One of the major benefits in some cities of Uber/Lyft over public transportation is not risking interaction with thementally ill, inebriated, panhandlers, or otherwise dangerous people (like the dancers on the NYC subway).
I've never once felt unsafe.
Mildly annoyed maybe, but never remotely unsafe.
Whereas I've felt unsafe driving through certain areas by myself at night. I've also felt unsafe driving when other cars were performing dangerous maneuvers around me.
>But I've experienced far too many train cars smelling like urine and experienced a homeless person with extreme odors come into a car basically necessitating it being vacated. Even a 1 in 100 chance is enough for me to opt for another mode of transport, if available.
All you have to do is get out of one subway car and move to the next one at the next station. Avoiding public transport because you (allegedly) have to do this 1 time in 100 makes no sense.
If public transit didn't result in worse experiences, then I wouldn't opt to use Uber/Lyft.
2) do you also avoid leaving your house entirely?? because you are likely to run across homeless people in other public places than the subway. The worst smelling homeless person I've ever encountered was at a grocery store.
I’m certain most people would not want Singaporean-style justice in the US.
E.g., the most famous case, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, was caught sharing 1700 songs. The RIAA asked for $5000.
She refused, so they sued. They sued over 24 of the songs. Why not sue over all 1700? Probably a couple reasons. First, if they sued over 1700 and won, the minimum damages they would receive would be $1 275 000 (statutory damages of $750 [1] per infringed work x 1700 works). Only suing over 24 cuts the minimum to $18 000. They were willing to settle for $5 000, but having to go to trial adds some expenses and so $18 000 is pretty reasonable.
Second, for each song they do have to file some paperwork proving that they have standing to sue on behalf of the copyright owner. Every bit of paperwork they have to file is time and money, and every bit of paperwork offers the defense something to challenge to further take their time and increase their cost.
Any non-moron looking at the above math would beg to accept that $5 000 settlement as soon as they found out that they were in fact being sued. But not Thomas-Rasset. Worse for her, she was a very unsympathetic defendant. She tried to pin the blame on her kids, she tried to destroy evidence, and she lied about that under oath and was caught at it. The jury gets to pick the damages and instead of going for the low end of statutory damages they went for something higher up, and she got hit with a large fine (around $200k).
And then what did the RIAA do? They offered again to settle for some reasonably low amount. She refused, got another trial, lost again (because of course nothing had changed) and that jury went high, going an order of magnitude higher than the first jury. The RIAA again offered to settle, although now they were asking $25.
Eventually she got an appeals court to lower the damages back down to around the first trial's amount. Again the RIAA offered a much lower settlement, if she would agree to make a video about copyright infringement. She refused.
If you are going to pirate, fine, but be an honest and honorable pirate. If you get caught and are offered a reasonable settlement (and 3x what it would have cost you to buy the works without pirating them is reasonable [2]) take it. Don't waste the court's time with going to a trial you have pretty much no change of winning and that when you lose the minimal damages will be more than the settlement offer.
[1] It can go down to something like $200 or $250 per work if the alleged infringer can prove they were an "innocent infringer", which means that they did not know the works were copyrighted and had no reason to know this. That would be very hard to prove.
[2] It has to be more than the retail cost because if the worst that happens to you when you are caught is that you pay what it would have cost to buy retail, there is no incentive not to pirate.
Kind of hard to fine someone that doesn't have the money to pay for it. Kind of hard to put a person in jail when the jail is already full of kids with marijuana sentences.
I don't think this "Singapore Solution" would work in the USA.
Free for who?
Imagine the tax income down the line if every citizen that wanted a high-training-required career could get that career. Imagine the burden reduction on welfare.
and
>Imagine the tax income down the line...
are contradictory.
A better argument would be: "Increased education and welfare spending leads to more productivity and the added cost is offset by the increase in taxes due to the productivity gain". Or more simply: "Education and welfare are good investments".
Now we can have a serious conversation about the economic impacts of this kind of investment. But to market it as free is irresponsible. It it not free. At best we get more out than we put in, but by definition we must put in something.
That was the point of my original comment. Everything has a cost. Even an investment with a nearly guaranteed return comes at a cost and has a certain amount of risk associated with it.
Imagine slashing DoD funding in half. I don't think taxes would have to go up a penny to provide free education then.
Other than that, yes, I agree with you in using investment terminology.
Another assumption that you make is that the problem with the US education system is a lack of funding. I don't think this is the case.
I think we can have that while also auditing and cleaning up whatever ineffective messes money is being spent on by the doe now.
You seem to just assume if we give people free stuff they will all go get PHD's. That's just simply a fantasy.
I didn't say "mandatory higher education," I said "free." It already is free for twelve years so it seems silly to think slapping on another 2-6 would be some massive burden against the expected returns.
For those that don't want it or can't test into it because they literally are too stupid (this is after fixing inequal access to early education), there's no associated cost. They just to to work, same as it was before.
I think you will find the IQ benefits of education itself is not really that large. I could be wrong but it seems like scientists are looking more into diet these days as bigger influencers than quality education.
Which is to say, of course there is contrast between a child who never goes to school and is just left to leisure around the house until they are adults to one that goes to a quality school that are beyond simply a diet but that in western countries, diets could be a bigger reason for poorer socio-economic populations scoring lower on IQ tests.
I think though that you would have to rebalance the culture when it comes to higher education before making it free because in countries like the USA, you already have too many people going to university and then going into non-skilled jobs despite the insane prices.
Lowering the price to free is only going to increase that when many kids see college as an experience more than a critical education for a high end role.
That's the opposite direction of where the SF Bay Area is going. The San Francisco District Attorney, for e.g., has been at loggerheads withe police department because the former has been eager to let even violent criminals go scott free.
Of course, you add the rampant social justice warriors in the area and you get accused of racism for arresting 11-time felons (e.g https://stopcrimesf.com/blog/2018/8/10/second-chances-how-ab... vs https://48hills.org/2018/08/judge-soft-on-crime/)
I'd like to see what happens if all the buses became free, with reasonable counter-actions taken (i.e. increased funding from city budget to offset loss of ticket costs, more buses to handle increased ridership, etc).
Of note though: Apparently making it free was too expensive, so now only a "great reduction in price" is considered [2] (June 2018).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/14/german-cities-... [2] https://global.handelsblatt.com/politics/german-cities-slash...
EDIT: I'm not dismissing the inherent risks of public transportation and interactions, I'm stating it is a risk that must be accepted as a condition of the living environment.
If transportation network consumers wish to use those services, they should be able to. And cities should tax those rides to offset additional congestion and improve public transportation. Everyone wins.
Would the revenue generated from those taxes result in successful public transit reform to address the issues that are pushing the public away? Not arguing that it doesn't, I'm genuinely curious because I don't know enough about the problem to say that insufficient funding is the root of the issue for most cities' transit systems. I'd agree that it's a net win if the additional funding would enable meaningful progress, but nobody wins if money isn't the root of the problem and that money is squandered or spent elsewhere.
One either actively polices and maintains the commons, or it devolves into trash.
> In the SF Bay Area, rides are $3.80 during off-peak hours, and are $5 during peak hours.
I have no idea what their operations or financials look like, but they have survived for at least a few years, so the business model must be at least somewhat viable.
Sharing a subway car with dancers isn't anywhere near as dangerous as sharing a road with other vehicles.
You're not going to logic humanity out of it.
It's not an education problem, either. People will still feel this way even once they're aware of the numbers, because we evolved in an environment that rewarded avoiding aggressive strangers and also in which automobiles did not exist.
The feelings that you mention are far from universal and significantly educable. I find subway dancers mildly irritating. They've never caused me to fear for my safety.
>we evolved in an environment that rewarded avoiding aggressive strangers and also in which automobiles did not exist.
People from remote tribes who've never seen an automobile are practically scared to death when they first set foot in a city. Not being scared by cars isn't in any way the default attitude for a human to have -- quite the opposite. But we get used to cars. You can also get used to people dancing on the subway.
Also, subway dancers aren't "aggressive", in my experience at least.
We shouldn't conflate the experience of seeing a big, loud automobile for the first time with the experience of driving or riding in one, which is designed to be so comfortable as to eliminate all sense of danger.
Similarly, once you’ve seen dancers on the subway a few times, you won’t be scared of them — if you ever were in the first place.
There is nothing inherently scary about dancers as compared to cars. Indeed, there are all sorts of good evolutionary reasons to be less scared of dancing humans than of large, heavy, fast-moving objects.
...what did the dancers ever do to you?
Navigating in Penn Station with 20/200 vision is fun.
https://nypost.com/2017/02/23/dancers-attack-straphanger-who...
http://thesource.com/2016/01/13/one-of-the-infamous-showtime...
https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20171006/midtown/nypd-polic...