Purposely interfering with competing businesses isn't part of a free market. People who complain about "free markets" don't know what a free market actually is....

What I really don't get is the nutjobs (looking at you) who don't understand where Taxi regulation has ended up. It's easy to say how bad it used to be but now we have the end game of any regulatory regime where entrenched players totally control the "regulation" in order to tilt the playing field in their favor and erect barriers to entry that are all but impossible for a newcomer to overcome.

It's shameless. In NYC you have to buy a "medallion" in order to have a taxi. Hey, sounds easy, right? I mean, just go to the city and buy one, right?

Wrong.

They sold a very limited number of them and then quit. The secondary market has pushed the price of the medallion into the high 6 figures last I looked, possibly over a million dollars now. Note that's just to run one single cab. The medallions are owned by rich people who use them as an investment and rent them to taxi drivers on a monthly basis.

Now, you tell me: how does that "help" me, the taxi industry, or anybody else besides the people who own the medallions?

In Nashville they had new regulations a few years ago backed by Gaylord (owners of Opryland) to "regulate" the limousine/sedan industry here. Again, utterly shameless. Gaylord was specifically exempted *by name* from the "regulations". The whole point was to drive a company called "Metro Livery" out of service, and hurt others. The regulations force companies to have cars that are no more than 5 years old and prices could be no lower than $50/ride among other things. Yes, they specifically put a minimum price in the ordinance. I had used Metro Livery to get rides to the airport so I knew who they were targeting. Their cars were a few years older but I could get personal sedan service for less than the cost of a taxi.

The entire point was to put a lower cost competitor out of business. Again, how does that help anybody except the big players? Hint: It doesn't.

I agree that this industry needs to be lightly regulated - having a meter requirement for taxis is an example of useful regulation. What we have now is not the regulation that is needed and has nothing to do with helping consumers.

I've been on /. for 15 years. That's the first time I've clicked an image link here that actually went to the image that I was expecting. Thank you.

Holy shit, dude. It's not the propaganda from the Cold War, it's the tens of millions of dead bodies that Communism produced last century. In my book, that is EVIL, yes. That doesn't mean there aren't other evils in the world or that the US has always been the bastion of freedom that we should be or any of that.

I cannot fathom how someone could be arguing in 2014 that Communism isn't evil.

This is my favorite part about Democrat voters. They don't claim their party has anything good about it - it's just "better than Republicans".

If that's your best reason to vote then, please, stay home on election day.

Those telcos are forced to provide service to everybody at the same price, which means they make a profit on tightly packed businesses in the city and that offsets their losses on the more widespread customers out of town. If the city comes in and serves only the tightly packed businesses, they can easily offer the service at a lower price and still make money or break even, and the telco ends up losing their profitable customers and therefore their ability to offset their losses elsewhere.

I'm not against "municipal broadband", but they need to be held to the exact same standard as all other carriers in the same area. That might well mean offering service to out of town customers, also.

I didn't understand the fuss until last time this came up and someone in the industry explained it quite clearly in a +5 post.

They're successful when you consider that the point was to move tax revenue to crony pockets:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

All takedowns have to be sworn under penalty of perjury. Next time google gets one that points to a page with no infringement (just happened) (just happened again) (oops, and again, okay, I'll stop counting now) whoever sent it needs to be prosecuted for perjury. The infringement notice bots would be shut down in 10 minutes when those behind them are suddenly facing prosecution.

As I've said time and again: we don't need a new law - we need to enforce what we've got.

People who are driving at a speed that is far outside the average speed on a particular road are a danger simply because the difference between their speed and others is likely to be large. Note that whether they're going "faster" or "slower" doesn't matter - it's the difference in speed.

If I'm going 90MPH and I bump someone going 89MPH we'll be fine and have minimal damage to our cars. If I'm going 45 and bump someone going 44 it's the same. But bumping someone who's going 45 when you're going 90 will result in a major accident.

I remember reading something a few years ago said by a patrol officer. Basically, fast drivers and slow drivers cause the same number of accidents. But in his experience the fast drivers were part of the accident while the slow drivers caused other people to have an accident (trying to avoid the slow poke) and drove off possibly unaware that they had caused an accident.

Actually the analogous action would be to drop their line voltage to 30V and perhaps change the frequency to 20Hz.

So, you proved that you were somewhere else, which is a positive.

Of course he knew what the OP meant, but I have to side with mrchaotica and I'll tell you why. A large part of the population thinks that copyrights are something that only big companies own. When people say "it's illegal to download copyrighted content" they perpetuate that myth. Nearly everything I download in a given day is copyrighted, it's just that the author has given permission for it to be downloaded. All the posts on /. are a great example.

So the issue is about whether it's unauthorized sharing, not whether it's copyrighted. I make that distinction simply because I don't want to help lay the groundwork for a fundamental change in copyright law at some point.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has been suggesting this approach for years with this and other invasive species. Ultimately it's the only way to go. When you say the fish "has no natural predators" - well, I know a *bunch* of potential predators....

Welcome to Slashdot.

Those jobs are taken from companies like mine that paid the taxes being used to pay for those jobs. Therefore, no net jobs are created and, in fact, net jobs are lost. The government doesn't create wealth - with the caveat being "usually" but "certainly not in this case".