Do you know the law of all the countries you are traveling to?
Your option to change the travel date may not be viable (e.g. cheap nonmovable RyanAir ticket). Your friend with car that is supposed to give you a ride may be called off (as it happened to me last time), or get mistaken by the angry lynch mob for an Uber driver anyway. You may have car but located in another country. You may be just glad that you got out of the airport guts barely alive, chewed up and half-digested by the travel, and Just Not Care - I for one get to such mental state pretty often when traveling and if you donât, my envy goes to you.
The world looks prettier from the high horse, doesnât it?
Carla, you need to read back what youâve written before you hit âpublishâ. Itâs Courtney Love (not âthousands of taxi driversâ) who was leaving Charles De Gaulle airport via Uber.
Agreed. Although I think that, as far as harrassment of non-whites goes, Iâd rather be pulled off the train than shot.
Seriously, no, itâs not utopia. Medical care isnât completely single-payer. Corporate bosses still have too much power and are paid too much. Then of course thereâs the FN.
But for me, itâs a hell of a lot better than the US.
Your ethnocentrism is showing. Public transport is only impractical in (most) US cities. In Paris, itâs very, very practical, as in most European cities. Thatâs a choice the US has made differently from Europe.
I donât think your analogy is apt, especially since the taxi cartels, not Uber, were the ones who got rid of their competition (by essentially regulating it away).
Though, as it happens, I do enjoy shopping at Wal-Mart. They offer a wide selection of goods at very low prices.
What I meant was, if it were a healthy capitalist system, the innovation wouldnât likely be so disruptive, since everyone would be working hard competing, and that means all parties would be innovating, thus reducing the chances of catastrophic disruption.
Instead what they have is regulatory capture and stagnation of the industry, making it ripe for catastrophic disruption from unexpected competitors. Itâs the price monopolies and oligopolies pay, if theyâre allowed to dominate the market and ossify.
Yeah absolutely. Itâs a sad truism that businesses (and very much more so, public sector organisations) are really bad at innovation, not least because itâs much easier to build protectionist measures than to provide real value. With disruptive innovators, innovation is the whole point, though more often than not, they soon get crap at innovation once entrenched - what have Facebook done in the last N years? (where N is several and is the number of years since they basically began providing the same service they currently offer).
The one time I tried I found a fairly cheap hotel using the information boards at CDG. Took maybe 15-30 minutes to line it up. The train was on strike though
The level of practicality depends greatly at the time when you arrive, the state of your neck and shoulders combined with the weight of your luggage, the number of changing the bus/tram/subway to another line, the level of your fatigue both physical and cognitive which can reach quite high levels after dealing with an average airport, and I could continue.
When you Just Had Enough For The Day, a car is the choice.
For the record, I am stuck in one of the European cities, with usable public transportation. I still make exceptions for traveling to/from the airport.
Taking a mild risk of getting caught and just winging it is VASTLY preferable to spending life as an unpaid wannabe lawyer, wasting it on reading mountains of legalese instead of just whipping out a phone, running a maybe legal maybe illegal who cares as long as it works app, and hoping for the best which usually happens. If it does not have a death penalty or excessively long prison sentence, itâs not worth the lawyering. Life is too short.
Somebody likes to ride the high horse. Somebody prefers the sausages.
I suspect you would find that most of the French do support the law.
That said, in the interest of full disclosure, I did just learn that Love was actually using one of the âuber luxuryâ, i.e. licensed, cabs, so I withdraw those comments. That said, since Uber is operating an illegal service alongside a legal one, they shouldnât be too surprised that the one gets confused with the other by the people whose jobs are being destroyed.
Have you ever read any of the French laws? What the law says very often doesnât tally with what the person who is currently berating you says it says - and that person being a policeman is no guarantee of anything.
Itâs a French pastime to try to use the law to protect entrenched interests, whatever the law actually might say (and the converse is true too, ignore the law when it happens to get in the way of doing something that is clearly the right way to proceed).
Feh. Iâm 53 years old, in crap shape, and use public transport in Europe whenever possible, even when Iâm exhausted and in a country where I donât speak the language. Itâs usually more convenient for for me, less expensive, and more environmentally friendly. Youâre still making a choice; you just refuse to admit it.
