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Comment Re:Death sentence (Score 1) 255

Those aren't unreasonable demands of someone wanting to carry passengers for hire. They are checks that pretty much the entire Western world has come up with after numerous problems with unsafe, uninsured and unsavoury taxi drivers.

The problem is not that these are unreasonable demands, but that the entrenched taxi companies protect their monopolies with extremely onerous or even impossible licensing processes with the help of the government. It should be quick, easy, and inexpensive for anyone with a vehicle who wants to make some extra money via this type of service to show that they have insurance, a valid driver's license and a safety inspection any service station can do in 30 minutes. The overal state of the economy and people needing to make some income by being creative with things they already have (like a car) should be more important to society than protecting the local established taxi monopoly.

Comment Re:Free market (Score 1) 353

As long as the new services operate under the same constraints as taxi companies, I see no reason why they should't be allowed to operate since, as you say, that's a free market at work. But they shouldn't get to skip over all of the costs of business that taxi companies absorb -- things like driver background checks, driver training (in some cities), insurance requirements, car maintenance requirements, etc.

Because there's a special fee on top of all that just for a taxi license that's usually in the tens of thousands of $$ and all it does it keep out competition. If insurance, maintenance, background check and some small fee anyone with a car in the first place could pay to become a taxi under one of these apps then that would be great; instead the purpose of the taxi license is to prevent competition.

Comment Re:The Crichton Diet (Score 1) 187

I don't know. These things were basically hunted to extinction. So they may be pretty delicious or it might just be that a Mammoth hunt was a comparatively easy way to get the whole tribe fed all at once, with left overs to store.

For people who lived on the prehistoric tundra, anything they could get was pretty delicious.

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