How can you reasonably have 500 drivers vying for the same fare and also have 30 people in a 8 person minibus? What is the motivation to overcrowd?
Erm, the motivation is easy money. The same thing Uber is promising.
I haven't been to Kampala, but I've seen the same thing in SE Asia, in fact it gets worse there. unlicensed taxi drivers tend to form gangs, create turf and fight over their territory. Thailand is a good example. In Bangkok where taxis are regulated they are cheap, easy to find, safe and reliable if you dont feel like using Bangkok's good public transport, a trip from the city centre to BKK airport (35 KM) is a mere 400 baht. In Phuket where there are no taxi regulations taxi and tuk tuk drivers refuse to turn on less than 200 baht. So you'll take the bus then I hear you say, well good luck with that, whenever the government of Phuket gets it in their head to set up a municipal bus service (baht bus) the drivers are stopped, dragged out of their buses and beaten by the taxi mafia.
Dont take my word for it, google "Phuket taxi mafia", "Tuk Tuk mafia" or even just "taxi mafia" (the first google result should be for Phuket).
We have taxi regulations for a good reason, sure I'll be the first to admit they aren't perfect, but having lived in places with the alternative, the worst protectionist policies are better than that.
If licenses weren't numbered, the proliferation of taxis would render city streets unnavigable.
That is utter bullshit. It is fear mongering at its worse.
You need to go and live where there are no taxi regulations before saying anything like that.
I've lived in several of these places. Taxis always ended up in the hands of criminal gangs, territories were enforced and fought over and it was at the point where the government couldn't do anything about it even if they wanted to. Case in point, Phuket's taxi mafia, you may want to note the heavily regulated taxis in Bangkok are a lot cheaper and a lot less violent.
He's talking about the vauge and nebulous threat that has never been quantified, let alone observed but he needs to believe in to justify his own beliefs.
Am I wrong.
That statement is vague enough
The statement is clear enough to state that yes, yes he is wrong.
A hammer made today still looks like a hammer from a century ago.
No, it doesn't.
Hammers come in all kinds of different colors with all kinds of designs.
I bet you believe in UX too.
Why does it matter what colour a hammer is? What function does the colour have?
A hammer is the same basic shape it has been in for millennia. A flat sided lump of metal attached to a handle. Even the claw hammer is over 500 years old and looks very similar to a modern claw hammer.
The biggest innovation in hammers in the last 100 odd years was switching from wooden handles and leather wraps to plastics and polymers. Even then, this is a slow evolution rather than a radical change and was mainly done to save costs and did not in any way alter the function of the hammer.
Metro is like redesigning a hammer to have the head in the middle of the handle. Its change for changes sake and ends up being less usable than the old design. However people like you will advertise it as "Hammer 2.0" or the "iBanger" and claim it's magically superior despite all evidence to the contrary.
I can assure you, Metro is not all of "simple, clean, aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and functional"... it's anything but, in fact unless you're doing fairly trivial tasks on a tablet.
This, a thousand times this.
The first thing I do with metro on a desktop is replace it with one of the many start menu alternatives. Metro is an interface I dont want on a phone, let alone a workstation. However I cant do this on servers as no IT organisation will permit it.
I press the windows icon to have something replace my entire screen. That is stupid as it completely breaks my concentration on my current task (and I dont log into servers just to stuff around), beyond this if you try clicking on down button it only flips between the metro screen and the programs screen, you have to press escape to get out of it.
Microsoft has slowly been fucking up a very usable GUI since Windows XP. The first thing I do on any new Windows 7 or Server 2008 box is to set the Taskbar buttons to "never combine". I never have so many applications open that I need them to be combined. Ironically, Apple and their bollocks User Experience pseudo-science are to blame for this.
A few people with or capable of getting PHDs will join the armed forces for the challenge or career opportunities, this does not mean most who join the army are PHD candidates. In fact I'd say the average Rifleman/General Infantry recruit is quite the opposite.
Why would any other armed force, regular or otherwise be any different. You want to attract highly skilled people for highly skilled work, you need grunts for grunt work and there is a lot of grunt work to be done.
The only real difference is that in the west, joining the army is seen as a good move for a kid with limited prospects (meaning he didn't do too well in school) where as its an act of desperation to join al queda (meaning there was no high school to do well in and even digging ditches is a highly controlled and nepotist market).
I've read neither in about 20 years since taking a comparative religion class at school.
It's the same God in both the OT and the NT. I wonder why, when Christianity's holy book's text is looked at, people leap through hoops to try to break apart the trinity or add all sorts of explanations for the hideous, God-sanctioned behaviour, with the Qu'ran it's apparently a factual guide book and evidence that all Muslims are violent psychopaths. It's all bullshit. Most Christians don't live by the Bible just as most Muslims don't live by the Qu'ran.
What you've got to remember is that the Qu'ran is selectively quoted out of context deliberately by people who have an irrational hate of Muslims. They do this because often the context doesn't support their point.
If you selectively quoted the bible, it looks just as bad. Zechariah 12:3 for example tells Christians to kill false prophets, Leviticus made it clear it's OK to keep slaves, then there is the well known example of Ezekiel 25:17 (think pulp fiction). In fact the entire story of Ezekiel 25 is pretty violent and advocates killing an entire people, the thing is, I know this is a story, a work of fiction the same as verses in the Qu'ran are poems built in the same manner. If you take individual parts of Ezekiel 25 it sounds like commands from god to kill the Ammonites, but in context its part of a story.
It's a case of "figures dont lie, but liars figure".
But whatever. This discussion is pointless. Neither book is at all suitable for teaching how to behave to your fellow man.
Erm, pretty much.
Almost all Christians ignore things like Leviticus on slaves, by the same token almost all Muslims dont take "kill the unbeliever" literally.
Fuck off Islam apologist. Sure, not all muslim are islamist, but all Islamist are muslim.
Not all people in Northern Ireland during the Troubles were terrorists, but all the Northern Irish terrorists during the Troubles were from Northern Ireland, so anyone from Northern Ireland was probably a terrorist.
This.
I know this argument borderlines on "no true scotsman" but you can argue that a lot of the people who join Islamic terrorist groups are proper Muslims. A lot wont follow the same tenants as are proselytised by the likes of ISIS, certainly this is the case with most western recruits. Then again, the tenants of groups like ISIS hardly represent the majority of Muslims.
The argument is ludicrous. Hint: the number of terrorists is tiny compared with the total population.
iiNet/Internode/Westnet/etc are the last service-oriented consumer ISP in the marketplace
+1 to everything you've said.
There's a reason I'm still with iinet ADSL despite being able to get Telstra cable to my house. After the TPG deal I'm thinking I might just jump ship.
Then again, I'm the kiss of death for ISP's. A few months after I joined Westnet, they were acquired by iinet, a few months after joining Internode they were acquired by iinet, a few weeks after joining iinet the TPG acquisition was announced. I wonder who's big enough to buy Telstra.
I don't think it is pro-bono if you're providing it to paying customers. If anything this should become the norm, similar to the way an insurance company has lawyers to aid in handling automobile accidents.
Insurance companies in Australia do not provide lawyers, they handle the entire thing for you because _that_ is what you pay them for.
ISP's on the other hand, you pay for internet access, not legal access (they're internet service providers, not legal service providers). So offering legal assistance for free is pro bono.
Having lived in Australia a few years, I've been amazed at how good the voting system is (mandatory, with ranking)... and how bad the outcome has been (Howard at the time) despite the good system.
The first problem with the last election was primarily that Murdoch went on an unrelenting attack on Labor. Coverage was so skewed that it wasn't funny.
The second problem was that there were too many back room preference deals. More people voted for Labor than the Liberal party but because the Liberal party had a lot of preference deals with smaller parties they received enough to get them _just_ past the post.
Voter apathy is still a huge problem in Australia and our mandatory voting system is part of it. I still prefer our Instant Runoff Voting system but the 2013 election is a good demonstration of how no system is perfect.
"Seriously I am living in Islamic country right now. (snip) I couldnt understand how any sane person knowing the alternatives would want this."
You're saying you know the alternatives, you're saying someone who chooses to live there knowing the alternatives isn't sane, and you're saying you live there. So, you're saying you're not sane...right? And if so, why should I take your word on the rest of it?
I've actually lived in a Muslim country, in fact the largest Muslim country in the world.
I lived and worked in Yogyakarta, Indonesia for 6 months. There were bars I could get beer in (in fact they were open longer than bars in Australia were permitted to), bacon was never hard to find. I was never forced to convert, people were friendly, I'd have no hesitation about going back to Yogya despite it being predominantly Muslim.
What the anti-Muslims dont want you to realise is that 99.9% of Muslims just want to get on with their daily lives. They've got jobs, families, homes, friends and dont really care that much about holy wars, much the same as 99.9% of Christians, Taoists, Shintoists, Atheists, LeVeyan Satanists and so forth. Using a few nutjobs as a representative of all Islam is like condemning all westerner by analysing the KKK.
Oh, and before someone trots out the old "well why dont they do something about the crazies, blah, blah, blah". They do speak out against them. I was in Yogya when 7/7 happened in London, every single person, regardless of creed was appalled, the problem with crazies is that they dont listen to sane people. Beyond this, I find those who are the first to point fingers at normal Muslims for doing nothing tend to be the last to act against the radical elements in our own society, mainly because they tend to support that radical element (so pot, kettle, black).
Actually most cars sold in Australia aren't built here.
Also an Australian made V6 Camry (we call it the Toyota Aurion) costs the same as it does in other countries. So Holden/GM are a really bad example especially considering that Australian made cars aren't really exported (Holden have exported less than 10,000 VE and VF commo's, Ford exported 0 Falcons in the same time).
Price differentials are due to car manufacturers deliberately pricing cars higher in Australia, not the minimum wage.
Holden is the australian GM brand which is why i compared it to chevy, keeping it apples to apples
Honda is a better comparison (but doesn't support your theory). Holden is not Chevy. Most of the Holden fleet is being supplied by Opel (Germany) or Daewoo (GM Korea). None of the American made cars are available here and when local manufacturing ceases (good riddance, the subsidies and protectionism can now stop) Holden are replacing the Commo with the Opel Insignia OPC as GM America have plainly said we're not making the Camaro or Corvette in proper hand drive.
true, but the cost of a chevy (holden to you) down there is about 2x what it costs here. so yeah, you are making more but your costs are higher so what is the difference?
Which is entirely due to the manufacturer.
A Holden Barina spark does not cost any more to import into Australia from South Korea than a Chevy Spark does to import into the US.
In fact you'll find the Spark costing approximately the same in both our nations, around $13,000 USD. Same with most Kia's, Toyotas, Hyundais and so forth. Its only certain manufacturers (*cough* euro *cough*) who jack up the prices for Australia. This is the reason that grey imports for cars are likely to be approved in the near future.
And I assure you this bias works the other way around. Finance and accounting people think that IT workers are utterly clueless morons when it comes to money.
Actually its the other way around. Finance and accounting tend to think IT workers are amongst the better people with money. Most IT workers have more discretionary funds than other forms of workers and tend to make better financial decisions. We tend not to rack up stupid debts and fall victim to "buy now, pay later" or "no money down" scams which end up being huge money sinks.
Now you would have had a point if you said "marketing and sales people" but being told that a marketing and sales person thinks you're wrong is a pretty good complement.
That's interesting, I thought it was "Taxed Enough Already."
Nope,
Its a mechanism by the Republican party to prevent voters from voting Democrat by giving them something else in the Republican party to vote for.
They really should have called it the "I can't believe it's not the Republican" party.
Australia has something similar called the National party. Because the Liberals (our conservatives) continually screw over rural Australia but rural Australia are too thick and pig headed to vote against them they vote National and pretend they aren't voting for the Libs.
At least it isn't as bad as the recent UK election, where UKIP had significant support in terms of individual voters, yet only ended up with two seats.
Thats an example of the system working. The last thing the UK needs is a party like UKIP dictating terms to a hung parliament.
Auctions. They are they ultimate free market. People bid on something up to the point they believe the product is worth. No government interference or price controls.
Price reserves are a price control.
Besides this, tenders are better as you aren't legally bound to accept an offer you dont like. Tenders have the advantage of not telling the purchaser what you will accept, so a purchaser may offer far in excess of what you wanted, also Auctions can turn against the seller when buyers refuse to bid (which is why you have to have a reserve).
an uber driver who is on his way to pick up a passenger is most certainly on the job
he started working when he accepted the fare and headed to the pickup point
Most insurance companies will not care if they had a job or not if it can be demonstrated that they were recently using the car for commercial purposes.
Definitely in Australia, if you had just finished an Uber job and run into the back of a Mercedes SL, even if you hadn't accepted another job your private insurance will legally be considered null and void as you were using the car for commercial purposes for that trip. The insurer of that SL will be permitted to come after you and Uber for the costs with no limitations.
I have no doubt insurers in other nations have similar regulations.
I wish we could get away from the "we need regulations, because what if *this* happened!" model of legislation.
Sigh,
Is that any worse than "we need regulation because this *has now* happened.
As much as you dont want to admit it, the scenario the GP used is not a "once in a million years" event. In fact its quite likely to happen even if we remove the "hopped up on stims". Hell, just a 4 hour shift without a break is enough to produce enough fatigue that it's the equivalent of driving with a BAC above 0.08%. Now consider an 8 or 12 hour shift.
It's a simple appeal to emotion
Your logical fallacies are stereotype threat and appeal to probability.
The problem is you're dead wrong with the appeal to probability.
A rational argument might analyze not only the possibility of this happening, but also its *likelyhood*.
A rational person will analyse it. The problem you have is that the numbers dont add up for you.
The risk of having an accident is not a fixed thing, it increases with the number of hours you spend on the road. In Uber's case it also increases with the number of drivers. Ordinary transport companies have mitigation procedures to reduce this loss ranging from additional training and increased insurance to punitive measures like employment suspension and termination and in many nations professional drivers are subject to higher punitive measures than private drivers (the penalty for a truck driver speeding is 3-5x that of an ordinary driver in Australia).
Uber is not doing anything to improve the safety of its drivers, so as more drivers spend more time on the road, the likelyhood of a fatal accident becomes ever more likely. Given that Uber drivers are not professional drivers, this increases the risk significantly.
So the risk of being injured or killed by an Uber driver is a real threat and has already surpassed the chance of being injured or killed by an ordinary private driver (which is greater than being injured or killed by a professional driver) by the simple fact that Uber drivers spend more time on the road, increasing fatigue. We'll ignore the extra pressure caused by time constraints, talking passengers and so forth for now, I dont really need those to make my point.
It's a simple case of "market liquidity"
Again you're wrong here.
Uber is not competing on the same terms as ordinary taxi companies. They pay no tax, they dont pay for insurance, it is a false economy and the problem with false economies is that they always fail in the end.
In Uber's case, we're just waiting for that one fatal crash in a country with decent liabilty laws. Taxi companies here are protected because they pay tax, license fees and insurance so this limits their liability, Uber receives no such protection so when that one fatal crash happens, insurance companies will be allowed off the leash to tear Uber to shreds. Uber being killed by regulation would be a far kinder death.
Medallions limiting taxis increase cars, not the other way around. If you can walk out and hail a cheap cab any time of day, anywhere in the city, why would you ever want to own a car?
Because you like to drive.
Because you want to just pick up and drive somewhere.
Because you dont want to wait 15 minutes to take a 10 minute drive to the shop.
Because you live out in the suburbs or just outside of town.
Because you have kids and dont trust someone being paid less than minimum wage to drive safely.
Because you dislike the mafia-like organisation that illegal taxi operations inevitably become.
Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Ubiquitous and cheap taxis decrease the number of cars on the road. Medallions limiting taxis increase cars, not the other way around.
Reality disagrees with that assertion. London for a long time has had minicabs (private cars for hire) as well as an excellent public transport systems, London is truly a city where you can live without a car and they've still had to introduce congestion taxes to reduce the number of cars because people want to own a car, there are significant benefits to owning a car that outweigh the cost of car ownership.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, some of these regulations are clear attempts to just protect the taxi industry from new models. On the other hand, some of the regulations (like having some basic insurance to cover if things go wrong) are pretty reasonable. On the gripping hand, both Uber and Lyft are both just blatantly ignoring regulations in many jurisdictions, and whether or not one thinks the laws should be there, it is hard to think that having cheaper car services is such a compellingly necessary service that it can morally or ethically justify ignoring laws.
If you wish to speak of morals and ethics
If you wish to speak of morals and ethics, I suggest you go and live where illegal taxi services have been operating for decades. There are good reasons for taxi regulation and they've been quite effective at preventing illegal taxi services becoming organised crime.
Slashdot Mirror
How can you reasonably have 500 drivers vying for the same fare and also have 30 people in a 8 person minibus? What is the motivation to overcrowd?
Erm, the motivation is easy money. The same thing Uber is promising.
I haven't been to Kampala, but I've seen the same thing in SE Asia, in fact it gets worse there. unlicensed taxi drivers tend to form gangs, create turf and fight over their territory. Thailand is a good example. In Bangkok where taxis are regulated they are cheap, easy to find, safe and reliable if you dont feel like using Bangkok's good public transport, a trip from the city centre to BKK airport (35 KM) is a mere 400 baht. In Phuket where there are no taxi regulations taxi and tuk tuk drivers refuse to turn on less than 200 baht. So you'll take the bus then I hear you say, well good luck with that, whenever the government of Phuket gets it in their head to set up a municipal bus service (baht bus) the drivers are stopped, dragged out of their buses and beaten by the taxi mafia.
Dont take my word for it, google "Phuket taxi mafia", "Tuk Tuk mafia" or even just "taxi mafia" (the first google result should be for Phuket).
There are many examples of this, such as what happened when South Africa deregulated their taxi industry.
We have taxi regulations for a good reason, sure I'll be the first to admit they aren't perfect, but having lived in places with the alternative, the worst protectionist policies are better than that.
If licenses weren't numbered, the proliferation of taxis would render city streets unnavigable.
That is utter bullshit. It is fear mongering at its worse.
You need to go and live where there are no taxi regulations before saying anything like that.
I've lived in several of these places. Taxis always ended up in the hands of criminal gangs, territories were enforced and fought over and it was at the point where the government couldn't do anything about it even if they wanted to. Case in point, Phuket's taxi mafia, you may want to note the heavily regulated taxis in Bangkok are a lot cheaper and a lot less violent.
He's talking about the vauge and nebulous threat that has never been quantified, let alone observed but he needs to believe in to justify his own beliefs.
Am I wrong.
That statement is vague enough
The statement is clear enough to state that yes, yes he is wrong.
A hammer made today still looks like a hammer from a century ago.
No, it doesn't.
Hammers come in all kinds of different colors with all kinds of designs.
I bet you believe in UX too.
Why does it matter what colour a hammer is? What function does the colour have?
A hammer is the same basic shape it has been in for millennia. A flat sided lump of metal attached to a handle. Even the claw hammer is over 500 years old and looks very similar to a modern claw hammer.
The biggest innovation in hammers in the last 100 odd years was switching from wooden handles and leather wraps to plastics and polymers. Even then, this is a slow evolution rather than a radical change and was mainly done to save costs and did not in any way alter the function of the hammer.
Metro is like redesigning a hammer to have the head in the middle of the handle. Its change for changes sake and ends up being less usable than the old design. However people like you will advertise it as "Hammer 2.0" or the "iBanger" and claim it's magically superior despite all evidence to the contrary.
This, a thousand times this.
The first thing I do with metro on a desktop is replace it with one of the many start menu alternatives. Metro is an interface I dont want on a phone, let alone a workstation. However I cant do this on servers as no IT organisation will permit it.
I press the windows icon to have something replace my entire screen. That is stupid as it completely breaks my concentration on my current task (and I dont log into servers just to stuff around), beyond this if you try clicking on down button it only flips between the metro screen and the programs screen, you have to press escape to get out of it.
Microsoft has slowly been fucking up a very usable GUI since Windows XP. The first thing I do on any new Windows 7 or Server 2008 box is to set the Taskbar buttons to "never combine". I never have so many applications open that I need them to be combined. Ironically, Apple and their bollocks User Experience pseudo-science are to blame for this.
A few people with or capable of getting PHDs will join the armed forces for the challenge or career opportunities, this does not mean most who join the army are PHD candidates. In fact I'd say the average Rifleman/General Infantry recruit is quite the opposite.
Why would any other armed force, regular or otherwise be any different. You want to attract highly skilled people for highly skilled work, you need grunts for grunt work and there is a lot of grunt work to be done.
The only real difference is that in the west, joining the army is seen as a good move for a kid with limited prospects (meaning he didn't do too well in school) where as its an act of desperation to join al queda (meaning there was no high school to do well in and even digging ditches is a highly controlled and nepotist market).
They'll have to pry my slow cooker from my cold dead oven mitts
Slow cooker != pressure cooker.
A slow cooker takes 6 hours to cook, a pressure cooker takes 30 minutes.
I've read neither in about 20 years since taking a comparative religion class at school.
It's the same God in both the OT and the NT. I wonder why, when Christianity's holy book's text is looked at, people leap through hoops to try to break apart the trinity or add all sorts of explanations for the hideous, God-sanctioned behaviour, with the Qu'ran it's apparently a factual guide book and evidence that all Muslims are violent psychopaths. It's all bullshit. Most Christians don't live by the Bible just as most Muslims don't live by the Qu'ran.
What you've got to remember is that the Qu'ran is selectively quoted out of context deliberately by people who have an irrational hate of Muslims. They do this because often the context doesn't support their point.
If you selectively quoted the bible, it looks just as bad. Zechariah 12:3 for example tells Christians to kill false prophets, Leviticus made it clear it's OK to keep slaves, then there is the well known example of Ezekiel 25:17 (think pulp fiction). In fact the entire story of Ezekiel 25 is pretty violent and advocates killing an entire people, the thing is, I know this is a story, a work of fiction the same as verses in the Qu'ran are poems built in the same manner. If you take individual parts of Ezekiel 25 it sounds like commands from god to kill the Ammonites, but in context its part of a story.
It's a case of "figures dont lie, but liars figure".
But whatever. This discussion is pointless. Neither book is at all suitable for teaching how to behave to your fellow man.
Erm, pretty much.
Almost all Christians ignore things like Leviticus on slaves, by the same token almost all Muslims dont take "kill the unbeliever" literally.
Fuck off Islam apologist. Sure, not all muslim are islamist, but all Islamist are muslim.
Not all people in Northern Ireland during the Troubles were terrorists, but all the Northern Irish terrorists during the Troubles were from Northern Ireland, so anyone from Northern Ireland was probably a terrorist.
This. I know this argument borderlines on "no true scotsman" but you can argue that a lot of the people who join Islamic terrorist groups are proper Muslims. A lot wont follow the same tenants as are proselytised by the likes of ISIS, certainly this is the case with most western recruits. Then again, the tenants of groups like ISIS hardly represent the majority of Muslims.
The argument is ludicrous. Hint: the number of terrorists is tiny compared with the total population.
This cannot be understated.
I immediately thought one of the intelligence orginizations, US, British, or Australian.
Well you can cross Australia off that list, there's no way ASIO is that competent.
They say that the CIA gets its bad news from CNN, ASIO gets its bad news from Slashdot.
+1 to everything you've said.
There's a reason I'm still with iinet ADSL despite being able to get Telstra cable to my house. After the TPG deal I'm thinking I might just jump ship.
Then again, I'm the kiss of death for ISP's. A few months after I joined Westnet, they were acquired by iinet, a few months after joining Internode they were acquired by iinet, a few weeks after joining iinet the TPG acquisition was announced. I wonder who's big enough to buy Telstra.
I don't think it is pro-bono if you're providing it to paying customers. If anything this should become the norm, similar to the way an insurance company has lawyers to aid in handling automobile accidents.
Insurance companies in Australia do not provide lawyers, they handle the entire thing for you because _that_ is what you pay them for.
ISP's on the other hand, you pay for internet access, not legal access (they're internet service providers, not legal service providers). So offering legal assistance for free is pro bono.
Having lived in Australia a few years, I've been amazed at how good the voting system is (mandatory, with ranking)... and how bad the outcome has been (Howard at the time) despite the good system.
The first problem with the last election was primarily that Murdoch went on an unrelenting attack on Labor. Coverage was so skewed that it wasn't funny.
The second problem was that there were too many back room preference deals. More people voted for Labor than the Liberal party but because the Liberal party had a lot of preference deals with smaller parties they received enough to get them _just_ past the post.
Voter apathy is still a huge problem in Australia and our mandatory voting system is part of it. I still prefer our Instant Runoff Voting system but the 2013 election is a good demonstration of how no system is perfect.
"Seriously I am living in Islamic country right now. (snip) I couldnt understand how any sane person knowing the alternatives would want this."
You're saying you know the alternatives, you're saying someone who chooses to live there knowing the alternatives isn't sane, and you're saying you live there. So, you're saying you're not sane...right? And if so, why should I take your word on the rest of it?
I've actually lived in a Muslim country, in fact the largest Muslim country in the world.
I lived and worked in Yogyakarta, Indonesia for 6 months. There were bars I could get beer in (in fact they were open longer than bars in Australia were permitted to), bacon was never hard to find. I was never forced to convert, people were friendly, I'd have no hesitation about going back to Yogya despite it being predominantly Muslim.
What the anti-Muslims dont want you to realise is that 99.9% of Muslims just want to get on with their daily lives. They've got jobs, families, homes, friends and dont really care that much about holy wars, much the same as 99.9% of Christians, Taoists, Shintoists, Atheists, LeVeyan Satanists and so forth. Using a few nutjobs as a representative of all Islam is like condemning all westerner by analysing the KKK.
Oh, and before someone trots out the old "well why dont they do something about the crazies, blah, blah, blah". They do speak out against them. I was in Yogya when 7/7 happened in London, every single person, regardless of creed was appalled, the problem with crazies is that they dont listen to sane people. Beyond this, I find those who are the first to point fingers at normal Muslims for doing nothing tend to be the last to act against the radical elements in our own society, mainly because they tend to support that radical element (so pot, kettle, black).
the holden is built in oz, not imported....
Actually most cars sold in Australia aren't built here.
Also an Australian made V6 Camry (we call it the Toyota Aurion) costs the same as it does in other countries. So Holden/GM are a really bad example especially considering that Australian made cars aren't really exported (Holden have exported less than 10,000 VE and VF commo's, Ford exported 0 Falcons in the same time).
Price differentials are due to car manufacturers deliberately pricing cars higher in Australia, not the minimum wage.
HOLDEN not honda
Holden is the australian GM brand which is why i compared it to chevy, keeping it apples to apples
Honda is a better comparison (but doesn't support your theory). Holden is not Chevy. Most of the Holden fleet is being supplied by Opel (Germany) or Daewoo (GM Korea). None of the American made cars are available here and when local manufacturing ceases (good riddance, the subsidies and protectionism can now stop) Holden are replacing the Commo with the Opel Insignia OPC as GM America have plainly said we're not making the Camaro or Corvette in proper hand drive.
true, but the cost of a chevy (holden to you) down there is about 2x what it costs here. so yeah, you are making more but your costs are higher so what is the difference?
Which is entirely due to the manufacturer.
A Holden Barina spark does not cost any more to import into Australia from South Korea than a Chevy Spark does to import into the US.
In fact you'll find the Spark costing approximately the same in both our nations, around $13,000 USD. Same with most Kia's, Toyotas, Hyundais and so forth. Its only certain manufacturers (*cough* euro *cough*) who jack up the prices for Australia. This is the reason that grey imports for cars are likely to be approved in the near future.
Actually its the other way around. Finance and accounting tend to think IT workers are amongst the better people with money. Most IT workers have more discretionary funds than other forms of workers and tend to make better financial decisions. We tend not to rack up stupid debts and fall victim to "buy now, pay later" or "no money down" scams which end up being huge money sinks.
Now you would have had a point if you said "marketing and sales people" but being told that a marketing and sales person thinks you're wrong is a pretty good complement.
The Tea Party's issue is the national debt.
That's interesting, I thought it was "Taxed Enough Already."
Nope, Its a mechanism by the Republican party to prevent voters from voting Democrat by giving them something else in the Republican party to vote for.
They really should have called it the "I can't believe it's not the Republican" party.
Australia has something similar called the National party. Because the Liberals (our conservatives) continually screw over rural Australia but rural Australia are too thick and pig headed to vote against them they vote National and pretend they aren't voting for the Libs.
At least it isn't as bad as the recent UK election, where UKIP had significant support in terms of individual voters, yet only ended up with two seats.
Thats an example of the system working. The last thing the UK needs is a party like UKIP dictating terms to a hung parliament.
Auctions. They are they ultimate free market. People bid on something up to the point they believe the product is worth. No government interference or price controls.
Price reserves are a price control.
Besides this, tenders are better as you aren't legally bound to accept an offer you dont like. Tenders have the advantage of not telling the purchaser what you will accept, so a purchaser may offer far in excess of what you wanted, also Auctions can turn against the seller when buyers refuse to bid (which is why you have to have a reserve).
an uber driver who is on his way to pick up a passenger is most certainly on the job
he started working when he accepted the fare and headed to the pickup point
Most insurance companies will not care if they had a job or not if it can be demonstrated that they were recently using the car for commercial purposes.
Definitely in Australia, if you had just finished an Uber job and run into the back of a Mercedes SL, even if you hadn't accepted another job your private insurance will legally be considered null and void as you were using the car for commercial purposes for that trip. The insurer of that SL will be permitted to come after you and Uber for the costs with no limitations.
I have no doubt insurers in other nations have similar regulations.
Sigh,
Is that any worse than "we need regulation because this *has now* happened.
As much as you dont want to admit it, the scenario the GP used is not a "once in a million years" event. In fact its quite likely to happen even if we remove the "hopped up on stims". Hell, just a 4 hour shift without a break is enough to produce enough fatigue that it's the equivalent of driving with a BAC above 0.08%. Now consider an 8 or 12 hour shift.
Your logical fallacies are stereotype threat and appeal to probability.
The problem is you're dead wrong with the appeal to probability.
A rational person will analyse it. The problem you have is that the numbers dont add up for you.
The risk of having an accident is not a fixed thing, it increases with the number of hours you spend on the road. In Uber's case it also increases with the number of drivers. Ordinary transport companies have mitigation procedures to reduce this loss ranging from additional training and increased insurance to punitive measures like employment suspension and termination and in many nations professional drivers are subject to higher punitive measures than private drivers (the penalty for a truck driver speeding is 3-5x that of an ordinary driver in Australia).
Uber is not doing anything to improve the safety of its drivers, so as more drivers spend more time on the road, the likelyhood of a fatal accident becomes ever more likely. Given that Uber drivers are not professional drivers, this increases the risk significantly.
So the risk of being injured or killed by an Uber driver is a real threat and has already surpassed the chance of being injured or killed by an ordinary private driver (which is greater than being injured or killed by a professional driver) by the simple fact that Uber drivers spend more time on the road, increasing fatigue. We'll ignore the extra pressure caused by time constraints, talking passengers and so forth for now, I dont really need those to make my point.
Again you're wrong here. Uber is not competing on the same terms as ordinary taxi companies. They pay no tax, they dont pay for insurance, it is a false economy and the problem with false economies is that they always fail in the end. In Uber's case, we're just waiting for that one fatal crash in a country with decent liabilty laws. Taxi companies here are protected because they pay tax, license fees and insurance so this limits their liability, Uber receives no such protection so when that one fatal crash happens, insurance companies will be allowed off the leash to tear Uber to shreds. Uber being killed by regulation would be a far kinder death.
Medallions limiting taxis increase cars, not the other way around. If you can walk out and hail a cheap cab any time of day, anywhere in the city, why would you ever want to own a car?
Because you like to drive.
Because you want to just pick up and drive somewhere.
Because you dont want to wait 15 minutes to take a 10 minute drive to the shop.
Because you live out in the suburbs or just outside of town.
Because you have kids and dont trust someone being paid less than minimum wage to drive safely.
Because you dislike the mafia-like organisation that illegal taxi operations inevitably become.
Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Reality disagrees with that assertion. London for a long time has had minicabs (private cars for hire) as well as an excellent public transport systems, London is truly a city where you can live without a car and they've still had to introduce congestion taxes to reduce the number of cars because people want to own a car, there are significant benefits to owning a car that outweigh the cost of car ownership.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, some of these regulations are clear attempts to just protect the taxi industry from new models. On the other hand, some of the regulations (like having some basic insurance to cover if things go wrong) are pretty reasonable. On the gripping hand, both Uber and Lyft are both just blatantly ignoring regulations in many jurisdictions, and whether or not one thinks the laws should be there, it is hard to think that having cheaper car services is such a compellingly necessary service that it can morally or ethically justify ignoring laws.
If you wish to speak of morals and ethics
If you wish to speak of morals and ethics, I suggest you go and live where illegal taxi services have been operating for decades. There are good reasons for taxi regulation and they've been quite effective at preventing illegal taxi services becoming organised crime.