<story><title>Travis Shrugged</title><url>http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/24/travis-shrugged/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jrockway</author><text>I personally like the model &quot;try to do something illegal and then complain on the Internet&quot;.  When people realize the laws are wrong, they&apos;ll change them. (Remember how epically SOPA failed?  Awareness is a key catalyst for change and many laws are for special interest groups rather than general interest.)&lt;p&gt;But even ignoring that, this article is crap.  It basically claims that taxi licensing exists for safety and that Uber is jepordizing the safety of the average man for the benefit of the out-of-touch Silicon Valley elitist.  Using facts to support this view, however, is difficult as there are none.  Uber uses licensed car services that are licensed to transport passengers but not to pick up people without a certain amount of notice.  The law that&apos;s being broken is saying &quot;I want a car now&quot; when the law says you have to say &quot;I want a car in one hour&quot; or otherwise hail a medallion vehicle.  Presumably the licensing process for drivers of cabs and car service cars is around the same (drivers must not rape their passenger, to use the example from the article).&lt;p&gt;The worst side effect of letting car services pick up passengers immediately is that the artificial value of taxi medallions will return to its true value of zero dollars, making a lot of people very poor very quickly.  There is an argument to limiting the number of cabs as a traffic-calming measure, but there is really no reason to discriminate based on vehicle type -- just implement a congestion charge and everything will work itself out.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I like to see counterpoint articles on HN so I&apos;m glad this was posted.   But writing a whiney blog post about how Uber is sticking it to the poor man is tiresome.</text></comment>
<story><title>Travis Shrugged</title><url>http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/24/travis-shrugged/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>clarkm</author><text>I&apos;m still trying to figure out the point of this article. I think the author is trying to discredit Travis Kalanick and Uber by associating them with Ayn Rand, but the argument seems to backfire.&lt;p&gt;Besides the fact that the article is annoyingly snarky, it just doesn&apos;t make good arguments. There are much better ways to criticize Uber than raving about some Ayn Rand connection. The writing meanders through several topics, but seems to be just grasping at threads. The author wants us to believe that Travis is some sort of Objectivist Fundamentalist, but fails to tie them together with anything more substantive than a Twitter profile picture and three year old forum post.&lt;p&gt;However, I do have to give him credit for creative character assassination. He includes lots of suggestive anecdotes (e.g. caricaturing Travis as &quot;downright adolescent&quot;), re-educates us with some condescending philosophical mischaracterizations (though he seems rather desperate in his attempts to portray Rand as the Worst Person In The World), and tops it off with some complete non-sequiturs (like trying to convince us that, &lt;i&gt;hypothetically&lt;/i&gt;, if faced with Airbnb&apos;s problems, Travis would&apos;ve ruined everything, all because of Ayn Rand).&lt;p&gt;I honestly can&apos;t tell if this article was motivated more by the author&apos;s hate of Travis or his hate of Ayn Rand. I imagine he already hated Travis, but upon noticing Travis&apos; twitter icon, became irate and penned this screed.&lt;p&gt;My favorite part:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; Worse still, Rand inspired Paul Ryan, The Tea Party and the Koch Brothers.&lt;p&gt;You read right -- Uber is basically The Tea Party. So overall, I think the author does a better job of discrediting himself than anything else.</text></comment>