Scale Ruins Everything

The legacy taxi services had this problem too, though, as you note, not on a global level. Pre-Uber, there was one taxi service that stopped taking my calls. I have no idea why. I had no way to appeal this, or to even get in touch with them to find out what was going on.

In the meantime, Bob still probably has public transit or local old-school taxi services to fall back on (which somehow still exist). Many areas even have local ride-hailing apps. Worst-case, Bob will have to rent a car when visiting other cities.

Self driving is the only way uber or a taxi can be a large business. The cost of labor is just too high and so most people are forced to learn to drive.

Even with the above I question if self driving is really worth it. If you own a car and have it parked nearby it is ready to go when you want to leave, and better yet you can store your stuff in it. Combine that with rush hour - most people are traveling at about the same time every day, and some people wanting nicer cars than others and it is hard to see how it can work out. (unless you live in density such that parking is hard - but then transit must be your answer not individual cars since self driving cannot solve traffic)

(Black cabs don't have to be black, but usually are. As to why they're called "Hackney carriages" - the last person to know the reason probably died in 1863.)

I wouldn't say nothing there, and that something is something. Translation, rephrasing and a lot of management tasks like summarizing what happened are way easier and better than any previous models I've seen.

Creating images and logos is usually very constrained by what you can describe without describing what's not there, it's impressive nonetheless.

Autopilot code autocomplete is pretty good, but not replaces all engineers good, rather increased efficiency good.

The problem is they all lie about it being the thing that will replace all knowledge work. CEOs are buying it up and salivating.

It could replace a lot of middle management at my company. But those are the people that are staying.

Doordash/Instacart/Uber Eats/etc are just market solutions to the problem of everyone being worked too fucking hard and not having the time to exist as people anymore. And while in principle the idea of "hiring someone who has nothing to do and having them do your grocery trip" is perfectly fine, even innovative, in practice what it amounts to is someone making less than minimum wage while putting mileage on their vehicle and burning fuel while a startup in the bay area collects the lions share of the fees from the customer. My gripe isn't with the business itself, the concept is fine. My gripe is that Instacart takes the money that should be going far more to the person actually doing the work. They should of course collect some: what they are doing is not devoid of value, for certain: but they should collect significantly less.

Incidentally that's the same problem I have with Uber. Matching people who want to work with people who have tasks they need to do is not inherently evil. What's evil is doing that, paying the people working peanuts, and charging out the ass for the service anyway so you can pocket more profits for being a middle man.

"Value extraction" almost implies non-ownership, and represents more of a contractual arrangement whereby you provide X to a set of transactions that would happen without you, and in return you receive Y. Obviously if Y is universally of less or equal value to X, nobody is harmed. But if Y is of significantly more value to a given demographic or particular circumstances, then it is not clear that this is a win for society overall.

Where they overlap is if you have managed to create sufficiently high barriers to entry in the field of "providing X". This is tantamount to ownership of a resource that people want, and you're the only provider (or one of just a few).

Now if it was instead a website, sure, much easier. No need to create accounts etc, just visit "chicagotaxi.com", perhaps shown on a sign at the airport/station/etc, then book and pay with applepay/googlepay.

But installing some application, signing up, having my data stolen, all to be told "no taxis available", is the reality of a local app.

In this particular example with Uber, I see "powerful actors" many decades ago breaking our social contract by using the force of the government to implement a monopoly for their own profit and everyone else's expense. Legal, yes, in the strictest sense of the word, but certainly against what I value about my particular republic (USA).

So Uber here is more "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" than a company I actually admire.

Not all laws are good. Using the taxi licencing system as a way of extracting tax income is one example of a "not good" law that somehow wormed it way into many societies.

It might never have changed unless an Uber had some along. The taxi licencing scheme has the unfortunate characteristics of being inefficient but not egregiously so, and had put golden handcuffs on a group of people making a valued contribution to society. Those handcuffs were the taxi licences, which became the taxi drivers retirement fund. The taxi drivers always fought any threat to the value of those licences long and hard. Those two characteristics ensured a politician would spend have to spend a immense amount political capital to fix something that had only a modest benefit. It looked like we were doomed to suffer from this tax parasite forever.

But then a seismic shift in technologies came along, and it was not so easy enforce the laws that protected the parasite. The way I remember it the taxi drivers screamed blue murder as their net worth went rapidly to 0, but the reaction from law enforcement was ... muted. I'm sure with a concerted effort the politicians could have made life so difficult for Uber the parasite could have survived. The taxi drivers certainly thought so. But it looked to me like my republics elected officials chose not to spend political capital on doing that. It was almost like they were glad to have an excuse to rid themselves of a parasite.

Now the carnage of the taxi drivers net worth going to zero is over. That aside, most things have got better. With the monopoly broken there are more taxi companies than there were before, taxi availability has become better since you don't need an expensive licence to put one on the road, and prices have dropped.

Sometimes the ends doesn't justify the means, sometimes it does. This looks like the latter to me.

You have created a convoluted ex post facto defense of taxi laws which sound plausible but are likely wrong.

"Chesterton's fence" doesn't say that "the most socially positive explanation is correct".

The simpler explanation is one of "concentrated benefits, diffused costs". A group of taxi owners helped implement a state-enforced monopoly at the expense of the rest of society. Technology enabled a new group (Uber) to concentrate benefits further at the expense of the relatively diffused monopoly-holders. Society benefited in some ways (easier rides) while likely bearing costs in other ways (drivers subsidizing Uber).

They should absolutely be held to a higher standard today, now that they are more or less one of those monopolies.

NIMBYs are property owners who vote for restrictive housing development policy in order to prop up their own home values.

Eliminate the NIMBYs and you end up with a lot more people who can have their own backyard.

Where do you think the AirBNBs came from? Some people decided to move out, and the people that moved in decided that others would get better use experiencing the property part-time as reflected in market prices. Would you ban them from making this choice? Would you screen every buyer not based on their own assessed price but on ever so shifting "intent"? Would you make the intent they declare at the start binding?

EDIT: I'll bet you $100 to your charity of choice that physical constraints aren't binding in the case you're thinking of (this could be shown by, despite a lax / encouraging planning environment, no one building anything).

Airbnb demonstrates that there was clearly substantial demand for "house style" hotel rooms but hotels chose not to provide them. In most hotels where a room is $400 a suite with a space to work, watch tv and cook, might be $10,000. The hotel market optimised for the business man travelling alone to conferences and paid a price for it. Even my favourite hotel on earth does not provide an "ordinary menu" for the nights where you just want to curl up with your loved one and watch a film - it's Michelin star dining or bust.

In most hotels the only amenity that a hotel offers that is "better" than the home experience is a swimming pool and daily housekeeping.

Who, but the richest amongst us, has their bed linen changed _every day_?

If hotels had been built as apartments with no zoning restrictions arbitrarily placed upon them there would have been an option for the hotels to adapt by offering their rooms up on a long lease.

dude! godawful gray granite or go home :)

Rent-seeking is something specific. If we can't get that right we're not going to get far into the discussion. Not all rents are the same.

Hotels rent rooms. But they are not the same as rent seeking.

If you're not creating new wealth/value add, and instead exploit rents by mere virtue of owning, then it is rent-seeking. If you're adding value, like providing a service or other additions, then no it's not rent seeking. The 98 year old lady? Probably rent seeking. The couple doing AirBnB? Probably not.

Why?

AirBnBs, like hotels, tend to provide a genuine service that adds value. The listings are in a competitive market, where people need to improve the living spaces in order for them to get rented out. This doesn't take into account the various hospitality businesses that have emerged in various rural communities because of AirBnB. It's an entire industry.

That is Hotels/Hospitality businesses are NOT rent seeking just because they rent out rooms or provide services on land they own.

Who is Rent-Seeking?

The people preventing new housing/infrastructure from being built are the ones rent-seeking. They artificially manipulate market conditions by restricting supply, driving up land value, and thereby generate unearned income. Income that isn't from productive improvements on land but from mere ownership of land. That unearned income on land is rent-seeking behavior.

The classic example of an economic rent is a feudal lord putting a chain across a river and charging a toll. This is economically unproductive because it's just putting a price on something that was free (and, you have to assume for the example, non-rivalrous). This is why the sibling comment points out that the rent-seekers in the housing market are more like the people seeking to constrain supply via zoning and regulation.

The complicating factor (which they miss) for a tourist region is that if your "product" is (in part) Small Town Charm, or Rural Character, then you can't build, baby, build without destroying the economic underpinning of the entire community. I wish my hometown had allowed for more hotels (like, decades ago - they were horribly regulator-captured for ages), and had the wisdom to restrict STR before it became such a thing.

For anywhere with a non-tourism based economy, however, I think they are correct: increasing supply is the only possible solution.

It only occurs to me upon writing this that areas without any existing tourist infrastructure are becoming tourist-dependent on the basis of STR, which might be the worst of both worlds. Those places need to allow hotels and (actual) B&Bs, before they ruin their communities through STR-tourist dependence.