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'.

Whoever thought of that name was probably praised by management for their mr blue sky thinking.

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.

No, not exaggerating, she codes, she sketches, she does a ton of stuff that should be done by people who specialise in it.

How about I prove you wrong in such an embarrassing way that you will have to eat your words? I have that account because at some point I bought Rogers Internet service, and email was part of what I was buying in the package. Eventually Rogers outsourced their email to Yahoo!, so I have an email account that is paid for and that I never imagined would be handled by Yahoo! I am actually a paying customer, you dumb shit.

Marissa Mayer is not a good CEO, she maybe was a useful engineer at Google, but she is a horrendous CEO at Yahoo! When Yahoo! outbid FB by a few hundred million to buy Tumblr it was clear, there is no plan. But there was no plan from the beginning.

I'll explain. You come to a new company as a CEO, WHAT DO YOU DO? What do you do first? What would YOU do? You know what I would do (as a CEO)? I would immediately run an inventory of what I have in the company, what do I have to work with, who makes money in the company, who does not make money, what investments are out there, what products, services, people, holdings, cash is out there.

I would want a recount and fast.

Then, as a new CEO I would definitely concentrate on those parts of the company that actually make money because those parts have already done the HARD work of figuring out how this company makes money right now.

Mayer didn't pay attention to the content generating part of Yahoo!, which is the part that actually earns them revenues at all, she didn't give a shit that there is a part of the company that brings in over a billion dollars a year. A BILLION dollars a year and she didn't care to figure out how that's done and how to boost it before doing anything else that TAKES money, any new investments can only be done once you understand your cashflow and you know that you can actually withstand the spending that goes into the investment.

Marissa Mayer was not hired as an engineer to build products, she was hired as a CEO, as a director to direct, to create strategy for the company. Yes, that means coming up with product ideas as well, no, it does not mean coding (which is what she ended up doing herself in many cases), that's a waste of time for her. She should be looking at markets and clients and making sure that her current accounts don't fall off the face of the earth, instead she didn't pay any attention to her advertising income (she stood up her largest clients), her content generating income (didn't even notice them apparently).

The only saving grace for Yahoo! was their Alibaba 1Billion USD investment that brought them money and investors, who used Yahoo! to invest into Alibaba indirectly.

As to products, what products? The fucking piece of shit Yahoo! account that I have (from old days) is horrible on Firefox under Ubuntu 11.04 that I still run on my laptop.

It certainly seems to be true that courts in the UK have shied away from questions of whether any given level of consideration is sufficient, favouring a simple finding of whether there was any consideration or not. My intended point was more that while obvious nominal consideration explicitly written into a negotiated contract might reasonably be interpreted as a demonstration of intent to enter into a binding agreement, in this case I'm not sure how well that argument works. In other words, it's not just about whether 1p constitutes consideration, it's about whether that nominal consideration demonstrates an intent to commit to the deal. It would be interesting to hear what any actual lawyers thought about this argument, but sadly it doesn't look like we'll find out here.

well, as always it's an all or nothing proposition, so good luck!

People are running around with computers in their hands, the phone is now nothing but an add-on feature, as such we should be able to have a real p2p encrypted channel with communications over it, so for people with data plans this shouldn't be a problem. I am more interested seeing if we can have a system that uses voice to send encrypted data over it...

You're probably thinking of Samuel Johnson as quoted by Boswell:

Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

Not in the UK.