I think throwaw181ay is making a different argument, which is essentially that you should license the people (e.g. like a driver's license, which indicates proficiency) and not the thing, which is (basically) the car.
And they do -- you acquire the taxi driver certification ("this guy has good eyesight, isn't a criminal, knows the taxi rules") independently of the medallion ("no more than N cabs may be operating at any given time"). The two regs accomplish different purposes.
As the parent notes, in certain setups (like cap and trade) the tradeability of the license is important for ensuring that the restricted resource is used efficiently: the most economical emitters of carbon get the rights, and the most economical drivers get the medallions.
> the medallion ("no more than N cabs may be operating at any given time")
The whole point of this is to ensure that the price for taxi rides is higher than what the market-clearing price would be. In other words, it's a scam to rip off gthe consumer.
(Similar arguments apply to zoning regulations and house prices, of course)
There are good motives and bad motives behind every law. I don't find it productive to assert, as fact, that the malicious stuff is only kind, without addressing the good that they're ostensibly accomplishing.
You might as well dismiss all cap-and-trade proposals as being "just another scheme to raise energy prices".
As far as I knew, taxi licenses were there specifically to certify that the driver was trustworthy. After all, the service involves getting into a stranger's car...
The whole medallion scheme just reeked of utter rent seeking. It was just a transfer of wealth from the poor (drivers) to the rich (medallion owners) for no reason. As you state, the city could still have restricted the number of drivers and cars though direct-to-driver licenses without the need for medallions.
I thought the original idea was to regulate the sketchy freelance taxis that existed beforehand. The current system of "expensive medallions owned by rich people who then hire poor people to drive the cars for a pittance" is just what happens once capitalism gets hold of a system with poorly thought-out, exploitable rules.
They were very smart to make it that low. At that cost, it becomes a simple no-brainer for the hotel, because it's cheaper than even just one booking refund. It also means it's very low priority for law enforcement.
> That's why it's so frustrating to me when people get on the bandwagon to ban Uber or lyft and say "just take a taxi!"
Does anybody really say that? I live in Austin, where we did essentially ban Uber and Lyft, and even then I didn't hear anybody who was for the tougher regulations on ridesharing argue that taxis don't suck.
You are confusing legal restrictions specifically set up to limit the power of the state with tools every company will use to limit fraud.
For example, you speak of "presumption of innocence" and "burden of proof" as "core concepts of our justice system". These are only core concepts of our criminal justice system; our civil justice system has very different rules for burden of proof, for example.
Some countries have much, much higher percentage of fraudulent transactions than other countries, and it's perfectly reasonable for Western Union to use country of origin as a factor in raising the fraud red flag. Western Union doesn't have the power to arrest anybody, and they have no reason to "presume innocence" for any one of their customers. If anything, when it comes to monetary transfers, I think it's safer to "presume guilt", that is assume all transactions have reason to be fraudulent, and then only let transactions through if you have strong reason to believe they are not fraudulent.
The burden of proof is still on the party forwarding an accusation in civil cases. Presumption of innocence still holds in civil cases.
Presumption of innocence is even in the UN universal declaration of human rights.
What is considered burden of proof would be different, but it is still responsibility of the person forwarding the accusation. What you describe would be an accusation through "probable cause", described as reasonable grounds to conduct a search or investigation.
That being said I think country of origin are not reasonable grounds. Could be an individual sending money home, could be a merchant, could be anything.
> Presumption of innocence still holds in civil cases.
This is just flat out, 100% wrong. Mainly because "innocence" and "guilt" aren't even concepts that apply in civil cases.
All of your responses still seem to assume that businesses somehow have the same level of responsibilities and restrictions of a government, and that is just not true.
It matters less what the ratio of bad actors to population is, and more what the ratio of bad actors to legitimate orders is. In the examples I mentioned above, they were seeing hundreds, perhaps thousands of bad orders without seeing any genuine ones. From countries with known issues of trafficking stolen goods.
The truly genuine customers can contact the company directly and deal with them directly, rather than buying through a site.
When your per-capita GDP is a few dollars a day, the odds that the order for a multi-thousand-dollar consumer electronics item is genuine gets awfully close to zero.
You call it discrimination against an entire country, I call it a sensible policy for a seller to enact. If you'd like to volunteer to police these fraudulent purchases, I'm sure they'd appreciate the help, but when you have an entire department that spends most of its time dealing with orders from two countries, orders which almost always turn out to be fraud, the most sensible way forward becomes nearly self-evident.
As others have mentioned, you seem to draw no distinction between constraints on governments, justice systems, and private policy determined by individuals and companies. I think until you stop confusing the two concepts (and the vocabulary thereof), you'll have a difficult time persuading anyone to come around to your thinking. (To say nothing of forming a coherent ethical argument for why you think this is some great injustice and what possible solutions might be.)
I'm taking exactly that into consideration–Nigeria has a sizable population, but very few people who can actually buy expensive consumer goods from western countries. So the odds are even more likely that orders are fraudulent. This isn't a country with a giant middle class.
Those few are actually in the order of hundreds of thousands if not millions. You are talking about a 173 million people country.
If only 1% of 173 million had a western-like middle-class+ purchasing power, that gives you? 1.73 million. A lot of people you can do business with. Like 4x that of Luxembourg.
You are also not taking into consideration that I, quite frankly, do not have the time or expertise to vet everyone who tries to buy something from me.
Again, it's a matter of perspective. I've seen quite a few well designed 1 bath/1 bed places for 600 sq ft or less. Not hard for me to envision turning the bedroom into another bathroom, with some space left over, and you've then hit pretty much all of your criteria.
Yes, that's part of it. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, but when it's easy to fire people, it also makes it a lot easier to hire them, because there is less of a risk when you make a mistake or need to change direction of your business.
While it's an upheaval to be sure, the vast majority of these laid-off employees have in-demand skills in a growing industry. Who I really feel for is people who get laid off in shrinking industries, where it's basically a game of musical chairs and there are fewer seats each round.
As an introvert, I'm skeptical of the conclusions of this article. Sales will always include a huge amount of customer interaction, and someone who gains energy from these interactions will always have an advantage over someone who finds these interactions tiring.
If anything, I've seen a greater separation of responsibilities, where sales people are supported by technical presales folks who can do a lot of the behind the scenes work.
Depends on what your point is. Both ARC and GC are approaches to limit the complexity and difficulty of memory management. As such, I think it's very reasonable to compare them, because they're different approaches to the same underlying problem.
FWIW, as someone who was a Java programmer for over a decade before learning Objective C right after ARC came on the scene, I greatly prefer ARC over garbage collection. I find the things you have to remember to think about with both ARC and GC (e.g. circular references and unintentionally strongly reachable references) to be about the same cognitive load, but the deterministic, predictable behavior of ARC means you won't have to try to debug random GC hangs that only happen in prod under heavy load and the subsequent fiddling with a million GC options to get performance to be acceptable.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about what is going on. The current Yahoo basically exists of 3 main parts:
1. The Yahoo website and properties that most folks think of when they think "Yahoo".
2. The 15% share of Alibaba
3. The share in Yahoo Japan.
Verizon bought part #1. That is not changing its name and will continue to be accessible on yahoo.com. Parts 2 and 3 are being left behind in a company that is being renamed Altaba.
