7 ms·

This is a great comment, and hopefully I could add some real life example around this, esp with 1) and 2). Uber did this in Europe. Uber pushed, fought and in

• kebman 7y ago
  Nobody want's a new McDonald's destroying their old status quo in their country. People don't want one-world-gov. They want disparate nations, that have charm and local uniqueness. Except that goes directly towards harmonizing international (trade) laws. If you want a lesson, check out how Lidl did in Norway when they challenged local chain stores.
  • Aeolun 7y ago
    > People don’t want one-world-gov Speak for yourself. I would personally love this. We’re long overdue for a one world government.
    • johnsimer 7y ago
      Imagine if a dictator rises to power, but this time s/he has power over the entire world.
      • Dylan16807 7y ago
        They'd have to completely undermine the world government to turn it into a dictatorship, and get the countries underneath it to go along. Is that much easier than getting power over the entire world the old-fashioned way?
        • bcrosby95 7y ago
          I mean, sure, if you want a toothless world government with no power that wouldn't be able to keep countries in line. In which case I'm happy to report we already have this: its called the UN. For anything else you would call an actual government, the highest body has the power and physical force to keep those under them inline. Even in the USA, where states rights are a thing, the federal government could easily force them to do basically whatever they want.
        • freepor 7y ago
          Huge countries like India, the US, and Russia have come under the thrall of men whose position in the feature space is near words like “deranged” and “terrifying”... there’s no reason to believe that the same thing could not happen to a world government
      • nkozyra 7y ago
        Imagine if there's a revolution, but it's world population - 1 this time.
        • mellow2020 7y ago
          Fully fledged totalitarianism isn't overthrown by revolution, a worldwide totalitarianism isn't some kind of necessary stage before universal peace -- it would rather make peaceful, dignified relations of people to themselves and another completely impossible, and maybe for good. > At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worth while to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything? In the United States and America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from now -- recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censor­ship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that govern­ment of the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts. -- https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/index.html https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/index.html It's not that we now have less risk for the things that were described by thinkers in the 20th century, it's that we became more complacent and cowardly, less ambitious and more comfortable, and are rationalizing it. We don't know more, we just are less able. We don't rise to the occasion, we pull it down into the gutter with us. This is the whimper our betters have seen coming.
    • zelly 7y ago
      As long as it's $MY_POLITICS, I would love a one world government
    • dangoldin 7y ago
      I've been thinking along similar lines - in my mind it boils down to that these days we have problems that only a global government can solve. And you can see this through history - tribes, cities, states, countries, X.
    • refurb 7y ago
      Will never happen, unless it’s authoritarian. There is way to much cultural, and thus political, diversity in the world. Not everyone wants the same thing out of their government. Hell, even small countries are usually strongly divided on politics.
      • AmericanChopper 7y ago
        To believe in a one-world government, I think it’s almost a prerequisite that you don’t care about what people actually want. The only line of reasoning I’ve seen sincerely put forward for creating a central world authority to rule over all people is that some people think they know what’s best for everybody else. Not only does what actual people want not matter, but in order to achieve their utopic vision, they must protect people from themselves when they want the wrong thing.
        • refurb 7y ago
          Yup. Just look at how Communist countries view dissent. It's not "this person has a different opinion", it's "this person is broken and we must fix them".
  • adrianN 7y ago
    I think you're overgeneralizing "people". I for example would be in favor of world-government structures that have actual power.
  • hyko 7y ago
    The failure of Lidl in Norway due to vested interests is an argument for one world government. Maybe if we had one government we’d finally be able to settle on one electrical plug, which side of the road to drive on etc. etc. Imagine if every country developed its own indigenous WiFi standard? How lovely, until you want to read your email. Charm and uniqueness is great on a postcard, but not when you want to actually achieve anything IRL.
    • simonh 7y ago
      I sympathise, but you don’t need one world government, just agreement and consensus between governments. That’s hard work though, it requires sacrifice and compromise, and recent history (Trump protectionism, Brexit) is against compromise or sacrifice.
      • hyko 7y ago
        Yeah, I guess what I envisage would be a very minimal federal government, rather than a central point of failure for decisions about every aspect of people’s lives. Very hard to get agreement at that scale though, as you say.
        • thequux 7y ago
          I look to Belgium as an example of the ideal world government. Trying to explain Belgium's government would require a wall covered in newspaper clippings and string, but the short form is that there are 6 independent governments with the same power as the federal government, with very long-standing cultural and linguistic strife between them. As a result, it is very hard to do much of anything on the federal level and instead, most decisions are made locally. As a result, despite Gent, Antwerp, and Brussels being about as far apart from each other as San Francisco and Palo Alto, each has a very different culture and regulatory environment regarding daily life. In Gent, it is completely normal to close one of the major roads into city center for a neighborhood festival. In Brussels, it requires weeks of fighting bureaucracy to legally block a side street for a few hours at 6AM with a moving van. Even larger issues are handled locally. Until last year, even immigration and work permit issues were handled provincially. It would take 3-6 months to get my work permit renewed in Brussels, but after I moved to Gent, it took 2 weeks. This all works because it is very hard to get national agreement on anything. Everybody knows that they're not going to be able to push their views on the country, so they work to change their local environment instead. This is all despite the government being (IIRC) the largest employer in Belgium:
  • eitland 7y ago
    More importantly, Lidl didn't have Norwegian newspapers when they arrived and while some of the things they sold were great a number of others just didn't feel right. A lot of the food they try to sell just didn't work because we aren't used to it at all.
• adamsea 7y ago
  Isn't Uber kind of the opposite kind of building the OP refers to? Uber externalizes so many costs to its drivers. It relies on someone else's healthcare system to care for its drivers. Someone else to pay to maintain the cars. So far the gig economy is maybe, half building something which has potential social benefit,half building something which clearly does not. Now, if Uber was lobbying hard for universal healthcare, then that'd be a different story :). But IIRC they mainly avoid or flout the law altogether. In summary I don't think Uber is a good example of a company that has tried to 'build' in a prosocial way.
  • atoav 7y ago
    The only thing uber has built really, is a way to extract more money from workers with less overhead while circumventing existing worker protection by acting as if they were just the messenger between customers and drivers. I have the feeling that the real building of the past two decades lies in ever cleverer bussines schemes focused on lock ins, extracting user data, doing as if you are open while there is no practical way anybody could take what you did in any significant way and improve on it. The exiting things always seem to happen outside of that space however.
    • catlifeonmars 7y ago
      Ubër has also built a service that I, for one, strongly prefer to traditional transportation services. Customer experience is far superior.
      • TeMPOraL 7y ago
        They did what's the equivalent of selling $10 bills for $1. No surprise customers like it, they get decent service priced at well below the market rate. For a while, that is, because it's only a way for them to leverage VC money to kill off local competitors. Once that's done, Uber's service tends to degrade, and it eventually will even more so, once their money runs out.
        • 7y ago
• petra 7y ago
  Uber only did it because their investors really believed they could capture the market. Most situations are not like that.
• tekdude 7y ago
  One could view this as Uber making a novice mistake. Instead of just fighting to get rid of employment laws that slowed Uber's business, they should have fought to replace them with laws that entrenched its position. For example: they could have persuaded legislatures to make gig work legal, but only in the context of "licensed and qualified" platforms. Reaching that status might require submitting forms to government agencies, drafting reports for publication, instituting certain internal policies, having certain credentialed staff on payroll, etc... All tasks that Uber, who would essentially write such a law, would be naturally able to fulfill while newer competitors might not.