Thursday, April 16, 2009

So, how do taxicabs make money, anyway?

About a month ago, some friends of mine and I caught a late movie. After the movie, we spent about half an hour trying to hail a cab. Many times, empty cabs whizzed by the four of us non-threatening-looking people standing outside a movie theater.

Eventually, we called a cab company to send us a cab.

Were the cabs that went by us already on the way to other places? If not, what's the deal?

CC

Ps. Unrelated story: Back when I wrote for a living, one of my first freelance writing assignments was covering a computer hacking convention in New York. When I told my mother I was covering a hacker convention, she said "Taxicab drivers have conventions?"

And Justice Scalia wonders why some of us are skeptical of new textualism...

3 comments:

Wilson Wonders said...

sometimes cabs don't transport people, they transport "merchandise", which is worth a whole lot bigger fare than a couple people outside a movie theater. I'm just sayin.

Chalicechick said...

Well, there is that...

PG said...

Something I've been meaning to write about re: textualism: dictionaries often are repositories of "elite" meanings. Today, it's the inclusion of same-sex unions in the definition of marriage, but I bet in the past it has been economic elitism and social conservatism. This means that relying on the 1789 dictionary to define "commerce" and "property" and so forth could be fairly problematic if you're interested in what those terms meant to the average American.