Good point. Kickstarter is billed as a micro-investment, but in reality it IS a donation. The reward is basically like getting a coffee mug for giving to PBS, but it's delayed by a year and if PBS goes bankrupt in the meantime you can kiss your mug goodbye.

No, you are absolutely not in this case. Kickstarter is microfunding investments in a project/company, not a purchase of a product with a specific guarantee or warranty. The fine print says as much. Sure, if they absconded with your money for a vacation you could try to sue them. But in this case they tried in good faith to deliver what they could and ran out of cash before implementing all features (not only common but almost universal in the games industry - if you haven't seen this a dozen times you are not a gamer).

This is ABSOLUTELY incorrect. It's not a payment at all, you are NOT buying a product. You are investing in one, and you get a reward if it succeeds. Luckily the majority do, but if they declare bankruptcy and don't product anything because of mismanagement or just bad luck, you get to line up as an investor to collect/sue for any capital invested, which means you are 99.9% shit outta luck.

Welcome to the world of "venture capital." Just luckily for the investors it's $50 at a time and not $50M.

No, a lie is when you say something you know isn't true. Changing your mind (or in this case, adapting the product to reality of schedules and finance) is NOT A LIE. And it happens every freaking day in development.

You could say that (and in a way it's true), but technically there is no "buyer" since it's NOT a purchase, it's financial backing of a project.

Not much different from venture capital, except by giving $50 instead of $50M you don't get a board seat and massive returns if successful, you just get a possibly sketchy promise of a "reward" for your investment.

Sure, it sucks when projects don't meet their exact launch goals, but I don't have too much sympathy for the "backers" on Kickstarter in general.

The whole thing is clearly labeled as "crowdfunding", not "preorder". If you want to preorder a game, go to Gamestop. If you want to be a backer, i.e. basically micro funding of a startup project, go ahead and use Kickstarter, but in that case you really aren't *guaranteed* anything. There will be poorly managed Kickstarter projects that fail miserably and blow through their investment without ANY decent return/reward. And since you basically agreed to be an investor in the venture (that's why you get a "reward", not a "purchase"), do you know what you can do about that in most cases? Jack and shit.

Well, it may be anecdotal and hyper-focused on "the new kid on the block" but there are plenty of items in the news these days about incidents with Uber drivers...

And I can tell you second hand (I have a couple friends or acquaintances who have passed the Uber X "checks") that it's a trivial process that almost never gets rejected. The taxi licensing process in the US isn't all *that* hard, but it's still a lot more strict - and government regulated and *public*, not controlled at the whim of a private company with a vested interest to hide problems and doesn't need to publish its process or data.

But I'm not even really knocking Uber's system, the original comment just asked: "Forget about questions of fairness, step back and look at first principles and evaluate whether the regulations are of value to society. Were these rules ever necessary? If so, why? Do the same reasons apply to Uber and Lyft?"

And I think the answer is, whatever method is used to check and enforce them, yes, taxi/rideshare/whatever regulations are absoluately a value to society and were (and still are) necessary (in some form).

Heh, "distress" = "distros". Thank you autocorrect.

As of less than a year ago TRIM was still not enabled by default in mainstream Linux distress... has that changed?

And even if it has, clearly that means it's not as big a deal as this article claims...

It's not about the *customer* authenticating anything, it's about the driver having a vested interest in not committing a crime. In general people who have steady employment and are licensed at a trade, put down deposits, whatever (yes, medallions are just an extreme example), are not the ones committing violent crimes against others while they work. I'd imagine even the serial-killer-taxi-drivers out there will do their serial-killing on their own time, since they still gotta put food on the table.

No, that's completely untrue. In fact it says in plain English that UberX is not only covered, but is PRIMARY (i.e. comes before the personal insurance). The only limitation to it is that doesn't cover accidents the driver gets into when they do not have a scheduled fare. And since the OP was talking about fares being injured, that makes that part irrelevant.

"If you’re taking a ride requested through uberX, some transportation providers are rideshare drivers providing transportation with their personal vehicles. Rideshare providers carry personal insurance policies. However, there’s a commercial insurance policy for ridesharing with $1 million of coverage per incident. This policy covers drivers’ liability from the time a driver accepts your trip request through the app until the completion of your trip. This policy is expressly primary to the driver’s personal auto policy."

Many rules were absolutely necessary. Today, some are, some aren't. Probably needs an overhaul, but that doesn't mean some things aren't working well...

Do you ever wonder why with this completely paranoid culture we have today why no one ever really worries about getting into a random car driven by a complete stranger in a dark alley in a city in a major US city? Well, it's because the medallion that driver carries is worth several hundred thousand dollars in most cases. These guys (or their employers) are in it for the money, and there is a lot of it - which is part of the implicit guarantee to follow the rules...

Because if you hire a negligent cab driver with no personal assets and no insurance who kills or maims a passenger insurance you or your family is basically screwed.

Why should it be any different from any other profession/company (doctor, airline, etc) where you put your life in someone else's hands?

In the US, at least, Uber has a commercial rideshare insurance policy that is primary and covers $1M per incident.

https://support.uber.com/hc/en...

Likely true in any other country that has similar liability regulations for taxis and rideshares. So, you are basically totally incorrect.

And SF public transportation sucks ass. Your point?

Depends on who you are and where you are going. As they say, time is money. If saving 30 minutes on a bus is worth $50 in productivity you are in fact saving money.