The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Restaurant

Re:The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Re... by rayiner on Saturday September 17, 2016 @05:51PM (#12522672)

Eh. The city passed laws to regulate how much for-profit businesses impinged on the public. Food smells in the air, signs and patio chairs on the public sidewalk. Especially if we're talking about a typical patio that actually impinges on the public sidewalk. Regulating that doesn't seem unreasonable.

And if everybody else has to follow those laws, why should your friend's place be any different? Why should a competing business have to bear the expense of installing a filtration system, then sit idly by while someone sets up shop next door and flouts that regulation?

This is where part of the criticism of cabs is unfair. Cabs aren't allowed to maximize their profits through the perfect price discrimination offered by dynamic pricing. Stuff like Pool and $1 fares are illegal for cab companies to do. So why shouldn't they complain when Uber competes with them without following regulations they have to follow?

Your complaint sounds like those people who get mad when someone rats them out for cheating in class.

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Re:The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Re... by khuey on Saturday September 17, 2016 @06:12PM (#12522777)

Cab companies agreed to those rules in exchange for the privilege of picking up random hails off the street. That used to be an enormous competitive advantage over competing transportation providers (e.g. SuperShuttle, limo services, etc). Thanks to mobile phones, that's no longer a significant competitive advantage. Everywhere that Uber operates legally though taxis have the option of giving up that privilege in exchange for being released from those regulations (essentially becoming Uber). Nobody is forcing taxi companies to stay in the regulated taxi business.

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Re:The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Re... by wtbob on Saturday September 17, 2016 @10:05PM (#12523575)

The problem is that those complaints may be baseless but disproving them is not costless.

And, of course, it's perfectly possible for the laws to be wrong.

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Re:The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Re... by javajosh on Saturday September 17, 2016 @08:59PM (#12523379)

>Your complaint sounds like those people who get mad when someone rats them out for cheating in class.

The legal system is so complex that we are all always cheating.

People only call for strict enforcement of the rules when they don't like you. It is a wonderful thing to get the government to attack your enemies for you.

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Re:The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Re... by rayiner on Saturday September 17, 2016 @09:54PM (#12523547)

Yeah, it's so complex: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycbe/downloads/pdf/nycchecklist_res....

OP's examples were not obscure subsection g part 4 item iii-type stuff. They are basic things you'd think about if you were considering the impact of your business on the public.

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Re:The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Re... by javajosh on Sunday September 18, 2016 @12:53PM (#12525998)

That's a strawman attack. You imply that the entirety of applicable law was contained in that URL, which is false. The actual corpus of law a citizen and business owner must be aware of is the entirety of the law from Federal, State, County, and City, plus all private contracts to which I am bound, covering every activity you do. You're a lawyer sarcastically chastising me with a link to the specific law, and that is poorly done. The very existence of "lawyer" as a profession implies that the law is too complex for individuals to understand.

The computer science version of this would be some poor guy confused about TCP/IP and I could link to the precise part of the RFC that answered his question, with a sarcastic, "Right, that's so complex". I'd be an asshole if I did that.

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