A broom leaves lots of dirt around. A broom is also useless in households with allergic people. There is a reason the vacuum was invented in 1901. It's not a 21st century luxury item, by far.
And those people are allergic mostly because everywhere is cleaned too well. A bit of dirt is good for you.
British toilets are crap too, using much more water than necessary
We overcome this with our native cunning and shove a couple of bricks in the cistern.
lacking all but the most basic features
What other features do you need in a toilet apart from a bowl, water and a way of flushing it? Air conditioning? Leather upholstery? Cruise control?
Don't forget the low flow toilet you have to flush three times.
You are so full of shit...
Central heating is a f*cking retarded idea - heating the whole house when the simple fact is an individual can only use one room at a time. Radiators in the halls - WTF is that for?
You are assuming that everybody lives on their own, but even then it's still useful to have a central boiler on a timer and simply adjust the individual room radiators down to zero if you're not using a room.
work out its commercial kinks
So would that be a straight BDSM dungeon, or are we going the whole way with specialists in urolagnia, acrotomophilia and menophilia?
No way I'm looking those last two up at work.
Flame bait? You lot have no sense of humour at all.
Slashdot has unwritten laws when it comes to humour.
I transgressed the unwritten law once, and the mods nailed my head to the floor.
I'm pretty sure travel agents are licenced.
Yes, but they're not licensed as taxi companies, and so therefore Uber aren't a taxi company and apparently that is a really big thing.
Once automated cars are in place, companies can simply become dispatching services for privately owned cars. Don't want to pay for parking in the city after your car drops you off at work? Let it drive around town and make money for you, then pick you up at the end of the day to drive you home. Then, it can pickup your neighbors as they leave the local bar at night, and it is ready for you, charged up in the morning.
The point is that if your/Uber's car is making money for you, it is a business, whether you call it a taxi or not.
And despite what libertarians here like to pretend, there is a difference between business and personal activities, and yes this involves Evil Government Regulation and even, oh the horror, taxes.
Amusingly, a vast fleet of non-personally-owned automated cars seems more like socialism than the US's traditional rugged individualism of private vehicle ownership, but hey ho, maybe something good will come out of Uber (once they're nationalised).
Uber does not allow "hail". You must pre-book and request a private car pickup. This is not a hail. A hail is a street-side pickup from real-time signal based on the hailer seeing a taxi and signaling a stop.
For that reason, Uber is explicitly not a taxi in most jurisdiction
Here in the UK, most taxis are only allowed to operate from their office location, or designated taxi ranks (like at airports). I think it's only London black cabs that you can (legally) hail on the street like that.
So Uber is definitely operating as a taxi service here.
The government wants you to believe that you need EXTRA liability insurance and safety provisions than is already covered by your motor insurance. If I give someone a lift, nothing extra is required. If that someone drops me a few bucks for gas, nothing extra is required. How is Ubers model *any* different?
If you have an accident and let slip to your insurance company that you were acting as a driver for commercial hire (and I don't see that even Uber fanboys could deny they are), then you will not be covered under your private car insurance (at least here in the UK).
Companies pay commercial insurance rates for a reason. If one of their vehicles ploughs into a school bus, they don't have to find a few million in compensation out of the directors' personal bank accounts.
I have serious issues with the 'medallion' system
This appears to be a mainly US problem and does not reflect most people's experience of taxis. Where I live (UK), it certainly doesn't cost the hundreds of thousands that US posters often mention to get into the taxi business. It's not free, but nor is starting most businesses.
If regulations exist that diminish your ability to acquire a chocolate bar,
and they were created by legislation spawned by powerful corporations successfully suppressing competition,
would you be wrong taking the sweets?
Um, yes.
I never said they shouldn't be punished.
OK, but they shouldn't be defending their actions by saying "we're not breaking taxi regulations because we're not really a taxi service".
Rosa Parks didn't say "I 'm not actually black, so you shouldn't arrest me for sitting in the wrong seat on the bus".
unraveling (in many cases) an absurd government granted monopoly
That's all it boils down to, and why Uber are so popular in places like slashdot on the internet and Silicon Valley in real life. Libertarianism.
Taxis are regulated by government, and therefore are bad. Because The Government is just automatically bad.
I look forward eagerly to the disruptive businesses selling cheaper mis-labelled food and drugs, lethal kids' toys, polluted water and fatal cars. Because at least they're not being regulated by The Government any more.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
