Posts by Insert sadsack pun here 457 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Nov 2017
This is good news for consumers - not just from a safety perspective, but also because it will shatter Uber's monopoly in one of the biggest European markets. If Uber is banned and binned, it will open the door for competitors like Bolt, Ola, Kaptan, Wheely, Careem, Gett and others. Equally, regulators should find it easier to regulate multiple weak companies than one behemoth.
The Uber bubble is going to burst. You can't carry on losing money on every ride forever, and there's no way for Uber to make money other than total domination of the market, which is both impossible for them and bad for us. The Uber app was great - it's time to move on to other providers.
As a bitter former "professional advisor": because that's what the client wants. No-one ever reads the fucking reports in which you painstakingly explain what you've found, how you reached that conclusion, and what it means. People can barely be bothered to read the one page executive summary for a $200,000 piece of work. And these are the bastards who are running the companies in which your pension funds are invested!
"another entity, say, the EU, who will guarantee academic freedom and foster intellectual endeavors."
How's academic freedom doing in our sister states like Poland, where it's a criminal offence to contradict the government's position that "Poles did nothing wrong in WW2", or Hungary, which recently shut down the Central European University for getting too uppity? Or even here in the UK, where people like Peter Hitchins (who's certainly a disagreeable windbag, but hardly a Nazi) gets no-platformed at universities?
Wait a minute - are you telling me your review of Leo Burnett Tailor Made? I'd be very disappointed to hear you didn't like the product placement of Leo Burnett Tailor Made on Wikipedia. I hope that other clients of Leo Burnett Tailor Made can share opinions here, free and online. Presumably when planning advertising and marketing campaigns with Leo Burnett Tailor Made, international and regional clients will be interested in how Leo Burnett Tailor Made's previous campaigns (such as that for The North Face on Wikipedia) have been received.
Islington is about 5 miles from top to bottom. If you had a straight, traffic free road for the whole length, youd make that trip in 10 minutes at 30mph or 15 minutes at 20mph, so you'd be moaning about a 5 minute delay. However, the above circumstances literally never ever happen, as it's probably the most densely inhabited and trafficked LA in the UK. What you're actually moaning about is a delay of seconds, and a benefit of fewer accidents, less serious accidents and lower pollution.
"Those data sets twenty years ago were from real time road sensors and local police / highway patrol and Catrans / WSDOT sources. Waze adds little to the mix."
Possibly a fair comment in the Bay Area, but Waze adds a fuckload to the mix where that infrastructure doesn't already exist and there is no viable prospect of having a government capable of creating that infrastructure eg in developing countries.
Because the licensed ones don't know where my street is; I don't really put a big price premium on them knowing where it is; they don't give me real time tracking of where they are; they don't give me a searchable recoverable receipt; they don't drop their receipt into my company's expense software; they use rattly cold cabs; and they absolutely frigging obsessively feel the need to turn down a side street every sixty yards.
"who are the state government going to care about most - the likes of Goggle, or the people who vote for them?"
Neither really. They're going to care about the people that pay them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dominion-energys-dominion-over-virginia-goes-way-beyond-ralph-northam/2018/11/30/052e3a56-f421-11e8-99c2-cfca6fcf610c_story.html
"Why are they not building their own solar and wind farm and then sticking two fingers up at the power company?"
Because Dominion Energy has a legal monopoly on power generation and distribution in the state. Fairness is supposed to be ensured by the fact that state government approves the tariffs charged to customers (residential and industrial). Unfairness is ensured by the fact that Dominion Energy is allowed to make political donations to state politicians - and they do so with gay abandon.
https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/dominion-virginia-monopoly-democrats_n_5a7de928e4b08dfc9303d14b
"training ... differs from real-life, because it's simulated, therefore, not that much stress"
That's why we at Cowherd Airways train our pilots with realistic stress levels in the simulator - by slapping them in the face, insulting their mothers, threatening their children and giving them the occasional zap with the BOFH-endorsed cattle prod.
"What's now making it worse is that a previous indicator of being in business on one's own account - provision of equipment - is being ignored."
There's no change and the courts didn't ignore it. That's just one of the indicia of being a contractor, but it's never been determinative. There are plenty of employees who have traditionally brought their own tools, but that has never meant they're contractors just because they did so.
Every case is going to be context specific. I don't see why a statutory test replacing a well-used body of law that's been built up over time would be an improvement.
" looking with dismay and horror at their bill after travelling within 5 miles of the Serbian or Turkish border..."
Although it has a border with Serbia, Montenegro doesn't have a border with Turkey (well, not unless Erdogan's done something pretty dramatic overnight).
Are you sure you weren't in Bulgaria, which is the only country to have borders with Serbia and Turkey...?
"It wants to be compensated for what it says were monopolistic practices that broke Californian and federal law."
No, it's not, you're misunderstanding the timeline. Sidecar is saying that Uber engaged in *anti-competitive* practices in the past in order to become a monopolist now. Sidecar did not say that Uber was a monopolist at the time it engaged in anti-competitive practices, and the court doesn't need to find that Uber is or was a monopolist in order to find that its anti-competitive behavoiur caused loss to Sidecar.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
