Well, Goose, my reading of history leads to the conclusion that at least in the USA, the overriding principle of nearly all legislators at all levels is “Where’s mine??”. You’d be pretty hard put to find a career legislator who retired without a lot more wealth than when first elected.
You’re welcome to be more optimistic than I. Best of luck…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-06-23/this-is-how-uber-takes-over-a-city
That was linked from the article cited by the OP.
They lobby very heavily against city governments with less resources (who therefore can’t deal with a protracted lawsuit) for rules that are vastly more permissive than the regulations governing taxi or livery services.
“but people are just too damn shortsighted to rationally stop themselves from… breeding,”
What rock do you live under? The biggest problem in what we colloquially know as ‘the West’ is the people who were born there have stopped having babies. The only thing keeping the US population rising is the birth rate of recent immigrants. In Europe, ‘native’ Germans, French, Danes, Swedes, etc. all have fewer than the 2.1 births per woman necessary for ZERO population growth. If not for their (mostly Muslim) immigrants, their populations would be falling drastically. Mark Steyn wrote a book about this almost a decade ago (“America Alone”).
It gets even worse when you look at Japan, where a huge demographic crisis is lurking. China is going to have one as well, but that’s self-inflicted due to their ‘one family, one child’ policy.
History shows over and over again that as women are educated, freed from metaphorical shackles (i.e. they are allowed to go to school, drive cars, get jobs, etc.), birth rates plunge. So I disagree completely with your comment as far as ‘breeding’ (an accurate, but horrible term, IMHO, when applied to people) goes.
I’ve thought about this before. If you have a robot driven car, and you don’t need it all day for your own transport, why not hire it out? So, while I agree that it’s ‘capital intensive’, it’s not an amount of capital that’s beyond the average family - most of us have cars, right? I can foresee lots of ‘mom and pop’ cars out on the streets, just as the Philippines has tons of jipneys.
Ouch! That’s very depressing, and I stand corrected.
The worst part is the number of lobbyists Uber has had to hire. Shows just how tightly an existing industry can wrap its tentacles around the government, and how many axes have to be used to cut them.
Yeah, agreed. On the other hand, I don’t love the Uber model either (e.g. only white kids from decently wealthy families can afford the “startup capital” of owning a clean, insured vehicle in good working order in the first place). And I do think the disabled shouldn’t be underserved by transport companies since they typically already have to deal with a lot of mobility issues – though the current regulatory regime is probably not the optimal way to handle that either. It’s a huge thorny mess of problems.
In related news, I had a very nice taxi ride last night, although I did have to call 4 separate taxi companies before finding one with an available car.
In the early days of automobiles, auto jitneys were a big thing here (at least here in LA and, I believe, most of the US) - the result of private car owners using their cars to generate revenue to help pay for the car. They didn’t have wireless apps, so they just ran fixed routes of their own choosing.
They probably would have put the trolleys out of business, but the trolley companies had them regulated out of existence - which is how we ended up with today’s arcane and expensive system of taxi regulations and restrictions.
But in the the real future, IMHO, Mom and Pop won’t own a car, they’ll just own a priority membership/share in an automated-car mobility service. Which could easily be a share in a co-op.
Is there any ground work like this for creating local broadband ISPs?
I live in a small town in heavily wired dense suburbia, and there is more than a small bunch of us who have really had it with Verizon and Comcasts bullshit. Any open-source platform to follow for creating a local municipal ISP?
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