Incidentally I've been to East Germany several times and wouldn't recommend its system of governance at all. The world is not binary, there are options in between the extremes.
Indeed there are "options in between the extremes". Price fixing invariably leads to shortages and corruption, but you can choose to engage in price fixing for only some goods (US) or for everything (East Germany). Personally, I want as little price fixing as possible.
Because right now it's pointless holding a conversation with you when the basic timeline of the posts in this thread all by itself proves how terrible your level of understanding is.
Normal human beings have no trouble understanding the meaning of a statement like "If you can afford to take a $50 Uber, you already aren't poor, and you can also afford to take a $120 Uber (or bother to car-pool with someone)."
No. You claimed that. 91degrees pointed out the fallacious logic that led you to this conclusion.
I'm sorry that you seem to have trouble interpreting natural language. For example, "birds can fly" and "penguins are birds" are both true statements, but they don't imply that "penguins can fly". Natural language uses fuzzy concepts and relations.
Only if you're a total cunt that believes the almighty dollar must rule everything. Other people like to think there are better approaches available.
True, lots of people think that, and they also think that they are morally superior. You can look to Venezuela or East Germany to see what happens when you put these people in charge: corruption and shortages.
Except that many people don't have a shot at being useful (and people are not paid in proportion to how useful they are). People tend to be poor because they didn't get a decent education or a chance to make something of themselves
Well, yes. And those outcomes are primarily determined by how parents raise their kids. What are you trying to get at?
and the working poor are relatively worse off than they were fifty years ago.
I suggest you check your data. Even using simple family income statistics, "the working poor", roughly the lowest income quintile, are financially about 30% better off in terms of income alone than they were 50 years ago (in comparison, the top 5% are about 85% better off). If you take government benefits and changing demographics into account, they are even better off. But in addition to being financially significantly better off, prices for many goods and services have fallen so much that their standard of living has improved enormously over the last 50 years.
Of course, "the working poor" isn't really a fixed class of people anyway, it is a stage that many people go through in their life. I was a "working poor" for about 10 years myself.
Erm. No, you've missed their point. 91 degrees has shown that by your logic someone that can afford a $50 Uber can afford a $500 Uber.
No, you missed the point. 91degrees claimed that raising the price from $50 to $120 means that (I'm quoting) "exclusively the rich" can afford them. That's not true. The sharp distinction he was trying to make simply doesn't exist. Yes, if you "can afford" a $50 Uber ride under normal circumstances as regular transportation, then you are in a category of people who can pay several times that amount in an emergency, even if it hurts you; you don't have to be "wealthy" to make such a painful but exceptional expense.
Surge pricing very clearly favours the wealthy.
Wealthy people can afford more expensive things more frequently, whether it's regular taxis, surge-priced Ubers, or private helicopters. So what? That doesn't change the need to allocate scarce resource through pricing based on supply and demand.
There are many things that wealthy people buy or use regularly that I personally only use rarely (e.g., satellite messaging). Rather than whining about the unfairness of it all, I'm happy that wealthy people are establishing the market and helping drive prices down. You should be too.
A lot of people disagreed with me vehemently but this is the only comment where someone insulted me, made assumptions about my motivation, even attributed traits and ideologies to me.
Yes, I did. Not in my first posting, but in my response to your statement: "Sure, of course that's how the market works. It's not a fucking religion, though. I don't have to speak softly around it."
Techies are working their asses off to make the world a better place, resulting in unprecedented and massive social progress, and you are glibly dismissing their efforts. You don't understand why that might justify that people are pissed off at you?
And someone who can afford a $120 Uber can afford a a $300 Uber and someone who can afford that can afford $500.
Congratulations, you are halfway towards understanding the absurdity of your statement "Scarce resources shouldn't be given exclusively to the rich. Why does a rich person deserve transport out of the city but a poor person not?" when talking about a factor two price hike.
How many more drivers did Uber get as a result of the price hike?
I doubt they got a lot more drivers, but they probably kept a whole bunch of existing drivers from simply packing up and heading home.
Why would earning more money cause them to "go out of business"?
If you mean that people will refuse to frequent a business that jacked up prices during a disaster, that doesn't seem to be the case. And in any case, businesses take that into account when deciding how to set prices.
Just to clarify do you think it's acceptable to insult people?
Not "people" in general, but certainly you: you denigrate the hard work of millions of techies for the purposes of self-aggrandizement and social signaling. And if that weren't enough, your self-serving posturing feeds into a general mood of doom and gloom.
Well, with this kind of stellar background, how could anybody doubt his judgment on the capabilities of technology, or even his honesty when making pronouncements about what his company will or will not accomplish?
Zimmer grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 2006, Zimmer graduated first in his class at Cornell University School of Hotel Administration and was a member of the Quill and Dagger society, as well as a member of Sigma Pi Fraternity.[1] After graduation, Zimmer worked as an analyst in real estate finance at Lehman Brothers in New York City. While at Lehman Brothers, Zimmer spent most of his time creating real estate models in Microsoft Excel. Zimmer left Lehman Brothers three months before it declared bankruptcy. In 2007, alongside Logan Green, Zimmer founded Zimride, a ridesharing platform that coordinated carpools, especially across college campuses.
Of course, physics and engineering labs used to "make their own" vacuum tubes. But generally, they had skilled glass blowers on hand who could create vacuum-proof glassware for them. If you really want to try, you might consider starting with chemical glassware intended to be used with vacuums.
Scarce resources shouldn't be given exclusively to the rich. Why does a rich person deserve transport out of the city but a poor person not?
The distinction you're trying to draw is bogus. If you can afford to take a $50 Uber, you already aren't poor, and you can also afford to take a $120 Uber (or bother to car-pool with someone).
Fixed pricing would distribute the resources more or less randomly, which is a lot more fair.
Fixed pricing would primarily result in fewer drivers bothering to come to a disaster area, and it would discourage people from sharing rides: both bad outcomes.
At MINIMUM Uber should donate any extra profit generated to help offset the costs to the victims and/or refund the extra charges to those who sought out their service.
Uber doesn't have any "extra profits": they are losing money.
The surge pricing is primarily going to drivers, drivers who decided to actually go into this area to drive people. Do you want to take away the money from drivers?
Funny, during the aftermath of hurricanes and such, the gasoline suppliers don't charge 5 times the market rate for their product, yet the stations often do.
Yes, and that is as it should be: the product is scarce so its price goes up. The gas station gets a windfall, just like they sometimes have unexpected losses when nobody drives or gets gas for other reasons.
No, they don't. The point of surge pricing is to motivate more drivers to appear; that is, to help riders. If they keep prices low, it just means that fewer people will get rides and drivers get less.
No, it is settled, basic science. That is, the freer and more capitalist a market is, the better off its members are. The policies your question imply have produced anything from poverty and corruption to feudalism and slavery.
That does not mean this is off limits to discussion because people did some good stuff.
People didn't do "some good stuff", people have revolutionized the world in ways that people like you didn't think possible a century ago. According to academics and statists, we'd run out of oil and food, have destroyed the environment, and live in some kind of war torn Mad Max dystopia by now.
I don't have to speak softly around it
Your self-righteous indignation and holier-than-thou views are exactly the kind of bullshit that have given us socialism, slavery, poverty, hunger, and totalitarianism. At the root of your problem is that you substitute your judgment as a privileged, wealthy member of society for the simple mechanisms of markets and aggregate choices of billions. So, I don't have to speak softly around it: you are a selfish, ignorant jerk who is trying to elevate his social status by pretending to speak for the good of humanity.
Correct. In a free market, those people who have been most useful to their fellow human beings get the most votes, because they have shown that they are the best qualified in allocating resources productively.
This is the reason why advertisement which has only small usefulness to the overall society
Advertising is enormously useful to overall society: it is essential for matching buyers and sellers and for informing buyers of the different qualities of products.
If money would be distributed more equally, the free market would certainly create a lot of useful tech which would make life much better for average people.
That argument would work if "money" were only used to determine which products to produce in order to meet everybody's needs; in that case, giving everybody roughly the same vote would kind of make sense.
But that is only one function of "money". Of far greater importance is the choice people make between consuming something now or investing in something productive, and the different tradeoffs between what people invest in. "The rich" (and that mostly means older people) don't have "money" and they don't consume a lot more than poor people, what they have is investments. People become rich by two simultaneous decisions: (1) to forego consumption now for future returns, and (2) by investing the money they didn't spend in businesses that yield a good return.
If you take away their wealth and redistribute it, the primary effect is not to give people a more equal vote in what to consume, the primary effect is to shift the economy from investments in jobs, production, and the future towards consumption, which is generally the wrong direction.
I don't feel that developers, sys admins, finance people, even policy wonks focus on the problems that we need to solve to have a healthy functioning society.
You mean why don't techies work on things like giving everybody on the globe to access all the books ever written, listen to lectures from the best minds on the planet, communicate with anybody anywhere, access financial services across the globe, learn how to grow food better, get highly accurate and detailed maps and satellite photos for free (e.g., for improving agriculture), buy and sell pretty much anything from anywhere, create software that allows anybody anywhere to analyze scientific data and write software?
Is there a systematic bias that channels technology workers into more profitable careers?
Indeed there is. In a free society with free citizens, we let individuals decide, and vote for, what they find useful. That kind of "voting" is carried out using money: if you produce something that I find useful, I give you money for it; if you produce crap that I don't want, I don't give you money for it. That way, people who produce useful stuff get rewarded and get the resources to produce more useful stuff, while the people who produce crap get fewer resources allocated to them. Does that answer your question? How else would you like things to work?
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Indeed there are "options in between the extremes". Price fixing invariably leads to shortages and corruption, but you can choose to engage in price fixing for only some goods (US) or for everything (East Germany). Personally, I want as little price fixing as possible.
Normal human beings have no trouble understanding the meaning of a statement like "If you can afford to take a $50 Uber, you already aren't poor, and you can also afford to take a $120 Uber (or bother to car-pool with someone)."
I'm sorry that you seem to have trouble interpreting natural language. For example, "birds can fly" and "penguins are birds" are both true statements, but they don't imply that "penguins can fly". Natural language uses fuzzy concepts and relations.
True, lots of people think that, and they also think that they are morally superior. You can look to Venezuela or East Germany to see what happens when you put these people in charge: corruption and shortages.
Well, yes. And those outcomes are primarily determined by how parents raise their kids. What are you trying to get at?
I suggest you check your data. Even using simple family income statistics, "the working poor", roughly the lowest income quintile, are financially about 30% better off in terms of income alone than they were 50 years ago (in comparison, the top 5% are about 85% better off). If you take government benefits and changing demographics into account, they are even better off. But in addition to being financially significantly better off, prices for many goods and services have fallen so much that their standard of living has improved enormously over the last 50 years.
Of course, "the working poor" isn't really a fixed class of people anyway, it is a stage that many people go through in their life. I was a "working poor" for about 10 years myself.
No, you missed the point. 91degrees claimed that raising the price from $50 to $120 means that (I'm quoting) "exclusively the rich" can afford them. That's not true. The sharp distinction he was trying to make simply doesn't exist. Yes, if you "can afford" a $50 Uber ride under normal circumstances as regular transportation, then you are in a category of people who can pay several times that amount in an emergency, even if it hurts you; you don't have to be "wealthy" to make such a painful but exceptional expense.
Wealthy people can afford more expensive things more frequently, whether it's regular taxis, surge-priced Ubers, or private helicopters. So what? That doesn't change the need to allocate scarce resource through pricing based on supply and demand.
There are many things that wealthy people buy or use regularly that I personally only use rarely (e.g., satellite messaging). Rather than whining about the unfairness of it all, I'm happy that wealthy people are establishing the market and helping drive prices down. You should be too.
Yes, I did. Not in my first posting, but in my response to your statement: "Sure, of course that's how the market works. It's not a fucking religion, though. I don't have to speak softly around it."
Techies are working their asses off to make the world a better place, resulting in unprecedented and massive social progress, and you are glibly dismissing their efforts. You don't understand why that might justify that people are pissed off at you?
Congratulations, you are halfway towards understanding the absurdity of your statement "Scarce resources shouldn't be given exclusively to the rich. Why does a rich person deserve transport out of the city but a poor person not?" when talking about a factor two price hike.
I doubt they got a lot more drivers, but they probably kept a whole bunch of existing drivers from simply packing up and heading home.
Why would earning more money cause them to "go out of business"?
If you mean that people will refuse to frequent a business that jacked up prices during a disaster, that doesn't seem to be the case. And in any case, businesses take that into account when deciding how to set prices.
Not "people" in general, but certainly you: you denigrate the hard work of millions of techies for the purposes of self-aggrandizement and social signaling. And if that weren't enough, your self-serving posturing feeds into a general mood of doom and gloom.
Well, with this kind of stellar background, how could anybody doubt his judgment on the capabilities of technology, or even his honesty when making pronouncements about what his company will or will not accomplish?
Of course, physics and engineering labs used to "make their own" vacuum tubes. But generally, they had skilled glass blowers on hand who could create vacuum-proof glassware for them. If you really want to try, you might consider starting with chemical glassware intended to be used with vacuums.
The distinction you're trying to draw is bogus. If you can afford to take a $50 Uber, you already aren't poor, and you can also afford to take a $120 Uber (or bother to car-pool with someone).
Fixed pricing would primarily result in fewer drivers bothering to come to a disaster area, and it would discourage people from sharing rides: both bad outcomes.
Uber doesn't have any "extra profits": they are losing money.
The surge pricing is primarily going to drivers, drivers who decided to actually go into this area to drive people. Do you want to take away the money from drivers?
Yes, and that is as it should be: the product is scarce so its price goes up. The gas station gets a windfall, just like they sometimes have unexpected losses when nobody drives or gets gas for other reasons.
Yes it is.
No, they don't. The point of surge pricing is to motivate more drivers to appear; that is, to help riders. If they keep prices low, it just means that fewer people will get rides and drivers get less.
So, why do you hate drivers and passengers?
The mistake is very easy to avoid: stop trying to tell others how to improve the world and learn something about basic economics.
No, it is settled, basic science. That is, the freer and more capitalist a market is, the better off its members are. The policies your question imply have produced anything from poverty and corruption to feudalism and slavery.
People didn't do "some good stuff", people have revolutionized the world in ways that people like you didn't think possible a century ago. According to academics and statists, we'd run out of oil and food, have destroyed the environment, and live in some kind of war torn Mad Max dystopia by now.
Your self-righteous indignation and holier-than-thou views are exactly the kind of bullshit that have given us socialism, slavery, poverty, hunger, and totalitarianism. At the root of your problem is that you substitute your judgment as a privileged, wealthy member of society for the simple mechanisms of markets and aggregate choices of billions. So, I don't have to speak softly around it: you are a selfish, ignorant jerk who is trying to elevate his social status by pretending to speak for the good of humanity.
Correct. In a free market, those people who have been most useful to their fellow human beings get the most votes, because they have shown that they are the best qualified in allocating resources productively.
Advertising is enormously useful to overall society: it is essential for matching buyers and sellers and for informing buyers of the different qualities of products.
That argument would work if "money" were only used to determine which products to produce in order to meet everybody's needs; in that case, giving everybody roughly the same vote would kind of make sense.
But that is only one function of "money". Of far greater importance is the choice people make between consuming something now or investing in something productive, and the different tradeoffs between what people invest in. "The rich" (and that mostly means older people) don't have "money" and they don't consume a lot more than poor people, what they have is investments. People become rich by two simultaneous decisions: (1) to forego consumption now for future returns, and (2) by investing the money they didn't spend in businesses that yield a good return.
If you take away their wealth and redistribute it, the primary effect is not to give people a more equal vote in what to consume, the primary effect is to shift the economy from investments in jobs, production, and the future towards consumption, which is generally the wrong direction.
You're erroneously generalizing from yourself to other humans.
You mean why don't techies work on things like giving everybody on the globe to access all the books ever written, listen to lectures from the best minds on the planet, communicate with anybody anywhere, access financial services across the globe, learn how to grow food better, get highly accurate and detailed maps and satellite photos for free (e.g., for improving agriculture), buy and sell pretty much anything from anywhere, create software that allows anybody anywhere to analyze scientific data and write software?
Indeed there is. In a free society with free citizens, we let individuals decide, and vote for, what they find useful. That kind of "voting" is carried out using money: if you produce something that I find useful, I give you money for it; if you produce crap that I don't want, I don't give you money for it. That way, people who produce useful stuff get rewarded and get the resources to produce more useful stuff, while the people who produce crap get fewer resources allocated to them. Does that answer your question? How else would you like things to work?
And when exactly do you think the American government had ever been moral?
For that matter, can you point to any moral government on the planet?
We are increasingly far away from a free society, but not far away from democracy: democracies aren't necessarily free societies.
"We were hacked by Russia" seems to be the latest excuse for poor security.
Hopefully, the World Anti-Doping Agency will be sued into oblivion over their mishandling of personal data.
Kill files based on keywords and users would be a boon. It's not so much about being "offended", it's more about killing a lot of crap.
Twitter is desperate to preserve itself as the premier platform for social signaling, manufactured outrage, and trolling; a platform where a character limit ensures that no rational argument or thoughtful analysis is possible. Keep going, Twitter, you're doing great!