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Comment by asg | Hacker News Reader

Of course this article is a lot of hyperbole, and whether you agree or not depends on your worldview. But one bit I couldn't agree more. Uber and Lyft are NOT examples of the sharing economy. Just adding an element of technology to good old fashioned capitalism does not a sharing economy make.

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Think of it in terms of resource utilization. In the old model, there's tons cars that need to be parked somewhere within SF while completely unused. In the Uber/Lyft model, these cars usually enter the city while they're actively transporting people, then they go back to the suburbs when they need to be parked.

Sure, one could easily argue that parking spaces aren't the most pressing resource shortage, but the point is that these types of changes do create value by sharing resources. The same concepts can be applied to more pressing domains as well.

>> "Think of it in terms of resource utilization. In the old model, there's tons cars that need to be parked somewhere within SF while completely unused. In the Uber/Lyft model, these cars usually enter the city while they're actively transporting people, then they go back to the suburbs when they need to be parked."

Didn't we already solve this problem with taxis more than 50 years ago? It was already a 'sharing economy'. Uber/Lyft just made it more convenient.

Sure, the same resource is being utilized by many people. But that's not sharing, as sharing implies either co-ownership or free-use to others other than the owner.

It's renting utility of a resource for a fix period of time. Not sharing, or part of a "share-economy". Though I can understand calling it a "share-economy" in order to combat the massive propaganda movement by entrenched taxi lobbies/industries/groups that seem to want to vilify services such as uber/lyft/etc.

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