Gimme Some Money

A really egregious business model is offered up in this new rapaciously anti-community, anti-consumer, truly Randian even-more-than-the-market-will-bear car service model using "dynamic pricing". The service is called "Uber" -- perhaps a Nietzschean reference -- and it isn't pretty:

Although New Year’s Eve was very profitable for Uber, customers were not happy. Many felt the pricing was exorbitant and they took to Twitter and the Web to complain. Some people said that at certain times in the evening, rides had spiked to as high as seven times the usual price, and they called it highway robbery. Uber’s goal is to make the experience as simple as possible, so customers are not shown their fare until the end of the ride, when it is automatically charged to their credit card.

The NYT blog post on this hints at the evil in the model. I hope this gives pause to such current trands as dynamic parking pricing, and other civic experiments of that ilk. There is a limit to the viability of unabashed greed costumed as market principles.