Posts by oga
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Up Front: Giving It the Bish, in reply to Shaun Scott,
Before you consider donating to Rainbow Youth under Tamaki's name and email address, please note that they will get a partial refund on your donation under the tax-exemption laws.
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It didn't take very long to escalate to serious assault. On a 55-year-old Uber driver, no less. It's kinda scary, this mix of ignoring local laws and legal taxi drivers willing to use violence, with the spectre of the cartels hovering in the background.
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Elsewhere, Uber is attempting to enter the Quintana Roo market by launching in Cancun. The taxi industry in this state of Mexico is vigorously opposed to Uber’s entry and has been protesting (link in Spanish).
Unfortunately, the ‘Uber’ driver wasn’t even an Uber driver. He was picking up some friends (the account is in Spanish) from a hotel in the hotel zone in Cancun.
Taxi drivers are frequently found dead in Cancun. I lived in Playa del Carmen, which is a hour south of Cancun on the Riviera Maya for two years, and the local newspapers were always reporting executions and burnt out taxis in Cancun that were presumably related to the Gulf Cartel driving the Zetas out of the area with the support of a local criminal group. These cartels are known to use taxi drivers in Cancun. The area police even issued a curfew last year with a warning not to drive in vehicles with tinted windows at night.
The taxi industry in Playa del Carmen can be exploitative, with drivers making up their own fares for unsuspecting tourists or non-Spanish speakers. The strategy most locals use is to give exact fare without asking the price. Uber’s entry would most likely lead to less corruption in the industry. However, when the standard across-town fare in Playa is 35 pesos (NZ$2.50), it is hard to see how Uber could undercut this competitively without destabilizing the industry even more dramatically than elsewhere.
I would not be surprised if drivers were actually killed over this.
By comparison, Uber in Mexico City seems comfortably situated, and I frequently use its services along with a rival App based taxi service called EasyTaxi for shorter trips or when I prefer to pay cash.
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Living overseas and consuming news through the respective iPhone apps for Stuff & NZHerald, I frequently wondered whether that was seriously the news for the day,. It's really hard to see new news if you're using the app. Obviously the app toploads with the same popular articles as the homepage, but there's no option to see an actual feed of real news. I know that there must be more articles published daily but if you regularly use the app, it looks like NZ is so quiet only 3-5 new articles are published on the apps, which are promoting the same top 10 articles as the previous day etc....
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Hard News: All right, then – take me to Rio, in reply to dave stewart,
Try the BBC for more extensive coverage
Thank you for this hot tip. I was wondering how to stream the Olympics on my second screen and found that your comments about the BBC were indeed not too good to be true. I switched my VPN to the UK and watched the swimming finals last night and they were live captioned!! That was the first time I ever saw swimming commentary. I'm still undecided whether it added or detracted from the viewing experience. Michael Phelps is a GOAT through and through. Goosebumps from that 200m butterfly.
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In Mexico, the Olympics coverage has several channels on the main pay TV provider (there is no real ‘free-to-air’ in Mexico unless you live in an area with excellent reception). To get a quality signal, one has to subscribe to pay TV at a princely sum of about NZD$20 per month (this is for HD, it’s much cheaper for normal definition).
Yesterday, I was riding on the open roads (every Sunday Mexico City closes down several roads for a cycling/running/walking circuit that takes about 4 hours to go right around) and I rode past the park in the old city downtown. Someone had set up a medium-sized screen in the park, which was broadcasting a football game with Mexico and some other team. There was nowhere to sit in front of this screen, with people taking up all available space. I’m not sure whether this screen would be up for the duration of the Olympics, but this wouldn’t surprise me.
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Saw this today. The real reason Uber is failing in Japan
In particular
corporate non-compliance is different. In fact, there is a common school of thought in the West that if it is cheaper to violate a regulation than it is to obey it, it is not only OK to break that law, but that the CEO has an actual obligation to his shareholders to break that law. Fines are simply a cost of doing business. No corporate exec is going to get fired for saving his company millions of dollars and paying a few thousand in fines.
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Didn't this whole post-truth thing have its genesis in the removal of the fairness doctrine in August 1987? All of the language related to fairness in broadcasting was removed completely from the law in 2011, and ever since, the practice of straight-up lying on the media has spread and spread until elections are won based on who can spread misinformation the best.
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This was the best analysis of why the UK should leave the EU that I read recently.
The Left and the EU: Why Cling to This Reactionary Institution?
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Polity: Custard, in reply to Alfie,
The slogan “Vote Labour… because we’re not National” will never be a vote winner.
Isn't that how National got into power last time? Saying nothing, and relying on the population to vote National .... because they're not Labour.