Open Prison Canada

I've seen a lot of pain in the faces of Hamilton cab drivers since the city government basically gave Uber carte-blanche to operate here. It's particularly painful for the older drivers who have devoted decades of their lives to this business, only to have the politicians up-end the apple cart, reducing many of those dislocated cab drivers to wondering whether pushing shopping carts full of junk, for storage in the cardboard boxes they now call home,  will be their next career move.

And don't give me any bullshit about how Hamilton laid a few charges against Uber drivers that would put them on the hook for laughable $305 fines, when A:) those fines are less than one-third of the cost of obtaining a taxi driver's license in Hamilton and B:) their $62 billion ($68) political parent corporation promises to pay their fines.

Who profits when the number of taxis on Hamilton's streets balloons from 447 to 1000 as a result of the dishonestly named "new licensing category" Hamilton politicians are going to create in order to legitimize Uber? (and screw everyone else in the Hamilton cab business.)

The drivers?

I don't think so. It's simple pie-chart arithmetic. The more drivers there are the less pie for each driver.

The City Government?

Well, it doesn't really matter to the City Government how many taxis are deployed. In fact, they may even benefit from some marginal extra fees they might be able to extract from all of the Ubered Piper's sweet seductions.

Uber?

Hmmm.... It really doesn't matter to Uber whether it has 100 cabs or 1000 cabs deployed in Hamilton.

If the average Uber trip is $10, then in a 100 cab scenario, each Uber taxi would have to run 20 trips to gross $200. I have been hearing that Uber drivers are having $200 nights.

100 Uber cabs times $200 each adds up to $20,000.

At 25%, Uber gets $5,000 of that.

Now let's switch over to every cab driver's nightmare. There are now 1,000 Uber cabs on the streets of Hamilton, moving forward to the full implementation of the "sharing economy."

That $20,000 that was previously divided amongst 100 cab drivers now has to be divided amongst 1,000 cab drivers.

The nightly take of each Uber cabbie is now reduced to a third-world sounding number..... $20.

But here is the fucking magic. Uber still gets its $5,000.

I mean, talk about "sharing."

It's the next best thing to running a numbers racket, except that the government has already expropriated that industry.

Uber is not a technology company. Uber is a political company. It's expertise lies not in some silly app. It lies in knowing how to exploit the fault lines and fissures in a corrupt political structure. It would not exist in a free economy.

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