making money off something the city provides for public use is wrong in my opinion, it's as the article states, predatory.
Agreed. Taxes provide that infrastructure for a purpose, and to hijack and disrupt that infrastructure and its purpose for profit is co-opting a public resource for personal gain. The only way you can do that legally is to get a contract with the government.
Haha. Imagine a the government sending cease and desist letters to those companies that bottle water straight out of the tap, because they're stealing a public resource for their own personal profit! It would be Bizarro World. The government seems to be mainly a tool for businesses to exploit publicly owned resources. If only they had this kind of courage in other areas.The only way you can do that legally is to get a contract with the government.
Bizarre as it sounds, you can "value add" water: you're making it portable, you're putting an attractive label on it, you're providing handy nutrition info for water, you're informing the customer that her bottle is recyclable and giving her an address where she can find out more about her water. They're also not stealing it - they're purchasing it through a metered tap just like everyone else. There's no way to value-add a parking space because you aren't purchasing it for resale, you're leasing it and releasing is almost always a no-no.
I imagine a world where all of this sharing economy becomes law and mandate. That this profit driven model will be subverted to a morality driven script fed to the poor to fight over there own scraps rather than them expect to move ahead economically. But then again I am kinda a downer.