[HN Gopher] Uber broke laws, duped police and built lobbying ope...
___________________________________________________________________
Uber broke laws, duped police and built lobbying operation, leak
reveals
Author : colin_jack
Score : 681 points
Date : 2022-07-10 16:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Laws that enshrine and entrench the taxi monopoly are bad laws.
| ajaimk wrote:
| Why is this news? It's from 2014... We already knew all this.
| They even made a TV series about all this.
| polynomial wrote:
| I don't feel great about taking Uber, but until NYC gets the TV
| screen out of my face, it's a no brainer from a user experience
| pov.
| raverbashing wrote:
| But the question is, how many politicians and lobbyists were on
| the other side, trying to keep the status quo as it was, in
| favour of taxi drivers?
| [deleted]
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I don't know of a more corrupt industry than the taxi industry.
| The tight control of supply via taxi licenses, the low pay of
| drivers and the inability for any incumbents to enter. It was
| horrendous and hugely profitable for those in power and
| exploitative for anyone needing such services.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| All you have to do is look at cities where they don't have Uber
| and you'll find a strong taxi mafia. Sometimes a literal taxi
| mafia like in Budapest.
|
| I was living in Valancia Spain, the first day I got there I
| remember walking down what turned out to be one of the main
| streets in the city to find it being blocked by hundreds of
| taxis in a peaceful protest. Ok fine, I didn't know why and it
| was all cosure with the police.
|
| Then a few months later my ability to use a good quality app
| with verifiable trust (extremely important in some parts of the
| world) and recourse to the operator was suddenly taken away.
|
| I had to order taxis using one of the crap taxi middlemen apps
| which offer little to no support for when things go a wrong and
| I was back to riding in cars where the driver was actively
| trying to rip you off.
|
| Oh you've lived here 10 years but you need to look on the map
| of where one of the main streets is? Ok great, make sure the
| meeter is started before you do that.
|
| Oh it's after 8pm so that short 4.50EUR journey is
| automatically a minimum 6EUR Ok great enjoy.
|
| 25EUR to the airport? I'm sure this used to be 14...
|
| Taxis suck, lack accountability and will do anything it takes
| to maintain their market share while providing a horrible
| scammy service.
| nprateem wrote:
| Which app was that?
| aikah wrote:
| 2 wrongs don't make a right. Uber operates like the mafia. I'm
| not going to take their defense just because they are a "just
| an app" or that the competition is as bad...
|
| Uber became popular because it leveraged VC and cheap credit to
| subsidized rides, it's becoming much less popular as we speak
| since ride fares are going up fast and it now needs to actually
| make money.
| lesstyzing wrote:
| The Uber propaganda here in this thread is insane. Taxi's maybe
| have been shit but that does not in anyway justify Uber breaking
| the law to conquer the market (btw, now that they've done that,
| they've also turned to shit because it was unsustainable).
|
| Perfect may be the enemy of good but we shouldn't excuse
| companies using endless VC money and law breaking to achieve
| something that's marginally better for consumers.
|
| Obviously there are some exceptions to this in the comments but
| generally, in modern countries where the taxi firms aren't run by
| literal mafias and killing people, we should condemn Uber's
| behaviour.
| hourago wrote:
| Uber is well known for paying to manipulate on-line discourse.
| The amount of propaganda just adds to my grievances towards the
| company.
| [deleted]
| lawgimenez wrote:
| In my country we used to have Uber but they pulled out maybe
| 4-5 years ago. I wish they have stayed, because now we only
| have one and it is driving the price way up high due to lack of
| competition.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| My observation is that nearly every municipality had a taxi
| service with negative press, isolated in local news under
| different taxi brands, and in municipal court filings. This
| being about local taxi that bent the law to become entrenched
| themselves.
|
| Whereas any incident with Uber is international news.
|
| Makes it harder for me to elevate Uber's issues as being as
| egregious as presented. I recognize their flaws, I also
| recognize the market need which still remains. So sure, make a
| better one thats more compliant. When I and others point this
| out we're not giving Uber a pass. Just assigning a weight to
| the problems.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > This being about local taxi that bent the law to become
| entrenched themselves.
|
| Can you give an example? I've never heard of that. They
| usually lack any power at all.
|
| > nearly every municipality had a taxi service with negative
| press
|
| Everyone seemed satisfied in my experience. I did see Uber's
| talking points everywhere on social media - how terrible
| taxis were. Unforunately, taxis lacked the money to run their
| own information campaign.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Ask actual individuals, take taxis yourself, ask people
| that try to be their own driver.
|
| Not everything is about an information campaign but factors
| in common pain points from consumers.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I have taken more taxis in more cities than you imagine.
| Thousands, I would guess. I've talked to many cab drivers
| and rideshare drivers about this exact issue: IME most
| think Uber/Lyft screw them, that cabs were better as
| their fate was in their hands (and they didn't have to
| provide a car!), but as Uber/Lyft control access to rides
| (the only real value they provide), the drivers have no
| choice.
|
| Uber/Lyft also use corruption to get free use of our
| public commons - the streets that they clog - while with
| cabs it was fairly distributed in free market bidding for
| the public resource (i.e., medallions).
| kortilla wrote:
| > I have taken more taxis in more cities than you
| imagine. Thousands, I would guess.
|
| Thousands? That's daily commute level which puts you in
| one of the extremely rare locations that had a semi
| functional cab system.
|
| You don't understand how miserable the cab system was
| (and generally still is) in most of the US because you
| lived in an aberration.
|
| > Uber/Lyft also use corruption to get free use of our
| public commons - the streets that they clog
|
| Not even on the top 10 of concerns surrounding Uber for
| the 95% of the population who don't live in a super dense
| city. Also, it's not free use because the drivers pay the
| same road taxes we do. They just aren't double taxed
| without the medallion system.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > Ask actual individuals, take taxis yourself, ask people
| that try to be their own driver.
|
| You know, I was a taxi driver in Phoenix when Uber/Lyft
| came to town and watched the fallout of their actions --
| absolutely nobody cares about that and every time I post
| about my firsthand experience in some Uber article I get
| downvoted to nothing.
|
| The disconnect (and astroturfing) is phenomenal. I don't
| think people would cheer on the Robber Barons 2.0 if they
| didn't personally benefit through direct subsidies. The
| funny thing is rates are basically what they were before
| they destroyed the taxi industry with the exception that
| drivers get paid a lot less than before, once the daily
| (or weekly) lease was paid up on the cab the rest of the
| money went to the driver. On a good day you could have
| the car paid for in the first few hours and then it's
| easy money. When I lived downtown I'd get up early and do
| 2, 3, 4 back-to-back airport trips ($15 airport special
| which usually paid $25ish) in an hour or so and have half
| the car paid off before the medical appointments started
| to come out. I also used to make two or three hundred on
| Friday and Saturday nights just working out a cab stand
| at one bar.
|
| Then Uber/Lyft came along and started charging less than
| cost and all that went away. You basically had to figure
| out who had what medical appointment when and be sitting
| on that call to even think about paying for the cab let
| alone gas and maybe, if you had a good day, could get all
| fancy with some Carl's Jr.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I've taken many, many taxis with barely a problem. They weren't
| (and aren't) shit at all to me.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I won't use Uber. It's terrible and far worse than my
| experience with taxis. I've also said here before that many UK
| cities had better taxis systems before Uber but was shouted
| down. The only way Uber could compete was unprofitably
| undercutting the local market with a worse service.
|
| Just because SF needed a new taxis system doesn't mean they had
| to inflict it on the rest of the world.
|
| You want to get to the airport for 5AM tomorrow morning? Good
| luck getting an Uber, they won't let you book ahead and if you
| want to hail at the time they will cancel on you 4 times.
|
| I've never had this issue with a taxi company and have got a
| pre booked taxi to time critical things a lot of times in my
| life.
|
| But yeh, they have an app (weren't even the first though) so HN
| loves them.
| kortilla wrote:
| > The only way Uber could compete was unprofitably
| undercutting the local market with a worse service
|
| If it was worse, why were people using it? Maybe people
| didn't like, or more likely couldn't afford, the taxi service
| you refer to.
|
| > they won't let you book ahead and if you want to hail at
| the time they will cancel on you 4 times.
|
| This is exactly what getting a cab was like before Uber in
| nearly every city in the US. That's why Uber had no problem
| disrupting taxis.
| mulmen wrote:
| > If it was worse, why were people using it?
|
| Because it was impossibly cheap.
| bogota wrote:
| I mean "inflict it on the rest of the world" come on. They
| wouldn't be selling if you weren't buying. Uber categorically
| provides a better service than taxis in almost all places and
| provides a far safer experience in others. But once again
| it's likely some self righteous first world person's opinion
| who has no context for how other countries function. Par for
| the course on HN.
| lesstyzing wrote:
| People are buying because they used VC money to undercut
| the competition. Until They owned the market and raised
| their prices.
| kortilla wrote:
| Where do they own the market? I use Lyft everywhere I go
| in the US just fine.
| lesstyzing wrote:
| Lyft still hasn't even broke out of the US and Canada.
| gatlin wrote:
| People weren't necessarily buying in a fair market, hence
| the secret lobbying operation.
| azinman2 wrote:
| At least in the US you can pre-book. I'm no Uber fan but I
| haven't experienced this cancelation you mention.
| lesstyzing wrote:
| You can "prebook" an Uber but they explicitly state that
| they will only try and find you a car automatically at that
| time, not guarantee one/arrange a driver in advance. So
| it's basically just automating the "find me an Uber" button
| press. At least this is how it works in the UK.
| andrewingram wrote:
| Yup, I've had exactly this issue, so I always end up
| going with a local minicab service for early morning
| airport flights.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I agree with you except with the marginally better part. Their
| service is profundly revolutionary.
|
| It isn't lack of capital or brains that prevented the taxi
| indistry before and after uber to provide the same service but
| beneficial to their interests. After all these years they are
| not even trying to compete with Uber they just want things to
| go back to the way they were where consumers are taken
| advantage of or discriminated against. Like it or not, Uber is
| more accessible to all types of consumers not just the ones
| drivers think will tip the most, they have better background
| checks and uniform and scrutinized safety controls and providen
| a viable primary or secondary income to drivers.
|
| The local laws and regulations should get out of the way and
| enable what uber is trying to do with or without Uber. The
| livelihood of taxi drivers is not the law's problem, the well
| being od consumers and the economy however is. An outdated
| business model should not be put on a respirator by
| politicians. I am of the opinion that traditional taxi system
| with medallions and all that should be done with. Anyome who
| provides consumer transportation can compete fairly with Uber
| and pals.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > After all these years they are not even trying to compete
| with Uber they just want things to go back to the way they
| were
|
| Who are you describing? Can you name anyone?
|
| > where consumers are taken advantage of
|
| I've never felt taken advantage of in a taxi. I know Uber
| pushes this all the time, but can you give examples? I know
| with Uber or Lyft they collect data on me such as where I am
| and where I go.
|
| > or discriminated against
|
| Is there any evidence that it's better with ridesharing apps?
| I mean evidence, not the same claims long made by Uber.
| codazoda wrote:
| I've been taken on much longer rides than necessary in
| multiple cities. Las Vegas and Chicago are the first that
| come to mind. It's also nearly impossible to know how much
| a taxi ride will cost in advance. The app and "quote" are
| the game changer with Uber and Lyft. If the Taxi companies
| (especially in Vegas) would build a similar app and pre-
| quote my trips, I'd probably still use them, even if they
| are a little more expensive, because Uber stops are
| typically much farther away. But Taxi companies don't seem
| to want to.
| jonnybgood wrote:
| As a POC and for many of my POC friends in NYC Uber was a
| god send. The discrimination is real.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Also a POC and never had an issue with NYC taxis.
| bhb916 wrote:
| Pre-uber it was common at McCarren Airport (Las Vegas) that
| taxis would intentially take you the wrong way to spike
| their fare. Those who knew would have to demand the driver
| to not take the tunnel, and even then they would argue with
| you. There is no reason not to think that this was common
| everywhere.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Their business was defacto to ignore local laws. And you'll
| find libertarians as a advocate of that business model.
| mi_lk wrote:
| ... the leak is from 2013-2017 when Travis Kalanick was still
| CEO, I mean it was bad but we already know it.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| When you have a massive leak of pervasive illegal behavior
| throughout the company, from the CEO down, and your response
| is...
|
| >> _" Kalanick's spokesperson said Uber's expansion initiatives
| were "led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around
| the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with
| the full approval of Uber's robust legal, policy and compliance
| groups"."_
|
| ... I don't think that messages what Kalanick's spokesperson
| thinks it messages.
| [deleted]
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| "It's all okay because our legal and compliance teams said it
| was."
|
| Talk about non-sequiturs.
| exhaze wrote:
| Disclaimer: at Uber 2014-2018
|
| Travis has not been CEO for 5 years. Based on this article,
| what do you want the people who actually presently work at Uber
| to do?
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Quit? And find a job in a legitimate company?
| exhaze wrote:
| I literally left Uber and moved to Japan. Mostly because I
| could not stand inequality I saw in SF and US. Did feel
| like Uber wasn't great for full time drivers as well and it
| bothered me a lot and always on my mind.
|
| So I did that.
|
| You ever actually do something like that or are you just
| giving theoretical advice based on stuff you've never done?
|
| Easy to say stuff like this. Tell me when you've actually
| done something similar yourself.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| In 2004, I left the US on humanitarian missions, never
| came back. Glad it worked out for you too.
| exhaze wrote:
| I'm glad you had the determination to do something like
| what you did. You sound like a better person than me.
| Keep doing what you're doing - need more folks like you
| who actually walk the walk.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Shit. Well done on both of you.
|
| Seriously glad for some light in the dark.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| There's nothing special or enlightened about choosing the
| life you want to live. Plenty of people do it, for better
| or worse outcomes. Give it a try, start with a low
| consequence decision, take it, and see what momentum you
| build.
| guerrilla wrote:
| You missed the point. There _is_ something special and
| enlightening about living an ethical life.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Uber's behavior was well-known from 2014-2018. I never
| even considered them for employment.
|
| Do you want a gold star for taking a job at an immoral
| company, exiting that SF tech cesspool because of
| "inequality", doing a runner to a comfortable, wealthy
| country that only someone privileged could afford -- and
| then pretending that move made you a saint?
| javajosh wrote:
| I don't think "they broke the law" has the same weight it used
| to. The American justice system has been so entirely captured by
| capital that such an accusation merely tells me that one of
| Uber's enemies spent real money on a PR firm.
|
| Plus, the laws they broke are ones that almost no-one except taxi
| companies (and perhaps city tax officials) care about.
| dnissley wrote:
| The laws being broken were clearly unjust and Uber committed
| civil disobedience (in the American tradition) by breaking them.
| That doesn't mean every underhanded thing Uber has ever done has
| been justified, but in this particular instance it seems like it
| was. No one wants to be sympathetic to a large corporation of
| course, but that's a conversation most people aren't willing to
| have...
| jsemrau wrote:
| How is this news? This has been known for a long while. I, myself
| of all people, have written an article about how dangerous
| lobbying from these tech companies is [1] Corporations need to
| get their funding out of politics because it perverts the
| democratic process. The same applies to foreign influence. It
| bothers me greatly how much right-wing parties all-over the world
| are taking a pro-Russian stance.
|
| [1]https://medium.com/@jsemrau/uber-and-lift-set-a-very-
| dangero...
| goopthink wrote:
| ... and in retrospect, was it worth it? Or was it a pyrrhic short
| term victory at a huge expense for something that would have
| happened eventually anyway but at a slower pace? Was this all
| just a quest to accelerate the inevitable outside of what
| overlapping Overton windows allowed for?
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Still a million times better than what it replaced. About 20
| years ago I was working with the Australian taxi cab industry.
| The hq of the regulatory authority shared the address of the main
| payment system. The regulatory authority was made up of
| representatives of each taxi cab company that each had one vote.
| There was one taxi company (the one that controlled the payment
| system allowed) with 200+ subsidiaries that made up that
| organization. If anyone tried to get into the taxi industry
| they'd use their 200 votes to say they are not allowed by
| regulations. This was a company making 2billion a year in one
| state of Australia alone (NSW). It was so incredibly fucking
| corrupt and i am thankful to Uber Lyft and all the other
| incumbents for managing to get their foot in. It required dirty
| dealing to get past this corruption.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Btw I'm being a bit coy about naming names but
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabcharge#Findings_of_the_Taxi...
| has all the details of what i spoke about above in case any
| doubts how corrupt the taxi industry is (although absolutely no
| one has doubted that to be fair).
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| End does not justify means.
|
| Disruption can (and does) happen without resorting to breaking
| the law.
| runarberg wrote:
| I wonder if there are any examples of a company that
| disrupted a bad industry with malpractice and then magically
| stopped it ones they succeeded.
|
| For some reason I would think the opposite was more common,
| i.e. if a company gets away with bad behavior, they will
| continue to do so until stopped by their government
| authorities.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It is a known and unfortunate phenomenon that regulation
| winds up creating moats even if in service of good ends and
| intentions. Pulling up the ladder effectively happens to
| the benefit any incumbent who can afford something far more
| than upstart competitors. If say, a scrubber stack on
| factories doubles the equipment costs it favors the
| existing factory owners even if retrofitting is a hefty
| expense, it would buy them a moat.
|
| Stopping on their own has to do with cost benefit analysis
| and is thus circumstantial. For a sort of in progress
| Amazon openly admits that they need to reduce turn over
| because they are running out of hiring pool. Their work
| conditions are still infamous but they set standards. That
| could ironically potentially mean a more competitive
| environment could have had worse wages. Not an arguement
| against it being a problem but an amusing irony.
|
| Similarly deeper pockets mean a need to be less reckless as
| big payout judgements become collectable. If a fly by night
| roofing company has a worker fall and break their back from
| lack of safety equipment it may only have a few hundred
| thousand in assets total. If it is a state wide one they
| could be on the hook for millions.
| runarberg wrote:
| What is your point? Is it that we can't have nice things and we
| should just settle with whichever company is able to make the
| most money from whatever corruption they can get away with?
|
| You are posting an anecdote and non-substantiated accusations
| against an industry based on your area. And you are doing this
| under a news where they have evidence that their competitors
| are as corrupt as it gets, a company which has been accused in
| the past of violating labor rights, disregarding local laws,
| bribing officials, exploiting workers, etc. And your point is
| that their competitors in Australia are worse "because you say
| so".
|
| Nah, I'm not buying it. The fact that the Australian taxi
| industry is bad, does not excuse Uber's conduct. In fact I
| don't care what the state is in this industry regarding this
| conduct and I wish Uber all the worst.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I worry that stories like the above article will be used to
| justify outlawing ride share in favor of the cartels. This is
| actually the case in many jurisdictions where ride-share apps
| are still not allowed and the taxi industry still operates in
| a cartel fashion. I don't care about Uber or Lyft fwiw. No
| stake in either in any way shape or form.
|
| My post is a very relevant warning (in my view) about
| allowing politicians to use the above stories as an excuse to
| close down an industry. They are looking for such an excuse.
| Be warned and call it out.
| drevil-v2 wrote:
| This is such a stupid simplistic view - read the BBC article on
| this leak of Uber files. The corruption they (Uber) instituted
| was just as bad as this anecdote you are alleging.
|
| How does replacing one set of elite corruption with another set
| of elite corruption get to " i am thankful to Uber Lyft and all
| the other incumbents for managing to get their foot in"?? You
| are thankful to them? What are you on about?
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of
| how wrong others are or you feel they are. It's not what this
| site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
| pessimizer wrote:
| So instead of virtual domination by one very large local
| incumbent with 200 subsidiaries, you have two foreign cab
| companies. That's an improvement?
| akira2501 wrote:
| > It required dirty dealing to get past this corruption.
|
| Why do you think the current state is "/past/ this corruption."
| It sounds like Uber spent a bunch of money to just "own the
| corruption for itself." On the whole, I don't believe it's an
| actual improvement.
|
| You may like the state of the cars more, but the continued
| overt monopolization and the worse outcomes for labor are
| massively negative outcomes, even if you aren't in a position
| to be personally impacted by them.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Maybe some places have shitty taxis, in my European corner I
| haven't seen anything good about Uber other than bringing the
| US gig economy of employee exploitation.
| maccard wrote:
| Not sure where you're located but I'm from Ireland living in
| the UK. In Edinburgh, all Ubers are private hire cars (it's
| not just anyone in 4 wheels). Uber has forced all of the
| major taxi firms to accept card payments, have apps with
| tracking, etc. Uber itself funnily is actually less reliable
| than the other operators. My experience in Dublin is the
| same. It's also completely removed the "take someone the
| scenic route and charge them 3x" (which happened to me in a
| taxi in Dublin from the airport in 2014!)
|
| Meanwhile, visiting my parents in a smaller part of Ireland,
| getting a taxi involves phoning, waiting to see if they
| decide to pick up (if it's busy they don't), then having them
| tell you it'll be 10 minutes only to arrive after an hour,
| not accepting card, etc.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| Irish taxis are unusual compared to taxis in other
| countries. They're virtually all self-employed owner-
| operators like Uber drivers. They are individually licensed
| and usually own their own vehicles. They can take app or
| radio dispatches or pick up street hails. If taxis in other
| markets had taken the same regulatory approach, something
| like Uber may never have had such widespread success.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In Germany nowadays, card payments and phone apps to call
| taxis were already a thing before Uber came here.
|
| In Scandinavian countries it was even better.
| seibelj wrote:
| It's hilarious how everyone acts like the pre-Uber taxi world
| was one of generous wages, honest hard working companies, and
| politicians working hand in hand with stakeholders.
|
| The taxi industry was (is?) insanely corrupt. There are
| literally state-sanctioned limits on taxis and artificial
| markets for medallions that made early purchasers absurdly
| rich.
| urthor wrote:
| Much of the general public genuinely believed that.
|
| The picturesque London Taxi driver lives on even today.
|
| Many of the 21st Century's worst attributes aren't due to
| society falling apart in the digital age.
|
| Online life is exposing the seediness of society, which
| wasn't reported in old world media.
|
| Lying on the internet is... difficult.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Lying on the internet is... difficult.
|
| And yet it is done many many times a day
| remflight wrote:
| It's rife with corruption especially from the mob. There are
| stories of the mob getting rid of toxic waste by putting it
| in the gas tanks of taxi cabs and having the cabs burn it
| off. Taxi medallions are monopolies that are propagated by
| political corruption and drivers are even worse wage slaves
| than Uber drivers with no benefits.
|
| And yet everyone is sitting here defending the taxi industry.
| It's utterly insane.
| blowski wrote:
| I really don't think you're arguing in good faith here.
|
| You're using unsourced anecdotes to support Uber and
| aggressively attack its competition, while ridiculing
| anyone who does the same for the "other side".
|
| There's a lot of nuance to this debate, but you're not
| providing any.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| No, you can critizise Uber and also think the old taxi
| industry is bad. They're not mutually exclusive and the
| world is not binary
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Sounds though like an orthogonal problem that could have been
| solved independent of destroying the entire industry?
| onion2k wrote:
| Replacing a corrupt system with a different corrupt system
| isn't progress.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| It is though. There's now 2 corrupt systems lobbying in
| different directions. We can now have them play against
| each other.
|
| When corruption is enshrined by the law itself what other
| way do you have to fight it except to have the corrupt play
| off against each other.
|
| The taxi industry existed for centuries (perhaps longer) in
| the cartel form. It's amazing progress to see that their
| power is no longer absolute.
| otikik wrote:
| More lobbying isn't good for the public, even if it's
| done in "different directions "
| hgomersall wrote:
| At least one of which has the explicit aim of displacing
| the actual solution to the problem: effective public
| transport.
| elbigbad wrote:
| Isn't it strictly better if no groups from the old system
| got worse, but some groups that transferred got better.
| adra wrote:
| Forget the reason for the change a minute, and focus on the
| outcomes. You've replaced a terrible set of local players
| with a handful of international mega players who I'd argue
| are just as crap as the ones you've displaced. There is still
| corruption in the sense that these platforms make the rules,
| and the drivers have basically no freedom to push back
| (baring some form of unionization).
|
| All of this medallion nonsense can just as easily come back
| with Uber whenever they feel that competition has driven down
| prices too low. With a wink and a nudge, all the large
| players will play ball because they can.
|
| As for what it is today, these companies still aren't
| profitable which means you're still living in a halo of
| speculative investment supporting you're current quality of
| service. The only viable remedy is to raise rates, which puts
| the service as a more expensive solution that could actually
| cost more than taxied ever did in the long run.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _still corruption in the sense that these platforms make
| the rules, and the drivers have basically no freedom to
| push back_
|
| I sort of agree with your broader points. But this
| statement mangles the definition of corruption beyond
| recognition.
| remflight wrote:
| You don't understand Uber's business model. They want
| prices so low because that's how they make money. Lower
| prices equals more rides. They know that the higher the
| prices the less overall rides they will get. You thinking
| that the goal is to raise prices is literally 100% wrong.
|
| In Brazil during their worst recession in decades, they had
| something like 300k drivers. This dropped the prices to the
| point where so many more rides occurred that everyone made
| more money and the customers were happy because the prices
| were low. That's what they are going for, not some sort of
| moat based on raising prices.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > You don't understand Uber's business model. They want
| prices so low because that's how they make money
|
| this sounds like you don't understand the concept of a
| business model.
| kbenson wrote:
| You can't lower prices to below costs and make money. If
| they're not profitable now, to become profitable they
| need to either cut costs or raise prices.
|
| The only reason to have prices below costs is to gain
| market share so you can do one or both of those later.
|
| What costs do you think Uber has left to cut that they
| haven't at this point? Maybe workforce.
|
| This is all a common well known business tactic, which
| many businesses have used in the past to establish market
| position. It's what they'll do with that market position
| people are worried about.
| mmsimanga wrote:
| I confess I know nothing of Uber's running costs but in
| my layman's understanding I think GP point is still
| valid. Driver buys the fuel and services the car. How
| does having more rides cost Uber more?
| niemandhier wrote:
| You can do the math and find an approximation of the
| price-demand relation ship ( assuming you adapt prices to
| keep your business profitable, and users react by
| adapting demand).
|
| This system has two fix points, one at the normal taxi
| price and much much lower. Point is , the second fix
| point needs the majority of the population to stop using
| a privat car...
| chrischen wrote:
| > You've replaced a terrible set of local players with a
| handful of international mega players who I'd argue are
| just as crap as the ones you've displaced.
|
| You've clearly not used both a taxi pre-Uber or an Uber.
| I'd wager my annual salary that a poll of users would rank
| the user experience of app based ride hailing as superior
| to that of the previous options. Uber didn't even start out
| cheaper than taxis. They just slowly won out by being
| better. Cheaper just helped them grow faster later on.
| wyre wrote:
| A good user experience doesn't pardon Uber's excessive
| corruption.
|
| > Uber didn't even start out cheaper than taxis.
|
| When Uber came to my city about a decade ago all rides
| were free to the passenger. So much cheaper than a taxi.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > You've clearly not used both a taxi pre-Uber or an
| Uber.
|
| You know this is extremely unlikely, so it's not good to
| base any argument on it.
| chrischen wrote:
| Plenty of people outside of cities, especially in
| suburban America, never use taxis, and many who have cars
| don't use Ubers/Lyfts. Coming from your perspective it
| may seem implausible but consider another perspective.
| blowski wrote:
| The technology definitely made life easier for passengers,
| especially in big cities. Prices were cheaper for some time,
| but only because they were subsidised by investors, so hardly a
| net gain. Arguably, they made the environment worse by pushing
| middle income off public transport and into taxis
|
| For drivers, things seem to have got worse. I've spoken to
| various taxi drivers, including current and former Uber
| drivers, and none of them liked working for Uber. They merely
| felt trapped.
|
| But there is an argument to say that the local taxi cartels
| needed breaking up, and only a company prepared to engage in
| these kind of tactics could have done it. I don't know what I
| think about all this.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| A key point here is that Uber didn't just disrupt taxi
| cartels, it also undermined public transport services. In
| places like Miami it even became a sanctioned alternative to
| bus routes that were cut. To me this is the true long term
| damage of their VC-funded predatory pricing model.
| [deleted]
| indymike wrote:
| USA centric answer here: In flyover country, in most cities
| ride share has been life changing for people that would be
| stuck using overpriced local taxis (in smaller 80K-150K
| person cities taxi rates are confiscatory and service is
| often VERY limited) or terrible public transportation.
| Terrible meaning, a $2 bus ride that takes three and a half
| hours (of which 2 hours is sitting in the elemets) out of
| their day vs. ride share taking 10 minutes and $15.
|
| Honestly, I'm not sure where the idea came from that
| outside some of the largest cities, public transport or
| taxis even were viable options. Now there's uber/lyft
| everywhere, because there's always someone with a car who
| would like to make some money.
| bsder wrote:
| > USA centric answer here: In flyover country, in most
| cities ride share has been life changing for people that
| would be stuck using overpriced local taxis (in smaller
| 80K-150K person cities taxi rates are confiscatory and
| service is often VERY limited) or terrible public
| transportation.
|
| And if Uber/Lyft had confined themselves to delivering
| reliable transport at a reasonable price in Indianapolis,
| Pittsburgh, Cleveland, etc. people would be singing their
| praises.
|
| But they didn't. Because those places weren't just
| unprofitable but were _wildly_ unprofitable.
|
| Which is stupid because I suspect being a reliable broker
| between driver and client could _still_ be profitable.
| Having someone put in "I need to go from A to B at time
| X." and having a pool of drivers who can go "I'm going to
| B anyway, so why don't I adjust my time and make some
| money for doing so." would be a good thing in "flyover"
| country.
|
| However, it won't be _venture capital_ profitable. And
| that 's really the crux of the problem here.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's great, but how does that justify Uber's poor
| behavior in places like Miami?
| indymike wrote:
| Not even trying to justify it.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| The idea comes from many other countries where 80k-150k
| cities have public transport services that don't require
| people to spend 2 hours sitting in the elements waiting
| for a bus.
| rawling wrote:
| > In places like Miami it even became a sanctioned
| alternative to bus routes that were cut.
|
| As in... government justified cutting bus services by
| saying Uber was a viable alternative?
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Technically, yes. For a while they provided vouchers to
| reimburse riders for using Uber instead of the public bus
| system.[0] Now those particular night bus routes have
| returned to service, but others have been reduced or
| canceled. This has been happening for the past 10 years
| or so all over the US.[1] It's not clear if Uber is the
| primary culprit, but it certainly doesn't help.[2]
|
| [0] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article2
| 4182271...
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/upshot
| /myster...
|
| [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S09
| 6585642...
| jbullock35 wrote:
| > I've spoken to various taxi drivers, including current and
| former Uber drivers, and none of them liked working for Uber.
| They merely felt trapped.
|
| I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare
| drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally none
| of them have expressed the feeling that they're trapped. (And
| not one has said that he would prefer driving a taxi.) They
| do make criticisms, more of Uber than of Lyft. But the main
| sentiments that they express are appreciation of scheduling
| flexibility and of not having a boss.
| r00fus wrote:
| > I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare
| drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally
| none of them have expressed the feeling that they're
| trapped
|
| Just think about the subjective bias here. They're working,
| you're the customer - do you talk shit about your employer
| on company time? Everyone knows that has serious risks.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. You need to actually be
| close friends to actual drivers, when not interacting
| with them as passengers, to hear how they actually feel
| about uber
| remflight wrote:
| blowski wrote:
| To say "no-one is complaining" is factually wrong, since
| there have been multiple Uber strikes throughout the
| world over the last couple of years on these very issues.
| And I have spoken to Uber drivers that are complaining.
|
| Whether they represent a majority of Uber drivers or just
| a noisy minority is more difficult.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare
| drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally
| none of them have expressed the feeling that they're
| trapped.
|
| if you ask a smoking addinct if they could quit, 80% say
| yes and 80% will fail if they try.
|
| Now if you show they've done the math on depreciation of
| their car, worked for 10 years, etc. then maybe yoi have an
| argument
| adra wrote:
| If they can be de-platformed, they have a boss. They just
| have flexible work hours.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Being able to work for many platforms means you choose
| your boss.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Being able to take several drugs means you choose your
| drug
| neilk wrote:
| The people who are currently working for Uber think working
| for Uber is a good deal. You might get similarly positive
| reviews from the buyers of scratcher lottery tickets.
|
| There are a lot of articles from random websites saying
| that it is a good deal, and given the ease of placing such
| content I think we should be skeptical. Every time I see an
| article from a driver, who is not a pro blogger in the
| space, and who's done the math, it is usually pretty
| negative to neutral.
|
| https://www.quora.com/Is-driving-for-Uber-worth-the-wear-
| and...
|
| It's actually really hard to know if you're making money
| when you take things like capital depreciation and
| opportunity cost into account, and sophisticated
| businesspeople make this mistake all the time. The average
| driver could easily be fooled until it's too late.
|
| It would be nice if capitalism did correct price discovery
| here but we're dealing with a market which has been highly
| distorted, both from questionable government regulation and
| taxi monopolies AND from insane startup valuations and
| investment. The only accountability moment has been the
| public markets and even then it's pretty mixed.
|
| Uber has overwhelming power over their drivers and if it
| was actually a good deal for them it would be the first
| time in the history of labor relations that a company left
| money on the table out of the goodness of their heart. Does
| Uber strike you as that company?
|
| Yes I use ridesharing when I'm in the SFBA because there's
| few other plausible ways to get around. I'm crossing my
| fingers the whole time that I'm not helping someone dig
| themselves deeper into a financial hole.
| remflight wrote:
| I love it. So you're comparing the experiences of real
| drivers who don't hate it to bloggers who are making
| mathematical calculations and you take the word of the
| bloggers. That's just about par for the course.
|
| "The poor dumb blue collar workers don't know any better
| and need to be protected by the smarter elites who did
| the calculations!"
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| So youve compared experiences of real drug addicts who
| don't have it to scientists doing the calculations and
| you take word of the scientist?
| Kranar wrote:
| I genuinely don't know any drug _addict_ who thinks
| taking drugs is a good thing, beneficial to them or in
| anyway a positive aspect of their life.
|
| Please don't make up phony exaggerations just to win an
| Internet argument.
| wyre wrote:
| I bet you know a lot of compulsive drinkers that view
| alcohol as a positive in their life.
|
| I'm addicted to marijuana, but I still think it's a good
| thing because it helps my PTSD. I don't like being
| addicted to it, but I'm better off consuming it than not,
| although my addiction makes it difficult to regulate.
| blowski wrote:
| I don't see you presenting any contrary evidence of the
| opinions of "real drivers".
| kbenson wrote:
| They didn't state the bloggers were making the
| calculations. The bloggers noted are pro Uber.
|
| If you're going to just dismiss someone's point through
| an appeal to sentiment, you might as well get it right.
| Or maybe getting what was said right doesn't matter, and
| just recasting it as elitist as a tactic _is_ the point.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Would you be happy if your child was an Uber driver?
| flappyeagle wrote:
| I would be happier for them to driver for Uber or Lyft
| than for a taxi company.
|
| I don't think it's a career. Just a job. If my kid drove
| for a ride share while going to school or something that
| seems fine.
| [deleted]
| runarberg wrote:
| I always put more weight on negative comments about owns
| work condition because cognitive dissonance is a known
| human bias.
|
| If you are working at a dead end job, where your pays and
| benefits are sub-optimal, and you are even putting more
| work hours then in other possible jobs, then why are you
| working there? Because of cognitive dissonance it is much
| easier to tell your self that you actually like the job
| over accepting the reality that you probably shouldn't work
| there.
|
| https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-08-09
| Ekaros wrote:
| Uber and others should really have been punished harshly for
| dumping. Banned from operating without extra taxes to bring
| them in line with other operators and fined for billions.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| How does that follow at all. Uber breaking the laws was not the
| only possible way to break up a cartel!
| winternett wrote:
| Slightly better circumstances don't exonerate corruption.
|
| Laws and regulation are supposed to reign in bad industry.
|
| Brigading and PR spin is rampant with Uber online for some
| strange reason, when in truth, they could provide a far better
| service by relaxing their tendency to spin bad PR by paying and
| insuring drivers better, and by operating more like a legit
| Taxi business.
|
| It is NOT Uber that swept in and fixed the corrupt transport
| for hire system... It was passengers choosing a less expensive
| (subsidized by company investment) service, which is now
| dramatically increasing in cost to users now that they have
| stable market dominance.
|
| The online PR spins only hold up for people who don't properly
| recall the past and for those who are unaware of the deception
| involved in use of "folksy" individual personal tropes used to
| over-simplify complex issues.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| > now that they have stable market dominance
|
| Do they? I'm trying to find some data on how much market
| share Uber has vs Lyft vs taxis.
| winternett wrote:
| That's not a key issue to the discussion, the discussion is
| about corruption.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > Still a million times better than what it replaced.
|
| Not really. It is not easy to paint existing systems with a
| wide brush. The situation in Germany is not the same as in
| Croatia which is not the same in India. I will always trust
| taxis in Mumbai and Berlin over Uber, whereas in a foreign
| location I will look for local options like Ola, Grab, FreeNow.
|
| Uber did act as a catalyst for the incumbents to get off their
| butts, but it created another set of problems which are equally
| bad.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Still a million times better than what it replaced.
|
| Not in my experience at all. I can't count how many taxis I've
| taken, with hardly any problems ever.
|
| > corrupt
|
| They lacked anywhere near the resources to be as corrupt as
| Uber!
| ccvannorman wrote:
| whataboutism isn't useful for highlighting corruption - is why
| you are being downvoted.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I worry that stories like the above article will be used to
| justify outlawing ride share in favor of the cartels. This is
| actually the case in many jurisdictions where ride-share apps
| are still not allowed and the taxi industry still operates in
| a cartel fashion. I don't care about Uber or Lyft fwiw. No
| stake in either in any way shape or form.
|
| My post is a very relevant warning (in my view) about
| allowing politicians to use the above stories as an excuse to
| close down an industry. They are looking for such an excuse.
| Be warned and call it out.
| asdfjkhasjkdfh wrote:
| > Still a million times better than what it replaced.
|
| Uber didn't replace taxi. taxi was dying on it's own. Uber
| actually kept the bad designs of taxi going but they
| monopolized the Medallions.
|
| "what it replaced" was the ongoing outcry to minimally decent
| public transit. Some of the international offshoots of the
| Occupy movement actually had this as their central theme.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| This is fantastical. Paying someone to drive you somewhere is
| not going anywhere anytime soon.
| twblalock wrote:
| People even use Uber in Europe despite having world-class
| public transit. That should tell you something about the
| utility it provides people: they could have used top-tier
| public transit but they chose to use Uber instead.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Uber is only "better" because it is unprofitable.
|
| The minute it starts turning the screws to be profitable, the
| service quality will go back to what it replaced.
|
| Here in India, its already less reliable and often more
| expensive than old school taxis.
| awillen wrote:
| Not true. In SF when Uber started, it only had black cars and
| was meaningfully more expensive than a cab. The difference
| was that if you called a cab, depending on where you were in
| the city, there was a pretty decent chance you'd be told it'd
| take 15 minutes, but no one would ever show up. The Uber
| would be there 100% of the time.
|
| Uber held drivers accountable. The taxi lobby did the exact
| opposite - they brutally abused an advantage gifted to them
| by the government because taxis are supposed to be a valuable
| public service.
|
| In India it may be different, but in the US it continues to
| be extremely reliable.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _In India it may be different, but in the US it continues
| to be extremely reliable._
|
| This is a hint at the main thing we need to remember: Uber
| replaced a terrible taxi situation in San Francisco. Every
| city is not like San Francisco. Every country is not like
| the US. Based on various comments here from people outside
| the US, some places already had functioning taxi systems,
| with reasonable prices, clean cars, and good drivers. Why
| is it ok that Uber got to flaunt regulations in those
| places as well?
| awillen wrote:
| I don't think it was ok anywhere. Even in SF I think it
| was beneficial but not "ok" in a general sense of
| fairness. The ends justify the means, I suppose. I'm not
| saying that Uber overall is a particular ethical company
| - I don't think they're great on that dimension.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| If they slash their operating developers from dropping out of
| the self driving cars race that would make them much more
| profitable. Whether doing so would be a good idea is another
| topic.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's just wrong.
|
| Ok, Uber in particular may be very badly run and incapable of
| turning a profit. But on most places they have competitors
| that are profitable and usually, cheaper.
| nyolfen wrote:
| uber is already profitable
| https://www.barrons.com/articles/uber-stock-first-
| profitable...
| blowski wrote:
| Operating profit, not net.
| nyolfen wrote:
| lol
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not do this here? If someone else is
| wrong, please explain (respectfully) _how_ they are wrong
| so the rest of us can learn.
|
| If you don't want to do that, option 2 is to chalk it up
| to the internet being wrong about everything and walk
| away. But please don't post
| unsubstantive/dismissive/swipey things. That just makes
| everything worse.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| registeredcorn wrote:
| I don't know if this really qualifies as the same sort of
| thing, but I do recall hearing a story about cabbies somewhere
| in Asia:
|
| A sociology professor I had assigned us a project to do
| something that would be "considered abnormal to the general
| public", and then document the results. He had mentioned over
| and over again to try and implement "as many safety measures as
| possible during planning". The professor went on to explain
| that the reason for harping on safety was such a big deal
| because a student of a previous class (decades before
| ridesharing) decided that their project would be to bring their
| personnel vehicle to where cabbies would line up. The student
| would instead offer rides to customers completely for free. I
| believe they even had a little sign they put on their window.
|
| After this occurred two or three times, all of the cabbies
| completely boxed the students car in and called for the police
| to come. If I recall correctly, they were yelling, screaming,
| and honking at the student about how they were taking money out
| of their pockets. Some were accusing the student of taking
| customers to an undisclosed location and robbing them in order
| to get paid, while others were saying that doing this for free
| was essentially stealing from the cabbies, since the student
| didn't have a taxi permit.
|
| I'm not sure if this was a matter of _corruption_ as much as it
| was messing with /hurting people trying to make a living, but,
| I did think it was interesting that all of these different
| cabbies, from all of these rival taxi companies were all
| willing to work together spur of the moment, to stop someone
| who they couldn't possibly compete with. As I understand it,
| the depths of the rivalry between some of these companies ran
| pretty deep; it was shocking how willingly they all were to
| join up to crush this outside threat.
| sschueller wrote:
| No, in Switzerland. Instead it managed to steal almost a
| billion USD from drivers in Switzerland alone and give others
| the "idea" they can break the law too.
|
| Uber is the worst kind of business preying on the lower class
| claiming independence and freedom when it's the opposite and
| you are basically a working slave. It did everything possible
| to go around government worker protections.
|
| [1] https://www.20min.ch/story/uber-soll-fahrern-eine-halbe-
| mill...
| FrenchDevRemote wrote:
| I don't see how it's slavery to work for uber. If uber wasn't
| there, the drivers would be either unemployed, working
| another minimum wage job, or taking 30 years loans to get
| Taxi licenses(which most of them wouldn't be able to get).
|
| It's just the same as any other precarious job
| the_mar wrote:
| I think the problem is exporting us labor practices to the
| civilized world
| runarberg wrote:
| This is a really simplistic view of labor dynamics and
| almost certainly too simplistic.
|
| Jobs don't exist in a vacuum. When a job is created
| sometimes it spurs other jobs, but sometimes it removes
| them. It is a really dynamic system full of feedbacks and
| feed forwards.
|
| I think I read somewhere where someone actually modeled the
| dynamics behind uber eats, and found out that it resulted
| in net-negative jobs... That is every worker for uber-eats
| meant that more then one other worker didn't get a job, not
| to mention the worse condition of that one worker that
| actually had the job.
| lesstenseflow wrote:
| I read the article you are referring to and it actually
| came to the opposite conclusion from what you're saying:
| net-positive jobs, more spent and more earned.
|
| (If you're wondering how I am rebutting runarberg when
| neither he nor I cited a source, that's a darn good
| question. But let the record show I offer just as much
| evidence as he.)
| dsco wrote:
| I know a bunch of people who are happy Uber drivers as they
| couldn't afford becoming regular taxi drivers. Do you often
| point out to your Uber divers that they're lower class and
| being preyed on? How do they take it?
| mavu wrote:
| you can tell yourself that all day long if it makes you
| feel better.
|
| In Europe, uber is exploiting the most vulnerable in our
| societies, and profiting of the harm they do to people and
| communities.
|
| Not to mention, breaking laws, endangering passengers,
| using outright evil methods to keep their workers money.
| yladiz wrote:
| Some of the most vulnerable are the homeless and mentally
| disabled. How is Uber exploiting them?
| harvey9 wrote:
| The phrase 'most vulnerable' is terribly overused, but
| your comment is still disingenuous.
| ipaddr wrote:
| These are not fair comments because everything you say
| the taxi industry it replaced is guilt of and closing the
| market. Uber puts new cars on the road and opens the
| industry to those who are locked out.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Suppose taxi industry is guilty of murder, does that mean
| I can now commit murder too?
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| If it gets replaced by a strictly less murderous
| alternative, this alternative is preferable.
| stale2002 wrote:
| No, but if a taxi industry is murdering people, and also
| helped create laws that prevent competitors from entering
| the market, I think it is OK to get around the laws that
| prevent competitors from competing with the taxi murder
| mafia.
| RajT88 wrote:
| My brother in law is a mechanic. He sees a lot of drivers
| who have a 3 year old car with 200k miles on them and
| basically a new car worth of repairs needed.
|
| I also get a lot of happy drivers saying "this is my first
| day / week".
|
| I see a lot of crazy driving too. All in all, it seems like
| there is a learning curve to being a profitable Uber
| driver. It is not necessarily easy to accomplish.
|
| The ones who seem to anecdotally do best by it are the
| folks supplementing income by opportunistically taking
| fares here and there.
| remflight wrote:
| I love people who somehow think that taxi industry is
| filled with clean, perfectly maintained cars, fairly paid
| workers with great benefits and just the epitome of great
| citizens without any corruption.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Do you think I am one of those?
|
| If so, why?
| sokoloff wrote:
| > [Mechanic brother] sees a lot of drivers who have a 3
| year old car with 200k miles on them and basically a new
| car worth of repairs needed.
|
| At the median rate for my city (Boston), those drivers
| were paid $1.07/mile* or $214K. They probably paid under
| $50K in gas, oil, tires, and repairs to that point, so
| they're quite a bit ahead even if they have to _throw the
| car away_. Even at $0.66 /mile for some of the worse
| cities, that's still $132K in gross income.
|
| * https://www.stilt.com/blog/2020/02/how-much-does-uber-
| pay/
| olalonde wrote:
| > The ones who seem to anecdotally do best by it are the
| folks supplementing income by opportunistically taking
| fares here and there.
|
| That's a large part of Uber's success: they are able to
| leverage the many people who have a car and occasionally
| have nothing better to do. There are even people who will
| drive for fun or as a way to kill boredom. Of course,
| those people will happily take a fraction of the pay that
| a professional taxi driver would. And those rides will be
| cheaper for consumers compared to taxi rides.
|
| It's of course a problem when regulators disallow them to
| leverage this large class of drivers. When they are
| forced to operate like a taxi operator, a big part of
| their value proposition is gone. This is bad for
| consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.
| [deleted]
| morelisp wrote:
| > This is bad for consumers and Uber, but good for taxi
| operators.
|
| Uber's biggest lie is that these are the only
| stakeholders in the equation.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > It's of course a problem when regulators disallow them
| to leverage this large class of drivers. When they are
| forced to operate like a taxi operator, a big part of
| their value proposition is gone. This is bad for
| consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.
|
| It's only good for customers when they need to get a ride
| for certain times and only for some time. One of the
| reasons why taxis get regulated is because taxi companies
| need to guarantee service throughout the day. Drivers who
| only drive on the side will not provide that service,
| moreover if the regular taxi drivers are driven into
| bankruptcy because of uber drivers taking all the
| profitable times prices on average actually go up and
| especially for off peak times.
| [deleted]
| winternett wrote:
| A lot of people eat peanuts, but a handful of people die
| from them. Should all people be made to eat peanut butter?
|
| Uber is only a good company if it improves, yet somehow
| there is a never ending online narrative that "It's
| treating me well, so it's great for the world!".
|
| That's not normal, it's deception.
| labrador wrote:
| > Uber is the worst kind of business preying on the lower
| class claiming independence and freedom
|
| Sounds like Uber was the original web3 business
| O__________O wrote:
| Taxi Drivers in Switzerland typically earn around 40,700 CHF
| per year and Uber drivers make roughly the same if working
| full-time, more if they are working more than 40-hours a
| week.
|
| Unless the union is able to explicitly explain their claim
| the Uber is somehow unfair to drivers, to me sounds like the
| union is just complaining they not getting their member dues.
|
| Possible I missed something, so here are my sources:
|
| How much Uber drivers make in Switzerland
|
| https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/ride-sharing-app-_uber-
| reaches-...
|
| Taxi Driver Average Salary in Switzerland
|
| http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-
| survey.php?loc=210&loct...
| sschueller wrote:
| Uber does not pay Social Security, Overtime, workers comp
| etc. When these people retire they have nothing, this money
| was effectively stolen from the workers.
|
| Unia has successfully sued Uber at the highest courts and
| Uber recently lost. Geneva has banned Uber and others are
| expected to follow. There will now be an attempt to recover
| almost a Billion USD that is owed to drivers from Uber. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.unia.ch/de/aktuell/aktuell/artikel/a/19138
| ratww wrote:
| _> this money was effectively stolen from the workers_
|
| Yep. And also from the state/taxpayers, as the state will
| have to spend money to ensure those workers aren't left
| out in the street when older.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Uber didn't "steal" anything as competition is not a
| zero-sum game. Drivers chose contract work over a full-
| time job, and it's their choice to save their income.
| Besides, pensions and Social Security aren't shields
| against elder poverty befalling spendthrifts. They're
| merely buffers and one's that come at the opportunity
| cost of being able to take the money at that point in
| time and investing it.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Drivers chose contract work over a full-time job
|
| And children chose to work in the coal mines and die of
| blacklung
|
| > pensions and Social Security aren't shields against
| elder poverty befalling spendthrifts. They're merely
| buffers
|
| By that logic a literal shield is not a shield against
| swords and arrows, they are merely buffers of stronger
| material that protects you.
|
| They come at the opportunity cost of being able to use
| the money to hire more soldiers or bribe your enemy.
| ctoth wrote:
| > And children chose to work in the coal mines and die of
| blacklung
|
| Are you saying the average Uber driver has no more
| ability to make decisions for themselves than the average
| child? Uber drivers cannot consent? I reckon they must
| also be prevented from buying cigarettes and having sex?
| This is absurd. An adult entering into a voluntary
| contract is profoundly different than a child being
| forced into work, in fact it's the main thing that it
| means to be an adult. What sort of weird infantilization
| does this line of logic even come from?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > An adult entering into a voluntary contract is
| profoundly different than a child being forced into work,
| in fact it's the main thing that it means to be an adult
|
| Ah, okay, let's deal with adults: can you volunterilly
| sell your organs, sell yourself into indentured
| servitude, or into prostitution? Can you buy heroin or
| uranium? Can you at least open a coalmine without health
| and safety and let other people agree to work in it when
| they know they will get blacklung? No, you can't even buy
| some financial products without proving you are a
| sophisticated investor.
|
| You are not allowed to do shit like that because when we
| allow business to profit out of misery and misfortune of
| others, business will purposefully trap unfortunate and
| vulnerable. It isn't an adult vs another adult -> it's
| one man vs multi billion dollars of lobbying, marketing
| and legal department.
| O__________O wrote:
| Please link to English sources -- as it makes it hard to
| hold you accountable for what appear to be false claims.
|
| Uber was neither banned, nor ordered to pay any money to
| government, union, or drivers. All the order did was
| state Uber & Uber Eats must treat drivers going forward
| as employees and Uber in response pulled out of the
| market.
|
| As for the drivers, they were not forced to work for Uber
| and were aware of the impact. I personally do not agree
| with the ruling, since drivers were in control of when &
| where they worked and as such, they were not employees of
| Uber.
|
| Thanks to the Union's actions 1000s of people are out of
| work. Is the Union going to pay the Uber drivers the
| money they "stole" from them?
| braingenious wrote:
| >Please link to English sources -- as it makes it hard to
| hold you accountable for what appear to be false claims.
|
| I appreciate this post, thank you for the chuckle. It's
| pretty rare to see somebody outright admit to being
| unwilling to use basic google functionality in the middle
| of a disagreement and request that the counterparty do
| the work for them.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > Please link to English sources -- as it makes it hard
| to hold you accountable for what appear to be false
| claims.
|
| Google translate is your friend. Linking to local sources
| makes more sense than to link to some 2nd hand reporting
| in English media.
|
| > Uber was neither banned, nor ordered to pay any money
| to government, union, or drivers. All the order did was
| state Uber & Uber Eats must treat drivers going forward
| as employees and Uber in response pulled out of the
| market.
|
| Sounds to me like their business model was banned. Sure I
| guess pendantically that is not Uber being banned, it
| still is the same outcome.
|
| > As for the drivers, they were not forced to work for
| Uber and were aware of the impact.
|
| The servs in 1800s russia also chose to work, so all is
| good?
|
| > I personally do not agree with the ruling, since
| drivers were in control of when & where they worked and
| as such, they were not employees of Uber.
|
| So what other companies did they work for? Also by your
| definition everyone who works from home (can choose where
| to work) and has flexible hours (chooses when to work) is
| not an employee?
|
| > Thanks to the Union's actions 1000s of people are out
| of work. Is the Union going to pay the Uber drivers the
| money they "stole" from them?
|
| The Union did not break laws, Uber did
|
| It seems you don't seem to believe in the rule of law.
| emilfihlman wrote:
| >Please link to English sources -- as it makes it hard to
| hold you accountable for what appear to be false claims.
|
| This is incredibly obnoxious. A) English language sources
| might not exist B) you can use Google etc translate so
| it's not up to the source provider to even find English
| language sources and C) you are assuming you are right.
| piva00 wrote:
| > As for the drivers, they were not forced to work for
| Uber and were aware of the impact. I personally do not
| agree with the ruling, since drivers were in control of
| when & where they worked and as such, they were not
| employees of Uber.
|
| They are effectively forced to work for Uber when the
| company eventually captures the market away from taxis,
| either due to subsiding rides and lowering prices vs taxi
| rides, or other offers that make them initially more
| attractive to riders than city taxis. After capturing
| said market by network effect you force more drivers to
| join because their customers are in the platform.
|
| It's Uber's business model for expansion...
| LargeWu wrote:
| "All the order did was state Uber & Uber Eats must treat
| drivers going forward as employees and Uber in response
| pulled out of the market."
|
| That they would choose not to do business there at all,
| rather than pay people what they were entitled, is very
| telling of an operation that's in the business of
| exploiting people.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Is every organization that employs contractors instead of
| hiring them as employees "in the business of exploiting
| people"?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| yah
| YZF wrote:
| Back in the day if you were working as a contractor you'd
| quote a price that reflected your higher costs. Let's say
| I'm an employee in a software company, that company may
| offer health insurance, if may provide me with a laptop,
| it may provide me with an office, it may provide me with
| severance pay if it lays me off, it will cover the
| various overheads of said office (electricity, insurance,
| whatnot). So if I'm an employee and I make $100/hour and
| I switch to being a contractor for that same job the
| company might expect to pay me $150/hour or $200/hour.
| Companies that employ contractors in that manner are
| fine. If a contractor is paid $70/hour vs. the full time
| employee $100/hour before overhead that's exploitation. A
| business that bends the laws so it can get away with
| attacking the business model of companies that are decent
| while at the same time exploiting employees shouldn't
| have a right to exist, isn't that pretty much the
| business model of organized crime?
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| The ones that call people "contractors" to get around
| employment laws pretty universally are in that business,
| yes. Is that controversial?
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| > Is that controversial?
|
| No, of course not. These people aren't arguing in good
| faith.
| kazen44 wrote:
| Heck, there is an entire spectrum of politics which state
| that pocketing excess value from the productions of
| others is wage-theft and thus exploitative.
| abigail95 wrote:
| if uber is loss making there is no excess value
|
| and uber drivers own or rent their cars thus owning the
| means of production themselves
| LargeWu wrote:
| The car itself is not the means of production. The means
| of production is the Uber network. Without that you just
| have a car.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| What does the Uber network produce exactly?
|
| The app doesn't transport people from point A to point B
| which is the whole point of using it in the first place.
| They also specifically argue against any claims they are
| anything more than an intermediary between the producers
| and consumers.
| eternalban wrote:
| >> the "idea" they can break the law too.
|
| There may be a disconnect here for those who are not
| Swiss. That very "idea" is arguably detrimental to the
| social health of a country like Switzerland (whose
| citizens appear to practice a sort of honor system when
| it comes to social norms and laws), while it may well be
| a non-issue in most other countries.
|
| I think a global company like Uber will have a social
| impact, whether positive or negative, that very much
| reflects specific regions or nations, so white knighting
| Uber as a general proposition is not very sound.
| kazen44 wrote:
| This is the case for many other european countries
| aswell.
|
| In the netherlands for instance, uber and many others got
| slapped down hard for circumventing the law according to
| the literal implementation of the law, instead of taking
| into account the spirit of the law aswell.
| chrischen wrote:
| They swapped masters from evil medallion rent seekers to
| software engineers. I'd pick the engineers any day and I'm
| glad they broke corrupt laws to make changes.
| mantas wrote:
| Taxi medallions ain't a thing in many countries. Many
| countries had proper regulated taxes with good drivers and
| clean cars (or vice versa). Now it's a shitshow with beaten
| Prius and a shithead behind the wheel.
| dantheman wrote:
| Too bad those countries with proper regulated taxis and
| good drivers couldn't compete. Sounds like they weren't
| so good at least to the consumer.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Of course they could not compete: if your competitor
| flaunts the law, avoids the regulator, does not pay local
| taxes and externalizes a whole pile of things then there
| is no level playing field. It would be extremely
| surprising if they could compete.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| >if your competitor flaunts the law
|
| The law in question being simply that they cannot compete
| at all.
|
| >does not pay local taxes
|
| They pay all sorts of taxes in my jurisdiction from day
| one, and still kicked the taxi industry's ass.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Good for you. That's not the case here. Taxi companies
| employ people, pay wage taxes, sales tax, have their
| vehicles inspected once per year and in general are
| marginal business, except for the few in the biggest
| cities where it is a good business. Uber _only_ went for
| the easy wins, siphoned off a large chunk of the profits
| in return for people working without a safety net and who
| do not pay into the social system, which works fine until
| it doesn 't and then society has to pick up the tab.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The regulator is the taxi industry. More local taxes are
| paid because more drivers exist. The rules around the
| playing field are in favor of existing monopolies and
| they haven't changed.
|
| The existing cartel wasn't fair. Having Uber open the
| door has allowed smaller players into a closed market.
| The taxi industry is still healthy and slightly more
| modern because of this.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Can't compete against a service that "sells" $2 worth of
| labor for $1. Now that the VC-funded subsidies are
| running out, we'll see how competitive Uber really is.
| jen20 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be competitive on price. I'd use it at
| twice, or even three times the price of a cab, simply
| because the service delivers on what it promises, without
| unnecessary fluff.
|
| I remember having to plan around the expected number of
| cabs that wouldn't bother to show up after quoting "10
| mins" to get to SFO. Or having a London cabbie decide
| that my being sat in his cab was a license to spout pro-
| Brexit nonsense for 15 minutes and then claim that he
| didn't take credit cards. Or NYC cab drivers blatantly
| flouting the law by purposely ignoring you if you had a
| suitcase, because they didn't feel like taking a fixed
| fare in traffic to JFK.
|
| No.
| chrischen wrote:
| > It doesn't have to be competitive on price. I'd use it
| at twice, or even three times the price of a cab, simply
| because the service delivers on what it promises, without
| unnecessary fluff.
|
| That is indeed how much Uber cost when it first came out.
| Particularly because they sent out nicer luxury cars and
| had to hire limo drivers. Uber used to be called UberCab,
| but the medallion cartel didn't let new entries in so
| easily and forced the change from UberCab -> Uber, and
| also made it so they had to use luxury limo drivers.
| Still, users chose and taxis died, rightly so.
|
| The unit economics are there that whatever Taxis charged
| Uber should be able to charge the same or less. If
| anything Uber et al are _removing_ overheads not adding
| to them. The only way taxis would be cheaper would be if
| they were dodging taxes with their "no credit cards"
| policies.
| wyre wrote:
| > That is indeed how much Uber cost when it first came
| out.
|
| I remember when Uber first came to my city and it was
| free for passengers.
| jen20 wrote:
| > if they were dodging taxes with their "no credit cards"
| policies.
|
| Bingo.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I've had ride hailing drivers cancel fairs or mark the
| trip completed on me before showing up. I suppose I've
| had worse taxi experiences overall, though.
| eropple wrote:
| Ah, but we'll make it up on volume!
|
| Selling a good at a loss in order to jack up the price
| later (the desired Uber play, though it seems like it's
| backfiring) _used_ to be called "dumping", but...eh.
| aaronchall wrote:
| I agree we should probably say "licenses" and not
| "medallions" when talking about policies all over the
| world, it's just that medallions are known as the worst
| example of corruption and regulatory capture, protecting
| incumbents while incredibly claiming this helped stranded
| people who need to get home when no taxis can be found.
|
| At the peak these licenses were going for a million
| dollars each.
|
| I think Uber, Lyft, and others are serving a great good
| in substituting for taxis in filling the need for road
| travelers. Taxi drivers may argue that the drivers are
| being abused, but we can't all have (nor do we all want)
| jobs with lots of protections.
|
| Being a driver should be a job anyone could take while on
| the road to reaching their dreams in life, and not
| restricted to a lucky few who demanded the government
| give them a monopoly on the gig.
| bri3d wrote:
| Wait... what? I think you need to follow the capital and
| who is exploiting the means of production here.
|
| In formerly-medallion markets, surplus value collection
| shifted from medallion rent seekers to VC and private
| equity rent seekers. In non-medallion markets, existing
| normally run companies had VCs price-dump an unbeatable
| competitor into their market. Software engineers (and what
| inherent "good" is there to "software engineers," anyway??)
| are also in the middle, albeit with more of an ownership
| stake thanks to RSUs.
| olalonde wrote:
| > No, in Switzerland. Instead it managed to steal almost a
| billion USD from drivers in Switzerland alone and give others
| the "idea" they can break the law too.
|
| It seems that this ~billion USD is an hypothetical amount
| Uber would have had to pay if its contractors had been
| employees? If so, I'm not quite sure "steal" is the
| appropriate word here. It also ignores the many things Uber
| might have done differently if its drivers had been
| employees: increase fare rates, decrease driver payouts, hire
| less drivers, possibly get out of Switzerland entirely, etc.
| Dobbs wrote:
| Wage theft is still theft. In the US it is the largest form
| of theft there is.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Doesn't wage theft imply they aren't paying the amount
| that they agreed to pay?
| notimetorelax wrote:
| Well, and this is exactly the problem. They disrupted the
| market of ordinary taxis by undercuting the prices. Now
| that they are compelled to pay social contribitions their
| business is suddenly unprofitable.
|
| As it was discussed in the other threads - Uber is not
| prohibited in Switzerland, they just need to adhere to the
| law same as everyone else. Somehow this seems to be a
| problem for them.
| np1810 wrote:
| Uneasy co-incidence, that recently an Indian Uber competitor
| (named Ola) also had a report of lobbying efforts...
|
| https://twitter.com/shrutisonal26/status/1544540603932758016
|
| Edit: Apart from the tweets, the actual article is behind a
| paywall.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Corporations are people, and people can be terminated by the
| state. Corporate death penalty. Easy.
|
| (Except that I agree neither with corporate personhood, nor the
| death penalty.)
| stef25 wrote:
| Uber isn't the most ethical company for sure but here in Brussels
| the taxi industry is pretty shady as well.
|
| Getting a taxi license costs an exorbitant amount of money and
| it's done through all kinds of dodgy deals.
|
| There's 1-2 companies that have a monopoly on the whole industry.
|
| There's weird rules about which types of taxis can "serve" the
| airport, akin to what mobsters are responsible for collecting
| trash in what areas.
|
| You'll often get "sorry the payment terminal is out of order,
| cash only" BS.
|
| A study a few years ago showed the main taxi company, according
| to their tax documents, earned a ridiculously low amount of money
| per day (= obvious dodging of taxes).
|
| They clearly refused to innovate for years. When you called their
| number you'd get some unintelligible voice on the other end that
| would give you about 10 sec to state your details before they'd
| clearly run out of patience.
|
| You could only request pickups at specific addresses that would
| then be connected to your phone number / profile. So "pick me up
| on this street corner" was impossible.
|
| The last time we called one for a ride to the airport they didn't
| show up at the agreed time so we got an Uber. Taxi company called
| us many times screaming insults down the phone, followed by an
| offensive email with an invitation to pay and threats of small
| claims courts.
|
| In light of all that, I have zero problems with someone else
| moving in fast to break things.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I don't use Uber. Several friends do, and, as a third party
| watching I'd suggest the experience is no better but now with a
| shiny phone app and exploitative would-be unicorn tech
| corporation at the helm.
|
| Most recent experience, we were in the docks, the docks are
| restricted access for terrorism prevention, on entry you need a
| specific purpose. Our purpose was to inspect a possible party
| venue (an actual steamship, it's awesome, for a few grand we
| could have them steam it out into the sea while we celebrated -
| but, on viewing it seemed like if weather was bad on the day
| it'd suck as a venue because there's only very limited indoor
| capacity). So after we've looked around we need to get back out
| of the docks. Friend summons an Uber. No problem initially,
| "This is why I use Uber" she says. Her ride gets to the edge of
| the docks and cancels, presumably because the driver sees scary
| warning saying "Restricted Area. State your business at
| checkpoint" and hit cancel because he has managed to live in a
| port city for years without knowing about this. She summons
| another one. It too gets to the edge of the docks and then
| cancels. "Uber says if this keeps happening they're forbidden
| from cancelling" she claims. Sure enough now her requests are
| just denied automatically.
|
| So once she gives up I called a regular taxi. That driver
| couldn't find us, because apparently a massive sign with the
| name of the ship is too hard to notice ("I had no idea that was
| here"), but once we walked a few minutes to somewhere this
| driver could recognise we were driven out of the docks to go
| for cocktails with another friend.
| lesstenseflow wrote:
| You couldn't be bothered to walk outside a "restricted
| access" area with what you call "scary warning signs" at the
| entrances, and you blame the Uber drivers for not wanting to
| take their chances driving past that sign to pick up you and
| your companion? Oh and the taxi driver also failed to pick
| you up there, and you finally move your butts to go meet the
| taxi.
|
| The Uber drivers probably thought the pickup location was a
| mistake- they get there and say "I can't pickup here, this is
| a wrong location" and cancel the job.
|
| So _three_ drivers can't find you, including a taxi, and this
| is Ubers fault somehow, not yours for making unreasonable
| demands of drivers. I suppose it was Ubers fault that the cab
| couldn't find you either? It amazes me how people rationalize
| blaming others in situations like this.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The entire docks, of a port city, ie that's the only reason
| people built a city there, is restricted.
|
| The University has a department with its buildings inside
| the restricted zone (Oceanography, it would be stupid to
| not put it next to the docks).
|
| Do I expect the average driver to be in and out every five
| minutes? No. Do I expect taxi drivers to have seen the
| docks before and know that, duh, "I have a fare to pick up"
| is a perfectly acceptable reason? Yes. That'll be what the
| guy who did pick us up thought too. How do you think we got
| in to visit a ship in the docks in the first place? Taxi.
|
| The docks are big. They're docks! We didn't walk out of the
| docks to meet that taxi, that would take ages, we just went
| from the car park next to the ship to a road that the taxi
| driver could find on his map. Unlike Uber, when he couldn't
| find us I just talked to him on my phone.
|
| Know what else is in the docks? Cruise liners. Need a taxi
| to the airport after your cruise? Those taxis are coming
| into the restricted access area. Know what else is
| restricted? The airport! I wonder if any taxi drivers ever
| visit the airport...
| magnuspaaske wrote:
| This is my experience too. The ride is only as good or as bad
| as the driver makes it and I have more trust in a system
| where a number of local taxi companies compete for my
| business than one massive far-away corporation that somehow
| can't geofence.
|
| In Copenhagen Uber made a splash until they decided they
| didn't get all they wanted when the taxi legislation was
| liberalised and they left. My reading of it is that they
| didn't want to give other European countries ideas and they
| were losing money anyways, so it wasn't really worth it to
| subject themselves to the same kind of regulation that exists
| in London or New York.
|
| And what did we get instead? 5-10 different taxi apps
| offering taxis at much the same speed it takes to get an
| Uber, but regulated locally and paying taxes. It's literally
| a question of installing a different (or multiple different)
| app and then the flow is the same.
|
| The kicker: Uber came to Denmark late enough that the taxi
| companies already had apps (or at least some of them which
| was then the ones I used). Ultimately it was just a big fight
| over nothing and Uber left with red numbers and a bad image.
| mmsimanga wrote:
| So Uber much like Tesla forced incumbent companies to
| innovate and you as a consumer have benefited, yes?
| ppsreejith wrote:
| I remember this being true in my home place (Kerala, India)
| till ~2016. Local autos/taxis were unreliable in some parts or
| would charge you exorbitant fees depending on your situation
| (Eg: if you were a woman traveling home at night). Uber really
| changed things in terms of reliability. Local taxi drivers
| would often resort to violence against Uber drivers for
| encroaching on their turf. Example video: (The driver
| eventually steps out of the car and gets beaten up).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okqxNEVYu7E
| mercy_dude wrote:
| saiya-jin wrote:
| so many words, not a single truth stated backed by some
| facts... I guess you've never seen Europe from closer than Fox
| news screen
| Apocryphon wrote:
| What does that have anything to do with Uber's crimes
| intrasight wrote:
| Rules are meant to be broken. That's how progress occurs. The
| courts will decide what, if any, sanctions to apply. This is as
| it should be in a liberal democracy.
| oefrha wrote:
| Meh, any corp of this caliber lobbies as much as they can. It
| wouldn't have succeeded if cabs weren't so shitty.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| They "succeeded" because every ride so far was subsidised by
| investors. It's not a level playing field for the cabs, which
| have to make a profit.
| oefrha wrote:
| I'm sure the cab cartel was on life support and only tried to
| scam every tourist and sometimes even locals because they
| couldn't make a profit otherwise.
| nprateem wrote:
| Or their competitors who played by the rules.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I'm not sure that the uber competitors (taxis) followed the
| rules as much as some people seem to think. For instance,
| why is their card reader is always broken?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Interesting reporting about behavior that goes somewhat beyond
| business-as-usual for corporate lobbying efforts (not a
| justification, just a note that these kinds of tactics are
| relatively common and this report is not an extreme outlier,
| compared to pharmaceutical lobbying for example).
|
| However, it's curious that there's no mention of Uber's largest
| backer, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which put an unprecedented
| $3.5 billion into Uber (initially, that may not be all). All the
| article mentions is this:
|
| > "From Moscow to Johannesburg, bankrolled with unprecedented
| venture capital funding, Uber heavily subsidised journeys,
| seducing drivers and passengers on to the app with incentives and
| pricing models that would not be sustainable."
|
| https://www.thestreet.com/investing/how-much-of-uber-does-sa...
|
| Uber's relationship with Saudi Arabia certainly deserves some
| mention:
|
| > "In the interview with the digital news platform, Khosrowshahi
| said the 2019 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal
| Khashoggi shows that "the (Saudi) government said they made a
| mistake. It's a serious mistake, but we've made serious mistakes,
| too right?""
| yieldcrv wrote:
| ITT: How Softbank and A16z broke up regional taxi mafias, while
| absorbing disproportionate press from many jurisdictions at once
| oriettaxx wrote:
| "Sometimes we have problems because, well, we're just fucking
| illegal."
| [deleted]
| jmyeet wrote:
| There's nothing particularly surprising here. This is capitalism.
| Pretty much every company operates like this.
|
| That doesn't make every company the same. Goldman Sachs literally
| killed people for profit. Defense companies made up for their
| revenue loss from the end of the Afghanistan war by earning
| almost that same amount in military aid to Ukraine (seriously,
| our ~$50B in both cases).
|
| Those aren't tech companies FWIW. Even there there'sa error
| spectrum. AirBnB is cancer, for example.
|
| But at last Uber killed the taxi industry, which was almost
| universally awful, corrupt and horrible to use. Seriously, good
| riddance.
|
| It'll be interesting to see what happens when Uber, Lyft, etc
| have to operate as commercial enterprises rather than VC money
| incinerators. This business isn't going away.
| rob_c wrote:
| But don't worry they're a changed company in the valley now and
| they're so sorry for past behaviour (nothing to do with being
| caught)... https://youtu.be/15HTd4Um1m4
| theplumber wrote:
| Uber is the best thing that happened to the taxi industry, from
| client's perspective
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Regardless of what you think about the company or their products,
| letting them get away with this sets a dangerous precedent in my
| opinion. Whether you agree with the specific laws they've broken,
| the precedent would allow companies to break other laws you might
| agree with more (and do more damage as a result).
| sitkack wrote:
| This will codify that breaking the law is a cost of doing
| business. Uber already killed a person by disabling the brakes
| on their self driving car.
|
| But this isn't about Uber, this is about power and corporate
| personhood.
| zouhair wrote:
| Their "legal" business model should already be illegal. They
| are just testing the system to see how far they can get away
| with stuff.
|
| And even this I highly doubt anything will come out of it.
| [deleted]
| dannyw wrote:
| Companies break laws every minute. Basically every US company
| operating in the EU is breaking GDPR post-Privacy Shield right
| now: it's illegal to transfer data of EU residents to US data
| centers.
|
| Oil and gas companies have been blatantly breaking laws for
| decades.
|
| Volkswagen, along with a majority of car manufacturers have
| been cheating emissions testing for ages.
|
| Big banks literally rigged LIBOR through intentionally lying
| about numbers and laughing and not a single executive is in
| jail.
| Entinel wrote:
| > Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking
| GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now: it's illegal to transfer
| data of EU residents to US data centers.
|
| This is not true and the devil is in the details. It's
| illegal to transfer "personal data" of EU residents. The
| definition of personal data under the GDPR is what US
| companies would consider PII or personally identifiable
| information and not all companies collect PII. In fact, I
| would argue most companies go out of there way to not store
| PII.
| kenniskrag wrote:
| > In fact, I would argue most companies go out of there way
| to not store PII.
|
| email address and ip is pii. So basically everything uses
| pii even if it is only for bot and ddos protection
| Entinel wrote:
| Not all companies store IP addresses. Or email addresses
| for that matter. And whether or not an email is PII
| depends on a lot of factors for your company but alone an
| email address is not legally PII.
|
| >So basically everything uses pii even if it is only for
| bot and ddos protection
|
| If I use Cloudflare for example, as DDoS mitigation, I am
| not storing PII, Cloudflare is and thus Cloudflare has to
| deal with the legalities of that.
| mitjam wrote:
| Even just transferring is not allowed without consent.
| And if you are the "controller" (ie. you are using
| Cloudflare to serve your customers) you would take the
| fine, not Cloudflare. And IP and email _are_ PII.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yes, but why are you saying this? Because you think we should
| allow more of it? Or because you think we have fundamental
| problems we need to fix? Or some other reason?
| c2h5oh wrote:
| Maybe it's time for mandatory penalty minimum set somewhere
| in the 3-100x profits made due to breaking the law. I'm tired
| of reading about how e.g. an investment fund settled for 100M
| with no admission of guilt after making a billion breaking
| the law.
| riku_iki wrote:
| They may agreed on settlement because case and outcome was
| not that obvious.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Or that the plaintiffs couldn't afford not to settle,
| more likely than not.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Plaintiff lives on budget money, and even he loses the
| case, he doesn't get any damage back. It is strong
| incentive to go to court.
| dannyw wrote:
| The people who write the laws and control who's in
| government are corrupt as hell.
| twblalock wrote:
| Think about the collateral damage caused by killing
| companies that break the law: lots of people lose their
| jobs, and most of them had nothing to do with the illegal
| act. That's not justice.
| wyre wrote:
| So what's the alternative?Corporations can't keep getting
| away with this.
| thorncorona wrote:
| As bad as China's politics is, their businesses bend the
| knee to the government.
| asdfjkhasjkdfh wrote:
| And they all set dangerous precedents, and now uber is
| setting yet another. And we all got dumber by taking the
| discussion to this direction. Enough defeatism.
| dylan604 wrote:
| To add to that, it could also be inferred that the Ubers of
| the world are able to get to where they are from the
| numbing affect of all the previous evilCorps that came
| before creating the death from a thousand paper cuts
| scenario.
|
| They're just standing on the shoulders of evilCorpGiants?!
| blablabla123 wrote:
| > Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking
| GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now
|
| No expert but in New Relic you can select in which data
| center your data should be. In fact many websites of US
| newspapers are not accessible from the EU. Just recently I
| had to order a gadget through reship.com because I couldn't
| buy it directly...
| melenaboija wrote:
| What is the point of this? That new companies should be even
| smarter than the stablished ones and therefore try to game
| the system even more? Or that we should learn from them and
| try to improve the situation and make all of them follow the
| rules?
| ArrayBoundCheck wrote:
| His point was going after newer and smaller companies is a
| joke when larger companies are basically getting away with
| murder, or more accurately doing nearly the same thing
| you're punishing smaller companies for doing (at a larger
| scale)
| melenaboija wrote:
| I still don't understand the reasoning.
|
| The way to follow the rules is looking who is doing worst
| and take that as an upper bound?
| ArrayBoundCheck wrote:
| More like it's pointless to say you can't do X behavior
| but someone else can
|
| You mostly need to outlaw all of it or someone will keep
| doing it. Going after smaller companies won't change
| anything
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _don't understand the reasoning_
|
| Prioritising limited enforcement resources based on harm
| minimisation.
| melenaboija wrote:
| As a citizen of a democratic country I still prefer the
| laws dictating what is harmful rather than a CEO and a
| member of the government unilaterally.
|
| And if something goes wrong use the tools from a
| democratic regime to change it. Even with its drawbacks
| democracies are the best system known to rule countries.
| orzig wrote:
| Agreed! And they should be held accountable too!
| monooso wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is.
|
| IIRC, Volkswagen were fined several billion, and a number of
| senior executives were charged.
| dannyw wrote:
| My point is that the precedent has already been set, and a
| company that essentially allowed people to transact freely
| (away from the taxi cartel and regulatory capture) isn't
| the straw that's going to break the camels back.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| IMO there's a big difference between breaking the law to
| optimize some otherwise-legitimate activity and starting an
| entire business on something that (at least at the time) was
| illegal in most countries.
| rafale wrote:
| I find what Volkswagen did worse. They polluted our air
| beyond the acceptable limit. On the other hand, Uber broke
| taxi laws that were anti-consumer anyway.
| r00fus wrote:
| Volkswagen was the only one that was caught, you mean.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| They weren't the only one that was caught.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just like SMU wasn't doing anything the other schools
| were not doing. They just got caught. It is an example of
| how using the extreme punishment had a much larger
| collateral damage blast radius than intended.
| runarberg wrote:
| Ohhh, they did a lot more then just braking taxi laws.
| According to this leak they engaged in illegal lobbying
| (which I would simply call bribery), and evidence
| tampering.
| sillyinseattle wrote:
| I despise how they operated from start through 2017. But do I
| wish Uber had never happened? Nope. Also, when you say "letting
| them get away with .." are you including Macron, Biden etc in
| "them'?
| wizwit999 wrote:
| Honestly, I'm happy they resisted the pressure. Visiting
| Istanbul, and the taxis suck here (apparently the taxi drivers
| got Uber banned here)
| Kalanos wrote:
| and scheduled me a 5:15am ride at 10pm the night before so i
| could get to their airport at the click of a button. where else
| is the driver going to make $25 (guessing their actual profit
| from $40 ride) in 20min at 5am? it's in the best interest of the
| people and progress. that's what the law should be enabling, not
| defending taxi licenses and unions
| silveira wrote:
| I highly recommend the episode 271- Uber from the podcast The
| Dollop which goes about the history of Uber.
|
| https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly90aGVkb2xsb3AubGl...
| mtlynch wrote:
| _The Dollop_ just plagiarizes content from other sources. They
| have a (not always complete) list of sources on their website,
| but on the podcast itself, they read other sources word-for-
| word without giving attribution:
|
| https://www.damninteresting.com/appendices/dollop-exhibits/n...
|
| https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/07/15/how-a-comedy-podc...
| ETH_start wrote:
| Uber has massively improved taxi services around the world. The
| labor laws and taxi medallion rackets they circumvented were
| massive barriers to improving transportation services.
| jollybean wrote:
| Someone describe to me why politicians even bother to meet with
| Uber.
|
| Why would Biden, Macron bother with this company, and not others?
|
| Where is the 'money flow' happening here? Is someone being
| bribed? Was Uber funnelling money to a related cause?
|
| I can understand ministers wanting to please a big up and coming
| company, sure, that's their job in some way, but not like this.
|
| How does Uber have the ability to get the VP to 'change their
| speech'.
|
| What's going on? That's not in the article.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| There is an ideological attachment to the gig company. See
| Macron trying to change the labor laws in France. In Macron's
| mind, France is "uncompetitive" and so Uber is like a straight-
| to-the-veins routing around the political system to change
| that.
| jollybean wrote:
| Having lived in France, I would definitely agree on some
| level with that, I see an entire nation of people fighting
| over surpluses and a lot less productivity - but I wonder if
| even that would be enough.
|
| Agree with Macron or not - that's at least him doing is job
| to 'make things happen' - but the degree of complicity is
| just to much.
|
| There's money going somewhere somehow, that's the missing
| piece.
|
| I don't suggest there is outright bribery because that's
| 'illegal' and would 'really get them in trouble' but
| something softer like campaign contributions or related
| causes, or favours here and there.
| wronglyprepaid wrote:
| > Why would Biden, Macron bother with this company, and not
| others?
|
| Yes I agree, Biden is also very tough on corruption[1],
| historically so in fact.
|
| [1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-
| releases...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > More than 180 journalists at 40 media outlets including Le
| Monde, Washington Post and the BBC [and the Guardian] will in the
| coming days publish a series of investigative reports about the
| tech giant.
|
| OT: What happened to the NY Times? They seem to have stopped
| doing ground-breaking investigations of the powerful, including
| government. Instead, we get investigations of trends and porn
| sites. What are they doing? It would be an incredile resource to
| lose. Seriously, please share the last investigation they did
| that fits that description?
| flakiness wrote:
| https://www.icij.org/investigations/uber-files/about-uber-fi...
|
| Only US media listed is WP. I guess this is because the file is
| about international (non-US) behavior of Uber and ICIJ might
| have asked for help in media in each country.
|
| Uber's behavior in the US is well covered by this very popular
| book [1] and it is authored by an NYT reporter, based on his
| own reporting on NYT.
|
| I won't argue about NYT's general trends, but it's not very
| fair to complain NYT not to cover Uber.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Super-Pumped-Battle-Mike-
| Isaac/dp/039...
| marban wrote:
| Lots of early stock holders in the comments.
| EGreg wrote:
| "There's nothing wrong with capitalism. This is a problem of
| crony-capitalism / corporatism. <EOF>"
|
| That is what people will reflexively say to any analysis that
| discusses the role of the profit motive and wall street earnings
| in leading to these outcomes.
|
| The fact that systematic actions like this to amass advantages at
| expense of the public happen with regularity at Facebook, Google,
| Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, General Motors and many other for-
| profit enterprises, means there may be some room to improve the
| economic paradigm in which these things are built. And in fact,
| we have just such a paradigm, and the products of it (Wikipedia,
| Linux, etc.) are of a completely different character. They don't
| have an investor class at all, that needs to recoup their
| investment by extracting rents forever.
|
| The alternative to for-profit venture funded companies owned by
| Wall St doesn't have to be communism or socialism. It can be a
| gift economy such Science, Creative Commons, or Open Source
| Software and decentralized permissionless networks based around
| protocols like HTTP.
|
| For example, Uber can be replaced with an open source,
| decentralized marketplace that _doesn't_ take 50% of all drivers'
| revenue, but has a free market and ratings / reviews operated by
| the community.
|
| But if a project is funded by venture CAPITALISTS, subsidized by
| money-losing unit economics through multiple rounds, and then
| dumped on the public in a Wall St IPO, and subsequently owned by
| pension funds and other pools of capital, then yes that is a
| quintessential example of Capitalism. And the result is that
| there is an investor class that will always tell Uber's board to
| maintain centralized control and extract rents from the public,
| squeeze drivers, as well as try to hack the society around them
| (as in this article: secretly trick, get around the police, lobby
| state officials) whereas an open source decentralized system
| wouldn't do any of that.
|
| The dream of cryptocurrency was that the developers would sell
| the tokens to the public and make money on the primary sale, but
| after that, the network would belong to the public. Even any
| royalties that could accrue (such as on every transfer of the
| token) would be above-board and disclosed once, so everyone knows
| the deal. Sadly, rather than focusing on a "peer to peer cash
| system" as Satoshi's whitepaper said, the entire space switched
| around 2013 to "store of value", HODL and speculative investment.
| It's actually a cop-out that happened because blockchains can't
| scale well.
|
| Bitcoin was the granddaddy and it solved the double-spend
| problem, but in a very brute-force way, by gathering all
| transactions in the world in one place every 10 mins to search
| for a double-spend. It's actually even worse than that, because
| every transaction has to be gossipped to every miner, and all
| mined transactions have to be stored forever in an ever-growing
| history. The tech is a straightjacket but the vision is good. We
| do need smart contracts to replace privately-owned middlemen, but
| we need the smart contracts to run on a better DLT than
| Blockchain. There have been tons of innovation since 2008 but
| Bitcoin maximalists and Web2 maximalists both deride all of it,
| so progress depends on open-minded people who look past the grift
| of utility-less coins long enough to build something useful
| trentnix wrote:
| _For example, Uber can be replaced with an open source,
| decentralized marketplace that doesn't take 50% of all drivers'
| revenue, but has a free market and ratings / reviews operated
| by the community._
|
| Sure! I volunteer you to build it for me.
| malermeister wrote:
| It already exists: https://drivers.coop/
| Pigalowda wrote:
| Oh cool! How many times have you ridden in a co-op car?
| EGreg wrote:
| I take you up on that challenge good sir
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| The current plague of cryptocurrency proves that, by itself,
| the mere fact of the market being open source and decentralized
| doesn't do anything useful; it even makes it worse in a lot of
| ways. The scammers will do exactly the same thing, except they
| take a 100% cut of your money when they dump the tokens onto
| retail investors and then do a rug pull.
|
| Smart contracts are a horrible invention that don't do anything
| new. The equivalent in a normal SQL database (the original DLT)
| is just running a transaction; every SQL database under the sun
| has supported this for ages.
| EGreg wrote:
| No, smart contracts are the realization of something just as
| revolutionary as Web1 and Web2 and just as likely to change
| the world, once people use them to help _communities_
| organize and coordinate their activities:
|
| Smart contracts represent the first time in history when you
| can trust code to do what it says. The next best thing that
| even come close is Intel's SGX extensions, where we trust
| Intel, or AWS key management service, where we trust Amazon.
|
| The idea that everyone can custody their own private keys as
| they want AND no one can be "above the law" and circumvent
| the business logic, is really powerful. That assurance and
| level of trust _in the code_ is what enables a whole slew of
| new applications that currently require human gatekeeper
| institutions, same as Web1 replaced radio, TV, newspapers,
| magazines, and centralized platforms like America Online,
| Compuserve and Minitel.
|
| You just are myopically focused on the silly Web3 phase, same
| as people derided Web1 personal home pages with <blink> and
| <marquee> tags until the Web grew up.
|
| For example https://intercoin.org/applications
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| >Smart contracts represent the first time in history when
| you can trust code to do what it says.
|
| This is extremely, extremely wrong. The operators of the
| network can change the smart contract VM whenever they
| want. There's nothing magic about it, the VM is just
| implemented in some code that all of the executor nodes
| happen to agree on at any given moment in time. In practice
| they don't change it, but neither would you if you were
| running a financial database on top of SQL.
|
| And besides, the worst issue in software development is
| unintended bugs made by programmers. No programmer I know
| would ever trust any non-trivial code to simply "do what it
| says" because there could be complex bugs lurking in there
| somewhere. Smart contracts can't do anything about that,
| practically speaking they make it much worse by making it
| difficult/expensive to change the smart contract. There is
| nothing revolutionary or powerful about them, the point of
| them is actually to make them weak and expensive on purpose
| so the executors can charge increasing gas fees.
|
| Edit: I looked at that list of applications, almost all of
| them could be done better without smart contracts or even
| without computers. Those things are all thousands of years
| old. The only exception on that list is NFTs, but NFTs are
| an entirely bogus concept that are yet another version of a
| ponzi scheme.
| EGreg wrote:
| You seem intellectually curious and honest from what you
| write. So I think you're one step away from the epiphany,
| if you can resist doubling down on this statement
|
| _this is extremely, extremely wrong_
|
| Sure, they can "hardfork" the protocol in a backwards-
| incompatible way, but they'd have to get the fork adopted
| by everyone who is currently running (and "securing") the
| other version of the database and its "stored
| procedures". Often, the node operators don't all know
| each other and it's hard for them to all collude to run
| the hardfork. Often, the old network has large enough
| incentives for each individual to not switch, similar to
| how everyone always threatens to leave Facebook but it
| still has the same MAU because its network effect is so
| huge. Good luck leaving when all your friends are on it,
| etc. And Facebook doesn't give you a steady stream of
| income, even. If it did, if you made more profit than it
| cost you to run a node, why wouldn't you ALSO keep
| supporting the old network? I can think of one reason
| only -- if the new network hardfork would pay you MORE
| and it would be a zero-sum game. It would have to break
| old contracts AND gain enough traction to pay all the
| node operators MORE than the old one. That's quite a
| hurdle and becomes harder the bigger the original network
| was.
|
| Bitcoin was forked multiple times, but even a sensible
| hardfork change like increasing the block size proved too
| hard to do. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV are around but
| most Bitcoin "miner" nodes still run the tried and true
| old blue.
|
| Ethereum team had to put a "difficulty bomb" in there to
| try to get the miners to upgrade. See Ethereum Classic,
| for instance, it is still being run, despite having no
| widely adopted applications or stablecoins on it. So even
| without utility, you can have shitcoins running for
| years, and you're talking to me about how ALL nodes can
| just abandon it?
|
| Now about the bugs and correctness. Look... first of all,
| no one is claiming that smart contracts will solve every
| single problem, neither did Web1 but it solved enough
| that everyone left AOL and CompuServe and MSN and joined
| it. That's a FACT. They also left Encarta and Britannica
| which were quite popular capitalist enterprises, paying
| all editors top-down from their profits, and instead
| Wikipedia eclipsed them all. They are now a rounding
| error.
|
| But you bring a fair point -- since smart contracts must
| be immutable to be trusted (like UniSwap Factory, or many
| other protocols) they have to be audited and battle
| tested before the public can trust them with large
| amounts of value (elections, money, etc.)
|
| The ultimate in this is Provable Correctness, and there
| are now tools to actually prove a smart contract or a
| program is correct.
|
| The second place is what Cardano is doing -- running
| fuzzing with massive amounts of input through what is
| essentially a functional programming language (Haskell).
| What is not enough about that? You get the best of all
| worlds... trillions of tests, and then immutable code you
| can trust.
|
| Disclaimer: I am not building on Cardano and have no
| connection to their ecosystem. Just that they are focused
| on moving the space to a more provably correct set of
| smart contracts, and it addresses your concern.
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| >So I think you're one step away from the epiphany, if
| you can resist doubling down on this statement
|
| I will double and triple down on it. I've been following
| this for at least a decade now. Smart contracts are
| completely useless and they need to go. The "epiphany"
| here is that it was obvious since The DAO transaction was
| reverted that there is nothing actually immutable about
| blockchains or smart contracts. If enough whales are
| threatened by some activity then they'll hard fork,
| because the miners/stakers all depend on the activity of
| the whales to realize their profits. The network doesn't
| exist without them, and it's not actually hard for them
| to collude.
|
| This is another reason why it's futile for you to expect
| anything out of blockchains; they're not actually run by
| volunteers, by design they're run by the greediest
| possible participants who are supposed to do whatever
| they possibly can to maximize their profit from mining,
| because if they don't do this then the network collapses.
| This is entirely how the system is designed to work.
| You're not actually "trusting the code", you're trusting
| that a hardfork won't be successful for entirely non-
| technical reasons, i.e. that they would lose money.
| People who run ordinary databases also don't mess with
| the database for the same reason. Blockchains don't add
| anything new to this, they're not a good or even
| interesting invention.
|
| >Bitcoin was forked multiple times, but even a sensible
| hardfork change like increasing the block size proved too
| hard to do
|
| This is ahistorical, it wasn't hard to increase the block
| size, it was just undesired by the majority of the
| miners. BCH happened because some miners were upset about
| SegWit, a change that did actually succeed.
|
| >The ultimate in this is Provable Correctness, and there
| are now tools to actually prove a smart contract or a
| program is correct.
|
| These tools do not solve the problem, because "correct"
| is entirely subjective. With those, you can prove that
| the program doesn't violate its own invariants or contain
| certain logic errors, but you can't validate that the
| output for the human is correct. No amount of fuzzing can
| solve this.
| EGreg wrote:
| I mean, I could say that you sound like the old fogies in
| each generation like Steve Ballmer who famously yelled
| "search is not a business!" People just don't get how the
| next generation of users could POSSIBLY find something
| useful, which they don't see useful. It's like people
| drew the future with flying cars, when in reality the
| innovation was in something else.
|
| In a regular database, I can't have an election because
| someone can go in there and change all the votes or
| stored procedures. I can't trust the code. I can't trust
| the database. One person with one key can change
| everything.
|
| You know what's better than that? People being able to
| only act as themselves, and the rules being enforced by
| multiple machines. As I said, it doesn't have be "a
| blockchain", but what I described _is_ the defining
| features of "smart contracts". It's simply more
| resilient than any middleman, and it makes it much, much
| harder to corrupt the system to extract rents. The system
| ends up being neutral, and all the "profits" are either
| taken out of circulation or accrue to the participants.
| There is no parasitic investor class in the end. People
| sell the tokens once and then they circulate among
| network participants. There are multiple gateways to get
| or cash out of the token instead of one (like cashing
| in/out of PayPal using PayPal Inc only). It's very hard
| to shut the system down or exclude certain groups from
| it. In all these ways (except the last one perhaps,
| depending on who you ask), it's strictly BETTER than
| centralized, closed, privately-owned systems. Why do Web2
| maxis hate all these improvements?
| dcow wrote:
| Who pays the volunteers?
|
| You're jumbling up a lot of things here. Fixing the economic
| paradigm does not lead straight to crypto. Maybe it's part of
| the solution in some areas, but it doesn't prevent capitalism
| or encourage open source bootstrapped enterprises.
|
| The closest thing IMO to a swing at fixing the economic
| paradigm would be something like requiring all companies to be
| nonprofits once they go public or something...
| EGreg wrote:
| Who pays volunteers on Wikipedia, Linux, BSD, Webkit,
| Chromium, PHP, Python and all those other technologies and
| languages who have taken over the world? Is TimBL rich
| through extracting rents from all users of HTTP?
|
| Vitalik is mega-rich from selling his tokens once, and now he
| doesn't control the network. That is the alternative I am
| talking about. The developers of a successful project make
| buck but then the project becomes bigger than them. There
| were was an article posted the other day from an open source
| author complaining that they are now being required to use
| two-factor authentication before they can continue releasing
| their product. They said "well, I guess I don't pay for the
| distribution platform, so I will take what I can get." But
| they are missing the point entirely -- the distribution
| platform isn't supposed to serve the one author/maintainer.
| It's supposed to serve the public! Those are the actual
| customers, and even if the author pays $1,000,000 a month to
| such a service, the value to the public of NOT having a
| security backdoor on the next update can become far, far
| greater. At some point, what you built just becomes bigger
| than you.
|
| That's why science has peer review, wikipedia has talk pages
| and open source commits have reviewers before merging the
| code. No one wants something to be rolled out at 5am on the
| whim of one guy, EVEN IF he has two factor authentication.
|
| There is a fundamental, fundamental difference in mindset
| between on the one hand the celebrity culture we have on
| Twitter, and various entertainment, and the peer review
| culture of science, wikipedia and open source. The latter is
| far more useful to society.
|
| In fact, most of our divisions and strife in demicracies is a
| result of for-profit news media trying to write one-sided
| outrage articles with clickbait titles because the market
| selects for that, while our social network algorithms surface
| this and put us in angry echo chambers because that leads to
| the most "engagement" (and therefore, profit). Once you see
| it, the profit motive IS WHAT CORRUPTS these networks.
| Wikipedia and Linux may have their faults, but not these.
|
| Who pays the volunteers? No one. They have enough financial
| stability to spend an hour here and there making a commit.
| There doesn't need to be a billion dollar investment by any
| party to advance the thing forward. They're like ants... and
| it beats closed profit-driven silos in the end.
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| >Who pays volunteers on Wikipedia, Linux, BSD, Webkit,
| Chromium, PHP, Python
|
| In order: Wikimedia Foundation, various companies, various
| companies, Apple, Google, various companies, various
| companies. Most of those developers are paid. The wikipedia
| editors are unpaid volunteers, but the IT staff isn't.
| EGreg wrote:
| You asked about the volunteers, not the paid staff. The
| vast, vast majority of contributions on eg wikipedia
| comes from unpaid contributors.
| orangepurple wrote:
| I would not assume the latter
| EGreg wrote:
| It is easy to check in a variety of ways, including
| calling their API of contributors. Where would Wikipedia
| get the money to oay this vast army of people? And even
| if they did, divide the amount they raised by the number
| of contributors and tell me if it is a meaningful amount
| compared to what employees are paid in the capitalist
| company model.
| dcow wrote:
| No, _I_ asked _my_ question assuming we lived in the
| world you're suggesting where all software is built by
| volunteers in a utopian gift economy. I am asking who
| pays _your_ volunteers. The question is semi-rhetorical.
|
| The answer as GP points out is that in the majority of
| these cases open source software is still funded by
| capitalists. Wikipedia _content_ presumably being largely
| a volunteer effort doesn 't change this. Some _thing_
| still has to fund Wikipedia 's existence. Wikipedia and
| signal for example are funded by nonprofits. I quite like
| this model which is why I suggested it in my previous
| comment.
|
| The main point is that you can't just tell everyone to
| work for free and still call it capitalism or even expect
| it to work at all. That's what it sounds like you're
| suggesting... I like your challenge to the
| capitalism/socialism dichotomy. I think your solution is
| lacking some sophistication in understanding how the open
| source landscape works, what motivates people and how to
| yield production, and is kinda out of touch with reality.
| blowski wrote:
| Metapoint. You seem to keep significantly editing your comment,
| so I don't know what's been voted or commented on. Either
| responding, or editing with the ---EDIT--- line would help
| there.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| This kind of collusion between the state and a company is
| antithetical to capitalism.
| [deleted]
| elcomet wrote:
| Yes but without a strong state to prevent this, the
| incentives do push the companies to collude
| dixie_land wrote:
| With a strong state, it'll just be easier to collude
| without even having to maintain an appearance.
| malermeister wrote:
| It might be on paper, but that's a "No True Scotsman"
| argument, just like all the socialists saying "oh the Soviet
| Union wasn't real socialism!".
|
| _In reality_ , this seems to be what happens every time,
| empirically. So maybe this is just what _real life_
| capitalism is like?
| blowski wrote:
| Most economic systems go through the same 3 step process:
|
| 1. Start out with a good idea.
|
| 2. Go through a golden period of good results, in which
| there is much innovation, and established dominant players
| are upended.
|
| 3. Revert to form, in which the newly dominant players
| prevent further change.
|
| The key is not looking for the perfect system at step 2,
| but the one which causes step 3 to break down in the
| quickest time possible.
| fallingknife wrote:
| You talking about Uber or the cab cartels they were competing
| with?
| Sebb767 wrote:
| A better argument: People will always try to dupe, deceive, get
| rich and get their way. Capitalism is - so far - the best way
| to channel at least some of that energy into building something
| productive for society as a whole.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| EGreg wrote:
| Second best. I think UBI + Open Source beats it over time.
| And I have examples to prove my point ... you are welcome to
| provide some the other way: Wikipedia vs
| Britannica, Encarta NGiNx and Apache vs IIS
| OSS browser engines vs IE Science va Alchemy
| etc.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Regulatory Capture ruins this.
| raverbashing wrote:
| The taxi drivers had the regulatory capture in this case
| switchstance wrote:
| 0xmohit wrote:
| How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide (2017)
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...
| SilasX wrote:
| HN discussion of that Greyball article (not just linking
| because my comment is the top one and explains it, or
| anything...).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785564
| speeder wrote:
| I actually joined a political party in my country, because they
| had the intention of protecting Uber.
|
| Some people wonder, but why? Why protect such scummy company?
|
| Well, it was literally to save lives, as much illegal Uber
| behaviour is, what they were trying to replace was worse, MUCH
| worse.
|
| Where I live "Taxi Mafia" was a thing, not just in the usual
| sense people imagine, like blocking competitors using
| regulations, but people were murdering others, there were
| beatings, assassinations, theft, high level government
| corruption, the Taxi Mafia was evil and destructive as any other
| "<drugs/guns/slavery> Mafia" you can imagine.
|
| A lot of people claim Uber is evil because they say their workers
| are contractors and not employees. Well, before Uber if you
| wanted to be a driver, you had to purchase your own car, open
| your own company, and then give 50k USD to the local mafia boss,
| and promise to join combat whenever called. Combat? Yes, combat,
| gathering up drivers to kill a competitor was a thing, one
| infamous case for example: out of town driver parked near airport
| to deliver someone, a client in a hurry got on his cab as the
| other client was leaving, the local mafia didn't like this
| happened, so they surrounded the car and invited the driver for a
| "walk", took him under a nearby bridge, and they all kicked him
| until he was a mangled mess, and then they kicked him some more
| to make sure he was dead.
| px43 wrote:
| This is true in lots of cities in the US too. In Portland, our
| police were working with the taxi union, and kept creating
| phony Uber accounts, requesting rides, and then fining the
| drivers. Obviously those riders were getting horrendously
| negative reviews, so they got added to the "greyball" list
| where the phony users would log onto the app, and it would look
| like there were no cars available. They had the gall to
| complain that they were being targeted unfairly.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/uber-portland-greyba...
|
| Fuck the taxi unions and especially the PPB for so many
| reasons.
|
| In Las Vegas, where the corruption is much, much deeper,
| police, at behest of the taxi union, were just driving around
| and towing any car with an Uber or Lyft sticker. When the ride
| sharing companies finally broke through, they were still forced
| to only pick up at the farthest point in the parking lot of
| their airport, and at the back end of any casino, which could
| mean 10-15 minutes of walking in the 100F weather to get to the
| rideshare pickup spot. Vegas is the only place in the US where
| I'll still take a taxi, which I hate, but ride share there is
| so horrible that there isn't really much of an option.
|
| I also got robbed in various ways about 50% of the time when
| taking a taxi in Miami, with taxi drivers driving circles, or
| threatening to drive off with my luggage if I didn't leave a
| tip that was several times the actual fare of the ride, etc.
| People who complain about ride sharing companies are obviously
| people who have had the privilege of never needing to ride in a
| taxi. Maybe they're okay in some places, but they've been
| terrible pretty much everywhere I've been. The reciprocal
| rating systems that ride share apps use is a godsend.
| morelisp wrote:
| > This is true in lots of cities in the US too.
|
| What speeder is describing is not even close to true in any
| US city.
| px43 wrote:
| Maybe, but from stories I've heard from some locals, Vegas
| is pretty close. It's very much a mob run city, and I've
| heard stories (completely unsubstantiated) of
| assassinations related to taxi turf battles etc, and the
| tourism board directing police officers to not record any
| murders unless there were a lot of public witnesses so they
| can still be a top travel destination for tourists.
|
| These are like, ramblings from random drunk dude on the
| street kind of stories, so maybe it's all BS, but it sounds
| like there is a lot of violent crime happening there in
| collaboration with the local police.
| [deleted]
| foepys wrote:
| I don't understand why breaking up the mafia wasn't a more
| pressing issue? What makes Uber drivers different that they
| won't be dragged from their cars and kicked to death?
| SSLy wrote:
| the politicians from the parent commenter's city/state aren't
| in uber's bed
| hunterb123 wrote:
| They don't have to be? They would only need to
| intimidate/recruit the Uber drivers (which they did) and
| use their gov connections to cover up the crime.
|
| A local mafia problem is a local mafia problem, no matter
| the transportation system being hijacked.
|
| This whole thread kinda turned into Taxi whataboutism to
| deflect from Uber.
| soneca wrote:
| They were definitely threatened and beat in Brazil several
| times at the beginning (I don't recall anyone dying on the
| news, but I maybe it happened). The difference is that anyone
| could become a Uber driver, where not everyone could become a
| tax driver (due to governmental regulations and tight control
| by the mafia)
| hourago wrote:
| > but people murdering others
|
| What is stopping them murdering Uber drivers? Your story seems
| a caricature and makes little sense. "Uber saved my country
| from assassins"
|
| Which country it was? Wich political party?
| morelisp wrote:
| Why do you think Uber would not have participated in the same
| corruption (or worse) once it was sufficiently entrenched?
| Remember, this is the company that in the US threatened
| journalists, and in India stole medical records of critics.
| It's not hard to believe they'd cross any line someone else was
| already crossing relative to local mores.
| squiffsquiff wrote:
| Not poster you asked but:
|
| With Uber you don't pay the driver directly. The price is set
| by a third party and so is the recommended route. Tricky to
| swindle the rate, route or tips. In areas where drivers have
| to be licensed, that is enforced so passenger and driver
| identity has some verification
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I'm wary of adding a me too comment, because we may be talking
| about the same mafia. But yes, it looks like most large cities
| in Brazil had an organized mafia that lived on extorting small
| amounts from the people unlucky enough to need a taxi ride. It
| helps that the government was the one organizing them,
| mandating meetings and price fixing, but the rampant extortion
| was not called for.
|
| And yes, there were about 3 years of very public beatings and
| assassinations from the taxi mafia on my city before they
| finally went bankrupt and disappeared. And now, suddenly the
| taxi service has a similar quality to Uber.
| [deleted]
| nprateem wrote:
| And now they enter the "ask for forgiveness" stage, get a slap on
| the wrist and get to bank their billions.
| miles wrote:
| > and get to bank their billions.
|
| The only billions Uber has is in losses:
|
| 2022:
|
| Uber lost $6 billion to start the year, but reports a rebound
| in ride-hailing and no issues with driver supply
| https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-posts-nearly-6-billio...
|
| 2021:
|
| Uber is still losing a lot of money
| https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-still-losing-a-lot-of-m...
|
| 12 Years After It Was Founded, Uber Says It Might Finally Make
| a Profit https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/09/21/12-years-
| after-it-...
|
| 2020:
|
| Uber lost $8.5 billion in 2019, but it thinks it can get
| profitable by the end of 2020
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21126965/uber-q4-earnings-...
|
| 2019:
|
| Uber lost over $5 billion in one quarter, but don't worry, it
| gets worse
| https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20793793/uber-5-billion-qu...
| bambax wrote:
| Uber may be losing billions, but Travis Kalanick still has
| his.
|
| > _In the weeks leading up to [his] resignation, Kalanick
| sold off approximately 90% of his shares in Uber, for a
| profit of about $2.5 billion._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_Kalanick
| amelius wrote:
| Sadly, this is normal for growing companies. Amazon lost year
| after year at some point.
|
| Uber's CEO is still laughing their way to the bank.
|
| F...ing up our economy is profitable.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Cory Doctorow makes a pretty compelling case it's just a
| bezzle: https://doctorow.medium.com/the-big-lie-that-keeps-
| the-uber-...
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| Really feels like there's a massive amount of corruption in
| European politics these days. Especially in the EU.
| lancesells wrote:
| Outside of maybe freshman politicians I would think that
| corruption exists with many, if not most, politicians in the US
| as well. I can't speak to other countries but power tends to
| corrupt.
| geitir wrote:
| More regulation => more opportunities for bribery => more
| corruption
| 0x_rs wrote:
| Inexcusable. Yet no considerable action will be taken against
| this corporation nor the corrupted, lobbied politicians that
| enabled this will ever be held accountable, let alone be cornered
| to resign from whatever seat they occupy. It's not a good
| indication for the future how the EU seems to be one giant toybox
| for fraudulent activities such as these, with all the recent
| scandals.. there seems to be very little interest in even just
| keeping a facade of legitimacy.
| tapatio wrote:
| The new norm: to become a unicorn you have to lie, cheat, and
| steal.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| FWIW this is about the company's founding DNA: "The leak spans a
| five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis
| Kalanick".
| skilled wrote:
| Biden being shown as a puppet in this context is certainly
| something.
|
| Admittedly, Guardian is the _only_ news site I check ever (last 5
| or so years anyway), and even I am impressed that they went with
| a straight arrow. Good job.
|
| // Weird seeing downvotes for my reply without any
| comments/input. Just goes to show - ignorance is bliss.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| All this effort and legal chicanery just to build a mediocre,
| unprofitable business.
| oneepic wrote:
| Yes, let's focus on the business and forget all about the
| product, which just so happens to be ubiquitous today, used in
| most developed countries and 10,000 cities, and people use
| "Uber" as a verb the same way "Google" is used for searching
| the web. /s
| wronglyprepaid wrote:
| > Files expose attempts to lobby Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz and
| George Osborne
|
| They can't be very smart, Joe Biden is the least corrupt
| president ever and has committed to total transparency:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-briefing-idUSKB...
| ratsmack wrote:
| >pledges
|
| A pledge has the same value as good intentions.
| wronglyprepaid wrote:
| It is not just a pledge as so far he has not broken it
| https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/biden-
| prom...
| Entinel wrote:
| There are some particularly bad things here like
|
| > Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of
| attacks from "extreme right thugs" who had infiltrated the taxi
| protests and were "spoiling for a fight", Kalanick appeared to
| urge his team to press ahead regardless. "I think it's worth it,"
| he said. "Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be
| resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought
| out."
|
| However, this is how all "unicorn" startups operate. Break the
| law until they get caught and pay a small fine. Uber will get
| away with this and people will continue to use Uber.
| electrondood wrote:
| > However, this is how all "unicorn" startups operate.
|
| No it absolutely isn't.
|
| Uber is uniquely corrupt. Their toxic tech-bro culture has been
| baked in from the start.
| effingwewt wrote:
| It absolutely is when paying fines for _breaking the law_ is
| called 'cost of doing business'.
|
| Businesses want to pretend they are people with rights, then
| they need to be punished. Send the whole C-suite and Board to
| fucking prison.
|
| Uber is super corrupt but hardly unique.
| kevincox wrote:
| Why would any rational company follow the law when the cost
| of not doing so is miniscule and the upsides are huge.
|
| If the law encourages people not to follow it the law isn't
| very effective.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I think it's important to realize that Uber is what SV has
| become: Corruption and abuse of power as the primary tools of
| business, not innovation. Embrace of the powerful, not the little
| guy in their garage. Destroying other people and embracing
| sociopathology..
|
| There's a long way from Steve Jobs' Apple, or Netscape, or many
| others (including FOSS!), who made exciting ground-breaking
| innovations, to Uber.
| crikeyjoe wrote:
| xwdv wrote:
| Everything Uber has done is pretty standard for a lot of big
| companies, people just love to bash Uber for some reason,
| probably people with ties to the utterly corrupt Taxi industry.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| No. The behavior described in the article is not "standard."
| When you identify a law in a big company that forbids you from
| doing a business practice, you _stop_ and obey the law. There
| is no alternative approach, particularly in a big company.
|
| The conduct described in the article is basically reckless win-
| at-any-cost nonsense that reflects Uber's very survival was
| _forbidden_ by law. The politicians who prevented subordinates
| from enforcing the law should be called out one-by-one and made
| to explain themselves. The lesson from the parent comment is
| not the correct lesson.
| xwdv wrote:
| I see no reason to be a staunch defender of bullshit unjust
| laws meant to stifle innovation and uphold monopolistic
| behaviors. The executives can hold their heads high at their
| acts of corporate level civil disobedience.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| No, serious executives cannot do that. If an executive
| acknowledges a business practice violates law, the action
| item is not 'do it anyway'. There is no corporate level
| civil disobedience. This is not correct and not reflective
| of the way this actually goes in real life corporate
| America.
| xwdv wrote:
| There is. You can treat fines as just another cost of
| doing business if your returns will be far greater.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| No. It is not standard to build an illegal enterprise and
| then treat the fines as a cost of doing business.
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