Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> "Ripe for disruption" is just "lots of laws we can ignore"

On the whole, I think society probably benefits from this kind of edge testing. I certainly don't encourage it. And taking on federal or state laws is a different game (legal and moral liability-wise) from challenging municipal codes, particularly when people get hurt.

But Uber challenging the taxi industry forced everyone to take out the rulebook and reconsider what is and isn't truly necessary. Something similar is happening with hotels. One could argue, with Bitcoin et al, too.

View on HN

Uber spent more money campaigning to prevent a law requiring background checks on drivers in one city than it would have cost to do background checks for all their drivers in the entire country.

These companies can try to claim it's about making things better all they want. It's clearly just about money to them. I learnt that the hard way trying to deal with AirBnB.

Tip: companies "doing the right thing" don't charge your credit card then require you to login with Facebook (which I don't have) or upload a video explaining why I want to rent a house.

I don't understand how Uber can be "just about money" if they spend more money campaigning against laws than it would cost to follow them? Sounds like it's more about not following laws than money?

I believe that falls under "spend money to make money", not to mention precedent. It was more money at the time - I can't imagine they have a particularly stable workforce and background checks for a revolving door workforce will get expensive, not to mention it means they have less potential drivers to make money from.

I think that's a slight oversimplification. Uber wasn't fighting doing background checks in Austin, they were fighting doing background checks the way the city of Austin wanted them to. But at a more meta-level, what they were really fighting was a precedent that would create a patchwork of local regulation on Uber that would make it harder for them to scale.

But yeah, it is ultimately about the money.

A self-imposed background check is essentially no background check.

The differences between Uber's and e.g. Taxi's is laughable, when you read accounts from actual Uber drivers like http://valleywag.gawker.com/uber-driver-heres-how-we-get-aro...

Honestly, Bitcoin is proving to the world why we need financial regulation.

Is it? The way I see it, it's the consequence of financial regulations, and proves nothing - you can't really compare traditional currencies spanning hundreds of years with one that was there for just a decade.

Of course I can. In fact, comparing new products with ones that have existed for decades is sort of the DNA of Hacker News.

Well, yeah, of course you can, but the comparison is nonsense.

How so? What are the problems caused by btc?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com