Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | loktarogar's comments login

Good. Uber has definitely improved the taxi experience in Australia, but operating at a loss to get business with heavy undercutting at the scale Uber did harms the market potentially permanently.

And operating illegally.

I'm not a fan of how taxis in Australia are operated, but the law was there to prevent unapproved businesses to pick up passenger.

The law was ignored and it impacted real people who had owned taxi licence plates, sometimes for generations. At $350k a pop, it was an asset that came under attack.


It only was an "asset" because they created a restricted supply oligopoly. Somehow they were being rewarded for very ordinary service. Uber created a necessary disruption to shake up the identity.

Licences could be non-transferable, to solve this "market".

In many jurisdictions these licences are given for free by the government, and can be sold 150k/200k+.


That asset value is made out of rent. It has baked into it an assumption of market inefficiencies in the form of excess profits.

you think $350k is a fair amount? if anything, the government should have be sued for this non-sense.

Won't somebody please think of monopoly rent seekers?

Uber acted in the same shitty way and ran illegal taxis and price dumped even in places which did not have monopolies. This is their modus operandi, illegally enter new markets and then paying the fines and starting to follow the law once caught.

Exactly. There should be additional penalties each time a parent entity operates this way across regions. Right now 180M is just the cost of doing business in a country for Uber. There is less incentive to not operate illegally for other players.

$180M is 10% of Uber’s global net income for 2023. Sure seems like a lot for one country.

Also, it looks like it wasn’t even for Australia as a whole, just one state?


Uber's global revenue was $22.5B in just the year 2023. This class action lawsuit has been dragging on since 2019. I completely get the 'regulatory capture' aspect everyone is supporting Uber for but breaking laws and regulations as a M.O. needs to be dealt with more than a slap on the wrist.

That's revenue my man. Uber's last quarter income from operations was $658m. So $180m isn't far off 10%. Also look at same time the year before, they are way in the hole. This fine will hurt them (if they ever have to pay it).

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...


Why would you want the other players to not operate illegally?

[flagged]


The point is that the "local laws and regulations" were an unjust monopoly. Ride-hires definitely improved the taxi experience from what it was before.

It was a deliberately tightly restricted market to ensure taxi drivers could make a liveable wage. Now the industry is filled with people forced to work two or three jobs to survive and a tech company is capturing profits off the top. That might be a better outcome for customers but it sure doesn’t seem like one for the workers involved.

It's amazing that one could care to care about maintaining regulatory capture to such an extent that consumer harm is seen as preferable.

"Shows like that" or this show in particular?


Shows using the format where they do an interview and then selectively air parts of it rather than the whole thing. In general The Daily Show and its offspring -- not the interviews that happen in front of the audience in the studio, the ones for the pre-recorded segments.


Have you seen this show at all? It generally dedicates the bulk of its episode to a single story and goes in depth. Not saying this can't be happening, and there's always going to be stuff left out in even a 30 minute timeframe, but it tries to educate on the "complete picture" with nuanced points on a single issue per ep


Further, they're relying on prior reporting. Like Sagan did for science, Oliver is simply popularizing current events. Oliver's not claiming to be like 60 Minutes or Frontline.


With going in depth you mean:

1. Continuously make fun of superficial attributes and mannerisms

2. Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition

3. Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance

Even when I agree with the narrative, the mechanisms by which the audience is persuaded feels quite disingenuous to me. Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism. My perspective is based on episodes I watched in 2016. The small bits I've seen from him and other similar formats since then suggest it is still this way.


It is a comedy show after all. One that tackles very serious subjects in ahumerous way. Doesn make the reporting wrong.

And, this show in particular, gets the fact right almost all of the time. And it provided more context and details on the whole Boeing saga than any other news source I have seen or read so far since the door plug blew out. Heck, going back to the 737 Max crashes I would be hard pushed to find main stream media reporting that was, factually and regarding context, better.


The thing that irked me was the mechanism by which it seemed people were convinced. It could be used to push whatever viewpoint they want to push. While it is a comedy show, they do a for the rest of the industry embarrassingly thorough job of investigating topics. So that puts a lot of responsibility on them.


Yeah, it's a formulaic, juvenile approach, hard to watch more than a little without feeling empty and exhausted. The research seems very solid, but the tone is shallow and teeters on the edge of Fox News-style partisan ragebaiting.


> mechanism by which it seemed people were convinced

If not humor, what mechanism would you prefer?


They're not making fun of Trumps small hands, they're making fun of his belief that hand size is important. So it's not an attack on their appearance.


Thanks! This whole Trumps hand size thing was started by Trump himself.


Speaking as a person with an amazing ability to offend and alienate folks on both sides of the political spectrum.

I like it when John Oliver or whoever goes after corruption and incompetence, but it still has to be said that popular comedy news shows are kind of the left’s version of Fox News in terms of shrillness, pandering, and brainwashing. While episodes on many topics are cringey to watch, at least they aren’t completely post-truth yet. When the writers do wade all the way in to culture war nonsense, I think they do this with a certain self awareness and I like to think they feel bad about it.

It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?

NPR (my old favorite) has jumped the shark. Other outlets generally harass me with paywalls when I’m already forced to sift through a total shit show of a website with op Ed’s no one asked for, celebrity gossip, and lengthy gpt-powered regurgitation all fluffing up the same few short blurbs from the AP wire.

Mainstream media for both the left and the right, domestic and foreign, all have websites with ads like “free WiFi for senior citizens” and “Just add this one weird thing to your toothpaste” next to big brain articles about dealing with disinformation in the next round of elections.

None of this is very confidence inspiring, so no, I doubt they’ll sell many subscriptions, and yeah, I expect quality will continue to decline. So I guess comedian-journalism is probably here to stay, regardless of whether I like the format


> It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?

The journalists are in the same boat as the engineers at Boeing: being held hostage by MBAs management at the behest of shareholders.


The MBAs trying to keep old media afloat are held hostage by shareholders who don't even watch the product. The general public has become increasingly less willing to spend any amount of time (eyes on ads) or money (subscriptions) on broadcast and print journalism. A whole generation of consumers has grown up on ad-free content and cannot fathom how the business model worked so well, pre-AdSense. Even if they can comprehend broadcast and print business models, they refuse to participate and then complain about the rising cost of subscription services; services that are now experimenting with reintroducing advertisements.

Journalists are in a boat that Youtube, Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist and Google search plowed into. Until consumer habits change, the sinking continues.


Have they ever considered ... idk, making a compelling product? They sat around watching the whole Metallica vs Napster saga unfold while calling the internet a fad and writing articles about how "blogs aren't trustworthy".

If they spent that time rubbing two brain cells together, they could have come up with something that, for example, resembled OG Hulu or Spotify -- A product that appealed to the new generation of news consumers instead of expecting them to faithfully put in a doorstep newspaper subscription like their parents did.


Can we please stopping the cringe-meme of blaming MBAs? I assure you, engineers are just as prone to fall for greed and being unethical and sycophantic as MBAs, doctors, journalists or software engineers.


> Continuously make fun of superficial attributes and mannerisms

> Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance

> Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism.

It is foremost a comedy show yes, and they present things in a light hearted way. For an American show that means stuff like that. Mind you the jokes about Trumps' hands are more about something that Trump brings up constantly, a weird public insecurity about the size of them.

> Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition

I mean. I didn't say it doesn't pick a side. But it does go in depth, and it does present opposing arguments reasonably faithfully (even if it immediately rebuts them) (in my opinion!)


I have found the Gell-Mann amnesia affect to be quite strong with this show. Generally I watch it I feel very convinced of the quality of the arguments and their research. The handful of times the topic has been about something I’ve been fairly knowledgeable on, I’ve been surprised by how poor the episode was.

These days I just assume that’s the quality of the average episode and I don’t know enough to know otherwise.


>> Shows using the format where they do an interview and then selectively air parts of it rather than the whole thing.

Isnt this how newspapers work? Isnt this also how journalism works in general? If that wasnt the case, you wouldnt have two/three completely different takes on stories given which side of the political spectrum you're on.


Without some kind of perf api baked into rails, this will require some server side code at the very least. An extension won't work without _something_ on the server.

But, there's also nothing stopping you from adding this during development and not committing it.


Perhaps a future improvement is like how rack-mini-profiler does it, and just injects itself


This is closer to "If you don't open your door, your fridge won't make ice"


Framing it like that makes it much more simplistic than reality. While there are some people you can clearly place into "best" or "worst", most people fit somewhere along a spectrum where their placement changes day to day. You ever had a bad day where you forgot to do something you would have done any other day?

Do you want software that allows you to do anything on a good day but is potentially catastrophic on a bad day?

The answer may still be yes, but regardless it's a more complicated a question than best vs worst.


That's fair, I was being more flippant than necessary. :)


I only seem to see .xyz in the crypto space (and alphabet inc). Generally it's a crypto scam pushed at me in a twitter/x ad. What are some other players on the .xyz tld?


I've used .xyz because the domains go for a few cents per year. And then I moved away from them because it felt so unprofessional.


i've seen lots of devs using it for their personal blogs, i guess because it's cheap. personally, im excited to buy an .lol tonight!


.lol is overpriced and worse, can arbitrarily increase the price in the future. Using anything other than an ICANN-controld gTLD (com,net,org,etc.) or a ccTLD (be very careful about ones from countries other than your own) is a fool.


the domain i was looking at is $1.80/yr so im not upset at the price, and its just for silly personal stuff so if they increase price i could just switch to something else.

good to know about the risks of price hikes though!


First registration is $2 but any renewal is $20 after. A lot of first year domains use different pricing and they are charged differently I think by the TLD holders, so it's not just stupid marketing by like GoDaddy who hopes you don't transfer to another registrar after them taking a loss the first year and huge hike after

A lot of super cheap ones have expensive renewals.


“A fool” is beyond dramatic.


One of the lecturers at my faculty has his academic website on an .xyz domain.


Does he speak any Slavic languages? I know a Russian lecturer who does that in part because he considers it funny to use a TLD that looks similar to the obscene word "хуй".


That's a bit weird of an association. I'm Russian and хуй doesn't usually come to my mind when I see xyz.


> Does he speak any Slavic languages?

Well yes, but not one that uses the Cyrillic alphabet or has this word.


> I’m interested in your ability to maintain very complex business logic over the course of years.

I think this is a bit over the top. You can maintain complex business logic in any language (any language!) for decades with discipline and good software development processes.

Ruby lets you do a lot that could bite you, but it's people who write code.


so, exactly the same as .internal


You didn't quite count that right with the dots ;)


Great! Now I just need to memorise the sha2-256 digest of my favourite memes


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: