blockchain is the solution to exactly nothing. zero things are better with blockchain. zero. in the case of hiding cannabis use, the problem is that it is illegal despite having valid medicinal uses.
Boy will you not like the "high vibrational" commentary people would have for that adventurous™ libertarianism©* of yours.
The "medium vibrational" ones merely wish its pursuers behind bars, the more energetic ones are discussing optimal guillotine blade shape profiles.
* * * * * * *
Question to you.
Would a startup that maintains a public database of names, addresses, and approximate locations of people with net worth over $1B be libertariously adventurous enough by your standards?
You know, like Page, but crowdsourced, and with wage workers as the users (not as product). Purely opt-in. Give it a higher-energy vibe name, like, say, 'rage (as in "average" - for the average people).
Anyone who sees Elon Musk could anonymously report his location to 'rage, giving wage workers an option to avoid providing services to him - just like Pave gives employers an option to avoid getting services from undesirable workers.
Are you a pastry seller who'd rather call in sick the day Peter Thiel or his buddy JD Vance are in town again? Get 'rage, and avoid the awkward interaction.
Anyone who gets a wind of someone fitting the wealth profile will have an option to anonymously contribute this data to 'rage's Wealth Accumulator Registry (Rage WAR™).
They may be breaking their NDA's while doing so, but that won't be 'rage's problem, of course. 'rage will not be in the business of policing individual actions and limiting users' personal freedoms.
The user identity will be e2e encrypted, guaranteeing anonymity. It will be impossible to prove that someone has a 'rage account against their will, or find out they have one.
The app, however, will also allow users to confirm that they have a 'rage account if they choose to do so. This way, wage workers who are concerned about their peers could ask them to privately confirm their account status and contribution karma to avoid sharing a workplace with a scab.
Registration will require entering your own personal wealth data into 'rage WAR™.
While tax returns can be faked, someone uploading a copy of their W-2 paystub will practically ensure that one does not fit the target wealth profile for the B-status.
Those could be faked too, of course - and one could see large employers not wanting to collaborate with 'rage for whatever reasons.
That's exactly where startups like Pave come into play to verify the correctness of the data.
'rage and Pave would not only complement each other in the financial data ecosystem, they would form a natural symbiosis, giving wage workers incentives to ask their employers to use Pave. As for Pave, 'rage would merely be one of its clients, consuming W-2 data just like everyone else.
I hope you will find this proposal sufficiently adventurous and relevant; and I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.
Kinda. Often this casual law breaking isn’t entirely victimless even if it benefits both consumer and the startup. I think Schmidt was talking about using content to train models. So artists getting short end of stick. Or Airbnb causing locals getting prices out or whatever.
There is certainly some dodgy protectionism happening of the sort you describe but there are also externalities borne by society for this break laws startup style.
And the externalities introduced here are not borne by all of society, but only by a small number of people (How many important artists are there? 10,000? 100,000?). Just like horse-and-buggy drivers were affected by automobiles, while the vast majority of people benefited from automobiles.
That is…quite a stance. Not quite sure what to even say here.
I also recommend HoboSleepinCar Driveway as a service next to your home. The consumer has spoken!
Uber "won" because they cheated. They operated at a loss for almost 15 years, on the welfare of investors. Guess what, mom and pop running a taxi can't live on a negative wage.
Wrong on at least one count. I've never been refused service while black from Uber. The taxi industry was brought out of the dark ages of discrimination by Uber et al. Taxis (around the world) have tried to rip me off almost half the time I've used them, with no accountability.
And hopefully everyone else "successful" having the morals of a greedy chimpanzee follows the same fate as those swindlers. Whatever happened to doing good by people and society (or at least pretending to)?
Yes, that's kind of the main difference between government functions and private companies. Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?
Perhaps that should change. Or at least it’s a reason to scrutinize and repeal laws that are used for price fixing.
> Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?
Zoning Rules! by William Fischel gives good a history of zoning. Zoning was originally for segregation within the city but to the question of prices, no it was not inherently problematic. It was not until the 1970s that zoning was used for growth control to make entire cities unaffordable.
As an example in support of this, healthcare is barely price-regulated and hardly run by the government in America, and is thus extortionate.
They are supply-regulated by governments. According to Niskanen Center, the high cost of health care is due to the American Medical Association limiting new accredited medical schools and certificate-of-need laws limiting new hospitals. https://www.niskanencenter.org/faster_fairer/liberating_the_...
Barf. These seem like very erudite reasons when really the issue is running healthcare as a balkanized private system with opaque pricing information that patients often don't see until after they receive care is fundamentally an inefficient system. The government could run a single payer system at a loss and it would be cheaper than what we have now.
A lot of things governments do would be illegal if private companies did them. Are you arguing that governments shouldn't have special abilities that companies can't have? Should every road be owned by a company? Should the police report to Amazon instead of the local municipality where you may actually have a say in how they are run?
We give governments additional powers because they, at least nominally, answer to citizens and society. Companies have no such responsibility.
Obviously that's easier said than done, and SV has a track record of "ask forgiveness not permission" as a successful tactic for effecting policy change. But many times it results in indefinite undermining of government which leads to selective enforcement and cartels, which is worthy of criticism (of both government and VC-powered undermining of government).
And to make those who interfaced with the prior system in good faith whole again; eg: drivers who bought taxi medallions for six figures USD, only to have the value of the medallion plummet with the arrive of "rideshare" services.
In the case of Uber, they successfully broke up the taxi cartel since the state PUC ruled that ride hail is a separate category.
In the case of Airbnb, according to their founding story they were created to help economize on space because rents were high in San Francisco due to zoning. Although they made a useful service, they did not succeed in reducing rents because the underlying zoning is still the constraint that keeps rents high.
And the government can establish monopolies on many things, my private nuclear weapons startup did not get much traction either.
I don't know about Uber, but Airbnb deflects this by saying they are not in fact a hotel service. Rather hosts are hotel services, and Airbnb is simply a discovery platform matching buyers and sellers. It's up to an individual host to make sure they are complying with local laws including whether their city or district allows an individual to rent out their house or a room in it without a hotel license (this varies from city to city). In this way Airbnb (fairly or unfairly) pushes the burden and liability onto the hosts.
I believe this is also a huge reason why Uber doesn't want to classify drivers as employees because then it is the taxi service, whereas it could argue that the drivers are each operating their own taxi service and Uber is just a discovery and payment platform.
If hotel or taxi lobby was more powerful or caught the threat early on AirBnB and Uber would have been destroyed.
airbnb had a much more legally tenuous start