@markr Very true. Ideally, the city would have managed taxi plates (medallions), increasing the supply every year so that it approximately matched the number of drivers the market would support, instead of freezing it at an artificially-low level so that plates were selling for $500K+ on the secondary market (before Uber and Lyft wiped out their value).
David Megginson
0 Post – 6 Comments
Joined 1 years ago
#Tea drinker. Urban dweller. #Gardener. Classical guitarist. #Standards wonk. Grounded pilot. Pantheist. Jane Jacobs fanboy. #Language nerd. 25-year #vegetarian. 30-year #Linux user. #Disabled. Open-* and humanitarian #aid person. Former medieval philologist (Ph.D, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 1993). Living on unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory.
Header picture: Large reddish-orange letters spelling "Hintonburg", some lying flat on the sidewalk for use as benches.
@FaeDrifter @Smatt I read Tolkein's books more in the light of his experience serving on the front in WW1. There's this terrible thing that you have to leave your cozy, safe home to do, and it damages you so much that even after "victory", you can never really go back.
@sab If Threads plays by the rules, they're welcome, but if they fail to meet our moderation standards (as they likely will), we shouldn't give them any special treatment.
Also, federating with Threads might not be as big a prospect as we originally thought. Daily active users had fallen by 80% last summer when Meta stopped releasing official numbers. It could be that the numbers have improved since, but then why not make a big deal over it?
@cheese_greater @Banzai51 LOTR isn't very Christian; Tolkein was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, at a time when Old English studies were focussing more on the pagan elements that they thought were more "pure" and corrupted by the arrival of Christianity.
C.S. Lewis's books were allegorical Christian (very high church), but fundamentalists don't go for that kind of thing; for them, Jesus has to be Jesus, not an anthropomorphic lion inspired by the story of the crucifixion.
@sab I think the concern is more about tens/hundreds of thousands of toxic bros from Threads jumping into conversations on the fedi. We'll know enough not to follow them, but they'll be able to find us.
The fedi already has every kind of hate and -phobia and -ism present, of course, but if the wrong people from Threads get involved, that could go up by an order of magnitude and push us past a tipping point where our network of volunteer moderators just can't keep up.
@ajsadauskas @technology The one thing I don't sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in #Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.