The "rich people reinventing basic public services" genre gets less funny when you realize they mean privately-run versions that can exclude undesirables.
@Zero_Democracy I'm not sure I see the problem in this.
If they want to spend their money on the world's biggest collection of stuffed toys, who cares? If they want to do a Bill Gates, and fight infectious diseases in the third world, that's nice (assuming that the result is a positibe one). So they're building private bus fleets - I'm not clear on what the earth-shattering, soul-consuming, mind-numbing, bowel-erupting problem is.
Presumably it would still mean fewer cars on the roads?
Sorry if we take offense to our surplus value being robbed from us for the sake of exclusive luxury carriages that neither we nor our children will ever be able to afford.
Eat the rich.
@vroom @jankoekepan @Zero_Democracy Oh, it's more than that. Theres the possibility of them making their services, then getting the public versions diminished and eventually discontinued - effectively privatizing them. And I like my local libraries and do not want to see them privatized. -_-
@Angle @jankoekepan @Zero_Democracy definitely.
The subscription model needed to subsidize self driving tech keeps it out of the public sphere, with the rich investing in fancy chariots anyone who relies on buses will find less and less service.
@Zero_Democracy I must have missed something, what's this referring to?
@brandon Seeing the CEO of Stripe theorizing about "spotify for books" (replacing libraries) was what instigated my articulating it, but it applies to pretty much everything in that vein, in particular a lot of what Elon Musk spouts off about, Uber floating bus services etc.
@Zero_Democracy @jjg also - run by people you can't vote for
@Zero_Democracy Didn't we see this coming with the 1980s craze for 'privatized' public schools? The Edison Project or whatever it was called?
@wohali It's been a long, grim slide since Reagan, but I think the important thing to note with the modern incarnation is what amounts to virtual redlining. (Look at FB currently being sued for violating the Fair Housing Act to see what I mean.) A bus can't decide whether you're allowed to be picked up or where you can be transported to based on its opaque standards. Uber can. "Spotify for books" can decide what knowledge/resources you're served, and why.
@Zero_Democracy I guess the thing about undesirables is that people, by definition, don't want to be around them if they don't have to.
@Zero_Democracy
In my experience, excluding "undesirables" is more likely to be done by zoning and border control.
They aren't reinventing trains and busses and libraries because they're pod people. They're subtracting the idea of default public entitlement to those services.