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> I'm looking forward to seeing the uber/airbnb equivalent for education, healthcare, energy, etc.

The total disregard for laws and regulations? Exciting. Fingers crossed Uber burns up it VC money sooner than later.

It's pretty terrible when people on HN pine for the days of less developed countries (no worker protections, no labor/safety regulations).

> It's pretty terrible when people on HN pine for the days of less developed countries (no worker protections, no labor/safety regulations).

The Developed World can not continue with it's standard of living, it's simply not sustainable. Something has to give.

The way I see it, services like Uber and airbnb can slowly chip it down to something sustainable, or we can hold onto it until the bitter end when it all comes crashing down.

Also, just because a job is offered with no worker protections, no labor/safety regulations etc, it doesn't mean a person has to take it. People vote through their actions.

And people are really bad at making decisions with long term repercussions. Take smoking, drinking, texting while driving, driving without a seatbelt, eating too much, sitting too much, spending all day staring at a computer screen, not sleeping enough, etc. Humans are short-term thinkers. So if you ask a poor person "would you rather protect your industry and reduce the risk to your health, or keep getting paid"... well look at all the people working in coal mines. They sacrifice their health, their neighbors health, their economy, and their planet just to have a paycheck.

People vote with their actions. But people are short sighted, selfish, and greedy. That's why labor regulations and unions were invented. It's just been so long since the days before unions and regulations were created that everyone thinks they're useless. It's been so long since it rained that you start wondering why you have a roof over your house. You'll remember soon enough.

> The Developed World can not continue with it's standard of living, it's simply not sustainable. Something has to give.

That's not true _at all_. How productive are self-driving cars going to be with no drivers? And electric powertrains? Very! Why would a government allow Uber to have a monopoly on that? They're government owned roads!

You can entirely continue to provide a high quality of life to citizens of a developed country using automation and software.

Shall we continue to socialize the losses and privatize the gains in society? Pardon me for being crass, but fuck that noise.

But still , that calls for something like UBER with democratic vote over it's decisions. And since most people will be consumers ,not employees of that service , the incentive towards how to manage it's drivers would be the same.

> But still , that calls for something like UBER with democratic vote over it's decisions. And since most people will be consumers ,not employees of that service , the incentive towards how to manage it's drivers would be the same.

You mean like mass transit provided by a government org? You own the roads, you make the rules.

> That's not true _at all_.

Go and spend some time in the developing world, then you'll reevaluate that statement.

What you don't see/realize is that we've simply outsourced slavery. The reason your iPhone, etc. are so damn cheap is becuase there are slaves building it, who have a standard of living way, way, way lower than yours.

I'm saying it has to equalize globally, which means our has to come down.

I cried when I visited the silver mines in Bolivia - http://theroadchoseme.com/potosi

That has more to do with poor governance than rich countries consuming too much. Bolivia has all the natural resources necessary to provide its people with a high quality of life, but education and corruption act against that.

I live in the country that makes your iPhone. Same here also.

> What you don't see/realize is that we've simply outsourced slavery. The reason your iPhone, etc. are so damn cheap is becuase there are slaves building it, who have a standard of living way, way, way lower than yours.

Foxconn is replacing most of its workers with robots. Most work can be replaced with software and/or robotics in the next 5-20 years.

> I'm saying it has to equalize globally, which means our has to come down.

Completely disagree. Perhaps on meat consumption, and petroleum use (both which need to decline across the entire world).

> I cried when I visited the silver mines in Bolivia

There are responsible ways for mining for the resources you need.

I'm not following your logic of how airbnb and uber are standard of living equalizers.

First, most people employed by the industries being disrupted by these companies (hotels and taxicab companies) are taxicab drivers, maids, bellhops, front desk. All relatively low-paying jobs already.

Paying people at the bottom less keeps prices low. Therefore, people with disposable income can the spend the same amount of money and get more goods and services. It raises the standard of living for the middle-upper class while pushing people in these low paying jobs closer to poverty.

This is not a diatribe against these companies or the free market. I just don't agree with you. These companies are actually raising our standard of living. Giving us more money and time to consume things and spend more money.

> I'm not following your logic of how airbnb and uber are standard of living equalizers.

Globally, I mean, to bring our standard of living closer to those people who are for example building our iPhones for pennies.

The standard of living in the developed world has to come down closer to theirs, and one of the ways we'll do that is through things like uber and airbnb because they are a lot less heavily regulated, and result in less employee income/safety/security etc. I.e. the people who "work" for uber are closer to those in the developing world, than those working for the current taxi scheme in a developed country

Okay, but did you not see my response? People who work for uber are already at the bottom of the proverbial food chain in America. Your use of the word "our" in "our standard of living" is puzzling since you are most likely middle class. Paying them less will marginally raise your standard of living since you could presumably afford more taxi rides.

>it doesn't mean a person has to take it

That's fine as long as the job market is good. Have you considered that those that control enough levers in government might want to keep the job market poor in order to force low wages and less protections? This is how union-busting happens.

The Federal Reserve specifically targets a "healthy" amount of unemployment to prevent inflation.

>> no worker protections

Worker protection should apply equally to everyone, not give preferential treatment to one group(taxi drivers) at the expense of most other groups who just have minimum wage laws and osha.

I'm referring to how Uber illegally classifies their workers as contractors. And I agree that worker protection should apply to everyone equally.

They are losing that battle in a hurry...

June: "In California, Uber driver is employee, not contractor: agency" http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/18/us-uber-california...

Just yesterday: "Another Uber Driver in California Ruled an Employee, Not Contractor"

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/09/10/another-uber-driver-i...

They are contractors, though. They own their vehicle and set their own hours. They can choose if they want to work that day or not. Uber is just a lead source to the driver. My neighbor drives a black car, legally licensed as a limo, and drives for Uber. Not all of his fairs come from Uber. He owns his own business, Uber is not his employer.

Governing bodies across the US continue to find Uber "contractors" to fit the parameters as employees.

As far as I am aware, no driver outside California (which is, contrary to popular belief, not the entire US) has been ruled an employee.

And even the cases in CA are not going to be settled for a couple years.

Florida: http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/22/8647163/former-uber-driver...

Also, the IRS is nationwide. Uber has a high hill to climb with them regarding contractor status.

Maybe the answer is to extend protections to more workers, not take them away from some.

Work force disruption is an unfortunate side effect of technological disruption. If your solution is NOT to embrace change because you don't want to see disruption take place then that's not a long-term solution.

Edit: I'd like to expand on this with a (not so) hypothetical. Autonomous cars are already here. How long until we have automated taxis? Let's just say 10 years. Would you make them illegal to keep the taxi workforce in place?

There is disruption in virtually every workforce because of the Information Era. Our work force will have to adapt.

I don't think you understand my point.

I'm not against technological disruption. When the shipping container revolutionized shipping 60 years ago, the shipping industry split the productivity gains with the longshoreman union to buy out those made redundant by said productivity gains. I'm inferring that the same will need to be done again.

If technology obsoletes people, and they're unable to retrain, they'll be supported by social safety nets, funded by taxes on said technology.

> in the 80s, 90s and 00s everything about our society became more and more regulated and safety conscious (hotels, taxis, health care, education) meaning costs skyrocketed, and the cost of entry to compete in those markets became astronomical.

Speaking generally, I think it's safe to say that this is the opposite of what happened. The hallmarks of Reagan's [1] and Thatcher's economic policies in the 1980s was massive deregulation (and privatisation). By the end of the decade it became the global norm for economic policy, a consensus generally accepted by even their left-wing successors, Clinton and Blair, by many others around the world, and became a key part of the "Washington Consensus",[2] which was a set of economic policies forced on poor countries who needed aid by Western governments and agencies (and accused often of coldly sacrificing the welfare of hundreds of millions of very poor people). As a more recent example, excessive deregulation of the financial industry, such as the repeal of Glass-Steagall act [3], is widely blamed as a signicant cause of the financial crisis of 2008.

I'll add an interesting point: The period of perhaps greatest economic growth in the West, the 1950s and 60s, was the period of greatest government regulation and direct involvement in economies. Deregulation began in the 1980s and while economies have grown since then, wages for most Americans have been flat for 30 years. That proves nothing, but it suggests the evidence for the libertarian theory isn't so clear cut. (Personally I think regulation is not an ideology but a tool, good for some things and not for others.)

[1] It actually began under Jimmy Carter, a little known fact.

[2] http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidtrade/issues/washington.html

[3] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/wei...

Petrodollar starts in the 70s causing exponential inflation in the 80s.

> The period of perhaps greatest economic growth in the West, the 1950s and 60s, was the period of greatest government regulation and direct involvement in economies.

What calculation leads you to conclude there was more regulation in the 1950s and 1960s than today? My impression is that "deregulation" in practice largely amounted to at best a decline in the rate of increase in federal regulations, not an overall decrease in total regulation. Today there are vastly more federal rules and regulations and also substantially more government employees as a percentage of total employment than there was in the 1970s.

Um, here's a plot of one proxy for new regulations - the size of the federal register in pages:

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-regula...

There were several high-profile cases of actual deregulation (eg, regulations related to trucking and airline fares), but it amounted to pushing back the tide - the nature of government programs is to grow and most have continued to do so, occasional changes in fashionable rhetoric notwithstanding.

(arguably) less safety.

I don't even think this is arguable - there is literally nothing that owning a taxi medallion does to improve safety.

That's a ridiculous statement. The power to shut down a business gives a regulator a lot of power to do things like improve safety. In NYC, the Taxi and Limousine Commisson is a strong regulator the does a bunch of things to improve safety.

Just because your city sucks and doesn't do it's job doesn't mean that the solution is to hope that Uber's army of independent contractors maintains their cars.

The GP's point (under the most charitable interpretation) is that safety regulation is orthogonal to medallion limits. You can revoke someone's permission to drive for hire without also placing a limit on the total number of people who can drive for hire. Indeed, this is the typical model in Germany (IIRC): anyone who meets the standards and doesn't mess up can be a cab driver.

* The power to shut down a business gives a regulator a lot of power to do things like improve safety. *

That can easily be done without the government provided monopoly of taxi medallions. Medallions (or any other form of monopoly granting) aren't required for regulation, enforcement, or any other aspect of keeping the public safe.

So, you don't think having 10x more cabs in midtown manhattan would cause potential safety problems?

Taxis are a shitty business, no doubt, but replacing a government medallion with a corporate medallion isn't a solution. Uber has the valuation they have because after they kill off the competition, they'll limit the supply of rides and jack up the cost.

>It will be interesting to see if this pushes any traditional cab companies to become their own "mini Uber".

>i.e. sell all their medallions, get rid of all their regulations and expense overhead, and just operate all their drivers like Uber operate theirs. At which point competing should be easy enough.

There was a story on HN about a year ago, regarding an cab company owner doing exactly this, although the owner didn't have medallions to sell, he simply stopped renting them and paying associated fees.

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8134323

My summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8134695