

Uber vs. Piketty - hga
http://cafehayek.com/2015/08/uber-vs-piketty.html

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venomsnake
> While working together earlier this week on a business trip to California,
> my Mercatus Center colleague Ashley Schiller and I were chatting about Uber
> and the assaults that governments are now launching on this amazing
> innovation

Calling Uber amazing innovation means you have no idea what you are talking.
It is neither amazing nor innovation.

And if the government was really assaulting Uber they would have used RICO.

~~~
hga
Well, in the context of the thesis that companies like Uber are allowing
people to partly convert consumption assets into production ones, to an
economist it strikes me as not unreasonable he'd describe it as both "amazing"
and an innovation.

That's certainly a very interesting concept, and new in the modern era, I
think. Closest I can think of right now is selling surplus solar power your
home is generating back to the utility, a somewhat different thing.

~~~
venomsnake
You know about the many self thought programmers that learned on their own
PC-s ... since the late 70s.

~~~
hga
I don't think education is this sort of consumption or production, in fact,
when did people start buying PCs more for consumption? E.g. games and
telecom/the Internet?

Comparable might be buying more PC that you need, and selling the extra
cycles. There have been for some time schemes that do that for non-profit
uses, e.g. math
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_Search))
and science
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home)),
I now notice a huge list of them:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects)
But I think I would have heard of any "make money at home!" schemes....

