Ha ha, the law exists and you fail to understand it. To make your example appropriate for the situation you have to set a condition that the bakery only has a limited supply of ingredients and/or energy and/or time to bake the cookies, so does Uber, they have a limited supply of drivers at any moment in time.

So a bakery cannot just rump up the supply on a moment notice if, for example, ten buses with tourists stopped by the bakery and all of them wanted some biscuits. However the baker can raise the prices if he sees an increased demand, thus making sure to reduce the secondary market for his product, which would be created (an opportunity for arbitrage) if a few tourists discovered the bakery first and decided to buy all the product in it, because they could then insert themselves between the baker and the rest of the tourists, making a nice profit for themselves.

The baker could raise the prices, but he would have to react quickly to the changing market demands.

What Uber is doing is they are looking at all of the information at once and deciding that the market conditions are such that raising prices will in fact allow them to make more money by finding the new equilibrium price for their service. If there is much more demand than there is supply, raising prices is a very legitimate (and used) method of ensuring efficiency, which otherwise would be much lower.

I am not Peter Thiel and I think welfare is horrendous and should not exist, nor should any form of welfare like system. Welfare is what keeps people down, lulls them into the sense of entitlement, that somebody else must work to keep them living.

WHY?

Why should anybody be forced by the (very visible and well armed) hand of government to pay for other people's consumption? Actually my argument is based not only around economics, but most importantly around immorality of slavery, which is what welfare recipients get in the system that they vote for: slaves.

Anybody who is forced by the well armed hand of government to pay any taxes (or when money is borrowed, so future taxes, or when money is printed, so the inflation tax) to support consumption of anybody is a slave of the system and I am completely and 100% against slavery.

Slavery is when your property and/or labour is forcibly taken away from you and given to anybody else. If you charitably provide somebody with money they need to survive, that is great, your life and your choice. Income based taxes, borrowing that causes future growth of taxes, inflation (money printing) is all a form of slavery, which is why I am against any government maintained welfare state.

I am completely and consistently against any form of slavery and basically initiation of force by any government organisation. Of-course I am against slavery and initiation of force by anybody, however it is the government initiation of force that is the most immoral of all, since it is the 'law of the land', so to speak, so you can be born into a system that prearranged your slavery within it.

So did Uber just rediscover supply / demand curve and the fact that increased demand with stagnant supply pushes prices up?

I mean that's like the FIRST law of supply and demand, if demand increases and supply stays the same clearing prices go up.

Well, let's see if the patent office knows anything at all about basic economics or if this will be accepted as an 'innovation because of ... computer or mobile phone'.

No Net Neutrality for YOU! Pay EXTRA for Hulu!

yes, that is what the parent post said and was specific to use sarcasm tag for people who he knew wouldn't get it to accent the point that ignorant luddits should in principle be against every labour saving innovation that people come up with, not just the most obvious (machines, computers, robots), but everything we do. Everything we invent and innovate is a labour saving device somehow. To stop that would be to give up on the idea of humans changing environment to improve our circumstances. Luddits want to stop progress, be it computers and robots or pesticides and pallets. The parent comment was pointing it out, not complaining about it.

I'm not saying that everyone will have to grow their own food; robots will do the planting, tending, harvesting, and transportation.

The elephant in the room is that capitalism will collapse; in a robotic society, the only workable government will be communism.

That sounds strange to me, can you point me to a link? Usually he more popular a thing is, the more it earns. KSHE doesn't have a "deep tracks" show but they've always played them. They also still play whole albums; I sampled ACDC's new one last Sunday. The RIAA would scream PIRACY!!!

If you're writing music that is indeed a concern; I'm sure Seether will be sued for same damned life; its rhythm guitar is note for note identical to the melody to I Will Follow Him (a bad pop song from the early sixties). There's a suit against Led Zeppelin for a guitar riff that sounds vaguely like Stairway to Heaven; I think Zep will win, but it turns out that the guy suing would have had no standing if Zeppelin had never heard the song.

Other art forms don't have that problem.

How is that any different than someone who builds a house and rents it out forever? Or me, after 27 years I'm retired and no longer have to work.

That said, I agree copyrights are WAY too long.

Yes, people buy bottled water, too. The point is you don't HAVE to pay for food, you can grow your own. It's simply less work to pay for it with money.

The best things in life are free.

Well, you have to respect your audience. Since I'm retired, I have no need to monetize my books; I'm just happy people read them, which is the whole point of writing them.

I seem to have written Nobots at too high a reading level for some folks; I got comments such as "can I find those words in a dictionary?" So I wrote Mars, Ho! (may be ready for publication this week) mostly from the perspective of a high school graduate with bad grammar, which was oddly more of a challenge.

I did get some folks saddened when I stopped writing diary-like stuff, but they seem to like the sci-fi even more.

Buying? We're talking about a post-scarcity society here. If no one is enjoying your art, it may not be any good. If nobody is using your code, it's probably poorly designed. Find something else to hold your interest, it isn't hard.

I'm lucky, in that people read my books every day, according to site stats, and folks buy hardcover copies and send me fan mail, which is far better than money; I have enough money to live pretty well.

Sales is the worst possible metric for any creative endeavor. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life, to his brother to repay a debt. Meanwhile, what was selling in the galleries for big bucks is worthless today.

I have no fear of copyright trolls; I register my books with the US Copyright office. If one fucks with me, I'll wind up with HIS money.

And since I'm my own publisher, I'm my own gatekeeper. You can find my books in bookstores world-wide, and I've posted them on the internet. Site stats say folks are reading them every day.

What I'm doing was impossible twenty years ago. Now that I'm retired I have the time to do it. When the subject of conversation actually comes to pass, everybody will be retired.

They've been working on it for over 12 years; I wrote the following for my web site in 2002. It will be in an upcoming book. Apologies for the mangled unicode, but slashdot's preview is worthless, since "preview" shows the unicode but the submission displays garbage. Here is the article:

McCoy: He's dead, Jim
        Several years ago, before PCs were not nearly as com-mon in the home as they are now, a friend of mine asked of my computer, âoebut aren't you afraid it will explode?â
        He was a Star Trek fan, and in the old 1950s and 1960s science fiction and spy shows, computers all had a nasty habit of blowing up. All one had to do to these TV or movie computers to make them explode was shoot them, with either a ray gun or a police revolver. Some TV and movie computers would blow up if you âoepressed the wrong buttonâ; one episode of the 1960s TV show The Prisoner (âoeI am not a number! I am a free man!â) had a computer that could answer any question. The bad guys, who had imprisoned the hero, a spy who had resigned his post, wanted to know why he resigned. Of course, before the bad guys could ask the computer âoeWhy did number six resign his post?â the intrepid number six offered that he had a question the computer could not answer.
        He typed in to the Remington electric typewriter and fed the paper into the computer, which, of course, promptly started smoking, sparking, and ultimately blew up. The question was simply âoewhy?â
        Similarly, in an episode of Star Trek, Spock makes a computer explode by asking it to figure the value of pi to the last decimal place. Of course, any time a Star Trek computer was fired on, whether by a Klingon or Federation phaser, and no matter what civilization designed and built the computer, it would explode in a grand display of fireworks.
        I had to explain to my friend that this was all nonsense, that early computers from the early 1950s used thousands of vacuum tubes, requiring high voltages, which could throw showers of sparks and bright purple flashes with the characteristic âoepop!â if there was a short circuit in its 120-240 volt circuitry but would not actually explode, and that modern computers ran on three to twelve volts and wouldn't even get a spark from a short.
        I had to explain to my friend that the only explosions were in my games; that the computer itself here in the analog world was safe.
        Along with the matter transporter and faster than light travel, the exploding computer was one of those things relegated to science fiction.
        Until now.
        New Scientist reports that they have found a way to make silicon explode on demand, either by shock, as with that .38 caliber police special or by electrical signal.
        âoeThis machine is stolen and will self-destruct in ten seconds.â
        New Scientist says âoeFor instance, the American spy plane impounded by China last year could have used it to destroy its secret electronics systems.â
        They add âoeIn a stolen mobile phone, the network would send a trigger signal to the part of the chip containing the gadolinium nitrate âdetonatorâ(TM), triggering the explosion... and detonate it at will.â
        So not only is Star Trek's computer to blow up, its communicators will too! I can see in five years when these bozos have the anti theft circuits in phones. Drop your phone now and it might break. Drop it in five years and it might take your leg off!
        Of course, the new viruses in ten years will not just reformat your hard drive; the kids will be writing viruses to make people's computers explode in their homes!
        Doncha just love science... Personally, I'm hoping someone with a little common sense will have a talk with these educated morons and explain that just maybe, exploding computers ain't such a good idea after all. Just maybe the US Government might be more concerned with bringing its spy plane crew home alive than exploding its electronics; they could have blown the plane up with conventional explosives, or even driven the thing into the ground, but they didn't.
        When my cell phone explodes the manufacturer better hope it takes my head off, because if it doesn't I'm suing the shit out of the morons!
        Beam me up, Scotty.
1/18/2002