Beg to differ all you like, having lived in one of those countries most of my life and another of them for a number of years, I'm not impressed.

Certainly it affects all those things. The drivers get a decent wage, the schedules and routes mean they run all day, and often all night, when purely commercial operations would not operate outside busy hours and routes, and unlike the unlicensed systems you mention, they tend to have stops with electronic countdowns to when the busses are due.

In Britain they partially "deregulated" the busses in the 1980s, and the services got worse and more expensive.

As I said, your opinion is prejudice, not reality.

Convenient, yes. Cheaper, depends. But don't dismiss the importance of having the price quoted before the journey - that's a BIG attraction.

I'm afraid you've committed a classic systems analysis mistake - letting your preconceived idea of a solution affect your requirements (or use cases).

Again, it's got fuck all to do with the cost of licenses. Uber uses drivers with badges where the law already allows for their technology to be used.

That's your prejudice, not reality. Neither government, subsidy, not monopoly affects the speed of a bus. Congestion does. And dedicated lanes speed them up again.

Oh, I certainly don't want to click on them. They're just useful for context. The very thin ones are fine.

Duh! I'm not talking about a phone call. I'm talking about an app on the passenger side, and an app on the drivers side that calculates a fare. The legal barrier is the means of calculating the fare. (phone app vs sealed, approved, serviced meter of a specific type.)

It's not about the USA but a country where proper public transport is much needed, and these mini-bus taxis are filling in for the lack of it.

Invest in bubbles, and you ask for the consequences. I certainly hope that the utility of a city's transport system isn't dictated by such considerations.

Well, he worked on the Tesla battery technology for years, and then open sourced the patents.

I expect that as soon as he's satisfied it's tweaked to the point it's working as intended, he will open source the curriculum for the school.

I suspect that, should this happen, it's not going to change much about education, since really public education is how to get promoted to the point you are an administrator, and can start raking in the 6 figure salaries, and really has dick-alll to do with teaching kids these days.

Actually, it's closer to Montessori.

There's nine Montessori schools in the Los Angeles County area, so it's not like he couldn't have just paid for the kids to go to one of those.

There's not a lot of public Montessori's, however they are becoming more common (e.g. North Shoreview and ParkSide Elementary in San Mateo), but they tend to be Magnet schools, and there tends to be a lottery to get in because everyone wants their kid to get in. On the plus side, if you have multiple kids, once the older one gets in, there's a bump in the lottery for your remaining kids, and (A) once in, a kid generally gets to stay as long as the parent remains in the area, and (B) they don't totally screw up.

Frankly, if it's a choice between sending the kids to a private school, and building your own, and it's going to pretty much cost your the same for tuition either way, it's a hell of a benefit he's giving his employees (IMO).

Having spent part of my time in a system set up like you describe... it's the *ABSOLUTELY WORST* thing you can do to a high achieving kid: take away their opportunity to reach even greater heights, in exchange for keeping them busy by becoming an unpaid teaching assistant.

Thankfully, it really didn't work out (having a 4th grader teach 6th graders math just gets that 4th grader beat up during lunch and after school), and they backed off eventually. Which was fine with me, because I was already working on calculus, organic chemistry, and college level reading that the bookmobile lady snuck me after doubling my number of books checked out quota over everyone elses.

If you want to go back to the "Little House On The Prairie"-style one room schoolhouse, good on you, but please do not drag high achieving kids back there with you, or worse try to "socialize them at their grade level", because I'm telling you, you might as well buy them a T-Shirt with a target on it.

Musk may not being anything new -- and he's really, reading the 3 articles, just describing Montessori with a couple of tweaks, like taking the grade level away -- but at least at his school I don't think you'd be holding back those who are able to vastly outpace the slower learners.

What's not cheap about busses?

I'm afraid you have got the wrong end of the stick.

Yes they do. For example London. However London also has the quite separate "private hire car" category, who are not entitled to pick up hailing customers from the street or use taxi ranks. That's the group Uber operate in there. Paying the appropriate fees.

That's the issue. Uber operate quite legally, within the system, where their system is permitted. ANd they use civil disobedience where it isn't.

It's not about refusing to pay for badges.

That's not true. Taxi legislation often specifies how the taxi service is operated, such that specific taximeters and manufacturers/service companies are mandatory.