Peter Thiel used the word 'unfair' as you would expect, in the context of saying that monopolies are successful for exactly the same reasons that they are unfair. And that, as a founder, people should be looking to build monopolies (which are unfair by definition).
By "skirting around" do you mean "blatantly flouting"? Because that's the truth of it..
Uber, Lyft, et al are just central dispatch for gypsy cabs. I don't see any reason they shouldn't get massive fines or seized vehicles in all locales they operate.
> Uber, Lyft, et al are just central dispatch for gypsy cabs.
True fact: Every single Uber and Lyft vehicle which I've ridden in, in New York City, has a Taxi and Limo Commission plate on it in the T123456C format. The so-called "gypsy cab"+ market consists of the vehicles without those plates.
First, the drivers aren't even Romani. Second, the NY Times has used the phrase, quite often. Granted, with a quick Google I couldn't find a more recent NYT reference than 2008, so maybe they changed their mind.
Pulitzer Prize winning columnist William Safire, perhaps best known as a long-time syndicated political columnist for the New York Times and the author of "On Language" in the New York Times Magazine, a column on popular etymology, new or unusual usages, and other language-related topics[1], explains in the NY Times:
Just because some people take offense
at a word, however, does not automatically
banish the word from the English language.
...
it is hypersensitive to take it as a slur
This makes your argument worse, not better. The term "gypsy cab" derives from a racist stereotype of the Romani[1]. How can a term with a racist etymology not be racist?
Imagine any group of people appropriating traditionally-derogatory ethnic slurs for another group to describe themselves. How is that okay?
As for the Pullitzer Prize winner, that article is from 1986, more than a bit out-dated. Bizarrely, the author even defends the verb "to gyp" as not being racist because it's only one syllable. Imagine the sheer outrage if the verb "to nig" came into popular usage and referred to a negative stereotypical activity.
Why am I even arguing this? The fact that the term "gypsy cab" uses the name of an ethnic group to refer to a stereotypically negative trait of that group should completely and utterly speak for itself.
Because you don't agree with Safire, who stated quite clearly:
Egyptians, from whose name the word gypsy
erroneously originated, are usually unaware
of the etymology and are not offended.
(Gypsy cab, which uses both syllables,
stresses the ''wandering'' meaning of gypsy,
which is descriptive and not derogatory.)
Edit: You seem to be saying
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in
rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what
I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
Never mind the opinions of people who made a living writing about the meaning of words.
Based on your racist and derogatory statements, I have to wonder if you're involved in the taxi industry.
The fact is, taxi lobbies are just protection rackets. I don't like Uber at all due to the way they treat their customers and drivers, but ridesharing is the future and the taxi mob is desperate to stop them from growing. If that means paying off the local law enforcement and city officials to illegally and unconstitutionally seize law abiding citizens' vehicles (including regular folks dropping off or picking up family and friends, which boggles the mind), they will do it.
The problem is that even if you can't own a person wholesale anymore in this country, you can own the right to be the sole provider of one type of service to that person, and charge them exorbitant rates. To the taxi lobby, the citizens of New York are not free men, but their property as customers. Uber and the like are therefore dirty thieves, abolitionist usurpers.
The taxi lobby will also say that it's all for your own safety, even as unlicensed taxi drivers in licensed cabs proliferate. (fun story: I've had colleagues whose luggage was held hostage while driven to an ATM because the driver didn't want card payment because he wasn't driving the cab legally. good luck pursuing recourse for that.)
Your colleagues should/could have played the game. Just sit there, in the cab. Either he takes the payment that they offer or they get to leave. As long as they're sitting in the cab, it's not making any money.
Force him to decide to either take their payment or write off the loss from the ride because he can't get any other fares while they're occupying the seat. What's he going to do? Call the police and tell on himself?
Wait, I don't understand. Because this person used a term that you describe as a racist and derogatory term, you are claiming the entire taxi industry is racist? As I asked elsewhere, how is this term racist and derogatory?
> As I asked elsewhere, how is this term racist and derogatory?
Gypsy is a racially problematic term.
Using that term to refer to unlicensed cabs links travellers (who may or may not be Roma) to crime and dangerousness.
If you care about this kind of stuff it's probably a good idea to move to phrases like "unlicensed cabs". You get some benefit it's more useful for an international audience.
"Gypsy" may also refer to Irish Travellers (Pavees), and possibly even to other insular nomadic cultures, not just Roma. I wouldn't be surprised if a travelling carnival worker had ever been called a gypsy.
The term itself is derived from Egyptian, which just goes to show how little people care about actual facts when labeling outsider groups.
And if you really want to be politically neutral as well as culturally neutral, "unofficial", "non-medallioned", "hackney", or "jitney" would be better than "unlicensed" or "illegal".
As I responded in the other post where I asked the question, under English law that is the definition of which is the version I was familiar with. Referring to nomadic person regardless of race or origin. I've never understood it to reference a particular race. Hence my confusion on why it would be a racist term. Derogatory I could understand, but not racist.
"Gypsy cab" is a slang term for an unlicensed taxi, and no longer has anything to do with the Romani people. It's not a term I personally use (outside a descriptive context like this), but it doesn't seem intended as an insult.
One of the (I guess intended) effects of using an aniquated slang word is to illustrate that this is not a new problem, but that this very same problem exists for so long that it got its own well known insulting term a long time ago.
Uber and Lyft are licensed livery cabs in NYC. Livery cabs are not allowed to accept street hails, but are allowed to be ordered for pick up in other ways (such as through a phone call). The only way that they would be illegal is if you believe that ordering through a phone app is more similar to street hailing than it is to ordering through a phone call, but I think that is a huge stretch.
There is a very strong case for that line of thinking. The bureaucrats and politicians created an environment where society valued the work on Apollo as well as a very significant budget.
Without the politics, the Apollo missions wouldn't have happened.
It's somewhat obvious, but when you lose your job, you're unemployed.
I got dropped about two months ago. They didn't handle it well; failed to provide a written notice of any kind or immediately provide my final wages.
Since then, I've had an offer that fell through and several interviews. My time in the office has been traded for phone calls with recruiters and filling out forms. There's also a fair amount of leisure time, which I'm starting to divert toward projects.
I'll probably put more effort into my off-hours projects going forward, as I don't want the current stresses of my life to rise in the future.
The games on the right certainly are the originators of the games on the left; in fact, in both cases, the developers of the game on the right were the very team which followed up by developing the game on the left.
If your son is passionate about technology and computers, direct him to learning to code the hard way series. Or pick up a book that will teach programming by creating a series of simple games.
If he his not, stop trying to live vicariously through him.
You'd recommend to an 11 year old to read a book "learning to code the hard way"? Really?
I think you're making a lot of assumptions with a comment like "stop trying to live vicariously through him". Would you have had the same reaction if the question was about sports?
If the question were about sports, then yes, it would be similar. (eg: football) If your child is passionate about football, begs to watch games etc; consider enrolling him in a football league where he will play football and buy him a book that explains real plays that wont talk down to him because he is a child. If you love football and want to see your child play football, but he has expressed no interest in it, it may not be A Really Good Idea(tm).
For an 11 year old, a more visual pseudo programming language (see Scratch or Alice) is more appropriate than jumping into something like PHP or C. Even Codea is a jump... but Lua is pretty friendly for someone seeing code for the first time.
My kids aren't passionate about sports but they play soccer. The question that I could have asked is 'what's the best league in my area to be in?'. I wouldn't expect that readers would jump to the conclusion that we were living vicariously through them.
At any rate, I thought it was a reasonable initial question. We don't push kids into programming, but we do make materials available when they show interest. That's why I'm familiar with what I posted. However a comment such as "stop trying to live vicariously through him" comes across as rather snide.
Disagree on Scratch or Alice being necessarily better. At 11, he can certainly jump into languages like PHP or Python perfectly fine. Many programmers (including many here) started a much younger age than 11 and at a time when Scratch or Alice may not have been available. There's nothing wrong with going straight to those.
Yes, I think that really depends on the kid. Mainly I wanted to point out that there are plenty of learning vehicles that teach the programming concepts without necessarily being 100% text-based coding. For some kids that will excite them more. (That's also why I like WeDo Robotics and Mindstorm.)
Nothing wrong with going directly to programming languages if that's what the kid's into.
