Recent post by Scott Adams described his vision for the future of public transportation in the new economy.
Suppose the government enacted laws that made it legal for anyone to be a taxi driver in his own car without a special taxi license. And suppose the income was non-taxable. The result would be cheap taxis and high availability. Every time you wanted to run an errand, and had an extra minute, you could choose to pick up a rider and cut your own driving expense in half. Technology will make it easy to match amateur taxi drivers with riders. And the market would keep prices low.
This is very similar to the system that existed for years (and still alive an well) in the USSR and countries that followed it. In addition to pretty well developed system of public transportation and state-owned taxis, a person could just stand on the street, raise a hand and flag down a private car. Both sides benefited equally: a passenger received a semic0mfortable ride for a price comparable to a cab (general price/distance ratio was common knowledge) and a driver made some extra money without making any extra effort. Some people liked it so much that they made it into a part-time job. Others just picked up passengers on the way home or wherever.
Imagine yourself standing somewhere on the Lenin Street (each city had one of these), you raise your hand and soon one of these beauties stops to pick you up:
Soviet Union had its own “Big 3”: GAZ, AutoVAZ, and AZLK; ZAZ in Ukraine produced some of the ugliest and the most unreliable even by the Soviet standards vehicles. Due to the shortage of cars and years-long waiting lists people were happy to get anything with wheels. Sometimes, when at the end of the month autoworkers were rushing to fulfil quotas so they can get their bonus, a lucky buyer would find a bucket of uninstalled parts inside his new vehicle. Despite these cars being 20-30 behind the rest of the automotive world when they came off assembly line, many of them are still on the road closing in on 40 years. Soviet people invented ingenious ways of keeping them going and they turned out relatively easy to fix and maintain.
If you are a long-time follower of this blog, I am sure you already know that today is the day to fly your red flag to celebrate another anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution – a holiday no longer celebrated in Russia where people for some reason blame it for 70 years of crappy life. I am not going to repeat my previous posts on the subject, so this year we will celebrate with another batch of old photos taken at the Moscow’s Red Square on this day in 1962.
On this photo we see the current leadership of the USSR – Comrade Khrushchev is the 5th from the right next to Comrade Brezhnev. In a few years, acting exclusively in the interest of saving Comrade Khrushchev’s health Comrade Brezhnev will replace him while he will be away on vacation.
These people are happy, just imagine their faces when they are not.
The ad wizards who thought it was a great idea to put small print on a highway billboard came up with another gem.
Here are my suggestions for the future billboards:
My car kicked your car’s rear end;
My car’s big black tailpipe is longer than your car’s tailpipe;
My car took away your car’s gas money;
My car swallowed a luxury car and now it craps exhausts luxury;
My car voted for McCain;
If you come up with your own winning caption I will throw in up to 700 miles for your choice of a magazine subscription.
Continuing with the subject of advertising if your child is composing/performing a jingle about the hemorrhoid treatment center, you are within your rights to demand back all the money you’ve spent on the music lessons. (the jingle starts on the 20th second of the clip).
The 8th of March is The International Women’s Day – a celebration of women young and old, beautiful and smart, lovely, witty, (sometimes) funny, unique and irreplaceable. Thank you for letting us bask in all that.
My feelings are best expressed by a Japanese Karaoke performer, whose song I was lucky to capture at the St.Louis Japanese Festival few years ago:
