This isn't a very good picture, but it illustrates some of what I'm talking about when I mention taxi system inefficiency. This is the Rustenburg taxi rank, and one of the striking things you notice on walking in is the staggering number of idle taxis sitting around. There's probably upwards of two hundred in this rank alone. I asked a few people about that, and of course they had various reasons for it, but I cannot imagine this doesn't represent a huge waste of resources, both in terms of unused potential and just in that so many empty taxis are quite literally clogging up the rank.
This post is dedicated to Mark Bedau , my philosophy professor at Reed, a great guy and a wonderful teacher, by far the least pretentious philosopher I've ever met. He is responsible for this post only insofar as he sparked my interest in the subject; its many shortcomings are mine alone. Who's ready for some unqualified philosophical rambling? I'm not going to do much more than summarize, as this is probably one of the five biggest problems in philosophy and the material quickly gets out of hand. Anyway—let's start with some terms, appropriately hefty philosophical ones. (I'm going to steal shamelessly from Wikipedia, as the free will article is very good.) Free will is "purported ability of agents to make choices free from constraints." Some call it the "ability to have done otherwise," but that definition runs into problems which I'll describe later. Determinism is the view that all events are caused by previous events, while indet...

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