And Christians have been dicks to people, but it's not in the same league as jihadis.
Ignore the particular insult. The point is any reasonable reading of history, <snip>
History tells us of a "Holy" Roman Empire that waged wars within its own borders, a Pope who invented the Crusades and triggered mass murder simply to keep the unruly knights busy looting and pillaging other people's countries. History tells us of pogroms of Jews across Christendom; the murder, exile and forced conversion of Muslims after the Spanish Reconquista; colonialism and further forced conversion in all corners of the world; the slave trade; white supremacists wrapped in warped versions of Christian iconography; Christian churches siding with fascists for fear of secular politics. Hell, there was allegedly even one Christian printer in Africa that sabotaged a safe sex campaign by stapling condoms to a magazine/leaflet, and thereby actually risked causing the spread of AIDS and unwanted pregnancies, simply because of their ideological objection to their client's campaign.
When you claim to point out clear and obvious "truths" about Islam, you end up simply lying about Christianity. That's why people keep objecting to your statements. It's not political correctness, it's factual correctness.
So sure they'll go after someone mocking "pedo-worshipper" muslims, but probably never anyone mocking Christians for worshiping a zombie or whatever.
"Zombie Jesus" is purile taunting, and there's really no call for it, but it doesn't create the same feeling of pure revulsion as associating someone with child abuse, so let's not start on the "poor marginalised Christians" angle. People are being dicks to Christians, but it's not in the same league as islamophobia.
That's why I talked about "casting aspersions" and "suggesting". His words we're "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." The implication is that the drug mules, criminals and rapists are proven fact, and the majority, and the good people are an unproven minority. It is a smear.
I imagine your "quasi-live" watching is essentially what most sports fans do -- all those time-outs in the final few minutes of play really make some sports unwatchable -- skipping past them means action, not ads.
Not so obviously. Slashdot, in publishing, is arguably implicated in the speech act, so it's not straightforward to say that refusing to transmit certain speech isn't itself an act of free speech.
It's still all dumb. Don't bother evaluating someone's ideas for truth, just label it an -ism, denounce it, and move on. We must end ismism, because the ismists are killing our ability to think.
That's the "political correctness gone mad" approach -- just claim they're being unreasonable.
There's nothing in most hate speech legislation that stops you discussing facts -- just the stuff that stops you smearing powerless minorities with ideas like "they're all rapists" or "they're all terrorists", ideas that misinform and risk spreading and causing hate. So it's alright to discuss the age of a certain prophet's favourite wife (as documented in the religion's own holy text), but it's really not alright to call followers of his religion "pedo-worshippers" or anything, because that is a statement designed to cause others to hate.
That's not what "free speech" means, as you damn well know.
Yes it is. Free speech doesn't mean private entities giving an open platform to all and sundry -- SlashdotMedia is allowed to choose which speech it wants to transmit through its site.
Most people attack what Trump is saying. Trump casts aspersions on other people, rather than address their points.
Trump: "we're gonna build a wall to keep the rapist Mexicans out, and it's gonna be great." Someone else: "We don't need a wall, and by the way, it's kind of racist to suggest all Mexicans are rapists." Trump: "There's a media conspiracy, a liberal elite, that is trying to use political correctness to shut me up and telling us we don't need a wall. Just look at Alec Baldwin!"
It's not the same thing at all. (And of course Trump is not the only politician to get impersonated on comedy shows!)
Hate speech isn't about hating, it's about preaching hate. And it's not about preaching hate against things or against concepts, but against people.
There is a fuzzy line between the two, of course. Sometimes you can preach hate against people even when your words are against a concept. For example "X-ism is a religion of evil" has the clear implication that X-ists are evil -- hate speech. But "Y-ism is based on the words of a paranoid schizophrenic who heard voices and thought he was speaking to a god" only implies that Y-ists are misguided. They may find it offensive, but you can't call it hate speech.
The core concept of "nationalism" is that of a "nation", derived from the Latin from birth. Original nationalism was tied to the notion of an "English race", a "French race" etc. It believed in a notion of common ancestry and common culture that imposed an unrealistic ideal of uniformity on the people of the country. Nationalism means ignoring regional identities, bulldozing cultural landmarks that don't fit the chosen national myth and denying diversity of religion and language.
Most people don't think that's what they're talking about when they talk about nationalism, but the more they become invested in the notion of a "nation", the more these intolerant attitudes tend to slip in.
The contemporary nationalism truest to the original concept is the USA's "white nationalism" that wants a uniquely "white" race, but not one that speaks French or Spanish, one that speaks English, because white Cajun and white Mexican are not "proper" white. White nationalists are also sticking to the script over religion, and while they're not making much of a fuss over Mormons, that's only because they have other targets at present. Ban Muslims from the country and the white nationalists will start to turn on them. And the white nationalists don't see themselves as racist, just like previous nationalists: they're not against anyone, they just think everyone has their "right place".
Actually Slashdot is worse than what the EU is proposing because it has an active filter. If you try to write "n*gger" it won't let you post. Presumably other words are also blocked.
That's not "worse" -- the site admins are practising free speech.
Point out the over-representation of Islam in terrorism, the inbreeding, lack of education and over-representation in crime in refugee populations. That's politically incorrect.
Yeah, I want to go back to the days when it was OK to claim that people from other countries had tails and ate babies. Anything else is political correctness gone mad.
Seriously, though, if you engage in discussion and debate facts, most people won't accuse you of hate speech. However, those have to be fair facts. In order to prove the "over-representation of Islam in terrorism", you have to deliberately limit the debate to the 21st century, because the history of terrorism involves a hell of a lot of white Christians, including anarchists across Europe and the very prominent Irish republican movement. While the WTC attacks are the single biggest act of terror in terms of direct casualties, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by nationalist terrorists resulted in a war that left almost 40 million dead, wounded or missing in action, and set the stage for the sequel in which 60-80 million people (3% of the world's population) died.
You can only have inbreeding in "refugee populations" if you keep people in refugee camps for multiple generations. If you mean inbreeding in immigrant populations, yes, that happens, but you're not being specific, and you're using the actions of a minority to smear a whole group.
Lack of education correlates highly with high crime rates. Refugee populations aren't generally given much of a chance to either A) get educated or B) get work, so there are certainly external pressures that push them to crime. But that's a problem that society can potentially solve.
p>The proper reaction to "bad" speech is good speech.
I wish it was that easy. There have been a great many populist rulers who got their power through manipulative speech. Trump, for example, aims to delegitimise the speech of his opponents. His free speech is an attempted denial of others'.
My point is that "tragedy of the commons" is a misnomer, because in a true commons, the commoners are working for mutual interest, and between them come to conscious decisions, and compromises. There are no explicit multi-party compromises in an open market with no management.
The concept of the tragedy of the commons has been used to justify private land ownership, by claiming that the proprietor has a long-term stake in maintaining the quality of the land, but the result is quite the opposite -- private ownership often encourages short-termism in the hunt for immediate profits, and is often to the detriment of local communities who would be stakeholders in a commons arrangement (such as tree clearances of upland land for sheep farming leading to flooding and landslides downhill.
The rich landowner's legacy can just be a bank account -- he doesn't need productive land for his children. Commoners who don't leave big bank accounts are far more concerned with maintaining a sustainable ecosystem.
Uber doesn't need to create a healthy transport ecosystem -- they just want to make a big bank balance.
There are certain low frequency problems that are worth avoiding. For instance, there was a rash of sexual assaults about 20-30 years ago in rural Central Scotland by a guy who pretended to be a taxi driver. He used a radio scanner to listen out for dispatch messages for rides for 1 passenger with a female name, and if he could get there before the assigned driver, he'd pick the woman up. Sometimes if he decided he didn't fancy them he'd just tell them to get out in the middle of nowhere. They were the lucky ones.
The traditional fee for a sitting-on-his-arse middleman is 2.5%. Uber demanding 10 times that is almost racketeering and begets a question: Why doesn't someone start a ride-sharing business that provides security checks, carriage insurance and online 'training' for their contracted workers? The business could actually provide a service and still make a tidy profit.
If people are so sick of Facebook's constant invasion of privacy, why don't they set up another social network.
Oh, they did?
Oh, they went out of business?
Uber's greatest strength is the same as Facebook's: coverage. Lyft is mySpace to Uber's Facebook -- i.e. trundling on getting slowly eclipsed until the day when nobody is actually sure whether it still exists or not [checks myspace.com -- oh yes, it still exists]. The dozens of other social networking sites whose names you forget are equivalent to the dozens of ride-hailing apps that you never heard of because they never got the market traction.
Microjobs are part of the economy of the future, and letting 19th century-style job laws stand in their way will only stifle the economy.
Correct. But the solution is to replace the 19th-century-style job laws with 21st-century-style ones, not medieval-style economic serfdom.
Disclaimer: I'm 34, have never had a job and am a virgin.
These statements appear mutually contradictory. If you're a 34-year-old virgin, you must have at least had a hand job, even if you gave it to yourself.
The hot answer these days for things like manicurists is reputation. Don't go to a salon with a 1.5 star rating on Yelp. That's how ride sharing and home sharing services also regulate their quality. And companies are really, really serious about maintaining their reputation.
What happens when your top manicurist decides she's had enough of being the employee and opens her own salon, taking the best people on your staff with her? You get in new manicurists that can do the work, that's what! Ideally you'd be protecting your reputation by only hiring the best, but a reputation is no use whatsoever if you can't sell your services.
It's the same in restaurants. All the reviews tell you how great the chef was, how clever the head chef's menu is, and those reviews don't disappear the instant the head chef gets a better job 2 miles down the road and the new head chef is just whoever had been working in the kitchen longest. The restaurant doesn't just shut down indefinitely while waiting for a new chef equal to the guy before.
Of course, the restaurant still has to maintain legally mandated levels of food safety, and the chefs need all their food handling certificates. Why should the beauty saloon need to have basic training in healthy and safe practices too? Safety is not the same as quality.
Free marketers would say that the market would find the right level. But that's religion, not reality. A free market finds A level, not necessarily the right level.
It's not religion any more than believing a wise and well informed third party can deduce the right value.
It's less of a faith position to say that a well-informed third party can deduce value than to claim that a mass of uninformed individuals can.
I once visited the famous tourist beauty spot of Biarritz in France. Beauty spot? It is ugly as all sin. The problem is that the mass of tourists have destroyed everything. You have clifftop walks which originally had planned paths, set out in concrete. Tourists didn't want to follow those paths, and walked across the grass. The authorities in Biarritz apparently took the view that you couldn't argue with the crowd, and they reinforced the new paths the tourist created. Guess what? The tourists cut corners between the new paths, and made further paths. The seafront at Biarritz is now more path than grass or rock. You have areas of natural clifftop about the size of a kitchen table surrounded on all sides by wide concrete paths. It's horrible. You may have heard of "the tragedy of the commons" -- I don't like the term: where common grazings are still in operation, they are run in planned cooperation between locals who know each other, but the idea is sound: individuals all pursuing self-interest and self-gratification do not act in ways that aim to the common good.
There's a reasonable argument that there's a right number of grocery stores, computer programmers, car makers, etc.
If we let anyone open a grocery store, program computers, etc., then there will be too many of each and everyone will be in poverty.
What? Taxis are different? How?
Grocery stores typically require trading licenses issued by municipal authorities, and they are most assuredly issued based on local need and demand.
The difference with computer programmers is that you don't accumulate much experience as a taxi driver after a year or two on the road, so you don't become more valuable.
Car makers, on the other hand, are heavily regulated, and you have to meet stringent safety regulations to sell what you make. There may not be direct regulation for numbers of car makers or quotas for factory output, but the capital outlay is extremely high, which is where market forces work. If you have a car, the capital outlay for Uber is nil, so there's no obvious loss to entering an already-saturated market; lots of people enter said saturated market and deflationary pressures arise.
In fact, that's the whole point about minimum wage laws: the capital outlay for getting a job is at most a new shirt and trousers, so lots of people going for work is a natural deflationary pressure. Market fanatics would say that's a "good thing" because of "efficiencies", but we tried that before. Workers fainting from exhaustion due to long hours isn't efficient, and workers dying of starvation on the job because they weren't paid enough to live isn't efficient; but undirected, uncontrolled market forces sustained that madness for a looooong time (and it still happens in developing countries) -- labour laws were the only effective solution.
You need to call a taxi... but not if ride-shares (so called) have put them out of business.
The reason you can't use a phone to order an Uber, is because in many jurisdictions, that is illegal. Once the taxis are out of business, those laws can be repealed.
That doesn't guarantee it will happen though. Running phone lines is expensive, and that eats into profit. Uber's business model is one of cherry-picking profitable business, not of getting full coverage; whereas one of the main points about regulated taxi and private hire car services is that you can mandate that a license holder has to cater for different classes of passenger. That means that a medium-to-large taxi firm must have a certain percentage of accessible vehicles, and now practically all black cabs bought new will have ramps and straps for wheelchair access and securing the wheelchair once in the vehicle, because it makes economic sense. Game theory used to mean that the possibility of a few extra fares made accessible features of no economic value. Now, the absence of them has regulatory implications as well as the possibility of marginal lost trade, so "better to be safe than sorry" meant that the features gained economy of scale, and now a disabled person in a city like London or Edinburgh can hail a cab like the rest of us, and 99% of taxis will be able to stop and pick them up.
All these people who think that regulation is a bad thing should have a look at why regulation was invented in the first place. It was made to protect the public, and if in some cases that has been corrupted by vested corporate interests, the solution is to deal with those interests, not to remove consumer protections completely.
Slashdot Mirror
And Christians have been dicks to people, but it's not in the same league as jihadis.
Ignore the particular insult. The point is any reasonable reading of history, <snip>
History tells us of a "Holy" Roman Empire that waged wars within its own borders, a Pope who invented the Crusades and triggered mass murder simply to keep the unruly knights busy looting and pillaging other people's countries. History tells us of pogroms of Jews across Christendom; the murder, exile and forced conversion of Muslims after the Spanish Reconquista; colonialism and further forced conversion in all corners of the world; the slave trade; white supremacists wrapped in warped versions of Christian iconography; Christian churches siding with fascists for fear of secular politics. Hell, there was allegedly even one Christian printer in Africa that sabotaged a safe sex campaign by stapling condoms to a magazine/leaflet, and thereby actually risked causing the spread of AIDS and unwanted pregnancies, simply because of their ideological objection to their client's campaign.
When you claim to point out clear and obvious "truths" about Islam, you end up simply lying about Christianity. That's why people keep objecting to your statements. It's not political correctness, it's factual correctness.
So sure they'll go after someone mocking "pedo-worshipper" muslims, but probably never anyone mocking Christians for worshiping a zombie or whatever.
"Zombie Jesus" is purile taunting, and there's really no call for it, but it doesn't create the same feeling of pure revulsion as associating someone with child abuse, so let's not start on the "poor marginalised Christians" angle. People are being dicks to Christians, but it's not in the same league as islamophobia.
No one said all Mexicans are racists.
That's why I talked about "casting aspersions" and "suggesting". His words we're "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." The implication is that the drug mules, criminals and rapists are proven fact, and the majority, and the good people are an unproven minority. It is a smear.
But I'd hazard sports fans are more likely to own DVRs anyway, as with all the stuff on Netflix, Amazon etc, who DVRs series or movies any more?
I imagine your "quasi-live" watching is essentially what most sports fans do -- all those time-outs in the final few minutes of play really make some sports unwatchable -- skipping past them means action, not ads.
Not so obviously. Slashdot, in publishing, is arguably implicated in the speech act, so it's not straightforward to say that refusing to transmit certain speech isn't itself an act of free speech.
It's still all dumb. Don't bother evaluating someone's ideas for truth, just label it an -ism, denounce it, and move on. We must end ismism, because the ismists are killing our ability to think.
That's the "political correctness gone mad" approach -- just claim they're being unreasonable.
There's nothing in most hate speech legislation that stops you discussing facts -- just the stuff that stops you smearing powerless minorities with ideas like "they're all rapists" or "they're all terrorists", ideas that misinform and risk spreading and causing hate. So it's alright to discuss the age of a certain prophet's favourite wife (as documented in the religion's own holy text), but it's really not alright to call followers of his religion "pedo-worshippers" or anything, because that is a statement designed to cause others to hate.
That's not what "free speech" means, as you damn well know.
Yes it is. Free speech doesn't mean private entities giving an open platform to all and sundry -- SlashdotMedia is allowed to choose which speech it wants to transmit through its site.
Trump: "we're gonna build a wall to keep the rapist Mexicans out, and it's gonna be great." Someone else: "We don't need a wall, and by the way, it's kind of racist to suggest all Mexicans are rapists." Trump: "There's a media conspiracy, a liberal elite, that is trying to use political correctness to shut me up and telling us we don't need a wall. Just look at Alec Baldwin!"
It's not the same thing at all. (And of course Trump is not the only politician to get impersonated on comedy shows!)
Hate speech isn't about hating, it's about preaching hate. And it's not about preaching hate against things or against concepts, but against people.
There is a fuzzy line between the two, of course. Sometimes you can preach hate against people even when your words are against a concept. For example "X-ism is a religion of evil" has the clear implication that X-ists are evil -- hate speech. But "Y-ism is based on the words of a paranoid schizophrenic who heard voices and thought he was speaking to a god" only implies that Y-ists are misguided. They may find it offensive, but you can't call it hate speech.
There's nothing wrong with nationalism.
The core concept of "nationalism" is that of a "nation", derived from the Latin from birth. Original nationalism was tied to the notion of an "English race", a "French race" etc. It believed in a notion of common ancestry and common culture that imposed an unrealistic ideal of uniformity on the people of the country. Nationalism means ignoring regional identities, bulldozing cultural landmarks that don't fit the chosen national myth and denying diversity of religion and language.
Most people don't think that's what they're talking about when they talk about nationalism, but the more they become invested in the notion of a "nation", the more these intolerant attitudes tend to slip in.
The contemporary nationalism truest to the original concept is the USA's "white nationalism" that wants a uniquely "white" race, but not one that speaks French or Spanish, one that speaks English, because white Cajun and white Mexican are not "proper" white. White nationalists are also sticking to the script over religion, and while they're not making much of a fuss over Mormons, that's only because they have other targets at present. Ban Muslims from the country and the white nationalists will start to turn on them. And the white nationalists don't see themselves as racist, just like previous nationalists: they're not against anyone, they just think everyone has their "right place".
what is an opinion though, is what classifies as "hate"
And my opinion is that "all Xs are terrorists/drug-dealers/criminals/rapists/inferior" is hate.
Actually Slashdot is worse than what the EU is proposing because it has an active filter. If you try to write "n*gger" it won't let you post. Presumably other words are also blocked.
That's not "worse" -- the site admins are practising free speech.
Point out the over-representation of Islam in terrorism, the inbreeding, lack of education and over-representation in crime in refugee populations. That's politically incorrect.
Yeah, I want to go back to the days when it was OK to claim that people from other countries had tails and ate babies. Anything else is political correctness gone mad.
Seriously, though, if you engage in discussion and debate facts, most people won't accuse you of hate speech. However, those have to be fair facts. In order to prove the "over-representation of Islam in terrorism", you have to deliberately limit the debate to the 21st century, because the history of terrorism involves a hell of a lot of white Christians, including anarchists across Europe and the very prominent Irish republican movement. While the WTC attacks are the single biggest act of terror in terms of direct casualties, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by nationalist terrorists resulted in a war that left almost 40 million dead, wounded or missing in action, and set the stage for the sequel in which 60-80 million people (3% of the world's population) died.
You can only have inbreeding in "refugee populations" if you keep people in refugee camps for multiple generations. If you mean inbreeding in immigrant populations, yes, that happens, but you're not being specific, and you're using the actions of a minority to smear a whole group.
Lack of education correlates highly with high crime rates. Refugee populations aren't generally given much of a chance to either A) get educated or B) get work, so there are certainly external pressures that push them to crime. But that's a problem that society can potentially solve.
They are always used to suppress politicallt incorrect opinions.
That's a shame. They should really be used to ban preaching violence and intolerance. Oh wait, they are.
p>The proper reaction to "bad" speech is good speech.
I wish it was that easy. There have been a great many populist rulers who got their power through manipulative speech. Trump, for example, aims to delegitimise the speech of his opponents. His free speech is an attempted denial of others'.
It can be assumed that if the username/password works access is authorized
Can I similarly assume that if your door's accidentally left unlocked I can walk in and leave with your computer?
The concept of the tragedy of the commons has been used to justify private land ownership, by claiming that the proprietor has a long-term stake in maintaining the quality of the land, but the result is quite the opposite -- private ownership often encourages short-termism in the hunt for immediate profits, and is often to the detriment of local communities who would be stakeholders in a commons arrangement (such as tree clearances of upland land for sheep farming leading to flooding and landslides downhill.
The rich landowner's legacy can just be a bank account -- he doesn't need productive land for his children. Commoners who don't leave big bank accounts are far more concerned with maintaining a sustainable ecosystem.
Uber doesn't need to create a healthy transport ecosystem -- they just want to make a big bank balance.
There are certain low frequency problems that are worth avoiding. For instance, there was a rash of sexual assaults about 20-30 years ago in rural Central Scotland by a guy who pretended to be a taxi driver. He used a radio scanner to listen out for dispatch messages for rides for 1 passenger with a female name, and if he could get there before the assigned driver, he'd pick the woman up. Sometimes if he decided he didn't fancy them he'd just tell them to get out in the middle of nowhere. They were the lucky ones.
The traditional fee for a sitting-on-his-arse middleman is 2.5%. Uber demanding 10 times that is almost racketeering and begets a question: Why doesn't someone start a ride-sharing business that provides security checks, carriage insurance and online 'training' for their contracted workers? The business could actually provide a service and still make a tidy profit.
If people are so sick of Facebook's constant invasion of privacy, why don't they set up another social network.
Oh, they did?
Oh, they went out of business?
Uber's greatest strength is the same as Facebook's: coverage. Lyft is mySpace to Uber's Facebook -- i.e. trundling on getting slowly eclipsed until the day when nobody is actually sure whether it still exists or not [checks myspace.com -- oh yes, it still exists]. The dozens of other social networking sites whose names you forget are equivalent to the dozens of ride-hailing apps that you never heard of because they never got the market traction.
Microjobs are part of the economy of the future, and letting 19th century-style job laws stand in their way will only stifle the economy.
Correct. But the solution is to replace the 19th-century-style job laws with 21st-century-style ones, not medieval-style economic serfdom.
Disclaimer: I'm 34, have never had a job and am a virgin.
These statements appear mutually contradictory. If you're a 34-year-old virgin, you must have at least had a hand job, even if you gave it to yourself.
The hot answer these days for things like manicurists is reputation. Don't go to a salon with a 1.5 star rating on Yelp. That's how ride sharing and home sharing services also regulate their quality. And companies are really, really serious about maintaining their reputation.
What happens when your top manicurist decides she's had enough of being the employee and opens her own salon, taking the best people on your staff with her? You get in new manicurists that can do the work, that's what! Ideally you'd be protecting your reputation by only hiring the best, but a reputation is no use whatsoever if you can't sell your services.
It's the same in restaurants. All the reviews tell you how great the chef was, how clever the head chef's menu is, and those reviews don't disappear the instant the head chef gets a better job 2 miles down the road and the new head chef is just whoever had been working in the kitchen longest. The restaurant doesn't just shut down indefinitely while waiting for a new chef equal to the guy before.
Of course, the restaurant still has to maintain legally mandated levels of food safety, and the chefs need all their food handling certificates. Why should the beauty saloon need to have basic training in healthy and safe practices too? Safety is not the same as quality.
Free marketers would say that the market would find the right level. But that's religion, not reality. A free market finds A level, not necessarily the right level.
It's not religion any more than believing a wise and well informed third party can deduce the right value.
It's less of a faith position to say that a well-informed third party can deduce value than to claim that a mass of uninformed individuals can.
I once visited the famous tourist beauty spot of Biarritz in France. Beauty spot? It is ugly as all sin. The problem is that the mass of tourists have destroyed everything. You have clifftop walks which originally had planned paths, set out in concrete. Tourists didn't want to follow those paths, and walked across the grass. The authorities in Biarritz apparently took the view that you couldn't argue with the crowd, and they reinforced the new paths the tourist created. Guess what? The tourists cut corners between the new paths, and made further paths. The seafront at Biarritz is now more path than grass or rock. You have areas of natural clifftop about the size of a kitchen table surrounded on all sides by wide concrete paths. It's horrible. You may have heard of "the tragedy of the commons" -- I don't like the term: where common grazings are still in operation, they are run in planned cooperation between locals who know each other, but the idea is sound: individuals all pursuing self-interest and self-gratification do not act in ways that aim to the common good.
There's a reasonable argument that there's a right number of grocery stores, computer programmers, car makers, etc.
If we let anyone open a grocery store, program computers, etc., then there will be too many of each and everyone will be in poverty.
What? Taxis are different? How?
Grocery stores typically require trading licenses issued by municipal authorities, and they are most assuredly issued based on local need and demand.
The difference with computer programmers is that you don't accumulate much experience as a taxi driver after a year or two on the road, so you don't become more valuable.
Car makers, on the other hand, are heavily regulated, and you have to meet stringent safety regulations to sell what you make. There may not be direct regulation for numbers of car makers or quotas for factory output, but the capital outlay is extremely high, which is where market forces work. If you have a car, the capital outlay for Uber is nil, so there's no obvious loss to entering an already-saturated market; lots of people enter said saturated market and deflationary pressures arise.
In fact, that's the whole point about minimum wage laws: the capital outlay for getting a job is at most a new shirt and trousers, so lots of people going for work is a natural deflationary pressure. Market fanatics would say that's a "good thing" because of "efficiencies", but we tried that before. Workers fainting from exhaustion due to long hours isn't efficient, and workers dying of starvation on the job because they weren't paid enough to live isn't efficient; but undirected, uncontrolled market forces sustained that madness for a looooong time (and it still happens in developing countries) -- labour laws were the only effective solution.
You need to call a taxi... but not if ride-shares (so called) have put them out of business.
The reason you can't use a phone to order an Uber, is because in many jurisdictions, that is illegal. Once the taxis are out of business, those laws can be repealed.
That doesn't guarantee it will happen though. Running phone lines is expensive, and that eats into profit. Uber's business model is one of cherry-picking profitable business, not of getting full coverage; whereas one of the main points about regulated taxi and private hire car services is that you can mandate that a license holder has to cater for different classes of passenger. That means that a medium-to-large taxi firm must have a certain percentage of accessible vehicles, and now practically all black cabs bought new will have ramps and straps for wheelchair access and securing the wheelchair once in the vehicle, because it makes economic sense. Game theory used to mean that the possibility of a few extra fares made accessible features of no economic value. Now, the absence of them has regulatory implications as well as the possibility of marginal lost trade, so "better to be safe than sorry" meant that the features gained economy of scale, and now a disabled person in a city like London or Edinburgh can hail a cab like the rest of us, and 99% of taxis will be able to stop and pick them up.
All these people who think that regulation is a bad thing should have a look at why regulation was invented in the first place. It was made to protect the public, and if in some cases that has been corrupted by vested corporate interests, the solution is to deal with those interests, not to remove consumer protections completely.