One of the problems that we had with the taxi industry in New York City is that they had a difficult time carrying wheelchairs. New yellow cabs being phased in have to carry wheelchairs.

If Uber drivers are private cars, then only a small proportion of them will be able to carry wheelchairs. If they follow the free market, they will charge more. So instead of getting a $20 cab ride to the doctor or a theater, a wheelchair rider may have to pay $50 or $100.

I don't know if that will happen. I'd like to see what happens in a city that had Uber working for a year or two.

Will the free market fairy really solve all problems, or will she kill off the weak and helpless as she's done in the past?

You can replace butter with saturated corn oil.

You can replace your doctor with a touch-tone phone where you answer questions on a key pad, and a computer tells you what to do.

That doesn't mean the replacement will be as good as the technology it's replacing.

Those who are truly hapless are the ones who don't understand that you don't know whether new, hyped solutions will actually work or whether they will have unforeseen problems until you actually try them out for a while and see what happens in reality.

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

If you want to express force in conceptually simple terms, you should convert it to elephant pulls. Or Schwartzneggers.

Oh yeah. Staring at white women. Can't have that.

The one with the 50 states or the Confederate one?

Americans certainly do go to jail for criticizing the government -- and especially for trying to use the electoral system to change it.

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

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

You also obviously don't know that Americans were prevented from leaving their country too. Go look up "Linus Pauling" and "Paul Robeson" on Wikipedia. The U.S. passport had a department for deciding whether American citizens were politically reliable enough to get a passport.

And black people certainly got killed for trying to vote.

Where did you learn American history?

Obviously not in a state where they allowed teachers to assign books like Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.

Yes, but stopping and frisking people without legal grounds is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And in the U.S., blacks get stopped in black neighborhoods all the time. Whites don't.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

Americans who condemn Cuba for oppression should spend some time condemning their own country for its oppression.

Which was immediately deleted.

All the information in those two entries is well-sourced and legitimate comment.

According to the Texas Supreme Court, "VitaPro did not fare well with the TDCJ staff or inmates. In its motion for summary judgment, TDCJ presented evidence that the frequent serving of VitaPro demoralized the staff and inmates and led to adverse health effects, including rampant flatulence."[

That seems like legitimate information, sourced to a Texas Supreme Court decision.

That's right. I read the legal papers and the talk archives of the Yank Barry article. It all seems to be well-documented with reliable sources like the Globe & Mail. It meets the Wikipedia Biographies of Living Persons standards. If it didn't Yank Barry could have complained and some admin would have come along and deleted it.

I didn't even see anything on the Talk pages saying, "I'm Yank Barry and you got this wrong." I did see a lot of apparent sock puppets and Yank Barry fanboys arguing that the article is giving too much weight to all the negative stuff.

In fact in the Talk pages I saw stuff that was even more negative and well-sourced that should have gone into the article, like the details of his blackmailing or extorting his partner, or the prosecution that he was acquitted for.

I also didn't see anything to indicate that Yank Barry had complained to the Wikipedia foundation under the BLP complaint process. Maybe he did complain and Wikipedia's lawyers decided that it wasn't libelous.

IANAL but it didn't look like a very good case. California has an anti-SLAPP law so if Wikipedia defends it he'll have to pay their legal fees. http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guid... He's a celebrity, he's raising investment money in his businesses, he has a criminal record. He's a public figure.

Actually, under U.S. libel law, you are entitled to spread false and misleading information that can tarnish the reputation of another person, if that person is a public figure.

That was the ruling in Times vs. Sullivan, which you can look up in, oh, I don't know, somewhere on the Internet.

Sullivan was actually right in his complaint. He was indeed defamed. The Supreme Court decided that if a newspaper was requited to be right all the time, we couldn't have newspapers. They're immune from damages for their mistakes as long as they didn't publish it knowing that it was false, or published it without regard to whether it was true or false. That's what they mean by "malice." The New York Times got off, even though they printed false, defamatory statements about Sullivan.

Yank Barry is probably a public figure, since he hired a pr agency, calls himself a philanthropist, and got people to nominate him for the Nobel peace prize. In addition, there have been a lot of articles exposing him in established newspapers. He was in jail.

Well, I pay attention to people who know more than I do, and I recommend you do the same. Berliner knows a lot more than I do about education, and I take him seriously. You have no basis for dismissing his ideas like that.

That's a good point. I didn't think of that.

It's strange that none of these anti-tenure movements talk about improving bad teachers, they only talk about firing them.

The people who are bringing this suit don't care about your child. They want to destroy public schools and unions, and leave you with nothing but private schools.

It will be like Obamacare, where you don't have a public system any more, but you have to choose from among private for-profit systems run by billionaires. The rich will have their choice among good and bad schools, and as for the rest of us -- well, I hope you're rich.

Michelle Rhee's charter schools had plenty of bad teachers. They just got away with it by erasing the wrong answers on the standardized tests and replacing them with the right answer.