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Comment by jdminhbg | Hacker News Reader

> Taxi drivers protesting Uber aren’t saying that they want apps out of their cabs.

Of course they aren't saying that, it would be political suicide to say it. But given the stubborn resistance to even using the credit card readers forced on them by utility commissions, do people really think that cabbies are aching to have apps between them and their customers that would thwart their ability to skip inconvenient fares or grab an easier ride on their way to a call? Uber's end-run around regulation is only possible because cabbies use regulation to make consumers' lives worse.

It's kind of crazy to me the degree to which the left is becoming a movement built around kneejerk status quo bias, based on nothing but a distaste for the idea that someone might be making money off of making consumers' lives better.

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The distaste isn't that people are making consumer's lives better, it's distaste that people are making worker's lives worse by making consumer's lives better, and thus enforcing and widening a social divide that makes it very unlikely for an Uber driver to be able to afford Uber rides.

Yes, it's possible to make every single industry a brutal, dog-eat-dog race to the bottom. Yes, we can close every single factory in the Dominican Republic that tries to unionize. Yes, we can elastize production all over the world to make everyone compete with literally everyone else. Yes, we can uberify the entire world.

But as this article points out, in very well-argued and cogent thought that doesn't seem knee-jerk to me at all, such races to the bottom only really help the hyper-rich, and soon will not even help you or me.

What will the lifestyle of developers be when our industry is Uberized? When you no longer have a job to count on, with steady benefits and health insurance and security, but whatever comes down the pipe that day? What happens when you're commodified by technology?

Because, make no mistake, the ratchet of progress turns only every in one direction. One day the bell will toll for you. And then you'll find out too late that we really are all in this together, except for the people that are quite literally setting us against each other like dogs.

I feel like both the left and the right are trying to take us back to some idealized version of the 1950's. I want a political movement based on creating a new and better future, not hanging on to shreds of the past.

We now have the technology and resources necessary to provide everyone with adequate food, housing, healthcare, and education. That's what I want, not more "job creation" or preservation of obsolete jobs. The future could actually be BETTER than the 1950's :)

This is related to PG's essay on wealth: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

What motivates people in a society where all their needs are met? Competition for resources has long been and will continue to be large aspect of humanity as a species, but I imagine we could reach for a truly golden age once a large group of people have the luxury of thinking about things like we're talking about now. It'd be amazing what we could build if more people had time to experiment - possibly bewildering and dangerous!

I wouldn't say food, housing, health, and education comprise "all needs"...and I'm pretty sure the behavior of billions of people supports that. How many people earn enough to simply have food, shelter, and healthcare and then go "well I guess I have enough, I don't want a single other thing". Even the usual claim that "people will just spend it on weed, beer, and videogames" shows the clear desire for things beyond the necessities. _That_ is what would motivate people.

Exactly. Both the left and the right have stasists that think the future can be controlled to produce a steady-state ideal (some by being reactionary and seeking to duplicate an imagined past, others being technocratic and seeking to impose an imagined future), which frequently creates some very strange bedfellows. Meanwhile all their plans keep getting upended by generativity, engines of serendipity, black swans, virtuous and vicious circles, and accelerating returns.

The issue with credit card vs cash is actually far more nuanced. For example, in Boston, cab drivers don't get to choose a payment processor, the processor/cab company takes about a 8-12% cut of the total, and it's quite often subject to payment delays of 3-5 days between fare and receipt of funds. Compared to cash, that's a pretty raw deal, and for someone who's shelling out a bunch of money to rent the cab, and run it, can be sometimes the difference between profiting on a fare and not.

Your first paragraph is interesting but your second one really jumps the shark. The article is nowhere close to being "kneejerk status quo bias, based on nothing but a distaste for the idea that someone might be making money off of making consumers' lives better".

> the stubborn resistance to even using the credit card readers forced on them by utility commissions

They resisted it because it cost them money. When a corporation is forced to do something like this we call it burdensome regulation.

Fortunately for cabbies, fees overall are lower because Walmart won a massive lawsuit against Visa. That was back in 1996, but it looks like history is repeating itself: http://www.digitaltransactions.net/news/story/4587

Drivers want you to pay cash because everything else involves a technology company (CC processor, Uber, or both) taking a cut of the sale and cash doesn't. If a tech startup were resisting middlemen in this way, we'd probably call it common-sense business acumen. When it's a taxi driver, he's the scum of the earth?

>do people really think that cabbies are aching to have apps between them and their customers that would thwart their ability to skip inconvenient fares or grab an easier ride on their way to a call?

You do realize that these are regulations that the monstrous freedom-hating left gave you over your objections, right?

The key difference is that said startups use technology to cut out the middle man in a way that is transparent or even beneficial to the consumer. The cabbie, on the other hand, grumpily tries to pass the inconvenience onto the consumer.

The inconvenience of carrying $40 for cab fare is not worth anywhere near 2.9% of my income, yet if all of a cabbie's customers pay by credit, that's a minimum of 2.9% of his income excluding chargeback fraud.

What's your evidence? I regularly use Flywheel, which lets me summon normal cabs. Every driver I've talked to is excited about it. And they say the reason they've not liked the credit card machines is that the cab companies force them to use a particular one and tack on substantial fees. I suspect that if anybody is using regulation to make riders' lives worse, it seems to be the cab companies.

I recently took a regular cab from the San Francisco airport. The driver had some choice words to say about Uber, and told me that he's lost 80% of his customers inside San Francisco in recent years. He uses an app to find customers and I ended up paying him with my card using Square. I'm not sure there is a difference between him and an Uber driver, except that he's held accountable by regulation designed to protect those who ride in these cabs.

In SF the other night, coming from the airport, the cabbie told me the company CC reader had a 10% charge for him. Whereas if I used his Square account, it was only 3% or so. He seemed pretty excited about it and mentioned it several times.

He also shared my disgust at those ad-screens and provided a towel to cover up the bright display that would have otherwise assaulted my face.

With cash, isn't it also easier to pocket tips without declaring on your taxes?

did you even pay attention to why nyc taxi drivers didn't want customers to pay via credit cards? Because the answer was basically the company owners where taking a bigger cut and paying them at the end of the month instead of immediately (plus probable tax avoidance)

Can you clarify what you mean by "the left"?

Anti-market bias seems to be the unifying constant.

So the fascists are those with "pro-market" bias?

If we are allowed to use terminology like "left" willy nilly.

No, that wouldn't make any sense. Fascism and Socialism are on the same side of the statism fence. Both are anti-free markets. Both argue in favor of a large, powerful government with full control over the economy. The sole variance between them is how they implement and direct their statist controls, not whether they do.

The left / right premise as far as Socialism and Fascism is concerned is a fraud.

>Fascism and Socialism are on the same side of the statism fence.

Quite the contrary. Hitler was more or less sponsored by the big businesses of his era, and he cattered greatly to their interests. The big exception was that there was also lots of arms industry spending by the state. Under the Nazis Germany underwent a huge privitization effort.

From Wikipedia:

Big business developed an increasingly close partnership with the Nazi government as it became increasingly organized. Business leaders supported the government's political and military goals, and in exchange, the government pursued economic policies that maximized the profits of its business allies. Nazi Germany transferred public ownership and public services into the private sector, while other Western capitalist countries strove for increased state ownership of industry.

The policies of Nazi Germany were heavily guided by their requirements for war. As you said, they privatized so as to generate considerable revenue for the government.

Cherry picking this fact and proclaiming that Nazi Germany wasn't socialist is a bit sketchy. But there was plenty of nationalization going on, such as the entire steel industry.

Here's a nice summary from Wikipedia on Nazi Germany's pre-war economy:

Due to state control, business had little entrepreneurial freedom[39] in a regime that has been described as "command-capitalism".[74] In place of ordinary profit incentives guiding the economy, financial investment was regulated as per the needs of the state. The profit incentive for businessmen remained, but was greatly modified; Nazi agencies replaced the profit motive that automatically allocated investment, and the course of the economy.[75] Nazi government financing eventually dominated private financial investment and heavy business taxes limited self-financing of firms.[citation needed] The largest firms were mostly exempt from taxes on profits,[citation needed] however, government control was extensive.[76] Some economists argue that such control was responsible for the rationing, shortages, and low standard of living of Germans during this time.[77]

[1] -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany#Pre-war...

You can always compute a large similarity between two very different points by projecting them down onto a smaller space, particularly when the smaller space elides most of the real differences.

Or in other words, if you conceive of politics as "statists" versus anti-state proprietarians (what you call "libertarians", which by the way excludes actual anarchists), you can make anything look like anything.

>It's kind of crazy to me the degree to which the left is becoming a movement built around kneejerk status quo bias, based on nothing but a distaste for the idea that someone might be making money off of making consumers' lives better.

What exactly are you referring to when you say "the left"? The movements I'm familiar with as such are openly pro-technology and blatantly utopian and anticapitalist on those grounds.

>Of course they aren't saying that, it would be political suicide to say it. But given the stubborn resistance to even using the credit card readers forced on them by utility commissions, do people really think that cabbies are aching to have apps between them and their customers that would thwart their ability to skip inconvenient fares or grab an easier ride on their way to a call?

And why should they? I'm against micromanaging any sector to death, and getting them to work with the smallest margins possible. If they can hold their own, all the better to them.

When does "applying technology" stops and abuse starts? One can imagine employees in offices fitted with colars that give them electric shocks (or automatically reduce their paycheck) everytime they slack even momentarily (e.g check HN or think something of their own outside work).

Would we go for a automated hell of surveillance and micromanaging of every action and transaction to get everybody to work as a maximum productivity machine?

Relevant, if anecdotal: http://www.quora.com/New-York-City/Why-do-NYC-cab-drivers-ha...

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