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Comment Re:Uber is a Proxy for Progress (Score 1) 333

In preamble, you don't know what my response will be. This is because you lost the point.

I specifically mentioned insurance when the taxi is on the way to pick up the fare. At this point, there is no cost to the customer if a collision occurs.But there is a huge cost to society. Because driving to pick up a fare is a commercial activity, and most Uber drivers do not have commercial insurance. Therefore, they are, at that time, an uninsured driver. And society, will pick up that cost. Either through some government program, or through the "uninsured motorist" portion of whomever the Uber driver collides with.raising the costs (and therefore rates) of all car insurance.

As a rule, when your business model involves forcing other people to pay more money ten they where before for no additional benefit (ala a protection racket) we agree it's probably a bad thing.

Comment Re:I remember seeing a carpool club in the 90's... (Score 1) 333

In the law, the difference is whether it's a job or not. This is spelled out to a large degree by the IRS. Because of the tax deductability of business expenses, they had to solve that fuzzy line.

It has to do with whether you are trying to make a profit.

Making money for 3 out of 5 years is considered proof. But they consider ow much money is being made, esp. as a percentage of income, the percentage of time you put in, etc. It's complex.

So, an office worker making maybe 50k a year getting $10 on the side every month after investing like 40 hours of driving would probably not count.

In practice, they reduced the number of cars of the road. Uber increases that number.

Comment Re:Boo hoo... (Score 1) 818

I don't think it's tyrannical of the government to force the walled gardens open. Trust breaking, whether a monopoly or a duopoly, is a government interest.

Remember when the government broke up Standard Oil, how that led to tyranny? Or when they told MS they couldn't force their desktop monopoly onto the internet (well, the browser)? Oh the tyranny.

TL;DR. The solution to the catch-22 is to have the government fix the problem and leave the ideological hand-wringing at home.

Comment Re:Uber is a Proxy for Progress (Score 1) 333

You're still in "No true scotsman" level arguing. I'm claiming that your entire point is based on extrapolation. I believe at least half of the examples that you use are incorrectly categorized. Therefore your point is unsupported.

That's before we get into the fact that socialism and/or communism are in no way related (neither directly nor inversely) with the free market. But all you did was assert that the free market is better. The US abandoned a pure free market before Lenin took over Russia and NYC implementated a medallion system before Mao took over China.

Comment Re:Uber is a Proxy for Progress (Score 1) 333

Evidence please?

North Korea historically disrupted a lot of markets, but that wasn't good. Greece didn't really try to stop market disruptions... they had a bubble burst.

Meanwhile, I don't expect China to welcome market innovation at all... they use tried and true methods at a huge scale.

Hell, Cuba has a lung cancer vaccine!

Before you complain about Nitpicking... I'm saying that the majority of your examples seem off. You kinda just made a socialism and/or communism vs. capitalism argument in a different cloth. Which has nothing to do with whether regulations exist.

Comment Re:What's their fear with that? (Score 3, Insightful) 77

ATI and nVidia try to compete for share. They have high-payed repstrying to convince companies making the games used in the benchmarks to use features that favor their cards over their competitions'. I can see publicizing the drivers leading to the discovery of new holes that screw up a specific card getting pushed.

Security by obscurity is not a replacement for real security, but it helps in this narrow case.

Comment Re:Useless article, faulty summary (Score 1) 51

It has zero native apps but pretends to have lots of "apps" which are actually just icons that link to mobile websites.

Wait, it cannot run all the various OSS that the desktop version runs? What's the fucking point?

I thought it was all about trying to get more command line level control into a phone, to make it easier to do serious things.

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