Yeah, definitely. I think most people are likely to be too scared and driving too fast until they’re at least a few blocks away and around a corner to be thinking of anything other than survival themselves. It’s also pretty rare for people to be in their car in the immediate vicinity of the shooting.
I still think the worst part of the whole Uber thing is the corporation sending the gig economy worker into a life and death situation (presumably) without warning so the corporation can make the extra money.
The part I don’t understand is why stock market performance numbers are predicated on being in the market forever. Someone who put money into the market on Obama’s inauguration day and got out when he left office is going to be in roughly the same shape as someone who put money in the market on Trump’s inauguration day, even a little ahead. It seems kind of impractical to have to start every stock chart on May 26th 1896 because those first 100 points were so much easier to get than the last 100 points.
As to your actual point, yes as supply goes down prices should go up or the business is leaving money on the table. However, I would question that on a couple of different fronts. First, taxis strike me as almost being a public service, at least in the neighborhood of public transportation. So letting them dynamically raise prices is problematic. I don’t want the fire department charging more when two houses are on fire. If you truly think taxis can do more good than harm in emergency situations the state should subsidize all taxis into the area, that way the grid will get filled up with taxis and the shooters will be limited to escaping on foot…
Second, I’m no longer a fan of maximizing profits being the goal of companies. We are constantly seeing what that race to the bottom results in. It’s too bad there isn’t enough money out there that wants that to change.
Not surprisingly people are pissed off that Uber and Lyft took advantage of an emergency situation to maximize their profits instead of maximizing their utility to society. If they are smart they’ll fix this in their software instead of just relying on people to forget about it the next time they don’t want to wait on the bus or pay for parking.
The acceptance is because 231 years ago a bunch of rich white dudes wrote
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
so without getting 3/4s of States on board with the idea of adding new text to the Constitution to invalidate that one sentence, guns are legal in USA#1 and can’t be made illegal.
You’ve got this part exactly backwards. Anyway, lets stick with the guns here. We can do the other topic back where it came up.
My whole point is that if you want to maximize utility to society, there would probably be some price change to induce more ubers to go where they are wanted. That price is probably more than 1x (which is what the linked article suggested). It also may well have been less than what Uber was actually charging. If Uber was indeed charging too much, then capping at 1x is a stupid overreaction that doesn’t really help anybody.
Unfortunately, that’s not realistic. I do agree that efforts to make everything better for all are a good thing. However, what you suggest can’t really be done.
Imagine a society that functions exactly the way you would want with respect to emergency services. Now in that society some rich dude decides to buy an armored car, has a driver and an armed security guard with him at all times. I’m afraid his ability to survive an active shooter situation is way better than average. And it’s precisely because he has more money to spend.
I guess I was assuming a non-imaginary society. Even Scandinavian countries which seem to have their shit together on stuff like this still have rich people.
I agree, of course, but I’m talking about capping the surge pricing low. I don’t think the difference in a $10 Uber or $20-30 Uber matters for most people with the Uber app on their phones, and it gets more Ubers to the staging point in my scenario.
Most of us would be for banning all guns over the current situation, or banning most guns (and allowing like bolt-action hunting rifles and maybe revolvers) over any other option… But we’re discussing the current state of affairs in our gun-ridden mass shooting hellscape.
Well only like a third of americans own guns and an even smaller number own semi automatic rifles or assault weapons or whatever. Like I would bet there’s more regular tobacco users in the us than there are people that own assault weapons
Kafkaesque is an extremely accurate way of describing America’s gun laws. They are widely unpopular --like 80%+ of Americans want tougher gun laws, but there is an enormous weight of oppressive, unstoppable legalistic bullshit that keeps us from doing anything about it.
A similar question came up recently between my brother, dad, and I. We were wondering if there are more gun owners or dog owners in the US. Without going back to the Google to jog my memory, the numbers were something like 93 million dog owners and 343 million civilian owned guns. But we couldn’t find the number of gun owners, so had to guess the average owner possessed ~3 guns. Does that sound accurate? Either way, it’s just insane how many guns there are in this country.
According to this, the average gun owner owns 8.1 guns. There are more dog owners than gun owners, but there aren’t too many people with eight dogs because we’d all look at them crazy and think they were nuts… But if you own 8.1 guns, half the population doesn’t bat an eye. What a fucked up situation.
