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.
Libertarian is when smuggle drugs and oppress the working class through secret surveillance
When people say that libertarians are just right-wingers kidding themselves, I think they mean this kind of stuff. I don't think it's in a "libertarian ethos" to do wildly unethical and immoral things on a large scale, with the intention of exploiting people for profit.
If that actually is libertarian ethos, then it sucks.
I thought libertarians are right-wingers kidding with us /s
> I don't think it's in a "libertarian ethos" to do wildly unethical and immoral things on a large scale
I personally conflate libertarianism with wanting all regulations removed and whining about Big-Government, and then crying to Big-Government to bail you out when you crashed the economy with less-than-informed gambling.
> If that actually is libertarian ethos, then it sucks.
Astute observation!
Now, obnoxious white people in Silicon Valley would be upset that multifamily housing had allowed displeasing minorities in, but man would that make life better for everyone. I lived in East Asia, and it is really nice when cities are not too expensive for regular people to live in. Furthermore, I have no sympathy for rich @holes who complain about losing their expensive view.
Freedom helps all, but especially the poor. The leftists have tricked people in California and NYC into thinking the system fails the poor, when in reality it is their stupid regulations that made these places expensive.
Btw anyone else seen that bear rummaging around? Any idea how to get rid of it?
It is.
Also, when I asked whether they would have the same libertarian attitude regarding a crowd-sourced app to keep tabs on people with net worth over $1B, my modest proposal[1] got flagged and hidden -
- unlike the insulting comment that called the users who have an issue with Pave "schoolmarms" that "infest" the place, like pests to be exterminated.
Go figure.
Hypocrisy is OK on HN, calling it out is not.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the government can establish monopolies on many things, my private nuclear weapons startup did not get much traction either.
airbnb had a much more legally tenuous start
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.