To Protect Legitimate Interests, Seattle Should Cap All Forms of Innovation
I personally think the Seattle uberlyft rules are stupid, but it's worth remembering something that gets lost in the noise of "futurism" that clonks around the silicon valley echo chamber: it's not <i>inherently wrong</i> to have laws that protect established businesses.  I don't like cab companies, but I do want to know that my hired driver is insured.  I'm indifferent to hotels, but I don't want my neighbor running an SRO out of his apartment.  I don't enjoy high medical bills, but I like the ability to know that my prescription medications aren't radium-based elixirs.  And so on.<p>To the extent that stability of certain kinds of businesses is essential to the stability of our society, it's actually a very good thing that governments are somewhat conservative about protecting the establishment.  Moreover, there's no law of the universe that says that "disruption" is a good thing, and there <i>certainly</i> isn't any clean way to weigh the interests of one big established industry with those of a large, successful, wealthy competitor industry.<p>Anyway, I have a hard time getting worked up over the regulatory disputes of corporations -- we have bigger problems, not the least of which is the question of why those big, successful companies get so much influence over the laws in the first place.