The taxi industry has existed for a long time with a lot of the regulations that people are trying to force onto Uber. But drivers flocked from taxis to Ubers as soon as that option became available. That suggests that at least for those who've opted into Uber, Uber is preferable. Reducing the availability of that option (which is what these rules will cause) is going to hurt them, because the fact that they're doing Uber means that it was their best available choice.
1) It was VASTLY cheaper due to VC cash subsidy attempting to become the single monopoly. That's not an "efficient market"--that's predatory--and eventually the cities will have to deal with the aftermath in the cab system when Uber/Lyft collapse.
2) My feedback could hit the driver directly--so the failure modes of cabs were prevented (not picking people up, taking too long to pick people up, not driving them where they want to go, taking stupid paths, etc.).
>The taxi industry has existed for a long time with a lot of the regulations that people are trying to force onto Uber.
Not really. Most taxi drivers are 1099 contractors as well. They pay the dispatcher a cut of the fair for connecting them with the ride. They either own their cab and medallion, or rent them from the dispatch company.
It will be interesting to see if Cali prosecutors go after the dispatch companies the way they are going after uber and lyft.
That's what they're saying to justify it. That and the evergreen appeal to "security reasons". But these are the same people who, every few years, try to ban strong encryption. The next time they bring that up — which you'd better believe they will immediately the next time the right news story presents itself — they're going to use this as precedent. "See, we've been banning technology for all these reasons, what's one more little step? It's for national security."
Dense, multi-use blocks are part of the magic of New York. And there are hotels comingled with residential buildings all over the city. I'm not saying tenants should be free to violate their agreements with landlords, but these uses of Airbnb are solving a problem that city laws have created (an extreme lack of housing and hotel supply). I blame those city laws as a root cause. Putting supply on Airbnb is just water moving around obstacles the laws have created.
These people didn't just "commingle" hotels alongside other buildings; they implanted hotels into apartment buildings. That is definitely not a norm in NYC.
There are externalities, though, to running a hotel, which is why we have taxes and rules to mitigate those things. These people are trying to bypass these mitigations, and push the externalities back on the populace. That is not ok.
One distinction I should have drawn is between running an Airbnb with a landlord's permission (or as a landlord yourself) versus doing it in violation of other agreements you have (like with your landlord or co-op board or whatever). If you're violating contracts, then yeah, you shouldn't be doing that and other people in the building have a right to be upset.
But if you own the building and are running it as an Airbnb hotel, I don't know that it's a self-evident fact that you're putting significant negative externalities onto your neighboring buildings. I can imagine negative externalities, but I can also imagine plenty of positive ones. These are exactly the kind of calculations that regulators are empirically horrible at making, even when they have the best intentions (and often they don't have even that going for them).
The ban on short-term rentals is a ban on a use of property which is provably very valuable to the people on both sides of those transactions. Banning that use destroys value for both those sides. The objection is that short-term rentals divert housing stock away from long-term renters, but that's not a problem with short-term rentals (which are, as we can see from the fact that they're so popular, an even more in-demand use of the property than long-term rentals), it's a problem with the low supply of housing. Which is a problem caused by the very regulators who are riding in to "save" renters from Airbnb.
Taxes on hotel stays are popular with politicians because the people who pay the tax aren’t typically residents. It’s more likely that these taxes were an easy sell rather than something that offsets a negative externality of having a hotel nearby.
I guess it is "housing" but I think you'd find a lot less housing as in traditional places you can rent or buy long term, I belive we're already seeing that with Airbnb.
> I'd say that's a good argument for fixing whatever the flaws are in the handoff process that make it even worse than 28-hour shifts.
That's a good idea. Do you know what those flaws are, and how to fix them?
I'm not being sarcastic - there's a whole lot of money that's been poured into this over the last few decades, and it's not easy.
While we wait for someone to figure out the answer, in the meantime, it's reasonable for providers to go back to the policy that empirically produced lower rates of medical errors, which we know because that's what was standard practice up until a few years ago, and it already is standard practice for all other residents.
I agree with this assessment having only briefly paid attention to this topic while a friend was going through residency. This is not something that is being ignored - I would say the exact opposite is true, it was probably one of the most discussed topics of residents at the time.
But I also think the answer is pretty obvious, if not practical. You need to basically double the number of doctors, and stagger shifts so they have half-shift overlaps and scheduled 8hr (max) shifts to begin with. Then doctors can stay longer through the next shift if needed (and this would be common) to complete the handoffs properly as well as get through critical periods of patient care.
I think that would be far safer than the current model - but also would effectively double your salary costs which is of course a non-starter.
> But I also think the answer is pretty obvious, if not practical. You need to basically double the number of doctors,
As mentioned in the article, one of the problems they found with the shorter shifts is that it was less effective for teaching, meaning that they would need longer training periods overall to achieve the same results with shorter shifts. So that would mean increasing the costs of residency, which is already an unprofitable program to begin with.
So, doubling the number of doctors without compromising on training would mean increasing the per-resident costs significantly and then doubling them. That's... a hard approach to execute.
Also, that's assuming that having twice the number of doctors caring for each patient per unit time does not introduce any other problems, which is an assumption I'd question.
I again don't completely disagree, in the event real learning is going on. That's why I feel the "scheduled" shifts should be rather short and double-staffed, with the expectation residents stay as long as it takes to "get the job done".
I would make the argument that the vast majority of scheduled hours for a resident have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with learning and entirely to do with having shift coverage and are primarily economically driven decisions.
You do make good points about less uninterrupted time with patients, and it's a good reminder of how this is a very nuanced difficult problem to solve. Even in my industry where we can more realistically staff shift overlaps, we have handoff issues due to human mistakes. Nothing is going to be perfect, but I think we can do better for patients as well as doctors.
Sorry, I incorrectly assumed you were in medicine so the whole "this is all based on B.S. data" would have been self-evident.
The data from which the peer-reviewed empirical studies is flawed. I know, because I am the data. I -- and almost every other surgical resident I know -- routinely falsifies their work hours. Why we do this is a _long_ topic for another thread.
Please confirm with your local surgical resident; if you can find her. ;-)
When given a choice, drivers stampeded from yellow cabs to Uber. Riders stampeded from yellow cabs to Uber. It's clear which one most parties prefer. And that suggests that all those government "services" around the provision of taxi service are valued at or below 0 by most people.
You are speaking in broad terms and are making an assessment based on them. "drivers stampeded" "riders stampeded" "most parties" and you round all that off by saying that the value of the services offered were below 0.
I cannot speak to the motivation of those that chose Uber as a customer or employer. Perhaps customers chose them because of the cost and convenient app. Perhaps employees chose them because of the low barrier to entry and flexible hours.
Just because something different came along and grabbed everyone's attention does not mean that the gov services are valued at zero. There was a time when those yellow cabs had little to no rules or oversight. And that changed for a good reason - or at least a reason that people thought were good at a time.
The rules for Uber are going to change too - there will be laws and rules designed to correct wrongs (either real or perceived).
If the rules need to be different then people need to stand up and try to make the rules what they think they should be. My argument is that Uber should not decide on its own not to respect the will of the people.
It's not an argument. Getting people to "stampede" to you is trivial - just drop the prices well below market average, and the herd will quickly follow, regardless of whether or not your service is actually better. Doing that is difficult (that's the point of competition), but becomes much easier if you can blatantly break the law and get away with it.
Come on, there's no way you can say taxis are superior to a frickin button that you press to instantly get a car. Even if the prices were the same, I'm pretty sure most people would still choose Uber.
Actually I stick with taxis. It's more expensive but I don't have to hand over all my contacts and my location at all times from my cell phone for frankly no damn good business purpose except for one's the company won't reveal to me and will vaguely reference in its ToS. Deceivers. Sadly Lyft app permissions don't seem to be much better.
I wrote one on how to use an opensource testing tool for which there was lots of interest but not a lot of documentation at the time. That was quite popular for a while (almost 11 years ago).
Another book was on an emerging technique for collaborative analysis for software projects, that started becoming popular some time back in 2008-9 but was still not well understood.
Two more were on practical tips for how to work with user stories and how to come up with good testing ideas.
Interesting. If you don't mind saying, do you self-publish on sites like Gumroad, Leanpub, Softcover, on your own site, or both? If on your own site, you would need some system to accept payments, right?
I publish using leanpub and KDP (amazon kindle) for ebooks and using Lightning Source for paper books. I used Lulu 10 years ago but their customer service was appalling back then so I moved to LS, which gets the print book in almost all good online stores anyway.
I used to sell books on my own site as well until a few years back when EU created the stupid VAT on private electronic purchases that requires stores to adjust price according to the country of the buyer. I figured it's less hassle to just use leanpub for that.
Genuine question: is it safe to assume that dumping is bad for consumers? It's clearly bad for competitors, but it's basically like handing out free money to consumers. The concern is that once all the competitors die, the dumper will have a monopoly and jack prices up. But empirically, what are some examples of that happening? With few exceptions, it's only possible for monopolies to sustain above-market prices when laws block new competitors from starting up.
Look towards video rental back in the nineties. Blockbuster would move into a town, give very cheap rentals until the moon and pop stores went under, and then raise prices.
The interesting thing in the case of Uber/Lyft/etc. is that the end goal would almost have to be a situation in which on-demand ride sharing applications became nearly the sole mode of transit in the regions of interest. Otherwise, literally as soon as you drive out all the other transit competitors (taxi companies, other ride-sharing services, whatever) and begin to apply monopolistic prices, there will be a huge flood of lower-priced alternate options, like taxi companies popping up again.
For me, this is what's so scary about Uber. It's not "disruption" as many people seem to claim. It's engineered regulatory capture.
The goal isn't to disrupt a market, but rather to wipe it out and have the financial and political backing to secure some sort of regulatory environment in which lower-priced options cannot emerge after the VC-subsidy phase ends and the monopolistic price increases begin.
It's double sad that as the sort of flagship start-up of the era, Uber leads the way in deplorable executive behavior, shady business practices, and questionable labor policies ... and despite it, they've managed to win the PR war that has every naive tech youngster singing about how they are "disruptive" and singing how all criticisms against them are invalid because of precious, precious "disruption."
It seems to be coming around a bit, but people still talk about "taxi monopolies" and whine about how awful cities like Austin and Vancouver are to block Uber.
In a town here, we had basically the same with a doner kebab shop. The chain moved in, priced the doner at 1.20€ (local was 2.20€ which was already cheap), killed the competition after a few months and then raised prices to 3.50€.
If a monopoly keeps prices high, but has deep enough pockets to temporarily lower prices and put any competitor out of business, then no competitors will arise.
Unlike what the other commenter said... there are plenty of historical examples.
> The most notorious of the trusts were the Sugar Trust, the Whisky Trust, the Cordage Trust, the Beef Trust, the Tobacco Trust, John D. Rockefeller's Oil Trust (Standard Oil of New Jersey), and J. P. Morgan's Steel Trust (U.S. Steel Corporation).
Those monopolies were generally protected by tariffs, expensive licenses or regulatory costs, or other laws that blocked competition.
Some dominant companies of course emerged in that era, but I'd be interested to see evidence that companies that weren't insulated from competition by government policies actually used their dominance to harm consumers.
Those trusts arose at a time where there was very little regulation. There were tariffs protecting the industry as a whole from foreign competition, but that wouldn't have affected the rise of domestic competitors.
Foreign competition is important, because some things (like oil drilling or sugar farming) are only doable in a few places, so if one company captures those places it'll be tough to compete.
Also, the fact that some companies became very dominant doesn't mean ipso facto that they harmed consumers. If a company becomes huge fair and square (as opposed to via regulatory capture or other coercive means), it may just mean that people like their product the best.
> expensive licenses or regulatory costs, or other laws that blocked competition.
Those didn't exist in the 1800s. The rise of the corporation occurred after the 1830s, when Congress no longer had to approve of every single company's existence.
After that, it was Laissez-faire economics for over 50 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire ... basically ending with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act when Americans realized that was a bad idea.
Globalization wasn't a big thing in the 1800s. US Companies basically only had to worry about other US Companies. There was some foreign trade, but not much.
Within the US, a major entity like the Tobacco Trust had the power to set prices. When you're the only company in the entire US, you have the ability to stomp out competition like that.
Time-Warner Cable, Verizon, Comcat, Google Fiber... plenty of competition.
The issue with natural-monopolies is that when one company starts serving a neighborhood, it makes no sense for a 2nd company to start serving the same neighborhood. That's just wasteful.
So there are huge amounts of Verizon-only neighborhoods or Comcast-only neighborhoods out there.
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Other countries solve this by highly regulating the "natural monopoly" part. IE: If you are going to lay wires to a neighborhood, you become subject to strict regulations. (Ex: utility).
Then, they force you to provide multiple choices. The deregulation of power companies for example allows me to pick a blend-of-energy, or I can pay a little bit more for clean energy providers.
Similarly, if we turn Comcast into a government-regulated utility (aka: accept the fact that it will always monopolize a neighborhood), and then force it to supply multiple ISPs in its pipes, things would probably get better.
My county actually has this deregulation, but it doesn't seem to work in practice because Comcast is both cheaper and got better customer service than the other ISPs that run on Comcast's networks.
The argument for "treat ISP infrastructure like a utility" has always been that quality of service will improve and prices will drop if competition is introduced. It sounds to me like the regulations did exactly what would be expected when an actual market is allowed to form. How does this arrangement not work if you have good customer service and low prices from Comcast? Are you suggesting that the alternatives are somehow even worse than standard Comcast?
> Are you suggesting that the alternatives are somehow even worse than standard Comcast?
Arguably, it forces Comcast to have better customer service. Because they're actually competing in my area. I actually go with Verizon in my neighborhood though.
Taxis once provided a good service. Just 20 years ago, you needed a specialist to take you to random places in a new city.
Then a little thing called the "GPS" was invented. Uber takes advantage of the GPS and anybody can now plot a course to anywhere without specialist knowledge of a city.
The strange thing is, people seem to have forgotten what life was like before GPS.
In Vienna (Austria), taxi drivers had to pass a pretty tough exam which required intimate knowledge of the cities streets.
A good driver still makes a difference in the age of GPS, because you can often safe quite some time by avoiding certain points of congestion and factoring in traffic.
But with GPS that incorporates (live) traffic data, the additional value is a lot smaller.
Fares are still the same, you just don't notice it because a VC is subsidizing it for you.
The day that ends, it will be back to business.
Think of Uber as a taxi company subsidizing your travel for a few years. Things will be back to normal once the VC realizes they can't make profits until they charge customers like other taxi companies.
There are no examples. Social/price dumping is the big boogie man here in Europe used to regulate, tax, sue or just plain forbid foreign companies from competing aggressively against local companies. Branding the permanent menace of social/price dumping is just cronyism and protectionism in disguise, it hurts customers, innovation and employment. I hate it when populists and even regular politicians uses it and I hate it even more when people buy it, really makes me cringe but there's nothing I can do I guess.
I dunno about European History, but here in the US, every child is taught the lesson of the monopoly era.
Rockefeller Oil, J.P. Morgan Steel / US Steel, Tobacco Trust, etc. etc. These companies monopolized the industry in the late 1800s and fixed-prices to kill competitors.
In the Spain of my youth, the regulation was way past avoiding a monopoly in commodities, and full on to protecting any incumbents on anything, like mom and pop retail.
One example was (and maybe still is), to ban discounts on textbooks, as the big margins were a big reason small bookstores stayed afloat.
Another was is to limit hours of operations in stores, including making stores be closed on sunday being mandatory, as many family retailers just couldn't man the store without hiring someone, and labor laws made hiring someone for little time expensive.
There was also a semi-recent outcry when the government stopped regulating rent hikes. for commercial property. There were plenty of stores in highly desirable locations that were on the same lease for a century! Their monthly rent could be two orders of magnitude away from the space next door.
Such level of protectionism of old business models just means that instead of going through pain and optimization for decades, they all get wiped off the map in one fell swoop the minute competition that can skirt the protectionist regulations comes in: Imagine what happens to tiny stores when, instead of first having to compete with US levels of efficiency in big box stores, they get to compete with Amazon. What happens to record stores that can get away with selling music for 25+ euros an album when spotify shows up?
So, while there is reason in fearing monopolies, the levels of regulation I describe just have little to do with what the US calls anti monopoly regulation.
> With few exceptions, it's only possible for monopolies to sustain above-market prices when laws block new competitors from starting up.
This is false. The 'exceptions' are the norm.
It's all but tautological that monopolies can only be established in markets in which there are meaningful barriers to entry.
Those barriers are seldom legal, and legal barriers are of arguably limited value.
The only way for a 'start up' to 'disrupt' is if they are extremely well funded relative to the monopoly holder's investment in the market.
As noted elsewhere today, that is precisely the business model of Uber/Lyft/AirBnB: use vast amounts of capital to attempt to break into locked markets, while unprofitable for years and years.
Absent funding at that level, monopolies that level are largely unassailable once established.
The pace of breaking them and evolving the market in the interest of consumers is thus measured on a very very long timescale, during which consumers take it in the shorts.
>The concern is that once all the competitors die, the dumper will have a monopoly and jack prices up
I'm not sure how relevant it is to ride-sharing, because the industry is not particularly vital to the economy, and the barrier to entry is low.
Where it becomes a concern is in crucial industrial infrastructure. Over the long term, China, for example, can dump cheap, government subsidized steel in the US, obliterating the domestic steel industry. 40 years down the road there's nowhere else to buy steel, which is bad both economically and militarily.
in addition, uber may be getting rid of one kind of competitor that has a hard time competing with it while laying the ground work for other low-end entrants to compete with it.
I really love seeing cars around town with both uber and lyft signs in the windows. ..I can imagine a sign with 8 of these.
While Uber competes with Lyft directly in the on demand rides space it by no means will gain a monopoly on all transportation, there are multiple levels of competition after all. So I don't believe we'll end up in a monopoly situation soon where we have to pay whatever Uber demands. If Uber gets too expensive (similar to how they started with pricey black car service), consumers will simply resort to alternative ways of transportation.
To answer your question, the way we think of health insurance isn't compatible with a free market system. Insurance pools risk and money to cap your losses in rare, ruinous events. But that's not how we use health insurance. We use health insurance to pay for low-cost, common, certain-to-happen events (blood work, checkups, X-rays, sprained joints, etc.). To borrow an example from the book, imagine we had grocery insurance. Every month, you paid $500 to the grocery insurance company, and you could go to the store to pick out any covered groceries. The market for food would quickly take on all the negative features we find in the market for healthcare. Prices that are crazy and only get higher, minimal competitive forces against low-quality providers, no transparency for consumers, etc.
Market forces are great at lowering prices while increasing quality, but they only work if people personally decide how and where to spend their money. If you give your money to a third party who then makes all the spending decisions, it smothers all the price/demand/competition signals that providers should naturally get. (And which, in a healthy market, automatically put providers out of business when their prices get to high or their results dip too low.)
To borrow from the book again: it seems crazy to expect people to pay for healthcare out of pocket. But add up your premiums. You're probably paying $6-10k per year right now. That's many times more than enough to cover typical healthcare in most years. With plenty left over to buy catastrophic coverage for high-cost low-probability stuff. And in a market where people are making their own decisions with their own money, prices would quickly drop, which would stretch your out-of-pocket dollars much further than they go today. Every $2500 MRI would go out of business, replaced by $500 ones. (We already see this kind of price deflation in the corners of medicine where people do pay out of pocket, namely laser vision correction, plastic surgery, and to some extent walk-in checkup clinics.)
