> Business are in general not solvent in their first years. Even some business such as Uber took 15 years to generate a profit [1].

This is true, but it's not clear to me how it relates to either the discussion of whether markets are rational or the discussion of whether common-law liability is more effective than preemptive regulation. Can you explain the connection?

If the implication is that people choosing to bear risk in the expectation of achieving a long-term profit is irrational, then I'm not sure how to respond, because this seems almost axiomatically false to me. In fact, given that we live in an observably stochastic universe, where cause-and-effect is best represented by probability models and not deterministic logic, I'd regard that rationality itself includes probabilistic decision-making, and that attempting to preempt all risk is itself highly irrational.

> This is true, but it's not clear to me how it relates to either the discussion of whether markets are rational or the discussion of whether common-law liability is more effective than preemptive regulation. Can you explain the connection?

Its tangential. The Market-Irrational quote is all about how even if you know the stock market is wrong (especially due to large scale fraud by that company) you may not be able to profit from that knowledge because the market can continue to buy that stock (be irrational) longer than you can afford to have the contrary position (be solvent).

People (probably myself as well) use it to describe other situations though. Such as a Taxi-like company selling 20$ car rides for 10$. No matter how irrational having your only revenue source be a loss-leader for decades; if you bet against Uber at IPO you'd be out 30/share right now (current 70, IPO 40).

To get back to the actual origin of this tangent [1], although Uber still exists but imagine you only had a Taxi industry and Uber comes in and all the Taxi drivers get fired. Then Uber goes bankrupt and all the Uber drivers are fired. Now all you have are a bunch of unemployed people. Society did not benefit here. That's the scenario being described in the origin of our tangent. In these situations there might not be somebody with a large pile of cash that they feel like investing into re-starting the taxi industry so that region may just not have taxis anymore or just the richer parts of the region have a rebirth of the taxi industry and the poorer parts are un/underserved. So it would be rational for people to have a NIMBY approach to something that in the long term will only cause problems.

> I'd regard that rationality itself includes probabilistic decision-making, and that attempting to preempt all risk is itself highly irrational.

Betting with 1:-1 odds is irrational unless you're running a money laundering scheme. If you think that a region can only support 4 car washes then as a local government official you should prevent the 20th from being built because it's just not sustainable (or at least force them to prove 20 can be supported).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39738996