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>They broke the law.

Law was unjust, they had a moral imperative to break it.

>Furthermore Uber's competitive advantages are fueled by incredibly dangerous financial practices.

And if Uber was seeking a monopoly this might be relevant, but they opened the market up for anyone, including those not doing scary financial practices.

>the new kid on the block typically isn't infused with tens of billions of VC.

Yes, so it should have been the case that the taxi monopolies were broken up decades ago. Not waiting around for VC capital to do it.



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>Law was unjust, they had a moral imperative to break it.

I disagree that they had a moral imperative to break it. But our laws must be quite bad because foreign companies seem to love breaking them while claiming the moral highground.

>And if Uber was seeking a monopoly this might be relevant, but they opened the market up for anyone, including those not doing scary financial practices.

Is there any successful rideshare company without similar financial practices? I admit I don't know much about any of them other than Uber. Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised. I'm glad to hear that uber isn't seeking a monopoly.

>Yes, so it should have been the case that the taxi monopolies were broken up decades ago. Not waiting around for VC capital to do it.

Irrelevant to my point, but thanks for the take


The biggest issue with Ubers financial practices (other than, not having much money) is that in the US they can also provide car finance, and can take the car payments directly from the trip payment. Its got a whiff of the company store about it. As far as I am aware none of their competitors do this anywhere.

Considering the low value proposition of the Uber app, I am relatively surprised that theres no strong open source competitor with a very modest sum going to maintain the app. Such a hypothetical competitor would now also be allowed after ubers entrance.


>But our laws must be quite bad because foreign companies seem to love breaking them

There was a great interview I watched recently on ABC. A gentleman was politely explaining why theres a shortage of produce in Australia at the moment. He explained how the government increased requirements on local farmers, but haven't set the same requirements on imports. So large aggregators set up shop in countries with cheaper wages, and less onerous laws, can the produce there and ship it into Australia while pocketing the difference.

The reporter conducting the interview was shocked, and immediately asked the standard question. "Should the government be seeking to impose penalties, or tariffs or some other kind of support"

The farmer shook his head. He said he didn't think it was an issue of penalties, or tariffs. He just wanted the government to put the industry back the way they found it. But the reporter literally didn't understand his line of thinking. And kept asking. 2 more times he answered. No. No new laws please, just let us compete on the same basis as NZ. The NZ produce is being eaten by aussies anyway. so there's no net difference. Just let his business continue.

So yeah I believe our laws are quite bad. For a variety of reasons. Mainly that the country is addicted to the idea of a great national project, and despite terrible results in these areas (National Energy Market (Debatable but I think it does a lot more harm than good), National Broadband Network, National Disability Insurance Scheme) governments of all stripes continue to smash anything that's right fit at a small scale to fit it into these dumb nasho boxes. I am just glad that the government of the day has forgotten about its pre election promise to disband all private fibre network providers and roll them into the NBN.


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