Ex taxi driver here. - When things go really bad what recourse do you have against the driver other than posting a bad review on Uber? How do you propose to force bad drivers out of the industry when you have torn up the rule book? Are you suggesting we simply hand the taxi industry to Uber on a silver platter secure in the knowledge they will police themselves - because freedom?

There are good (and bad) historical reasons for the constraint but that is irrelevant to the ideology you have espoused. Let's take my home town of Melbourne as an example, there are 10,000 medallions (or "plates" as they are known here), that $5B in small business assets that will become worthless overnight if we follow the ideological path your suggesting. I doubt Uber are willing to cough up $5B in compensation for the taxi owners of Melbourne, my guess is they are expecting the government to fund the inevitable plate buy-back that would accompany dropping the requirement for medallions.

BTW: A "market" is a set of rules (artificial constraints) that govern trade, (eg:property law). A "free market" is one that is open to all. Therefore the highly regulated taxi industry is a "free market" in the original sense of the term.

Whatever the reason, simply dropping the requirement for a medallion (where it already exists) means you are deliberately screwing people who have paid as much as a house to own one, worked for decades to pay it off, and plan to sell it to fund their retirement. Changing the medallion rules to suit Uber's business model means bankruptcy is a certainty for a lot a very hard working small business folk, or (more likely) a huge compensation bill for the city/state.

In other words, if you change the market rules by removing medallions from where they already exist, everyone loses except Uber. Fine if Uber were offering some massive social benefit that outweighed those costs, but it's not, it's just a bunch of dodgy cheap-labour capitalists running a dispatch center "on the internet".

All theories are rubbish until tested. There is no such thing as "proof" in Science, never has been, never will be. That's actually why Science is by far the best method we have found to describe and predict the behaviour of the universe.

The relativity of wrong.

Agreed, some people in this thread seem to equate "immoral" with "annoying". Advertising is simply a glorified way of shouting "hey, look at this" for personal gain, annoying but harmless. False advertising is simply lying for personal gain and clearly immoral.

Somebody stole your willpower?

Seriously though, I don't see the level of cooperation required for this project persisting long enough to pull it off.

Of course given history, there will be disruptions, but it'll work out in the end. They are easily startled - but they'll be back, and in greater numbers.

Meanwhile I can import seismic data from the early 1970s into current software without any conversion -

Strange, but that is exactly what I am doing at the moment. Or at least, I was doing until a few moments ago, when the task finished. Hi ho! back to the grindstone!

Further to Itzly's reply, nor are there any volcanoes anywhere near the Larson B ice shelf. There are probably sub-glacial volcanoes in the hinterland of some of the more southerly ice fields and sheets of West Antarctica, but from the absence of ash bands in the surrounding ice cores, they're pretty marginal on the activity front.

Oh, BTW, we know from studies of Icelandic volcanoes that even quite minor sub-glacial eruptions tend to produce substantial amounts of ash because of the violent emission of steam from interactions between lava and ice.

Your hypothesis is superficially reasonable but is destroyed utterly by the facts of the situation.

but it can become profitable with some specific changes according to one analyst.

So, another attempt to get rich on music falls flat on it's face, burning it;s investors arses in the process. And why should anyone care? If we believe the bullshitters, the entire music industry needs to die so that people can pay musicians directly, instead of letting the money be stolen by the music industry.

Well, that'll be great. And if the music industry goes down the shitter and takes the musicians with it, who's going to care?

That and "Ebola" sounds like E. coli, causing people to confuse the two.

Seriously?

Wow, the world is several points more stupid on average than I'd thought, and I'm still astonished that people are astonished that half of all people are of below average intelligence.

Indeed. What they should have done was get the writer/director of the original film, who I gather had been trying to get a sequel made for over a decade, to come and write and direct the new one. Clearly whoever they got to write this didn't really understand Max's character at all.</sarcasm>

See my third paragraph. You're implicitly buying into the myth that people losing their jobs to automation makes the economy poorer. The opposite happens: there's more wealth. Even if a significant number of people lose their jobs and don't get new jobs (or get crappy ones), that loss is more than made up by someone (or everyone) else having more money. There are always customers. The decision whether it's a few super rich people being waited on hand and foot and some people working as gladiators in the entertainment arenas (reality television) or a more equitable distribution, such as in Switzerland where everyone is guaranteed a minimum income, is a political problem that will be solved one way or another. The free market is quite capable of sorting it out by itself, but that way is almost sure to be a lot nastier, probably involving food riots and rich people lined up against walls.

Sure, a truck going the same speed as a car can have the brakes fail completely, or the driver have a heart attack too, then it can take twice, three times, or arbitrarily longer to stop than a car. Or vice versa. Sorry, I assumed you were trying to say something relevant.

I quite pointedly said that things are somewhat more complicated with real vehicles than the simple physics analysis of locked wheels. It's not my theory, it's basic physics (which you claimed did not support my original post), and also the formula that most police forces use to estimate (note, estimate) the speed of vehicles involved in collisions.

You are completely ignoring the fact that, as I posted, US regulations require trucks be able to stop in much less than twice the distance cars can, and test results that indicate most (well maintained) trucks can stop quite a bit better than required. In real life, as is demonstrated in transport safety statistics, large trucks are quite frequently poorly maintained and so their stopping distances may well be longer.