A good post, even as one given over to naturally ignoring stupid rules. Many start-ups are engaged in the "flout the law and make abnormal profits by hoping so

A good post, even as one given over to naturally ignoring stupid rules. Many start-ups are engaged in the "flout the law and make abnormal profits by hoping society evolves/decides in our favour" gamble. Uber and Airbnb are two obvious examples, where I'm sure if a couple of people had died in transit, or a house burnt down and killed its occupants, and resulting cases went to court and they were found to have gone against transport/hotelier laws in a jurisdiction, then I imagine the course of such companies would be very different. I'm sure we'll have more interesting case studies that I'm just not as familiar with as we have startups move into other heavily regulated but emergent/disruption ready/ambiguously policed sectors: see drug legalisation, communications/cryptography/security, financial services, legal services, health/pharmacy, etc as logical places where you'd expect to see these gambles starting to show up...