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I am trying to come up with an analogy to comprehend this. Imagine a city government has a rule against palm oil and no restaurants are supposed to use palm oi

I am trying to come up with an analogy to comprehend this. Imagine a city government has a rule against palm oil and no restaurants are supposed to use palm oil. A restaurant think that rule is nuts and decides to protest it publicly by using it. At the same time, they rip off the label from the palm oil. The city was having trouble finding the palm oil in the restaurant. You can claim that the restaurant has broken the city rule - which is not a secret. But I don't think ripping off the label or making the regulators life more challenging is a crime by itself.

lordnacho 10y ago
Imagine murder is illegal. But some guy thinks it isn't and does it anyway. He puts bodies in acid, hides them in concrete, and so on. Now this kind of behaviour is likely to mean the authorities will take a lot longer to find murderers. Murderers will get away with it from time to time. And a lot of resource needs to be spent just to find the criminals. We do tend to be more forgiving with crimes where the criminal confesses, and rightly so.
- eddieplan9 10y ago
  Equating outdated city-level taxi regulations to universal law punishing murder is disingenuous, to say the least. FTC did a report [1] in 1984 about taxi regulations and pointed out why cities were not well-equipped nor incentivized to regulate for the purpose of market efficiency: > There are, in fact, reasons to doubt that existing regulations are efficient. One problem is that the analytical and informatiqnal problems involved in determining the efficient levels of the relevant policy variables are great. It is doubtful that regulatory authorities generally have the necessary expertise or information to determine these levels. Also, taxi ordinances and the government agencies that issue taxi regulations may not be motivated primarily by concern for market failure and achievement of an efficient resource allocation. It appears that taxi regulations have often been designed to protect public transit systems and existing taxi firms from competition. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/economic-analysis-taxicab-regulation/233832.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/ec...
  - lordnacho 10y ago
    It's totally irrelevant what the crime is, whether you like the rules or not, or whether the rules are economically efficient. The point is you can't obstruct law enforcement from detecting that you've broken the rules.
briffle 10y ago
In my town, they were picking up drivers, then immediately fining them $1200 for being a taxi, without the taxi insurance and a special license/permit. I could see uber wanting to avoid that.

lordnacho 10y ago

Imagine murder is illegal. But some guy thinks it isn't and does it anyway. He puts bodies in acid, hides them in concrete, and so on. Now this kind of behaviour is likely to mean the authorities will take a lot longer to find murderers. Murderers will get away with it from time to time. And a lot of resource needs to be spent just to find the criminals. We do tend to be more forgiving with crimes where the criminal confesses, and rightly so.

eddieplan9 10y ago
Equating outdated city-level taxi regulations to universal law punishing murder is disingenuous, to say the least. FTC did a report [1] in 1984 about taxi regulations and pointed out why cities were not well-equipped nor incentivized to regulate for the purpose of market efficiency: > There are, in fact, reasons to doubt that existing regulations are efficient. One problem is that the analytical and informatiqnal problems involved in determining the efficient levels of the relevant policy variables are great. It is doubtful that regulatory authorities generally have the necessary expertise or information to determine these levels. Also, taxi ordinances and the government agencies that issue taxi regulations may not be motivated primarily by concern for market failure and achievement of an efficient resource allocation. It appears that taxi regulations have often been designed to protect public transit systems and existing taxi firms from competition. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/economic-analysis-taxicab-regulation/233832.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/ec...
- lordnacho 10y ago
  It's totally irrelevant what the crime is, whether you like the rules or not, or whether the rules are economically efficient. The point is you can't obstruct law enforcement from detecting that you've broken the rules.

briffle 10y ago

In my town, they were picking up drivers, then immediately fining them $1200 for being a taxi, without the taxi insurance and a special license/permit. I could see uber wanting to avoid that.