The idea behind demand pricing is that people who need it the most will be the most willing to pay; pricing is the only real general mechanism we have to express need/desire. With Uber, I sometimes take Ubers even though my destination is straight down a bus line (to avoid waiting at the bus stop, if the weather is bad, etc). If the price was high enough, I may decide to just take the bus, which means the Uber is freed up for someone taking a trip that's less amenable to purely taking transit.

You are of course right that this effect is distorted by the fact that the wealthier you are, the less valuable money becomes, so you're willing to pay more for things that are less important. It just seemed like you were being a little reductive and ignoring the actual intent (and partial result) of demand pricing.

There is another one, actually. It's called voting. And it's how taxi regulations came about in the first place.

Of course, voting expresses needs and desires, but that's in an entirely different sense of the word than it's being used in this context. The only way one could mistake the two is if they read my comment COMPLETELY without context: without having read the article, the headline, or any of the HN comments page....unless you're just nitpicking semantics to be contrarian because you have nothing else to contribute, in which case I'm not interested in wasting any more of my time.

How does it not? Voting represents long term needs and desires, like the desire for an orderly, reliable public transportation system. Voting determines whether there are going to be taxis at all. It's not a matter of semantics. I read the article, the headline, and many of the comments, including yours. And I don't see any 'context' that supports a flat statement that pricing is the only way people express their need for transportation, sorry.

"Of course, voting expresses needs and desires, but that's in an entirely different sense of the word than it's being used in this context....The only way one could mistake the two is if they read my comment COMPLETELY without context: without having read the article, the headline, or any of the HN comments page....unless you're just nitpicking semantics to be contrarian because you have nothing else to contribute."

I understand that you're trying to be deliberately obtuse here, but in the small event that you're not, i'll make it blindingly, incredibly, extremely, amazingly obvious that I'm talking about allocating resources at the time of purchase, for each potential purchase. I mean jesus,you claim to have read my comment, and yet you're pretending that I didn't give an explicit example of what I was talking about and you're continuing to talk about something that couldn't be more off-topic. Here is the example again, in case you somehow (???) missed it:

When there is a rainstorm, and there are T taxis, and P people who want a taxi, and T < P, there is no jurisdiction in the world who holds a referendum (or has Congress decide) that taxi 1 is assigned to Bob, taxi 2 to Fred, taxi 3 to Alice, etc. To make this ultra-ultra-ultra-clear, so hopefully even you will understand it, when I said prices are the only mechanism of expressing needs/desires, I was incredibly ridiculously obviously talking about "needs/desires of each person for a given product at a given time", since that is the context of the article, the headline, the HN comments, et al. The fact that you're pretending not to have understood any of the context of this and insist that "voting" is an expression of every individual's demand for a product at every relevant moment in time (which again, is the topic of the conversation here) is either incredibly disingenuous or mind-blowingly stupid. The fact that voting can set the value of T beforehand(in the above example) has NOTHING to do with expressing each individual's need/desire for the taxi product at every relevant moment of time (which, again, is what the conversation about and what you were attempting to rebut when you claimed that voting could take the place of pricing in that regard). I mean really, Jesus Christ

You took for granted that "of course" those people also had the power to express their desire politically, you just didn't think it was relevant for the point you were trying to make. I get that. In these discussions, I see a lot of comments along the lines of "give the consumer choices" and "let the market decide", putting the focus just as you did on the point of transaction. But in a democracy the consumer can also exercise choice by voting to limit the market. I'm making the point that those choices shouldn't be discounted simply because they weren't made at the time the immediate need presented itself.