I found the article quite humorous, and I assume that the article was intentionally sarcastic. But of course, these days Poe's law might even apply to more traditional publishers.
This kind of piece is usually boring (not only The Guardian ones btw), but they have an important purpose: remind us of the ridiculousness of our culture. We need every help possible, believe me
I thought the article had an entirely appropriate level of snark. The Valley's level of self-congratulation for achieving the mundane becomes insufferable without regular doses of cynicism. It's good to get chopped back down to reality every once in a while.
> By “convenient” they mean anonymous people on minimum wage clean up after you.
Hey, let's not stigmatize the upper middle class actually hiring people to do worthwhile work. That's how jobs, small businesses, and economic growth happen.
> As was quickly pointed out by numerous people this is basically a “bus”. Just, you know, without the poor people.
Likewise, this is a good idea. People sharing rides in smaller buses that can service different routes is good. Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more. It gets everyone where they need to go with fewer cars (and therefore pollution and traffic).
> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more
I asked someone from my local bus service once. Their answer was that it's not economically viable for the public bus service, as the only major saving was fuel cost and the extra services don't provide enough revenue to offset the employee cost (otherwise they could service it with the large normal busses).
So basically this becomes viable with increased ticket prices or self-driving busses. The technology isn't quite there yet for the latter, and governments don't like price differentiation in bus lines.
* Maintenance cost per line might go slightly down, but apparantly overal it's more expensive because they need to maintain technicians and parts for more models.
Well, some startups think they can make it viable. Either they can or can't, but making fun of them for reinventing "buses" isn't going to help.
Likely any company in this space is looking to as many users as possible while breaking even, banking on self-driving tech developing in the meantime. When the vans drive themselves, the economics will change drastically.
That's when you don't hire employees but entrepreneurs, you know, gig economy so you only need to pay them for however much rides they manage to get instead of a living wage like old fashioned bus drivers get.
...facebook wasn't the first social network. To be clear, I'm not arguing it's a great idea. I'm arguing that it's not worth dismissing the work as ludicrous.
The fact that I'm arguing this on HN of all places makes me wonder what happened to the attitudes of hackers, geeks, and entrepreneurs. Let people do something dumb and fail. It's OK to do that sometimes. If it's dumb, don't invest in it.
1. Something between taxis and buses could theoretically be viable.
2. Many cities already have rush hour fees on public transportation (or equivalently discounts for off-peak passes) so some price differentiation in bus lines seems possible.
> 2. Many cities already have rush hour fees on public transportation (or equivalently discounts for off-peak passes) so some price differentiation in bus lines seems possible.
I have never seen that anywhere in Europe or Canada, does that mean there are two different tickets with different prices, and you have to have both if don't know exactly when you're going to take your bus?
Also, I wonder how it works with a monthly or yearly pass.
I've seen it in a few places, and it's common on the London Underground where you have a peak/off-peak fare - you're charged for pay as you go and it's your responsibility to know which fare you're going to be charged for the journey.
It's also common on the trains, where most have a peak price (usually only in the morning).
For season tickets (monthly, yearly), all fares are usually included (i.e. your pass allows you to travel any time, very rare to find an "off peak only" seasonal pass, although some people, like OAPs have them).
It makes sense in large European cities because people won't take their car (if they even have one) because transit is more expensive during rush hour, instead they will try to adjust the time they use transit.
And yeah, to answer GP I had forgotten that London has such a system that makes it quite easy to implement different fares for off-peak travel, I'm more used to places with fixed fares.
> 1. Something between taxis and buses could theoretically be viable.
Very common in South America, it's called collectivo and it's awesome. It's basically very inexpensive, shared taxis that have pre-determined routes. But you can talk to the driver and he might go off his route a bit if it's not too inconvenient.
> Their answer was that it's not economically viable for the public bus service
There's a huge number of dollar van systems all around the world, they're usually profitable, sometimes profitable enough to wage wars against competitors.
Public buses: Big, amenities, lose public money.
Private minibuses: Small, rough, earn profit.
Moreover, they can totally turn the table with regards of quality of life. Village where my granma lived had a bus from the city maybe once per for hours. Now it has some bus still, but also a minibus every 15 minutes! That's a game changer.
Police aren't there to prevent the first offense - only to clean up afterwards. Regulation (read: licensing, etc) is more pre-emptive in heading off some of these issues.
There's only so many minibuses. It's not an infinite number, so obviously, first offences occurence will be naturally limited by this fact.
Regulation also costs society money, indirectly taken from your wallet.
You spend a lot of money without even solving a problem, because there's no certificate for honest person.
I would say, regulation costs 10x of cleaning up afterwards, which you still have to do. I would wait for the first offence if it was me.
Having ridden public transit in the USA, dollar vans that I have ridden elsewhere have a long way to go before their sanitary status deteriorate as much. I'm talking about scary sticky floors everywhere. Light rail in Sacramento is ghetto on the wheels, and don't pretend blaming it on poverty since dollar vans were in much much poorer areas than CA.
If anything, driver of private vehicle cares more about their vehicle, it being private. Who cares for public ones?
driver of private vehicle cares more about their vehicle, it being private
That's how it starts. But then one bus driver figures that if he gets together a loan, he's able to buy a bunch of buses and hire a bunch of drivers and scale up his income.
Next thing you know, he's trying to evade liability when one of his dodgy buses has an accident, or he's trying to avoid repaying the loan, or he's cheaping out on driver skill. If the whole house of cards falls down, he sets up another shell company via a relative, transfers the assets across via a sale, and continues on his merry way.
The private bus owner with the well-maintained bus goes out of business because the he's outcompeted by the scale efficiencies of the fly by night operator.
You can obviously hold a call for bids on dollar van routes, so that the best routes go to most capable companies and upstarts have to choose between less desirable routes.
Other than that, you could write same things about bakeries and not buses. But we still have a lot of inexpensive private bakeries around.
We already have highways full of private vehicles with no rules about responsible upkeep. Bus operators have an incentive to keep their vehicles working and not get wrecked.
There are dollar vans in NY, that supposedly regulated and still profitable. It's really weird how developed world mostly ignores third-world model of private mini-buses.
I’ve been on a third-world minibus. In comparison to developed nation public transport, it was overcrowded by a factor of two, it only set off when it was full and not to any timetable, and (from what my partner told me after living there for years back when she was a teenager), most of the drivers constantly consume stimulants so they can work for 15-hour days.
(I would also describe the minibus as poorly maintained, but that’s by European standards — I was really surprised by the poor condition of American vehicles on each of my three visits, and it didn’t seem significantly worse than an American vehicle).
This depends on a country, I've seen some where it's municipal bus, that is overcrowded, and mini-bus is a more "premium" service. But anyway, do you think you should force them to pay twice the price by removing the overcrowding? It's just a revealed preference, like with airplanes, people prefer price to comfort. Modern startup in this area can experiment with a different price for standing/sitting.
If this jitneys are really worse, there is no need to forbid them, municipal buses will outcompete jitneys.
No one is forbidding "jitneys". What is being discussed is maintaining certain safety standards that, as an individual, one might not consider significant enough to care about, but on a societal level, make everyone's lives better.
For example, someone can undercut you on price by taking risky shortcuts. Therefore your product or service won't sell, but as a society, it's better for everyone that certain standards are met. Hence, regulations on electrical work and plumbing, etc. Same thing with driver's training and sleep minimums.
Real life example is the recent bus crashes in New York City from overworked or underpaid Chinatown buses.
Back in early nineties in Russia, when the public transport system ceased to exist in almost all second tier cities and below. People were relying in people driving on mini-van taxis that were driving "approximate routes" where the driver was changing his route at will to get more passengers.
You was signalling to the driver by hand to be picked up, telling where you go, and he will tell if his current route passes by that place.
I was just in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the city is chock-full of these tiny taxi-buses called "marshrutki". You can use the regular public transit card and everything — costs the same as a regular bus IIRC. Seems to work great and has since Soviet times.
It has to be resurrection of the idea in [probably] better way. These marshrutki were prohibited/heavily restructured long time ago, because everything was wrong with them: drugged drivers, half-working brakes, non-closing doors, refuelling with passengers inside, overloading, uncontrolled cash. These still appear in smaller cities (in much better state), but it is surprising for me to hear about it in SPB.
Not a St.Petersburg citizen though, maybe they managed it right way from the start, but these minibuses appeared long since SU (assuming we’re talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZelle ). Transporting system of SU was a thing that I really hated in my partially soviet childhood. “Let’s go to ...” was one of worst things I could hear.
> Hey, let's not stigmatize the upper middle class actually hiring people to do worthwhile work. That's how jobs, small businesses, and economic growth happen.
It should be at least a little stigmatized. Having upper middle class people be able to afford lots of labor intensive services is a sign of an unhealthy society with too large an income gap.
In a developing economy like China or India, it does provide a good opportunity to transfer wealth from rich urban dwellers to poor rural residents. It isn’t clear how development could happen otherwise if some weren’t allowed to get rich first, and then pull up the lower classes.
As a developed economy, much fewer people can afford house keepers in the USA. Our cleaning tech is better to compensate.
Nobody is mandating minimum wage here. And housekeeper is not a dead end job. People can small businesses or use good references and clean records (i.e., proven to be trustworthy) to move into all kinds of jobs.
Also cleaning houses is great work for responsible teenagers. They don't have to pay mortgages or anything.
At least by me, housekeeping is usually paid in cash and presumably under the table. It's not really going to help Uncle Sam, but I imagine it's helping people who need it stay afloat.
> Having upper middle class people be able to afford lots of labor intensive services is a sign of an unhealthy society with too large an income gap.
Getting well off people to spend is a great way to spread that wealth around. Especially when the money is going to sole proprietors and small businesses, as is typically the case for housekeeping, landscaping, etc.
Not having a middle class that can afford lots of labor intensive services is in my opinion even more a sign of a income gap, since it means that either you're very rich, or too poor to afford such services.
In an economy with a very broad and strong middle class and less extreme income distribution, the working class can demand higher wages than the middle class can afford. This was the case in the US during its strongest economic periods in the second half of the 20th century.
That is with charging $5/day capped at $100/month, so if fares were to cover the entire cost, the cost would be $500/month.
So, public transit provides a bare bones, horribly uncomfortable, and inconvenient transit experience, at a cost that is only slightly lower than a car.
And public transit systems are too inefficient to operate outside of high traffic hours at all.
If someone in tech can figure out how to offer a shared transit system that people will actually pay for without being forced to that would be a major innovation. No public transit system has ever done it.
Mass transit is generally funded progressively, i.e. people with higher incomes pay proportionately more (via taxes) than those with lower incomes. Are you really arguing to make it regressive? There are no virtues to a regressive structure unless you have some serious animus against lower income people.
In fairness, private transit (e.g. cars) is also extremely inefficient, with gas taxes only paying for roughly half of the cost of roads, signage, lighting, maintenance &c. And then there's the cost in land value of parking lots, the cost to society of car accidents (until very recently, more people died due to car accidents than to guns), the emotional cost of being stuck in a little vehicle for hours upon hours a week.
I do wish that public transit were nicer & cleaner. Something like PRT sounds just about perfect.
I could forgive the political bias, if the news would try to describe reality and only... you know, focus on certain aspects of reality more, and certain other aspects less. That is, if they would let politics influence their priorities, but not their facts. (Having such newspapers is still suboptimal, but as long as no one is lying, you could at least try to get a more nuanced vision of the world by buying multiple newspapers with competing points of view.) However, Guardian already goes beyond that.
> While food replacement beverages have been around for a while in the guise of things like Ensure or Slimfast, they’ve traditionally been targeted at older people and women, that is, people who are basically irrelevant to “tech bros”. Soylent, on the other hand, was made by and designed for young men in tech and had cool branding.
Did this scribbler even read the web pages of Slimfast and Soylent? I mean, in the age of internet and google, it should not be that hard to get the most basic information at least approximately right. Unless one is not even trying, and instead optimizes for outrage...
The essential difference between Slimfast and Soylent is not that the former is "old women's food" and the latter is "evil white cishet tech bro food". The difference is the former is advertised as something that makes you slim, fast. It's in the very name, how can you miss that, Guardian journalist? And if you look at the box, it says "lose weight, clinically proven". So, you just have to be slightly smarter than the average Guardian journalist to find out that Slimfast is supposed to make you lose weight.
Meanwhile Soylent tries to be "a complete blend of everything the body needs", a "complete nutrition" with "zero preparation". This is not a well-guarded secret, I am just reading information from their title web page I found using google. So, the point is that these two products try to achieve a completely different goal. It's not about tech bros refusing to eat food for women, as Guardian suggests.
If a newspaper cannot get even this basic information right, the only reason to read it is to get your daily dose of fresh outrage. No thanks.
It’s an opinion article, which obviously has an axe to grind. The standards of journalism are, were, and ever will be different for opinion than for reporting. The point of this article was to poke fun at the sometimes silly tech culture.
Also, the comparison to Slimfast isn’t that egregious. I mean, Slimfast was always marketed as a way for busy people to conveniently replace meals with a “nutritious” substitute (according to some hand-waving standard of nutrition). Seems a lot like Soylent to me.
The Guardian’s reporting is often excellent. Judging the paper on the perceived slights of an opinion piece is just misunderstanding how news works.
This is Guardians Opinion section. It's not news it's someone's opinion. I don't poorly judge the reputation of NYT or WP based on their opinion sections.
New York City bus drivers earn $21 to $32 per hour [1]. Bus tickets cost $2.75 to $6.50 [2]. That means a bus needs 3 to 12 passengers' fees, every hour, solely to pay for the driver.
> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more. It gets everyone where they need to go with fewer cars (and therefore pollution and traffic).
I've seen this in Russia and Turkey and it works pretty well. My wife's city (small, distant from Moscow) has a few routes and I don't think we ever waited more than 5 minutes for a bus.
I think the author is being deliberately uncharitable. I think what these co-living spaces are proposing is more similar to an officers' mess, if people here have experienced that, than roommates, in that it's sort of like a private permanent hotel with private rooms, dining areas, kitchens, libraries, and staff waiting on you. As a young person it's a really fantastic way to live, very efficient, and it fosters community.
No a mess is not really like serviced apartments. It's more like one big communal house. Most of the areas except bedrooms and bathrooms are communal and you would normally eat together with staff waiting on. It isn't a new idea but most techies probably have not experienced that kind of lifestyle, so will be new to them.
I'd love to live in a living space like a mess if I wasn't married.
I've always thought that a mess for politicians would be a good solution to the parliamentary expenses problems in the UK as well. Could build a mess for the politicians in Westminster where they can all stay. Could be nicely appointed but efficient as they're all together.
They are probably trying to bring the "gated community" concept to the apartment block level.
Gated communities are a very bad sign; outside the US, they are usually found in places where income is very unequal, crime is high, taxes low and public services of very bad quality or inexistent.
It doesn't have to be like this. In fact, a more balanced society improves the lifestyle of everyone, including those who make more (and end up paying more taxes).
Before I'm asked "citation needed", try and imagine which societies I am thinking of.
Serviced apartments typically aren't "permanent", though, they're rented by the night like a hotel rather than on a longer-term basis, so they cost a lot more, to compensate for the high vacancy rate.
There are also permanent serviced apartments. An example that comes to my mind in the UK are the apartments in the Shard, which are serviced by the Shangri La but I believe were sold, not rented.
There is also Ascott in Asia, which are typically collected and comanaged with 5 star hotels. I had a friend who lived in something like this full time when I was living in Beijing.
Student dorms. While we're at it, let's rethink the whole social mess we're in with nuclear families. Vastly inefficient, totally anti-social. We need more communities.
Nuclear families seem to be empirically less poverty-prone than other family arrangements. And there seem to be higher order effects to the success of entire communities when there are relatively fewer nuclear families in the neighborhood.
Well, there are an infinite number of lifestyles to be lived. I doubt there are good numbers on dormitory-style lifestyles, for instance. But current numbers show that married households fare well.
Married households fare well because the tax system and plenty of other institutions favor married households. It doesn't have to the the case.
Marriage is mostly a "capital" redistribution system and with strong public services (ie shared services) there is much less need to focus on the nuclear family as a protection (sharing of ressources) network.
Ex. When a few years back pension laws changed in Japan and housewives got the right to get a pension separately from their husband, the rate of divorce boomed.
There is nothing in the nuclear family that makes in a natural fit to what humans are as social animals.
I do think it has some merit; the comparison to student housing is made, but IIRC there's nothing like that once you've graduated - you're almost forced to get a house of your own, rental or bought. I can imagine for a lot of people it's not actually an improvement, especially if you can't afford a house right after you've finished school.
I know where I live, in NL, there's a few scenarios. One, some people just remain students for ten years until their early 30's, living in student houses like this for that whole time. At least this used to be the case until the government cracked down on scholarships. I don't know if this type appears in the US, I can imagine with university being a lot more expensive year over year it's not that bad.
Another thing, and this goes for me, is that if you're out of school, especially in the city area, it's very hard to find a house. There's social rental which is the affordable rental apartments, but there's a 10+ year waiting list for that - that is, your parents would have had to sign you up for it when you were still a kid. If that's even possible. Then there's the free market, which is more like student houses and such. I've had to do the latter for... I think 8 years, at the end of my education and the first seven or so years of my career until I earned enough to be able to buy a house. (that + other factors, mind you; I think I could've bought a cheap apartment much earlier if I wanted to. Wasn't sure about buying yet 5-6 years ago).
erm, anyway. I think there's some merit to this, give the benefits of shared living but add the comforts of adulthood and working for a living (maintained shared spaces, privacy, etc) and there might be something there, especially in areas where housing is expensive and/or space is limited and/or people don't live in the same spot for more than two years.
It also used to be a very common living arrangement for single people. Boarding houses were very common until they were essentially outlawed through zoning regulations. It's a very logical way of living for people who don't have the option of sharing accommodations with family members.
These have existed before in the USA and been zoned out of existence. You may have heard of SRO hotels, single room occupancy? Otherwise known as flophouses. Basically middle class people look at how poor people live, go “I would never want to live like that.” and make it illegal. Also see tiny houses as a solution to homelessness. The problem is zoning.
>The problem is people.
Bingo. Many, many problems boil down to people making decisions in what they believe to be their own best interest, which ends up either A) harming others (i.e., theft and other crimes) or B) not actually being in their own best interest (i.e., strategic voting).
Plenty of people have done "communal" living before "co-living" was a thing. These sorts of arrangements were commonly associated with hippies or punks, but plenty of "normal" people do it, too.
You are correct, however, that the author is being deliberately uncharitable, which, I believe, Silicon Valley calls "snark."
That's why I brought up the analogy to the officers' mess, which is a very middle class and establishment thing, and shows that communal living is not just a hippy or punk thing.
Seriously. I've seen "co-living" plenty outside the SV context. It's simply the best word to describe the idea.
I do agree that the SV take on the concept has a nasty VC-fund-ishness to it. Co-living environments should be democratic and cooperative, not run like a startup.
I rented in youplus for 1 month. It was decent, but for a little more you can already rent a room, (which however will not be anywhere near as fancy in Shenzhen)
> Earlier this year, for instance, the ridesharing start-up Lyft launched Shuttle, which allows you to “Ride for a low fixed fare along convenient routes, with no surprise stops”. [...] As was quickly pointed out by numerous people this is basically a “bus”. Just, you know, without the poor people.
Implicit Nirvana fallacy. Yes, ridesharing is worse for society then using (and voting to improve) traditional public transportation. But it's still much better than the popular default of each person owning and solo driving a car, which sits idle most of the time taking up valuable urban space.
The author isn't arguing that any of the services or products are a bad idea.
She's arguing against the over-the-top marketing for something entirely ordinary. "We will revolutionise transport with this new invention" instead of "we started a bus route".
I recently read an article in the Chinese press about the new innovations of the shared eceonomy being made. One innovation was a bunch of “shared” washing machines that could be used by anyone as long as they paid a small fee. In other countries, this would have been called a laundromat, but apparently they never existed in china.
i think one problem with buses are the routes are absolutely terrible. in my morning commute i see a bus stop 3 times within 6 blocks, i kid you not. if you have to go from the end of 1 bus route to another it would easily take you over an hour. honestly remove some bus stops and make people walk anb extra block. i feel the same way about our metro system too.
This is the trade-off between accessibility and mobility. Stops in the US (assuming this is where you are) are typically spaced closer together than stops overseas in comparably dense environments.
In general I’d tend to agree that public transit in the US would benefit from sparser stop placement. I’d also offset the loss of accessibility with more investment in paratransit service / reimbursement for accessible taxis. On that basis, I’d get rid of wheelchair lifts on busses, due to the inefficiencies of loading and unloading. But again, that loss of accessibility would need to be totally offset by paratransit / taxi provision.
Honestly, this got me thinking. There are so many things that in fact, SI just re-invent, but .. don't sort of get .. the re-invention.
Is this not just 'the thing' about SI? That all human activities can be computerised. So, its not about 'inventing', but rather 'optimising through computerisation'?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 93.7 ms ] threadHey, let's not stigmatize the upper middle class actually hiring people to do worthwhile work. That's how jobs, small businesses, and economic growth happen.
> As was quickly pointed out by numerous people this is basically a “bus”. Just, you know, without the poor people.
Likewise, this is a good idea. People sharing rides in smaller buses that can service different routes is good. Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more. It gets everyone where they need to go with fewer cars (and therefore pollution and traffic).
I asked someone from my local bus service once. Their answer was that it's not economically viable for the public bus service, as the only major saving was fuel cost and the extra services don't provide enough revenue to offset the employee cost (otherwise they could service it with the large normal busses).
So basically this becomes viable with increased ticket prices or self-driving busses. The technology isn't quite there yet for the latter, and governments don't like price differentiation in bus lines.
* Maintenance cost per line might go slightly down, but apparantly overal it's more expensive because they need to maintain technicians and parts for more models.
Well, some startups think they can make it viable. Either they can or can't, but making fun of them for reinventing "buses" isn't going to help.
Likely any company in this space is looking to as many users as possible while breaking even, banking on self-driving tech developing in the meantime. When the vans drive themselves, the economics will change drastically.
The fact that I'm arguing this on HN of all places makes me wonder what happened to the attitudes of hackers, geeks, and entrepreneurs. Let people do something dumb and fail. It's OK to do that sometimes. If it's dumb, don't invest in it.
1. Something between taxis and buses could theoretically be viable.
2. Many cities already have rush hour fees on public transportation (or equivalently discounts for off-peak passes) so some price differentiation in bus lines seems possible.
I have never seen that anywhere in Europe or Canada, does that mean there are two different tickets with different prices, and you have to have both if don't know exactly when you're going to take your bus?
Also, I wonder how it works with a monthly or yearly pass.
https://www.metrotransit.org/fares-passes
has rush hours surcharge for most buses and light rail as well as more expensive express buses.
It's also common on the trains, where most have a peak price (usually only in the morning).
For season tickets (monthly, yearly), all fares are usually included (i.e. your pass allows you to travel any time, very rare to find an "off peak only" seasonal pass, although some people, like OAPs have them).
And yeah, to answer GP I had forgotten that London has such a system that makes it quite easy to implement different fares for off-peak travel, I'm more used to places with fixed fares.
Very common in South America, it's called collectivo and it's awesome. It's basically very inexpensive, shared taxis that have pre-determined routes. But you can talk to the driver and he might go off his route a bit if it's not too inconvenient.
There's a huge number of dollar van systems all around the world, they're usually profitable, sometimes profitable enough to wage wars against competitors.
Public buses: Big, amenities, lose public money. Private minibuses: Small, rough, earn profit.
Moreover, they can totally turn the table with regards of quality of life. Village where my granma lived had a bus from the city maybe once per for hours. Now it has some bus still, but also a minibus every 15 minutes! That's a game changer.
It's easy to earn a profit when you don't pay taxes or have to worry about liability insurance.
UPD: But yes, they do have some paperwork. Its relevance is open to the debate. However, same applies to any paper coming out of public bus system.
Regulation also costs society money, indirectly taken from your wallet. You spend a lot of money without even solving a problem, because there's no certificate for honest person.
I would say, regulation costs 10x of cleaning up afterwards, which you still have to do. I would wait for the first offence if it was me.
If anything, driver of private vehicle cares more about their vehicle, it being private. Who cares for public ones?
That's how it starts. But then one bus driver figures that if he gets together a loan, he's able to buy a bunch of buses and hire a bunch of drivers and scale up his income.
Next thing you know, he's trying to evade liability when one of his dodgy buses has an accident, or he's trying to avoid repaying the loan, or he's cheaping out on driver skill. If the whole house of cards falls down, he sets up another shell company via a relative, transfers the assets across via a sale, and continues on his merry way.
The private bus owner with the well-maintained bus goes out of business because the he's outcompeted by the scale efficiencies of the fly by night operator.
Other than that, you could write same things about bakeries and not buses. But we still have a lot of inexpensive private bakeries around.
(I would also describe the minibus as poorly maintained, but that’s by European standards — I was really surprised by the poor condition of American vehicles on each of my three visits, and it didn’t seem significantly worse than an American vehicle).
If this jitneys are really worse, there is no need to forbid them, municipal buses will outcompete jitneys.
For example, someone can undercut you on price by taking risky shortcuts. Therefore your product or service won't sell, but as a society, it's better for everyone that certain standards are met. Hence, regulations on electrical work and plumbing, etc. Same thing with driver's training and sleep minimums.
Real life example is the recent bus crashes in New York City from overworked or underpaid Chinatown buses.
No, but it will get there so proving the business model/market demand now then buying the tech when it's ready might be worth a vc investing in.
Back in early nineties in Russia, when the public transport system ceased to exist in almost all second tier cities and below. People were relying in people driving on mini-van taxis that were driving "approximate routes" where the driver was changing his route at will to get more passengers.
You was signalling to the driver by hand to be picked up, telling where you go, and he will tell if his current route passes by that place.
1 - https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isuzu_Elf_Route-va...
Not a St.Petersburg citizen though, maybe they managed it right way from the start, but these minibuses appeared long since SU (assuming we’re talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZelle ). Transporting system of SU was a thing that I really hated in my partially soviet childhood. “Let’s go to ...” was one of worst things I could hear.
It should be at least a little stigmatized. Having upper middle class people be able to afford lots of labor intensive services is a sign of an unhealthy society with too large an income gap.
As a developed economy, much fewer people can afford house keepers in the USA. Our cleaning tech is better to compensate.
Also cleaning houses is great work for responsible teenagers. They don't have to pay mortgages or anything.
Getting well off people to spend is a great way to spread that wealth around. Especially when the money is going to sole proprietors and small businesses, as is typically the case for housekeeping, landscaping, etc.
TriMet (Portland, OR) which has a modern mixed bus/light-rail system gets only 20% of expenses from fairs (http://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2018-adopted-budget.pdf)
That is with charging $5/day capped at $100/month, so if fares were to cover the entire cost, the cost would be $500/month.
So, public transit provides a bare bones, horribly uncomfortable, and inconvenient transit experience, at a cost that is only slightly lower than a car.
And public transit systems are too inefficient to operate outside of high traffic hours at all.
If someone in tech can figure out how to offer a shared transit system that people will actually pay for without being forced to that would be a major innovation. No public transit system has ever done it.
Wow. Ever? In the history of mankind or just in modern history? Please elaborate, preferably at book length.
I do wish that public transit were nicer & cleaner. Something like PRT sounds just about perfect.
> While food replacement beverages have been around for a while in the guise of things like Ensure or Slimfast, they’ve traditionally been targeted at older people and women, that is, people who are basically irrelevant to “tech bros”. Soylent, on the other hand, was made by and designed for young men in tech and had cool branding.
Did this scribbler even read the web pages of Slimfast and Soylent? I mean, in the age of internet and google, it should not be that hard to get the most basic information at least approximately right. Unless one is not even trying, and instead optimizes for outrage...
The essential difference between Slimfast and Soylent is not that the former is "old women's food" and the latter is "evil white cishet tech bro food". The difference is the former is advertised as something that makes you slim, fast. It's in the very name, how can you miss that, Guardian journalist? And if you look at the box, it says "lose weight, clinically proven". So, you just have to be slightly smarter than the average Guardian journalist to find out that Slimfast is supposed to make you lose weight.
Meanwhile Soylent tries to be "a complete blend of everything the body needs", a "complete nutrition" with "zero preparation". This is not a well-guarded secret, I am just reading information from their title web page I found using google. So, the point is that these two products try to achieve a completely different goal. It's not about tech bros refusing to eat food for women, as Guardian suggests.
If a newspaper cannot get even this basic information right, the only reason to read it is to get your daily dose of fresh outrage. No thanks.
Also, the comparison to Slimfast isn’t that egregious. I mean, Slimfast was always marketed as a way for busy people to conveniently replace meals with a “nutritious” substitute (according to some hand-waving standard of nutrition). Seems a lot like Soylent to me.
The Guardian’s reporting is often excellent. Judging the paper on the perceived slights of an opinion piece is just misunderstanding how news works.
Unions. This will have to wait for self-driving buses, though even then deployment is unlikely.
[1] https://nypost.com/2016/03/13/nycs-highest-paid-bus-driver-d...
[2] http://web.mta.info/metrocard/mcgtreng.htm
I've seen this in Russia and Turkey and it works pretty well. My wife's city (small, distant from Moscow) has a few routes and I don't think we ever waited more than 5 minutes for a bus.
now thats a good idea. Given the societal trends, it's something i 'd invest in.
I'd love to live in a living space like a mess if I wasn't married.
I've always thought that a mess for politicians would be a good solution to the parliamentary expenses problems in the UK as well. Could build a mess for the politicians in Westminster where they can all stay. Could be nicely appointed but efficient as they're all together.
Gated communities are a very bad sign; outside the US, they are usually found in places where income is very unequal, crime is high, taxes low and public services of very bad quality or inexistent.
It doesn't have to be like this. In fact, a more balanced society improves the lifestyle of everyone, including those who make more (and end up paying more taxes).
Before I'm asked "citation needed", try and imagine which societies I am thinking of.
Nuclear families seem to be empirically less poverty-prone than other family arrangements. And there seem to be higher order effects to the success of entire communities when there are relatively fewer nuclear families in the neighborhood.
Do you mean as opposed to singles or to extended families? In either case, I'd be interested in a source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#P...
https://www.ssa.gov/retirementpolicy/fact-sheets/marital-sta...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240051/
Marriage is mostly a "capital" redistribution system and with strong public services (ie shared services) there is much less need to focus on the nuclear family as a protection (sharing of ressources) network.
Ex. When a few years back pension laws changed in Japan and housewives got the right to get a pension separately from their husband, the rate of divorce boomed.
There is nothing in the nuclear family that makes in a natural fit to what humans are as social animals.
I know where I live, in NL, there's a few scenarios. One, some people just remain students for ten years until their early 30's, living in student houses like this for that whole time. At least this used to be the case until the government cracked down on scholarships. I don't know if this type appears in the US, I can imagine with university being a lot more expensive year over year it's not that bad.
Another thing, and this goes for me, is that if you're out of school, especially in the city area, it's very hard to find a house. There's social rental which is the affordable rental apartments, but there's a 10+ year waiting list for that - that is, your parents would have had to sign you up for it when you were still a kid. If that's even possible. Then there's the free market, which is more like student houses and such. I've had to do the latter for... I think 8 years, at the end of my education and the first seven or so years of my career until I earned enough to be able to buy a house. (that + other factors, mind you; I think I could've bought a cheap apartment much earlier if I wanted to. Wasn't sure about buying yet 5-6 years ago).
erm, anyway. I think there's some merit to this, give the benefits of shared living but add the comforts of adulthood and working for a living (maintained shared spaces, privacy, etc) and there might be something there, especially in areas where housing is expensive and/or space is limited and/or people don't live in the same spot for more than two years.
The problem is zoning.
The problem is democracy.
The problem is people.
You are correct, however, that the author is being deliberately uncharitable, which, I believe, Silicon Valley calls "snark."
This is how a huge portion of Chinese youth lives.
Those places are called ant colonies in urban slang. Your experience there can range from good to horrid if you rent in such places.
Landlords of such places can be anybody from random uncle Liao, to proper property companies.
The company in the article "the Collective" has almost certainly copied the approach of bigger Chinese property companies.
I do agree that the SV take on the concept has a nasty VC-fund-ishness to it. Co-living environments should be democratic and cooperative, not run like a startup.
I rented in youplus for 1 month. It was decent, but for a little more you can already rent a room, (which however will not be anywhere near as fancy in Shenzhen)
Implicit Nirvana fallacy. Yes, ridesharing is worse for society then using (and voting to improve) traditional public transportation. But it's still much better than the popular default of each person owning and solo driving a car, which sits idle most of the time taking up valuable urban space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
She's arguing against the over-the-top marketing for something entirely ordinary. "We will revolutionise transport with this new invention" instead of "we started a bus route".
It's called a library.
In general I’d tend to agree that public transit in the US would benefit from sparser stop placement. I’d also offset the loss of accessibility with more investment in paratransit service / reimbursement for accessible taxis. On that basis, I’d get rid of wheelchair lifts on busses, due to the inefficiencies of loading and unloading. But again, that loss of accessibility would need to be totally offset by paratransit / taxi provision.
Honestly, this got me thinking. There are so many things that in fact, SI just re-invent, but .. don't sort of get .. the re-invention.
Is this not just 'the thing' about SI? That all human activities can be computerised. So, its not about 'inventing', but rather 'optimising through computerisation'?