March of the Über-mensch

:thinking:

Earlier you were speaking of cars as if people shouldn’t have the right to use them less than x% of the time. Is that still on, or do you just want it to be optional?

Anyway, many people think they need cars because, essentially, they do. Crappy urban planning is too entrenched in most population centers. If you take the bus, not only is it inconvenient and unreliable, but it’s a sign of moral failure. :no_no: They’re like zombiephones. If you don’t have one, people freak out and say but how can I contact you?! as if they’d been born yesterday.

We don’t need to need these things, i.e. society could be better planned in terms of transportation and communication and so on, but Uber is not an antidote for the phenomena of bad urban planning and you-can’t-do-X-without-a-phone; it’s part of them.

(Yes, I know you don’t have a zombiephone. Congrats. And I don’t have a car, but I’d be screwed without my saucer. :flying_saucer:)

What you mean, then, by borderless is not really borderlessness but transnationalism. Those borders are still there to protect them. There’s a warrant for Travis’s arrest in South Korea? No problem, he can just stay out of South Korea! :rainbow:

It’s the same thing with people. Be as nomadic as you like, but in most cases you still have at least one passport, and that passport matters. Being a cosmopolitan “world citizen” is not the same as being stateless.

I’m skeptical when I hear you complaining about the UK (not because I wouldn’t also complain, but because you tend to make it sound like the 9th circle of Hell when I would call it just a hot day without AC). Is whatever tax discrepancy there is really a reaction to modern technology, or just the way things developed before the digital transformation took off, with some slight tweaks since then? And what makes German or Dutch law particularly restrictive in terms of self employment?

We’ve been over this before. Inequality of bargaining power is a recognized phenomenon. If you want to refuse to believe in it, go ahead and refuse. It won’t change reality for anyone else.

Compulsory arbitration clauses can and do get voided – another feature of The Law, as you would say – because they remove basic rights and make for bad public policy.

Repent! The end is nigh, for we have sinned against the almighty Uber! :runaway:

Again, where is the evidence that Uber makes a society healthier overall?

  • De facto lower the minimum wage in an era of rising inequality.

  • Cripple the competition in the traditional “anyone can get a job doing this” industry by breaking the law and being proud of it.

  • Complain that governments are repressing you, with a megaphone so loud it would make Mad Masala blush.

No, I don’t call that a recipe for the betterment and stabilization of society.

Customers tend to like Uber because it’s cheap and supposedly better delivers better service. People trying to make a living tend not to like it, because it’s crap. Customers would still get by without Uber. People struggling to put food on the table would in many (most?) cases be better off doing something else, like… driving a taxi, if the taxi industry weren’t being eaten by a rabid parasitoid.

:face_with_raised_eyebrow:

You see no contradiction between painting executives as altruists and acknowledging that they’re in the business of making money?

Go back and read about Travis. Maybe he’s not a cat person, but his own board found him enough of a cackling nutcase that they sent him to the backroom where he could cackle in private without giving the game away.

Oh, absolutely. But unless you see objectivism as socially positive, you can’t just rely on a bunch of objectivists to do something because it’s possible. You need to arrange things so that they perceive certain behavioral patterns as being in their best interest. Like, say, keep fining them until they decide breaking the law isn’t worth the hassle – money talks! :money_mouth_face:

Or better yet, change the culture so that people don’t perceive objectivists as worthy of emulation. But that’s a much bigger challenge.

Well for starters, Mr. Bigglesworth keeps liking them on social media… :heart_eyes_cat: