The Sharing Economy Fights Back Against Regulators 192
An anonymous reader writes in with a story about the advocacy group "Peers". The group says their goal is to “mainstream, protect, and grow the sharing economy.” "The growth of the 'sharing economy,' a loosely defined term generally referring to the internet-enabled peer-to-peer exchanges of goods, has brought with it a shift in the way we think about consumption. Its rise has been fast, and loud. What started with a few enterprising individuals willing to let complete strangers sleep in their homes and use their possessions has now developed into a formidable economic force that threatens to upend several different industries. Along the way, it has posed some major legal challenges. The companies that are pushing it forward have continually undermined local ordinances, consumer safeguards, and protectionist regulations alike. As a result, governments around the country are trying to reign them in. That’s where Silicon Valley’s newest advocacy group comes in."
Rein, not reign (Score:3, Funny)
Race to the Bottom (Score:4, Interesting)
The "Sharing Economy" is a race to the bottom. The people engaged are selling time and use of the only things they have left (houses, cars, and their personal time) for money to people still working because they cannot find a job that pays enough. It's people hanging onto a shard of what they used to have while renting out the rest. This can only implode, and the faster it grows, the bigger the implosion will be.
The predictions of the 40s and 50s about the future are coming true - robotics will do most menial labor, people will have more free time, except that free time is not evenly divided up among the population. There's the group working 80-120 hour weeks, and the unemployed or sub 20 hours per week minimum wage slave. That will continue until there are not enough consumers to support the people working, and then more layoffs ensue, until we're back in the serfdom and squalor of a good middle ages city with a wealthy elite and beggars and almost no one else in between.
OK, maybe that's a little extreme and apocalyptic view of the future, but where we're going is somewhere between now and there unless some major things change. Automation will remove more manual labor and service type jobs going forward, and there really won't be anything replacing it.
Re:Race to the Bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
wait... so efficiently exchanging resources will lead to destruction? What school of economics is that from?
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What do you mean nothing was created? I have something you need something I give you what you need for an agreed upon price.The thing I have was produced and the need for it gives it value. That is all that is necessary and like C0lo said, it is what the entire service industry and Banking industry is based on.
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I can let you crash at my place and build up rep and then crash at someone else's house. I may even "make a LOT of money" this way by being able to crash at seven or eight people's houses.
Or I can exchange an hour of my time to get "money" which I use give to someone to stay at their hotel for a night. In some way- -the money I give them is supposed to circulate around the economy and get back to me.
So at the root, a large part of the current economy is really indirect, camouflaged barter. We are exchang
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"Best" is a very relative term.
It can lead to living in Somalia, Mexico, Singapore, or Norway
If you live in a world where over half the people are unhappy, your "best" may not last for a large period of your life before you suffer terribly (from a murdered family member, an outright revolution which leads to a lot of stress for you and your family).
From a selfish point of view, isn't it worth giving up 25% of your money (if you will still be wealthy afterwards) to ensure you are in a stress free, happy soci
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I don't see this as a problem anytime soon in the US.
And...I pay more than 33% tax to
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That's pretty astonishing when you consider people like mitt romney pay roughly 14% (all taxes... federal, state, local, and social security).
Also
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43373 [cbo.gov]
Perhaps you are confusing your top marginal rate with the actual tax rate you pay?
I made six figures in 2013 and only paid about 30% including social security.
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A lot of our current deficit problems would be essentially solved* if we simply rolled back the bush tax cuts.
* (we'd still have deficits but total debt growth would be
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Yea, I think we can't get ever get to Star Trek.
For one thing, there is enough beach front property for about 5% of the population. So we have to share it/determine who gets it during the premium season somehow.
And with 7 billion people on the planet, there will probably be a million people better than you at anything you try. As the output of the top 100 is shared globally, the need for those "best" people drops. Newspapers have been doing a slow collapse for a long time. There used to be a need for 50
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you get money for some of your space being temporarily used. What do you need to create? that is like saying the guys who get $20 per car in the dirt lot near the stadium are getting nothing out of the transaction.
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Yes, but if I'm giving up something of mine (e.g. 80% of my house) then the process is not creating anything for me.
Here's a wild idea: why not let the homeowner make that call?
What dog do you have in this fight, exactly?
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Nothing is being created.
But something is being used up. My car will break after 150 000 miles. If I ride it alone, it will take 10 years. If I share it/rent it out, it will happen in 4 years and I will have to get a new one sooner. Same goes for the furnishings and the paint in the room I share, the lawnmower, the sander and everything else that's being shared through these services.
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Do you equate "value creation" to "having a real job"?
I sure don't. Driving a car, or preparing meals could be considered more value creation than what I do. It's the circumstances surrounding what these people do. I could be a door man, paid by a hotel to open doors and greet people. Or I could be a homeless bum that gets a bottle for opening the door for a day, replaceable by the poor sap sitting on the curb down the street pining for a bottle. One is a profession, the other is merely doing what they can to get by. Same basic effect - the door is opened when I walk up.
So, what's wrong with "sharing industry" then?
Other than "everybody in the sharing system is replaceable", you say the same value is being created.
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The Cynic school, which teaches that inefficiency, overhead and waste are vital economic elements in creating demand for labor.
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WTF does that have anything to do with this conversation?
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It's worse, actually, when the reason you are more efficient is because you have more capital and can thus afford better tools, such as factories and robots: you have better tools, thus you outcompete me, thus you can afford even better tools and outcompete me with an ever-larger margin.
That's the problem with free market: it has a natural tendency to collapse into a monopoly that sucks all the money in - an economic black hole, if you will
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I've been predicting this for a long time. A lot of armchair economists are. Yet curiously, no professional economists ever mention the scenario.
I'm not much inclined to trust the economist profession. Their recent track record has been terrible, and there seems to be nothing even approaching concensus on some very fundamental policy issues.
The obvious way it could be averted naturally would be for reduced cost to lead to increased consumption - that's how we avoided that outcome from the industrial revolut
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I've been predicting this for a long time. A lot of armchair economists are. Yet curiously, no professional economists ever mention the scenario.
I'm not much inclined to trust the economist profession. Their recent track record has been terrible, and there seems to be nothing even approaching concensus on some very fundamental policy issues.
Then you're listening to the wrong economists. There are many economists out there, from different schools of thought that have predicted a lot of what's going on around us. Sadly, all you're exposed to is what the mainstream media currently deems worthy. You seem like a smart fellow, look it up, research. You may find that there are others out there that share your economic beliefs, some may even be economists that have thought these things out.
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You're assuming the purpose of an economist is to figure out how economy works. There are a few employed in such a position, faced with the hopeless task of examining a system composed of self-aware parts that can read their research and change their behavior accordingly. But most are simply propagandists: they
Side effect of consumerism? (Score:2)
Consumerism convinced us to buy a lot of things that we don't really need or seldom use so, now that times are getting tougher, we're lending/renting our excess.
Not so fast (Score:4, Informative)
This has been going on for at least 60 years. HomeLink [homelink.org] and Intervac have been around since 1953, using printed books at arrange person to person swaps long before the internet.
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Sharing economy = can't tax them (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the major problem, eh? Can't tax it, can't regulate it. As government gets larger and larger, it needs more and more money to sustain itself. It seeks out new forms of revenue from wherever it finds weakness. Renting out your spare bedroom in New York City causes a lot of losses. No bed tax (in NYC it's something like 20%, or used to be when I worked in hotels), no income tax for the housekeeping staff, no sales tax from the gift shop, etc.
Let's not even get into room owners picking and choosing clients. I've seen them proudly say that they check Facebook and such beforehand, only allow professionals and other clean people, etc. Yeah, what they really mean is "no Negroes". When the "sharing economy" is beyond the reach of government regulation, problems like this that society thought solved re-appear with disturbing frequency.
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Let's not even get into room owners picking and choosing clients. I've seen them proudly say that they check Facebook and such beforehand, only allow professionals and other clean people, etc. Yeah, what they really mean is "no Negroes". When the "sharing economy" is beyond the reach of government regulation, problems like this that society thought solved re-appear with disturbing frequency.
Please. Racism isn't a solved problem. There is still racism today, and government regulation actually ends up prolonging it via racist programs such as affirmative action, which literally forces people to treat others differently based on what race they are.
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You can solve a problem without it being perfect, or complete. Racism existing does not counter the argument that the racism problem has been solved.
But I agree, government regulation does nothing to help racism.
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Please. Racism isn't a solved problem.
Racism is more than one problem, and some of those problems have been solved.
Racism that is legally required is difficult to oppose, but it was abolished in law a long time ago. Racism that is systemic and socially acceptable has largely, though not wholly, disappeared. The racism that is left is still racism, and it's still wrong, but it's mostly a fringe belief that has to be buried under a different, objective, phenomenon such as poverty or a broad statistical phenomenon such as ethnic identity or cult
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If I think somebody is suspicious then I don't want to be forced to rent my room to them. If I think people look suspicious because of their skin color then I will lose out on their business. Now, let's say we live in a racist society where a good amount of people don't like people of a certain skin color and thus don't rent rooms to them. What this means is that people who aren't racist will be able to charge them m
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You're basically saying I should pay more simply because I'm black. ... ....fuck you.
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The net result is that racists will be less successful at business and eventually be replaced by non-racist business owners.
You are assuming that the business environment is not a mirror of the culture and vice versa. In other words, those racist business owners will exist in a direct proportion to the number of racist clients, and can thus fill the niche market of "housing where you won't sleep in a bed that was slept in by 'those people'". They can, thus, charge more for their product because the clients will pay more for that product. Smart business people will notice a glut in the market of "non-racist" housing and the conc
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You are assuming that the business environment is not a mirror of the culture and vice versa. In other words, those racist business owners will exist in a direct proportion to the number of racist clients, and can thus fill the niche market of "housing where you won't sleep in a bed that was slept in by 'those people'". They can, thus, charge more for their product because the clients will pay more for that product. Smart business people will notice a glut in the market of "non-racist" housing and the concomitant lack of racist rooms (with the associated premium price) and begin to offer that product, even if they are normally non-racist. Kind of like people who smoke like a chimney running hotels with non-smoking rooms.
Hmm. I suppose there would be a market force in that direction as well. But then it would be more expensive to be a racist - and people really like not spending money when they don't have to. Perhaps I am naive but I think it would ultimately end in non-racism.
The freedom of free association implies a freedom FROM association, as well.
I don't follow - could you rephrase?
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Hmm. I suppose there would be a market force in that direction as well. But then it would be more expensive to be a racist - and people really like not spending money when they don't have to.
People buy BMWs when they don't have to. They feel they get value for the money. You wouldn't be much of a racist if you didn't think it was worth $10 a night extra so you could sleep in a bed that wasn't slept in by the wrong kinds of people, would you? The entire hospitality industry is based on selling people things they don't really need, isn't it? "Would you like fries with that"? Well, if I needed fries I'd have ordered them to start with. "I can offer you a king-sized bed for just $20 more a night..
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No, what this means is that their racist neighbours will beat them up for bringing filthy negroes into the neighborhood. And then lynch the negroes.
You really don't understand how evil works, do you?
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FYI... you are talking about our reality to someone who is living in their own reality where markets have never worked and planned economies have always worked flawlessly.
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1) Racial segregation, upheld by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson [wikipedia.org]. The decision upheld "the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the docrtine of 'separate but equal'." This is not a free market solution. This is institutionalized and legally mandated racism. This does not fi
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How fortunate we are to have a long distance and temporal mind reader on SlashDot.
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That would be great for my AirBnB efforts. I encourage all of you racists to refuse service to negros, so they will come pay me for a room instead.
I'm white. No black man has ever stolen from me. But white people? Let's see, let's see, what color are like 98% of politicians and bankers? Hmmmm....
Over 2% black people in federal elected office (Score:2)
Let's see, let's see, what color are like 98% of politicians
True, only 2 percent of the sitting U.S. Senate (Sens. Scott and Cowan) are black. But I count 42 black Representatives in the 113th House, making up 9.7%. And for the past twelve and a half years, the United States has had an African-American President or Secretary of State.
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too bad there are these things called records that can be subpoenaed. like people not paying taxes on ebay sales 10 years ago until the states started asking for these records and sharing the information with each other
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As government gets larger and larger, it needs more and more money to sustain itself.
Perhaps your government's only goal is to sustain itself, but mine provides me services in education, healthcare, transports, and so on. It needs money to do that
Re:Sharing economy = can't tax them (Score:4, Insightful)
My government keeps adding to its list. I'm not sure it's a coincidence that this also happens to expand its power and reach.
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The government can create all the money it needs out of thin air. Currently they're doing 85billion per month.
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So?
You're house....your rules on who stays in your home. It is a private thing, not a public business.
now developed into a formidable economic force (Score:4, Funny)
Hyperbole, thy name is Forbes.
Cost/Benefit (Score:4, Interesting)
Regulation does have its value. Civilization is better off when food, buildings, etc. are safe, and freeloaders are not cheating. There are risks associated with the unregulated enterprises. Still, even simple things like barter and sales of second-hand merchandise are important contributions to quality of life.
But do the benefits outweigh the costs? That question doesn't get asked enough.
Of course, sometimes 'economy' is just a euphemism for 'bank accounts of the already ultra-rich', which is what some economists seem to think.
Sharing not good for a debt-based economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sharing not good for a debt-based economy (Score:4, Insightful)
even going so far to say that a moderate amount of inflation is a "good thing".
Unless you believe that stuffing money into pickle jars and burying them in the yard produces wealth, a moderate amount of inflation is a good thing. It motivates investment over hording.
Re:Sharing not good for a debt-based economy (Score:5, Interesting)
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Money is supposed to represent a store of value earned by an economy's participants.
Only in the mind of people who understand neither the origin nor general use of money. Money has historically been used successfully for trade and taxing.
Meanwhile, all attempts at trying to turn money into a storage of value has has had dire consequences. The Euro simply being the latest in a bunch of total failures by people who are macro-economically illiterate.
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Because investment is historically such a great thing in our boom & bust cycle economy. Investing may make you money in the short term (if you happen to do so during a boom cycle) but those "busts" (1953, 1957, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1982, 1991, 2008) will probably wipe out most of your gains and in some cases a good chunk of the money you invested as well. All the forms of investment that insulate you (mostly) from losses don't even keep up with today's inflation.
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So my investing started about a year after the second to last bust you mention and I am still way ahead. I've looked back in history a few times to see howat the "average" investment in the market starting around the first bust and it is way up since then.
Investing is very risky short-term and almost never risky long term if spread out so "all our eggs are not in one basket."
XcepticZP said... "that's the problem with statists."
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you don't think that's a problem? That you have to risk your money just to keep it?
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Re: Sharing not good for a debt-based economy (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no such thing as a sharing economy. People renting out their assets and selling services as they have done for thousands of years
Only difference is that tech is allowing individuals to cheaply advertise their wares. Unlike in the last hundred years where you had to pay a lot of money to newspapers and other media.
Otherwise this so called sharing economy is just some marketing speak for stupid kids who eat this togetherness nonsense up. We had this small business and individual economy 100 years ago and corporations took over because they offer a consistent quality experience.
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But, just like with patents, its on the internet and 'puter so it must be a completely new idea.
It's easy to be cheaper (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy to be cheaper than the established players when you're not paying taxes.
Reality Awaits (Score:2)
Don't worry, a Charles Manson-like character will eventually come along and wake people up from their Hippy 2.0 daze as the rainbow and flowers take a shit on their face.
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"Hippy 2.0" has to be the phrase of the week.
Bad Brother Is Offended (Score:3)
Excessive consumption means big money for businesses. You can bet they will fight any changes in society tooth and nail. And they will not play nice. To them sharing is just another pinko-commie-socialist activity with evil advocates.
Re:Reminds me of Food Trucks (Score:5, Insightful)
The food trucks park in public, they have to adhere to normal regulations and are a far better method for many downtown areas. Why use up valuable real estate for a restaurant people will only be in for a few hours a day? Ride sharing seems fine to me, cars have to be inspected for a reason.
If you really believe that about most people you are a sad husk of a man.
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If you really believe that about most people you are a sad husk of a man.
Reality isnt pretty, nor are most people. I would put forth that anyone who doesnt think they are capable of truly horrific things, hasnt truly examined the state of their own heart and their capacity for justifying just about anything.
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Others of us have, and decided we will resist such temptations, large and small, and speak out against abuses. We call ourselves christians, Buddhists, secular humanists, jedi, whatever. Basically, people who have decided to not be dicks.
Re:Reminds me of Food Trucks (Score:4, Interesting)
Others of us have, and decided we will resist such temptations, large and small, and speak out against abuses. We call ourselves christians, Buddhists, secular humanists, jedi, whatever. Basically, people who have decided to not be dicks.
I prefer the term "ethical" as it covers the specific individuals that act that way, without including the unethical asshats that also happen to use the other terms for themselves.
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Yeah, why bother improving yourself!
Crime is down, people are more moral than ever and you want to say the whole world is evil. Sounds like your religion is clouding your judgement.
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Yeah, why bother improving yourself!
If you read carefully, I did not say that-- I just said that it would never be enough to fix the world.
Crime is down, people are more moral than ever
Bull. You display ignorance of the world, current events, and history. Look at the past 100 years for some truly horrific displays. In china today you can see forced abortions, where past societies would have considered it nothing less than murder. In the past decade there was a big fight over whether a ban on "partial birth abortions" (Read: the baby is ready to be born) should be allowed (whereas th
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Abortion was far more common in the past. Even forced abortions via abortifacients. Even the puritans were okay with abortion until the quickening, which when the child first moved. Partial birth abortion was not a major argument in the last 10 years. It was a fake argument meant to fight all abortion. Third trimester abortions are illegal unless the life of the mother is at stake. Abortions are way down too. In fact that only places where teen pregnancy are high are in locations where sex education is non-
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Even the puritans were okay with abortion until the quickening, which when the child first moved.
Thats from English Common law (in fact thats exactly what I was referencing), not representative of what the Puritans "were OK with". The only clear thing I found in a google search regarding their opinions was from John Owen, where hes pretty clear that its a particularly heinous type of murder. Id be interested to see any source that you have saying they were "OK with it"; even common law frowned upon it-- it just wasnt a crime until the quickening.
It is a simple fact that as we become more wealthy and more secure we are allowed to be more moral.
As we become more wealthy we care less and less about t
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Facts do not back you up. The cases you mention are famous simply because they are so rare and so far outside the norm.
Also the ethos is "If it feels good, and harms no one else, I am OK with it. As it should be. What you call vices, are likely victimless and should not be seen as such. If you want to invent crimes and immoralities then of course you can claim those are on the rise.
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I'm a Catholic. Pretty sure I was redeemed by this dude who died for my sins. I try to live as he taught, I make mistakes, repent, am forgiven, and I manage to do a little better each time. I know I'll never be as good as he was, but I'm gonna try.
It's not utopian nonsense. It's the fundamental idea of religion as an avenue of self-improvement (and by self-improvement, familial improvement, community improvement, world improvement), rather than being simply an assemblage of the self-satisfied.
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Perhaps I worded it badly if people are thinking im saying "dont try". Im saying "try, but nevertheless it will not be enough to fix humanity".
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But it has been. Slowly and inexorably for 2000 years. The world is getting more peaceful every day, despite what the news would have you believe.
One can certainly attribute humanity's progress to science and learning, but we wouldn't have western science and learning if it weren't for Christianity. That concept of the separation of religion, government, and economics that allows scientific investigation to proceed is only born of an outsider religion like Christianity. For all the talk about the Arab world
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The food trucks park in public, they have to adhere to normal regulations and are a far better method for many downtown areas.
Food trucks take up public parking spaces, and they are free to leave the area when an inspector shows up, avoiding any regulations that they don't feel like complying with. They pay no property taxes to support the infrastructure (like the parking space they use). They can show up for an hour a day, just to service the lunch hour crowd and then vanish when the customers do, having poached from fixed businesses enough to make a profit.
The brick and mortar (as opposed to tin and rubber) business has perman
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The issue of enforcing standards is a serious one.
It's also easily corrected. Pass a law that states the following:
1. Food inspectors may arrive without notice, in plain clothes.
2. Upon arrival, inspectors may compel mobile business owners to remain stationary for a period of up to fifteen minutes to permit inspection (How long can inspecting a one-room business take?)
3. Inspectors may pose as customers to purchase sample product.
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The issue of enforcing standards is a serious one.
It's also easily corrected. Pass a law that states the following:
1. Food inspectors may arrive without notice, in plain clothes.
2. Upon arrival, inspectors may compel mobile business owners to remain stationary for a period of up to fifteen minutes to permit inspection (How long can inspecting a one-room business take?)
3. Inspectors may pose as customers to purchase sample product.
4. Require both the business license and the health dept inspection certificate to be publicly displayed in a conspicuous location, so any informed customer can phone in a violation. Note: Nearly all jurisdictions already do this. Next time you are in a restaurant or at a food truck, look for the permits, and you will see them 99% of the time, often taped to a side wall or sometimes on the ceiling. Before I buy from a food cart, I check, and the only time I didn't see the permits was an ice cream hand c
Re:Reminds me of Food Trucks (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't go so far as to say they are a "far better method" than a regular restaurant, but they serve a niche and are far from the robber barons you guys are trying to portray them as.
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Maybe you live in a weird place
Texas - home of the no-gummit regulation for hazardous factories?
They're bit, and slow
They're BIG, and slow. And I see you have the same precise typing skills that I do!
Yes, if you visit a food truck in my town - and that includes the ones at the county fair - there WILL - by State Law - be a certificate displayed in a prominent location. And you can't just roll up to a street corner and open up. Within 15 minutes a cop will be by, not merely to check the certificate, but to determine that you have the proper permits to be on t
Food trucks are more tax-efficient (Score:2)
Just how do they allocate a share of property taxes to a vehicle that is parked someplace for two hours a day?
Tax evasion is illegal. Tax avoidance, on the other hand, is legal, and people pay tax professionals big bucks for avoidance advice. Food trucks avoid property tax by not occupying as much property. This makes them more tax-efficient. Think of it this way: Does a higher MPG (or lower cL/km) vehicle dodge fuel taxes? And is that a bad thing?
Not many people are going to look for a business license or health certification posted anywhere
Are dumb customers enough of a reason to ban food trucks entirely? It'd be better just to figure out a way to make certifications easier to check and harder to forge. Thi
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Re:Reminds me of Food Trucks (Score:4, Informative)
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I don't know why but I feel the need to correct you here. "They are supposed to be licensed with the city they operate in just like any other food-service business." Supposed to be is a key modifier there. You really have no way of knowing if they are or the license thing they show isn't a forgery. I suppose you could go to the health department and check but that sounds like a lot of trouble for a taco and soda.
Also, as I have found in my state, if any city or county health department passed you and gives
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The point is that taxi drivers, no matter how bad they might be, are regulated a whole lot more than the rest of us.
And I'm sure that means regulated and licensed taxi drivers are just safer than other drivers, right. They won't, for example, intentionally step on the gas before mounting the curb and hitting a 23-year-old tourist who lost part of her leg. [streetsblog.org]
My point being, you can find extreme examples of everything. Including rogue drivers, regulated or not.
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You can have my keys when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.
Analog always work. You never have to worry if the software in a keyless vehicle decides it's not going to work today or flake out while you're driving. Nor do you have to worry about your car being in a runaway situation and not being able to turn off your vehicle because the software says there's no problem.
It's the same thing with a manual transmission. When was the last time you
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Roughly every month there is an article about someone "accidentally" hitting the accelerator rather than the brake in an automatic. As a result, they go flying through a store, over a parking garage edge or into a crowd.
It is essentially impossible to do this in a stick as both your feet are occupied. If you hit the gas, the clutch is still in so you don't go anywhere. If you pop the clutch you will most likely stall the car.
As to shifting in to neutral, if the software determines there is no issue or yo
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But never mind - anything which could allow the riff-raff from the gutters to save a little dough, maybe climb out of the gutter, we need to put a stop to that. Can't have 'em catching up to me (now that I'm no longer giving plasma to get food).
Re:Reminds me of Food Trucks (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh my god, people are doing things I wouldn't do! I demand men in uniforms be sent to make them stop, through the use of physical violence if necessary! I'm just not prepared to live in a world where everyone isn't forced to be exactly like me.
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My kingdom, my kingdom for some mod points!
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Re:Reminds me of Food Trucks (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't say "predatory", and I would even agree that food trucks and permanent-location restaurants generally fulfill different niches, but I would argue against your statement that people don't "go to a food truck to get a quality meal". At least around here, these days people generally go to a food truck to get generally-overpriced hipsterish fusion silliness, the same sort of food they'd get from, for instance, a gastropub minus the booze. Food is often (though admittedly not always) indeed quite fantastic, just almost always also overpriced. Totally different from the pre-2000s roach coach type food truck concept.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me of Food Trucks (Score:4, Interesting)
They swoop in, scoop up money and split, leaving existing local businesses struggling in the aftermath.
Ugh. We must have read different stories on food trucks. You're either jealous or wearing pink glasses. Neither is good for objectivity.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, of course not. After all, land owners never charge anyone to set up businesses on their property. And as everyone knows, food trucks all have Mr. Fusions to power their cooking equipment, and are staffed by magical elves who can create water out of thin air.
Or you're an idiot. One of those.
Re: (Score:2)
If you trust humanity you'll end up paying for it, every time.
The same goes if you trust nobody. On this approach, you have two major choices:
* don't share. You'll lose nothing but opportunities/potential (of which some others may derive value)
* share under strict risk control. This control is going to cost you each and every time.
Re: (Score:2)