Road wear and tear increases as the fourth power of axle load. Are you counting the spending on bus stops, bus parking, dedicated bus lanes, and more on the other side of the ledger?
California has the most progressive taxation scheme of any state. Dividends and capital gains are taxed as income. I’m curious what you would consider “sufficient” taxation - the top marginal combined rate for a Californian is over 50%.
> Taking muni or bart involved walking, waiting, more waiting, and then more walking
Exactly.
Uber makes a lot of money these days. The price is not suppressed. And yet... it is more popular than ever. Prices were artificially low for awhile in order to bootstrap the market, and that worked, and now that the market has been established, prices are at a level that is sustainable. Your whole premise is wrong.
Amazon’s capex is not funded by venture capital. It is funded by people buying things from Amazon or services from AWS.
Uber hasn’t raised from VCs in years, and their business is far bigger than it was back when they were losing money.
The idea that SF residents choose to use Uber rather than BART because Uber is cheaper is simply wrong - Uber is much more expensive than BART, and with some notable exceptions for shared rides, that was true during the VC funded growth period as well.
People are generally responsive to incentives. In this case, the GDPR required:
1. Consent to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous and as easy to withdraw as to give
2. High penalties for failure to comply (€20 million or 4 % of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher)
Compliance is tricky and mistakes are costly. A pop-up banner is the easiest off-the-shelf solution, and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than compliance, so it's not surprising that they took this easy path.
If your model of the world or "image of humanity" can't predict an outcome like this, then maybe it's wrong.
> The mistake the EU made was to not foresee the madness used to make these decisions.
It's not madness, it's a totally predictable response, and all web users pay the price for the EC's lack of foresight every day. That they didn't foresee it should cause us to question their ability to foresee the downstream effects of all their other planned regulations.
If that is true, then what stops port operators from raising prices from their present level and pocketing the free money? In reality, demand curves slope down and the surplus from efficiency improvements is split between buyers and sellers. And with the lower costs that result from efficiency improvements, ports will be able to move more goods per unit of time. Even with the unrealistic assumption that the surplus is entirely captured by the port operators, buyers and sellers of goods will benefit from the increased volume.
"Enough" is a function of how much you have and how much you need. 25x annual spend is a common heuristic for the required net worth before you can safely retire. And the older you are, the less margin of safety you need. 4% of $1.3 million is $52k, which is enough to live quite comfortably in many places.
There is a big difference between Europeans in Europe and Europeans in the US - Europeans in the US readily point this out. The idea that Europeans are somehow genetically less suited to building tech companies is an obvious strawman. The reality is that Europeans in America are, like all immigrants, heavily self-selected.
The article also does not mention the huge difference in compensation for technology talent between the US and Europe. As long as that gap exists, top European talent will continue leaking across the Atlantic.