• Scooter use is rising in major cities. So are trips to the emergency room. - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/scooter-use-is-rising-in-major-cities-so-are-trips-to-the-emergency-room/2018/09/06/53d6a8d4-abd6-11e8-a8d7-0f63ab8b1370_story.html?noredirect=on

    Attention aux faux-amis, ici scooter veut dire trottinettes electriques.

    Il faudra un jour repenser la question de ces systèmes qui n’ont pas de points fixes (dont qui encombrent les villes, sont moins biens réparés et plus abîmés). Ce modèle est une certaine idée du partage qui en réalité est ouverte... à la « tragédie des communs ». Effectivement, dans ce modèle, le partage et la conservation du système devient second par rapport à l’utilité pour chaque usager. Les conditions de la tragédie des communs sont alors réunies : il n’y a pas de communauté pour « se parler » (communs, communautés et communication viennent de la même racine latine) et donc régler les problèmes.

    They have been pouring into emergency rooms around the nation all summer, their bodies bearing a blend of injuries that doctors normally associate with victims of car wrecks — broken noses, wrists and shoulders, facial lacerations and fractures, as well as the kind of blunt head trauma that can leave brains permanently damaged.

    When doctors began asking patients to explain their injuries, many were surprised to learn that the surge of broken body parts stemmed from the latest urban transportation trend: shared electric scooters.

    In Santa Monica, Calif. — where one of the biggest electric-scooter companies is based — the city’s fire department has responded to 34 serious accidents involving the devices this summer. The director of an emergency department there said his team treated 18 patients who were seriously injured in electric-scooter accidents during the final two weeks of July. And in San Francisco, the doctor who runs the emergency room at a major hospital said he is seeing as many as 10 severe injuries a week.

    As the injuries pile up in cities across the country, the three largest scooter companies — operating under the names Bird, Lime and Skip — have seen their values soar as they attempt to transform urban transit, following the successes of ride-hailing and bike-sharing companies. The scooter start-ups have attracted massive investments from Uber, the prominent technology venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, with some analysts estimating that some of the privately held companies might be worth more than $1 billion.

    A commuter rides a scooter on 15th Street NW in Washington. (Robert Miller/The Washington Post)

    But a growing number of critics — including doctors, former riders, scooter mechanics and personal injury lawyers — say the devices may look like toys but inflict the same degree of harm as any other motorized vehicle on the road, only without having to comply with safety regulations. These critics add that some ­electric-scooter fleets are poorly maintained by a loose-knit flock of amateur mechanics, making them prone to dangerous mechanical failures.

    Bird and Skip have programs that give helmets to riders who request them, and Lime notes that riders must go through an “in-app tutorial” on helmet safety to unlock one of the company’s scooters for the first time.

    “We also strive to reduce injuries though our vehicle design and include key safety features such as headlights and taillights, independent suspension, and a wider and higher footboard to improve stability,” a statement from Skip said.

    But Bird is also lobbying against legislation in California that would require users to wear helmets.

    The injured might quickly discover that their ability to sue the scooter industry is limited.

    Bird and Lime, the two biggest companies, require consumers to agree to not sue — either individually or as part of a class-action suit — and instead turn to a form of mediation known as “binding arbitration” as a condition of using their scooters. They both name specific arbitration companies, while Bird also names a preferred location for arbitration and Lime requires users to first engage in a 60-day “dialogue” with the company.

    Bird says its user agreement “represents an industry standard” among “transportation technology companies.”

    Skip recently informed users that its arbitration agreement would be binding for users beginning Friday. Skip said the company is adding the arbitration provision as part of a revamp of its user agreement as the firm expands across the country. In a statement, Skip said the changes “make the terms and conditions more clear, more informative, and more efficient.”

    Consumer advocates have long criticized binding arbitration as putting consumers at a disadvantage. Arbitration clauses — often appearing as fine print in user agreements and employee contracts — have become a defining feature of corporate contracts used by many of the nation’s most recognizable brands across multiple industries.

    #Véhicules_partagés #Tragédie_des_communs #Accidents #Economie_collaborative(_mon_c..)

  • Facebook faces the tragedy of the commons – Financial Times – Medium
    https://medium.com/financial-times/facebook-faces-the-tragedy-of-the-commons-4124e774f5f4

    Même si l’article se méprend sur ce que sont les communs (il y a une co-gouvernance par les acteurs), il pointe du doigt un problème sur la tragédie du domaine public.

    Et si la réelle solution venait de la construction d’un commun des médias sociaux, dans lequel les usagers seraient responsabilisés sur leurs propres usages ? Mais cela voudrait dire aussi en finir avec la pub qui ne profite qu’à la plateforme. Nouvelle quadrature à résoudre... par la socialisation des plateformes, en créant un « index indépendant du web » comme le demande Olivier Ertzscheid.

    Ou d’autres solutions de contrôle collectif à imaginer.

    Au fait, a-t-on besoin d’une plateforme de 2 milliards d’utilisateurs pour simplement connecter quelques centaines d’ami·e·s ?

    Each scandal produces fresh calls for networks to be treated like publishers of news, who are responsible for everything that appears under their names. Each one forces them further to tighten their “community standards” and hire more content checkers. By next year, Facebook intends to employ 20,000 people in “community operations”, its censorship division.

    A better way to think of Russian political ads, extremist videos, fake news and all the rest is as the polluters of common resources, albeit ones that are privately owned. The term for this is the tragedy of the commons. Open ecosystems that are openly shared by entire communities tend to get despoiled.

    Every time a scandal occurs, they have to reinforce their editorial defences and come closer to the kind of content monitoring that would change their nature

    Here lies the threat to social networks. They set themselves up as commons, offering open access to hundreds of millions to publish “user-generated content” and share photos with others. That in turn produced a network effect: people needed to use Facebook or others to communicate.

    But they attract bad actors as well — people and organisations who exploit free resources for money or perverted motives. These are polluters of the digital commons and with them come over-grazers: people guilty of lesser sins such as shouting loudly to gain attention or attacking others.

    As Hardin noted, this is inevitable. The digital commons fosters great communal benefits that go beyond being a publisher in the traditional sense. The fact that YouTube is open and free allows all kinds of creativity to flourish in ways that are not enabled by the entertainment industry. The tragedy is that it also empowers pornographers and propagandists for terror.

    Hardin was a pessimist about commons, arguing that there was no technical solution and that the only remedy was “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority”. The equivalent for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would be to become much more like publishers, imposing tight rules about entry and behaviour rather than their current openness.

    They resist this partly because it would bring stricter legal liability and partly because they want to remain as commons. But every time a scandal occurs, they have to reinforce their editorial defences and come closer to the kind of content monitoring that would change their nature.

    It would cross the dividing line if they reviewed everything before allowing it to be published, rather than removing offensive material when alerted.

    More than 75 per cent of extremist videos taken down by YouTube are identified by algorithms, while Facebook now finds automatically 99 per cent of the Isis and al-Qaeda material it removes. It is like having an automated fence around a territory to sort exploiters from legitimate entrants.

    #Facebook #Communs #Tragedie_des_communs

  • Facebook faces the tragedy of the commons
    https://www.ft.com/content/ec74ce54-d3e1-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9
    http://prod-upp-image-read.ft.com/f1542870-d52b-11e7-ae3e-563c04c5339a

    It is hard to keep up with the stream of scandals, big and small, involving social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. From unwittingly aiding Russian efforts to subvert elections to finding themselves exploited by extremists and pornographers, they are constantly in trouble.

    The latest is YouTube failing to stop videos of children being commented on by paedophiles, while letting advertisements appear alongside them. Only months after Alphabet’s video platform faced an advertiser boycott over extremist videos and had to apologise humbly, companies such as Diageo and Mars are again removing ads.

    Each scandal produces fresh calls for networks to be treated like publishers of news, who are responsible for everything that appears under their names. Each one forces them further to tighten their “community standards” and hire more content checkers. By next year, Facebook intends to employ 20,000 people in “community operations”, its censorship division.

    Tempting as it is for publications that have lost much of their digital advertising to internet giants to believe they should be treated as exact equivalents, it is flawed: Facebook is not just a newspaper with 2.1bn readers. But being a platform does not absolve them of responsibility. The opposite, in fact — it makes their burden heavier.

    Here lies the threat to social networks. They set themselves up as commons, offering open access to hundreds of millions to publish “user-generated content” and share photos with others. That in turn produced a network effect: people needed to use Facebook or others to communicate.

    But they attract bad actors as well — people and organisations who exploit free resources for money or perverted motives. These are polluters of the digital commons and with them come over-grazers: people guilty of lesser sins such as shouting loudly to gain attention or attacking others.

    As Hardin noted, this is inevitable. The digital commons fosters great communal benefits that go beyond being a publisher in the traditional sense. The fact that YouTube is open and free allows all kinds of creativity to flourish in ways that are not enabled by the entertainment industry. The tragedy is that it also empowers pornographers and propagandists for terror.

    #Médias_sociaux #Facebook #Fake_news #Communs #Tragédie_des_communs

  • La végétalisation des villes et la tragi-comédie des Communs | Calimaq
    https://scinfolex.com/2017/08/15/la-vegetalisation-des-villes-et-la-tragi-comedie-des-communs

    Au début du mois d’août, une nouvelle plateforme « Végétalisons Paris » a été lancée par la municipalité de la capitale. Le site rassemble les informations concernant les différentes initiatives de la mairie de Paris visant à inciter les habitants à investir les espaces publics pour y planter des végétaux. Chacun peut y effectuer les démarches nécessaires… Source : : : S.I.Lex : :

    • Le permis de végétaliser permet à un ou des habitants d’une ville de solliciter une autorisation pour utiliser une portion d’espace public afin d’y faire pousser des plantes. Juridiquement, il s’analyse comme une autorisation d’occupation temporaire (AOT) du domaine public, qui a grosso-modo la même nature que celles que sollicitent les cafetiers pour installer une terrasse empiétant sur un trottoir ou des manifestants qui veulent défiler dans la rue.

      #Tragédie_des_Communs (vandalisme des ressources communes)

      Si le système de l’occupation temporaire du domaine public comporte certains aspects intéressants, il est peut-être nécessaire d’aller plus loin et de couper les ponts avec cette philosophie des usages « octroyés » par la puissance publique pour aller vers la mise en place de véritables Communs urbains.

  • The world needs a rocket tax to solve the “Gravity” space junk problem – Quartz
    http://qz.com/132545/the-world-needs-a-rocket-tax-to-solve-the-gravity-space-junk-problem

    Earlier this year, a group of economists from Indiana-Purdue University, the US Federal Communications Commission, and the US Naval Academy tried to figure out how to limit the potential damage to a satellite industry that is responsible for everything from internet communications to GPS networks, and which was worth some $170 billion in 2012.


    (...) The study found that commercial #satellite firms launch more satellites than is “socially desirable,” and they use launch technology that is more likely to create debris “because they only compare individual marginal benefits and costs of their technology choice and fail to take into account social benefits and costs.” That puts space debris squarely into the category of a “negative #externality,” (...)

    One answer, they suggest, is a tax on satellite launches that could be used to pay for orbital clean-up

    #espace