in a heated debate where core beliefs are being challenged there will always a temptation to decide you're dealing with an idiot or a monster even when you aren't.

Maybe you only speak of the future of discourse because it's a deep sounding insult, but if you actually care I encourage you to read this essay and reconsider your acceptance of namecalling.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

The sad statement about the level of discourse is that you apparently care about it but still think granparent comment qualifies. It even breaks the first two rules of HN commenting guidelines: be civil, don't call people names.

I dislike Pao, the lawsuit, and the surrounding politics but I agree that this is unacceptable.

The argument is that the moderation policies are selectively enforced in order to shape the prevailing ideologies expressed on the website.

Reddit's response is that it isn't "safe" and they want to make it that way. If you've been labeled as somebody who makes the site "unsafe" your actions are assumed to be those of an aggressor and an oppressor. If you're somebody trying to make the site "safe" even when you cross the line you're viewed as an oppressed person fighting back.

It's an intentionally uneven playing field and the people it's slanted against aren't happy about it.

Given Uber's recent $50bn valuation I'd say "the market" believes they'll keep their market power and resulting profits for some time into the future. (46% definitely means monopoly power but it doesn't mean monopoly.)

I am being snarky, but the libertarian poster-child is shielding 46% of the national market from competition (drivers can't compete with eachother) and that's pretty ironic.

> As Deborah Blum puts it, "I do have sympathy for anyone caught in the leading edge of a media storm. But if we are ever to effect change, sometimes we need the winds to howl, to blow us out of our comfort zones."

She's implying social change only happens when forced by some group of activists and therefore activism isn't responsible for the collateral damage it causes. Many things cause social change so I think the role of "howling winds" may be overstated. In addition, one must make the argument that this particular form of activism is genuine and deserves solidarity.

> I believe the actual accusation was that he was contributing to maintaining the gender gap, not that he was responsible for it.

He may not have been blamed for it (the gender gap predates him by centuries) but the responsibility was placed on his shoulders.

> Actually, intersectional feminists talk about this quite a bit.

They try and I commend them for that.

> I don't mind as being seen as condescending here, but that's not my point. My point is that I have limited time, and I don't think spending it rehashing stale arguments with dedicated antifeminists is a good way to work towards the goals I have. If somebody actually wants to learn something, I'm glad to help them out. And if I end up with questions, I'll surely ask them. But absent that, I have better things to do.

I'm open to being persuaded and I don't think you can accuse me of deflecting or not taking what you say seriously. In fact I would love to be persuaded, the social punishments for disliking feminism are steep.

> I want that replaced with an anti-sexist cultural hegemony, because that shifts us in the direction of a more even distribution of power.

No it doesn't, that's only true if being male is a meaningful predictor of power, but it isn't. You can see this in poor white males: class outweighs sex and race combined. Feminism isn't interested in addressing or critiquing the real institutions of power, they want the power for themselves. It could even make the power distribution worse because those in power will have the outward appearance of equality.

I'm not sure what your political background is but ideologically your anti-sexist cultural hegemony bears striking similarities to the dictatorship of the proletariat(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...) which was rejected by the socialist libertarians of the time and would later become the platform of Lenin and Stalin. Anybody adopting this type of thinking should be aware of the horrors it has brought in the past.

> Also false. I'm not much of a fellow traveler in that I have a number of deep philosophical disagreements, but our goals are aligned for the next few decades or so.

The reason I say their worldview has become your own is because sometimes it seems like you're reading their script. I don't actually know you.

Since Uber sets prices for a large portion of the market they operate in they have monopoly power and it's therefore not a free market. Uber's at 46% market share in major U.S. markets[0], since taxi's are regulated locally and Uber is setting prices for almost half the market nationally Uber is arguably the #1 regulatory power in the U.S. personal transportation sector.

[0] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbender/2015/04/10/ubers-as...

In the situation of the shirt a reasonable reaction would be to not hijack the publicity earned by the Rosetta team and to deal with the issue once the mission was at a point where the lead scientist could be pulled aside to talk about his wardrobe choices.

Benefit of the doubt means that you accept your own fallibility, not that you use weasel words and implications to communicate the outright accusations you're making. To be clear, the accusation was at best that this guy in his stupidity is responsible for the gender gap in science. If you're a jealous keyboard warrior that's even better than calling him aggressively sexist because now you get to call him stupid even though he's the one with a PhD in magnetohydrodynamcs and you barely got a communications degree.

In your view of history women have entered science as the barriers of sexism have fallen so you believe fighting sexism is a Very Important Cause. But in the time period of science we've also had several major technological revolutions and science itself has drastically changed. That means you can't choose two signals and establish a cause-and-effect relationship between them.

These days STEM fields are the only ones feminists get to complain about because women dominate education at almost every level except for STEM fields. But we don't talk about women being 60% of college students, we don't talk about young black men having a 50% high school graduation rate while their female counterparts are doing significantly better. Instead we talk about the STEM gap and if we resist we get shamed into public apologies?

> If you have sincere questions (as opposed to argumentation in question form) I'm glad to answer.

I'm not sure if you realize how condescending it is to assume that you have nothing to learn from me but this is a great opportunity for me to learn from you. It's a common point in these conversatins where the person I'm speaking to assumes I just don't understand their One True Worldview. Next you realize I do, after that you decide I'm too emotionally attached to my privilege to admit the truth. Then, if this were in person, the public shaming and social penalties would begin and wouldn't stop until I gave an unqualified apology and retracted all previous statements.

> But as far as I'm concerned, that is good news.....I'm glad to live in an age where decreasing power imbalances mean a decrease in distorted communication.

I look at this and I see hegemony[0]. A social group with a significant amount of power over you has publicly shamed you (call-outs are done in public for a reason) into at least one tearful apology and as a result their worldview became your own. There was a time the Left thought this was a tool of evil people, seeing it become business as usual has been....interesting.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

I agree that the point of removing words is to change the way people think. (Orwell once wrote a popular book on the topic.)

It takes some pointed questioning to get people to go from "we're banning words" to "we're banning racism" and finally to "we're banning thoughts that we don't like." The last statement is where the problem becomes evident. We give our government the right to kill but in theory they don't have the power to act against a religion, group or philosophy. On the other hand we have this nebulous, almost rogue entity we let wield this power and somehow it's almost beyond critique.

I agree there are situations where giving a group the power to shape discourse and language might be a reasonable thing to do. I don't believe in giving a group that power and letting them use it to make questioning or critiquing themselves impossible. That's exactly what the social justice movement's doing when anybody who disagrees with them is cast as sexist, racist, bigot, ignorant, etc.

As hueving notes, history is written by the winners. Even Howard Zinn spoke of how hopelessly biased history will always be. He who controls the past controls the future, and all that. Part of why I don't like the social justice movement is I think their version of history is self-serving to the point of being inaccurate.

> Linus Torvalds is the creator and sole arbiter of the Linux operating system

Well, yeah, but the first rule of journalism is to know your audience and I'd bet if you asked the readers of Bloomberg to name a few operating systems they'd say "Windows, OSX, Android, Lin..Lin...Linux." How many would list things like Darwin or kFreeBSD?

Nothing coerced is voluntary, they're mutually exclusive concepts. Mozilla did not fire him nor was Mozilla the group that forced him to leave, that does not mean he wasn't forced to leave.

As far as whether or not he was capable of running an inclusive company, he once founded what is known to be an inclusive company and was an executive there for 15 years without, to my knowledge, any complaints about how he performed his duties outside of contributing his personal money to a political campaign.

Particularly telling is this part of the FAQ:

> Q: Was Brendan Eich forced out by employee pressure?

A: No.

That less than 10 employees got him removed is outrageous. The people that worked with him knew best whether or not he treated people fairly and the fact that so few of them wanted him to leave tells me the whole thing was a disgrace.

I can't read enough of the first link to comment, the second one makes me think "you said what to your students??" But then again, that was 1995 and cases like that are part of how language like that became unofficially outlawed, not just for teachers but for everybody.

When a principal gets fired for calmly saying he agrees with Interpretation A of events it's clear that he's being fired for having the wrong belief system. The fear is we're not just removing words from our lexicon but attempting to eradicate entire belief systems. The problem with that is who gets to decide what the right belief system is?

There are multiple definitions of the word speech and I'm drawing a distinction between expression and action.

I think there's enough of a difference between mob-mentality and artistic expression that we can deal with them separately.

> The second is that I don't believe that this is actually happening.

This article[0] posted elsewhere in this thread reveals a high school principal recently lost his job for saying "He did nothing wrong. He was afraid for his life, I commend him for his actions." in response to the McKinney story. So not only is it happening, it's apparently getting worse.

[0] - http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fla-principal-sacke...