I suppose that could be true depending on the details. It seems that there are quite a few psychopathic people who really only care about themselves and don't give a shit about what happens to their communities while still realizing the importance of the appearance of contribution as a means to an end.
Also, there are quite a few very wealthy people who have zero interest in contributing anything back to anybody. Maybe for those people their community is other entitled rich people.
I don't presume to know what is in the heart of every human being.
Except that it's not uber deciding. Is uber signing bills into law? Is uber the judge at the trial? There is a difference between deciding for yourself if a law is good or bad (which every person and corporation is free to do), and deciding for everyone whether a law is good or bad (i.e. doing the job of the government).
Uber can break whatever laws it wants, and it must take the legal responsibility whatever that turns out to be as determined by a court.
So far all the Uber drivers I've talked to seem to like it. They like the freedom of working when they want. It didn't seem like any of them would be fired. They had other jobs and went to school, etc. All in all they seemed pretty happy with Uber. I'm sure they would like health insurance and a 401K, but they usually entails working full time and not having a flexible schedule.
On a related note, I can't hire a nanny without paying him/her benefits and paid time off, etc. I'm not a corporation. I'm just a person, and one who doesn't really like filling out government paperwork. I guess I don't mind actually paying for a retirement plan, (I can view it all as the nannies effective hourly rate), but I really can't handle my nanny getting sick and deciding not to show up to work, and still paying him/her, while I have to stay home from work to take care of my kid. So I just do daycare, where I don't have to worry about managing employees, but I do have an extra 30 minutes of commute time (and my wife has an extra hour). There is a downside to the government mandating who and who is not an employee, and there is at least one less nanny job out there because of it.
Why not have one category of minimum level of insurance that covers $X of damage, etc, for everyone, and let the insurance companies decide how much to charge for this service based on factors like hours driven per month, whether the driving is done for work, whether it's a moped or a 18 wheeler, etc.
This way we don't need different kinds of insurance from a legal standpoint. The only requirement is "Must be covered to the minimum level", and it is the same for everyone (although it may not cost the same for everyone). This would dramatically simplify the laws, and make it so that Uber is automatically providing the same coverage as traditional taxi services whether it wants to or not.
If the city actually cared about making a level playing field (for those who invested in a license and those who didn't), they could offer to buy back the taxi licenses.
Uber is actually the modern day Rosa Parks. I think refusing to go to the back of the bus (e.g. refusing to obey an unjust law) is a better analogy. I'm sure Martin Luther King also engaged in civil disobedience, but he is known for more than just that, which clouds the analogy.
And uber is not determining which laws are good and bad. The elected representatives and courts are deciding that. Uber may spur a discussion through some dubious actions, but ultimately it is the people who decide what laws they want.
If you think marijuana laws are bad, one thing you can do is openly smoke a bunch of marijuana and show everyone that nothing bad happens. Uber is definitely within it's rights to try to sway public opinion. The courts will decide if they have broken any laws, and the voters will elect representatives who will represent them when coming up with new laws or repealing old laws in regards to uber (and everything else).
Hopefully there is more preventing you from randomly shoot your neighbors than the fact that it is illegal. (i.e. the reason for why randomly shooting your neighbors is bad, is not *because* it is illegal).
And yes, uber wants to maximize profits. To say that any law that prevents maximal profits is good, because anyone who wants to maximize profits is automatically wrong, is kind of silly.
We could make a law that says "Doctors must never be compensated, and must live in poverty". If the doctor lobby tried to fight this law, it could be said that they only want to law repealed because they want to maximize their profits. That would be true, but it doesn't make the law a good one.
Uber breaks lots of laws. Every city has it's own taxi laws. Some of the laws Uber breaks are probably good. Many of the laws Uber breaks quite clearly shouldn't exist, such as the laws that artificially lower supply of taxis.
I don't care about corporations getting profits. I care about good services being offered at the best prices through efficient use of resources. In the case of uber, it's simply different corporations getting profits (uber rather than taxi companies).
There was a time when it was illegal for black people to drink from the same drinking fountains as white people. I am not equating these 2 laws. I am only pointing out that sometimes laws are not justified, and disobeying laws isn't always immoral or harmful. In fact it can occasionally be helpful in driving progressive changes to poorly thought out and/or obeselete and/or unfair laws. Surely you do not completely discount civil disobedience as a tactic with no redeeming social value, even if you are not specifically a proponent of Uber.
How are you supposed to hack the lottery computer systems from the drug dealers den? If they want more money, they need to let you go to work. As long as the money keeps coming, it's in their best interest that you are happy.
The people that are helping create the drugs by allowing their mutations to be investigated should absolutely be compensated just like the scientist who is doing the investigating should be compensated.
And the recipient of that compensation is free to donate that money toward finding a cure for their own disease, or put it toward buying a new house, or whatever they feel is the best use of their own money.
I'm assuming that at some point the march of progress will eventually get to tackling lower priority problems, like curing diseases that only affect a few people, maybe it will happen in a version of a post-scarcity economy, or maybe the advance of technology will allow for general cures to entire categories of diseases (e.g. all genetic diseases, or all autoimmune diseases, etc).
I know a few people with the technical know-how to pull this kind of thing off, and then completely fuck it up when it came to common sense stuff.
I'm thinking of one person in particular who wanted to steal a companies data and try to sell it to another company for a few thousand dollars. He seemed pretty sure that the "I didn't steal the data, I generated the same data independently" defense would be unimpeachable. He seemed to confuse the notion of "proving something with certainty" with "proving something beyond a *reasonable* doubt to 12 jurors or "proving something by preponderance of the evidence to a judge".
I think $10000 is probably a good price. A lot of drug dealers have that much money, and they are able to kill you if you are lying to them. You can agree to stay captive in their underground lair until they get their winnings.
I recommend being a "benevolent" lottery cheater. You can find out what numbers your friends and family members have picked (or always pick), and just rig the game for those numbers to come up.
They won't know of any cheating, so they won't act nervous or weird.
If enough of your friends and family win the lottery, maybe they will give you some.
And even if you went the "piles of bills into your mattress" route, that's just pieces of paper.
And even if you went the "gold bars" route, that's just atoms of some incidentally rare material on earth. We could find a bunch of gold on some other planet, or simply just not deem it valuable anymore at some point in the future.
This is a very common claim, but I don't think it's true for a couple reasons.
1. Drug patents eventually run out, so it's not as if they can profit from a "treatment solution" indefinitely as opposed to a "cure solution". Both solutions have a limited time during which they can be exploited for profit.
2. Why couldn't drug companies simply just charge more money for a cure, to where it is the same amount of profit as a treatment? Insurance companies are probably even more likely to pay for cures rather than treatments because it is probably cheaper for them in the long term, and drug companies can make more money while their patents are still valid. The only party losing out is that drug companies making generics don;t have as much of an opportunity for profit.
3. If a drug company A already has a treatment for a disease, you are saying drug company B could make a cure for the disease and steal all of A's profits, but they'd rather just make another treatment and share the profits equally with A and deny society as a whole a cure for this disease?
Here is what I think is probably more likely to be the reality. Cures for diseases are harder to find than treatments. The easy cures for diseases have already been found.
In order to cure a disease, you either have to be really lucky, or have an incredibly deep understanding of the disease in order to intentionally engineer a solution.
I have a good friend who is a doctor (just went to his wedding), and he had a very good analogy in regard to the current way we treat diseases with drugs.
He said it's like opening the hood of a car and taking whatever fluid is lacking and just pouring out over all the components and hoping enough of it gets in the places it needs to go.
I don't see what is unethical about placing a higher priority on treating diseases that effect more people.
choices:
A. spend $1 billion researching a drug that helps a billion people.
B. spend $1 billion researching a drug that helps 10 people.
Here are some hypothetical facts that should not affect the answer:
1. The entity spending the $1 billion is a pharmaceutical company.
2. The pharmaceutical company is hoping to earn a profit.
3. The drug is developed from learning about mutations of people in scenario B.
I don't entertain nay fantasies that drug companies care about anything more than profits, but their profits are derived from creating products that actually help people. It's not a perfect system, but exploiting the profit motive of a capitalist society gets a lot of drugs made. Squandering billions of dollars helping a handful of people might make us feel good, but it's a pretty bad idea when you really analyze it rationally.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like Uber. They let their actions (i.e. law breaking) do the talking.
I suppose that could be true depending on the details. It seems that there are quite a few psychopathic people who really only care about themselves and don't give a shit about what happens to their communities while still realizing the importance of the appearance of contribution as a means to an end.
Also, there are quite a few very wealthy people who have zero interest in contributing anything back to anybody. Maybe for those people their community is other entitled rich people.
I don't presume to know what is in the heart of every human being.
Except that it's not uber deciding. Is uber signing bills into law? Is uber the judge at the trial? There is a difference between deciding for yourself if a law is good or bad (which every person and corporation is free to do), and deciding for everyone whether a law is good or bad (i.e. doing the job of the government).
Uber can break whatever laws it wants, and it must take the legal responsibility whatever that turns out to be as determined by a court.
I never said they shouldn't be punished.
So far all the Uber drivers I've talked to seem to like it. They like the freedom of working when they want. It didn't seem like any of them would be fired. They had other jobs and went to school, etc. All in all they seemed pretty happy with Uber. I'm sure they would like health insurance and a 401K, but they usually entails working full time and not having a flexible schedule.
On a related note, I can't hire a nanny without paying him/her benefits and paid time off, etc. I'm not a corporation. I'm just a person, and one who doesn't really like filling out government paperwork. I guess I don't mind actually paying for a retirement plan, (I can view it all as the nannies effective hourly rate), but I really can't handle my nanny getting sick and deciding not to show up to work, and still paying him/her, while I have to stay home from work to take care of my kid. So I just do daycare, where I don't have to worry about managing employees, but I do have an extra 30 minutes of commute time (and my wife has an extra hour). There is a downside to the government mandating who and who is not an employee, and there is at least one less nanny job out there because of it.
Why not have one category of minimum level of insurance that covers $X of damage, etc, for everyone, and let the insurance companies decide how much to charge for this service based on factors like hours driven per month, whether the driving is done for work, whether it's a moped or a 18 wheeler, etc.
This way we don't need different kinds of insurance from a legal standpoint. The only requirement is "Must be covered to the minimum level", and it is the same for everyone (although it may not cost the same for everyone). This would dramatically simplify the laws, and make it so that Uber is automatically providing the same coverage as traditional taxi services whether it wants to or not.
If the city actually cared about making a level playing field (for those who invested in a license and those who didn't), they could offer to buy back the taxi licenses.
Uber is actually the modern day Rosa Parks. I think refusing to go to the back of the bus (e.g. refusing to obey an unjust law) is a better analogy. I'm sure Martin Luther King also engaged in civil disobedience, but he is known for more than just that, which clouds the analogy.
And uber is not determining which laws are good and bad. The elected representatives and courts are deciding that. Uber may spur a discussion through some dubious actions, but ultimately it is the people who decide what laws they want.
If you think marijuana laws are bad, one thing you can do is openly smoke a bunch of marijuana and show everyone that nothing bad happens. Uber is definitely within it's rights to try to sway public opinion. The courts will decide if they have broken any laws, and the voters will elect representatives who will represent them when coming up with new laws or repealing old laws in regards to uber (and everything else).
Hopefully there is more preventing you from randomly shoot your neighbors than the fact that it is illegal. (i.e. the reason for why randomly shooting your neighbors is bad, is not *because* it is illegal).
And yes, uber wants to maximize profits. To say that any law that prevents maximal profits is good, because anyone who wants to maximize profits is automatically wrong, is kind of silly.
We could make a law that says "Doctors must never be compensated, and must live in poverty". If the doctor lobby tried to fight this law, it could be said that they only want to law repealed because they want to maximize their profits. That would be true, but it doesn't make the law a good one.
Uber breaks lots of laws. Every city has it's own taxi laws. Some of the laws Uber breaks are probably good. Many of the laws Uber breaks quite clearly shouldn't exist, such as the laws that artificially lower supply of taxis.
I don't care about corporations getting profits. I care about good services being offered at the best prices through efficient use of resources. In the case of uber, it's simply different corporations getting profits (uber rather than taxi companies).
There was a time when it was illegal for black people to drink from the same drinking fountains as white people. I am not equating these 2 laws. I am only pointing out that sometimes laws are not justified, and disobeying laws isn't always immoral or harmful. In fact it can occasionally be helpful in driving progressive changes to poorly thought out and/or obeselete and/or unfair laws. Surely you do not completely discount civil disobedience as a tactic with no redeeming social value, even if you are not specifically a proponent of Uber.
Stop slacking and do your job
How are you supposed to hack the lottery computer systems from the drug dealers den? If they want more money, they need to let you go to work. As long as the money keeps coming, it's in their best interest that you are happy.
I have watched exactly enough breaking bad.
The people that are helping create the drugs by allowing their mutations to be investigated should absolutely be compensated just like the scientist who is doing the investigating should be compensated.
And the recipient of that compensation is free to donate that money toward finding a cure for their own disease, or put it toward buying a new house, or whatever they feel is the best use of their own money.
I'm assuming that at some point the march of progress will eventually get to tackling lower priority problems, like curing diseases that only affect a few people, maybe it will happen in a version of a post-scarcity economy, or maybe the advance of technology will allow for general cures to entire categories of diseases (e.g. all genetic diseases, or all autoimmune diseases, etc).
anybody can kill anybody for any reason.
I know a few people with the technical know-how to pull this kind of thing off, and then completely fuck it up when it came to common sense stuff.
I'm thinking of one person in particular who wanted to steal a companies data and try to sell it to another company for a few thousand dollars. He seemed pretty sure that the "I didn't steal the data, I generated the same data independently" defense would be unimpeachable. He seemed to confuse the notion of "proving something with certainty" with "proving something beyond a *reasonable* doubt to 12 jurors or "proving something by preponderance of the evidence to a judge".
I think $10000 is probably a good price. A lot of drug dealers have that much money, and they are able to kill you if you are lying to them. You can agree to stay captive in their underground lair until they get their winnings.
I recommend being a "benevolent" lottery cheater. You can find out what numbers your friends and family members have picked (or always pick), and just rig the game for those numbers to come up.
They won't know of any cheating, so they won't act nervous or weird.
If enough of your friends and family win the lottery, maybe they will give you some.
And even if you went the "piles of bills into your mattress" route, that's just pieces of paper.
And even if you went the "gold bars" route, that's just atoms of some incidentally rare material on earth. We could find a bunch of gold on some other planet, or simply just not deem it valuable anymore at some point in the future.
It's all just a big game of monopoly.
duh-duh duh duh-duh duh-duh duh duh-duh duh-nuh-nuh nuh nuh nuh
This is a very common claim, but I don't think it's true for a couple reasons.
1. Drug patents eventually run out, so it's not as if they can profit from a "treatment solution" indefinitely as opposed to a "cure solution". Both solutions have a limited time during which they can be exploited for profit.
2. Why couldn't drug companies simply just charge more money for a cure, to where it is the same amount of profit as a treatment? Insurance companies are probably even more likely to pay for cures rather than treatments because it is probably cheaper for them in the long term, and drug companies can make more money while their patents are still valid. The only party losing out is that drug companies making generics don;t have as much of an opportunity for profit.
3. If a drug company A already has a treatment for a disease, you are saying drug company B could make a cure for the disease and steal all of A's profits, but they'd rather just make another treatment and share the profits equally with A and deny society as a whole a cure for this disease?
Here is what I think is probably more likely to be the reality. Cures for diseases are harder to find than treatments. The easy cures for diseases have already been found.
In order to cure a disease, you either have to be really lucky, or have an incredibly deep understanding of the disease in order to intentionally engineer a solution.
I have a good friend who is a doctor (just went to his wedding), and he had a very good analogy in regard to the current way we treat diseases with drugs.
He said it's like opening the hood of a car and taking whatever fluid is lacking and just pouring out over all the components and hoping enough of it gets in the places it needs to go.
I don't see what is unethical about placing a higher priority on treating diseases that effect more people.
choices:
A. spend $1 billion researching a drug that helps a billion people.
B. spend $1 billion researching a drug that helps 10 people.
Here are some hypothetical facts that should not affect the answer:
1. The entity spending the $1 billion is a pharmaceutical company.
2. The pharmaceutical company is hoping to earn a profit.
3. The drug is developed from learning about mutations of people in scenario B.
I don't entertain nay fantasies that drug companies care about anything more than profits, but their profits are derived from creating products that actually help people. It's not a perfect system, but exploiting the profit motive of a capitalist society gets a lot of drugs made. Squandering billions of dollars helping a handful of people might make us feel good, but it's a pretty bad idea when you really analyze it rationally.
That was my point. Google+ is good for society as a whole, and the people who intentionally avoid it, are ruining it for everybody.
Yeah that makes sense. If there is one thing a large mega-corporation is likely to do, it's valuing pride over profit.