So… it’s creating jobs!
This actually would be the trickle-down theory in action. FOR ONCE.
But these “jobs” are actively useless and harmful.
And it wouldn’t need to trickle down.
On enterprising captain of industry could just buy a bunch of beater cars and just fill the important streets. and then pay some other people to do the moving, while paying them less than minimum wage (its disruptive).
As you said earlier, someone who paid $20 for a parking spot probably wont wait around when they leave, so the spot can be claimed by the spot hoarders again.
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Let’s flip that around: Maybe you and your family have been waiting patiently for the preceding picnickers to leave so you could have the table, only to find that they’re refusing to vacate it for anyone other than Johnny-just-arrived because he was willing to pay them five bucks.
City parking brings out some bad behavior. People hover near soon to be opened spots, blocking traffic. Even worse are mall parking lots around Christmas. I’m not saying MonkeyPark’s any improvement. Just the the status que is screaming out for something.
I live near a big city with decent public transit. If I can, I’ll park at a park and ride and take the bus in. Kind’a time consuming, but it’s cheaper and much less hassle.
“No, I don’t, Bernard, and I think you know that I’ve opposed the death
penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a
deterrent and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal
with violent crime.”
it were joke
Here’s a thought. Put this story and yesterday’s story about Georgia’s open carry law together. What do ya get? A gun battle in a busy street between someone who paid for a spot and someone who was hovering.
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There is one, arguably salient, distinction to keep in mind(though it is not identical to the author’s proposed ‘jerky’/‘non jerky’ distinction precisely), founded on externalities:
Consider the case of ‘ReservationHop’: it makes its money more or less entirely by imposing negative externalities on restaurants (and possibly diners), for which it pays nothing but gets paid. Little more than a pickpocket business model.
If, hypothetically, a restaurant were selling its own reservation spots, the same level of rationalization would be present; but all externalities would be internalized. They’d be the ones making the tradeoff between reservation fees, unsold tables, diners happy to get convenience for a modest sum, diners unhappy to have to pay.
Same thing with ‘Monkey Parking’ vs. the municipality raising parking rates or adopting some sort of demand-based pricing arrangement. In the first case, ‘Monkey Parking’ and their users are unilaterally imposing their externalities on everyone else, fuck you I’ve got mine, and not internalizing them at all. In the second case, one need not approve(‘demand-based pricing’ is a polite synonym for ‘if enough people can’t afford it, it’ll be much nicer for those who can’ after all); but the externalities are internalized.
It is true that technology that lowers transaction costs will, more or less inevitably, bring market ‘rationality’ to areas that previously just weren’t worth rationalizing once the overhead was factored in. However, it can do so in a way that allows something little better than vaguely polite plunder, as formerly unpriced goods are simply appropriated and everyone else left with the externalities, or in a way where the arguably legitimate owner, even if they didn’t previously price their good, retains control.
The smug bastards who sack and pillage and then pat themselves on the back as ‘wealth creators’ should be lined up and ontologically reassigned to debt peonage and manual mud-brick manufacturing.
The questions of certain formerly inefficient transactions becoming cheap enough to be worth looking at demand caution; but are less intrinsically slimy.
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There are a pile of words in the post you responded to, and not a single one of them has anything to do with legality. The only way I can imagine you came to the confused conclusion that I was making some sort of legal argument that you need to correct was because I used to the word “steal”.
Stealing is a word in the English language that has nothing to do with legality or illegality. Stealing is taking something you don’t have the “right” to take, with “right” being the fuzzy morally gray thing that philosophers can argue over. While stealing can be illegal, it doesn’t always imply illegality. You can steal all sorts of things legally. I stole a fry off my friends plate the other day and no matter how upset they might get (they weren’t) they probably couldn’t prosecute me for it. You can steal the ball, steal the base, steal the show, steal someone’s line, and steal the toy from your little brother all without breaking the law.
Taking the entire conversation that was going on, ignoring every single thing said, and making a stupid point that no one disagrees with is annoying. Further having that worthless point that you make and that ignores all the discussion being just some annoying quibbling over a definition of a word that is being used in a way that any idiot can decipher the meaning of, regardless if it was used strictly correctly (which it in fact was), is fucking obnoxious. And when I say fucking, I mean that in the adjective sense of the word used to enhance the intensity of a word, not the verb that implies sex, or the legal definition. Just so we are clear.
Hopefully this just accelerates the banning of cars and parking in areas where the density makes it enough of a problem that people are willing to create predatory market apps to control them. I mean, eventually, someone is going to realize that just buying and re-selling valuable parking spots on the market can be automated, then eventually, it will just be bots on people’s computers, a-la the stock market, except in this case, running their automated cars from spot to spot as they penny-up-penny-down each other into a true flash crash… hopefully then we can get onto the business of making decent public transit, safe bike and pedestrian ways, and end this garbage.
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Hi All,
You cannot monetize public assets for individual company gain. Just because an app can be built, doesn’t mean it should be.
I’m a Co-Founder and CEO of a San Francisco based startup called CARMAnation.
We look to help solve parking issues via the true intentions of the sharing economy - working with the community to benefit the community. Our users share their PRIVATE available parking spots with one another.
Having tech startups trying to solve the parking problems with their own unique approach means there is a need to disrupt the industry. Technology is a wonderful thing, it can solve/simplify a lot of problems, but it has to be done right, otherwise “Monkey Parking” is what happens.
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