> If you take an ordinary taxi and pay cash, it will generate no records associated with you
I think that's a foolish assumption. Standard taxis not only remember the phone number / name / address association, they are likely tracking the cabs as well these days. They also often have CCTV.
> With real taxis, you can flag one on the street
Or not. Or they'll tell you they won't go where you want.
>> With real taxis, you can flag one on the street
>Or not. Or they'll tell you they won't go where you want.
Which city/country? Honestly, I am surprised. Admittedly, i lived only in Europe (France/Germany/UK) - entire life - never ever has a Taxi driver refused to take me somewhere.
Usually it's not overt. More common (in New York, London, and Cologne) is cabs that avoid me when I'm carrying luggage, however just a few weeks ago, at George Best (UK) airport, driver asks me to get another car after I am inside the car and tell him I want to go to Newry.
I've had it happen in NYC and in Washington, DC. And I'm a white male trying to get to the burbs. I can't imagine being a minority trying to get to a less desireable location.
Wasn't "Sorry mate, I don't go south of the river." once a common response from London cabbies?
Presumably they'll not want to take someone out to the middle of nowhere, where they'll probably struggle to get a fare on the way back. Much more profitable if you're carrying passengers in both directions.
London, frequently. Try getting a cab from Hammersmith out to Roehampton and you'll get a stream of "I'm not going that way" responses. Simple economic reason is that the driver is unlikely to pick up a return fare (source: talked about it with a taxi driver)
happens a lot in my city (são paulo) -- if the ride is too short, they won't take it. if it's too long, won't take it (since traveling back is going to cost them gas and they won't get a passenger).
taking to a play them deem not safe (even if it's safe)? not taking you.
In the UK, cabs are heavily regulated. If they refuse the trip, they may be fined or worse. Some of those bylaws and regulations are there to stop discrimination, some of them are there to ensure that they provide a service and charge fairly, not just run a business: that's an important part of how authorities view licensing somebody going around picking up strangers and driving them around for cash.
If you're covered in vomit, if you are eating food, if you are clearly so drunk you are likely about to vomit, if you are being abusive or aggressive, if they have reason to think you can not or will not pay the fare, they can tell you why they're not taking you and not take you. You can complain by making a note of the license number on the back of the car. If you are found to be right, the driver will be at fined, and may be forced to compensate you.
Generally, they're going to take you.
In London there are competitor apps to Uber for black cabs and minicabs. Some of them are great and provide drivers who provide great service (Hailo, Addison Lee), some of them less so (Kabbee).
I've used Uber a few times as an experiment and had mixed results. I see why people like it, but I'm inclined to stop using it, mostly because I think Uber is exploiting the drivers to a certain degree.
Also, most people aren't aware that Uber drivers rate you, the passenger. Support the wrong team? Don't like the route they're choosing and tell them so, and they hate you? You're going to struggle to get an Uber next time. My g/f tells me when she's in an Uber she spends so much time trying to be "pleasant" to get a good rating, it's like that episode of Black Mirror, it's ridiculous.
Says a member of the majority ethnic group. If you are not a member of that group, this is simply not true. A black man in NYC or a person not speaking Marathi in Pune simply cannot expect the same service quality.
In any case, Uber also has regulations, and in my experience they are enforced far better than any cab rules.
The last time I had a problem with an Uber it was some idiot pretending he didn't understand my Hindi and running up the meter by taking a long non-highway route to the airport. I submitted a complaint while waiting for the flight and got a "your trip has been refunded" notification when I stepped off the plane.
Will the UK regulator provide a similar level of service?
The post I'm replying to was a rebuttal to a comment about taxis in general, not the UK.
It's possible that UK regulators have solved all the problems that no other taxi regulator has managed: limited supply, high prices, and a complaint process that involves more work than taking out your phone. But I don't find it that likely.
My Hindi is bad. Nevertheless, it's exceedingly rare for a driver to fail to understand it.
It's even rarer for a driver to also fail to understand the words "MG road" spoken by a person pointing their finger at MG road (which every other Uber or taxi driver knew to take), while their Uber map also says to take MG road.
I'd love to hear about a single instance of getting a bad UK taxi ride fixed in under 10 hours with a simple text message. Could you link me to a description of how that works?
Yeah... kind of. In bigger places, maybe it has a meaning. But for example in Bath the driver literally bragged to me that people can complain that the taxi is late or never arrived, but they're just contractors renting the radio equipment. The dispatch doesn't care even if you complain to them, so they can do whatever they want. As I was sitting in his cab... so not sure what that was supposed to achieve.
On the other hand the one time I actually noted feedback on the Uber drive, it resulted in follow up questions and generally was handled well. (that was in Singapore)
> My g/f tells me when she's in an Uber she spends so much time trying to be "pleasant" to get a good rating
Interesting. I just pretty much never talk to cab drivers. Yet some make a point of telling me I got 5 stars from them, so that I give them 5 stars too...
Your taxi driver in Bath is embodying the stereotype of the taxi driver who is ignorant of the subject. Xe has alas conveyed that ignorance to you. What you state as second-hand fact is anything but.
The law that covers taxis and private hire vehicles in Bath is Part 2 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976. It is at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1976/57/part/II . B&NES Council is one of several local authorities to have adopted what are essentially uniform local bylaws. Other local authorities retain their own (sometimes much earlier) bylaws, but their differences from the Act are usually that they are even stricter.
It is interesting to contrast the actual U.K. law (which has been around since 1976) with discussion on this WWW page.
* It is illegal under section 69 of the Act for either hackney carriage or private hire vehicle drivers to prolong journeys.
* It is illegal under section 48 of the Act for licensing authorities to refuse to licence private hire vehicles simply in order to render licences a scarce commodity.
* It is illegal under section 64 of the Act for someone to park something other than a licensed hackney carriage on a hackney carriage stand (one of the ways that people could impersonate taxis).
* It is illegal under section 71 to tamper with taximeters.
* Section 66 of the Act prohibits the practice of charging something greater than what is on the meter just because the journey ends outwith the jurisdiction of the licensing authority, and "those rules don't apply out here, mate".
Examples of even stricter non-uniform bylaws are bylaws that ...
* ... require that the driver assist with luggage and not refuse a fare with luggage if the vehicle is designed to carry it;
* ... require that drivers carry all lost property to a police station;
* ... require that the meter not be run when not hired, not be hidden or obscured, and be lit at night;
* ... have detailed requirements on furnishing, such as cushions; or
* ... prohibit advertisements on the windows of such vehicles
And some of the same arguments can make it safer to ride cabs? If I step into a strangers car (yes that includes cabs) I appreciate if there are some public records of me doing so. Makes it easier for CSI to find me...
Even where he has good points, Stallman so often undercuts himself through overreach. Like, his decades-long attempt to rename things in a "pejorative" way or call them pejorative names when he doesn't like them is...weird. I mean, weird-for-him, not just weird. "Oh, we shouldn't call it Uber, we should call it Goober!" Are we back in fourth grade now? I mean, it's in the same vein as their redefinition of phrases into particular jargon (like, say, "free"), obviously, but then trying to use it in advocacy? Hasn't twenty years of wet-fart responses to the rhetoric taught him--or the FSF in general, who's usually pretty tin-eared too--anything?
100% agree. Overreach combined with childishness is a massive turn-off, even if you think he's right a lot of the time. And it damages the FSF/GNU by association.
If I see that I might have to sign a contributor agreement (often not in some straightforward manner, but involves reading multiple documents, postal mail, is only tangentially related to the core GNU product etc.) my first choice is usually just not to contribute. I hear myself saying internally "I don't want to have to deal with those people". Seems to me that this damages the Free Software world.
You don't sign a contributor agreement with the FSF. You sign away your copyright, but they also agree to only distribute the work under the same terms as the ones you gave it to them (i.e. the GPL in most cases). It is far more equitable than contributor agreements which basically try to remove the right for you to sue the organisation that gives you the contributor agreement. Instead, in exchange for your copyright, you get a promise that your work will remain free.
Also, the process has recently been transformed to be completely over email:
The GPL says that future versions of the GPL will be "similar in spirit". An "or later" GPL that allows non-free derivative works would probably not be viewed by a judge as "similar in spirit". There really is no great danger in the "or later" clause.
> They can't use that to retroactively close off submitted works, but project using other licenses can't do that either.
I don't understand this sentence, can you elaborate? Who can use what to retroactively lock up what, and what other licences do not allow what?
> I don't think the nomenclature is the important point here.
Only if you already knew the difference between what Google asks you to sign when you submit patches to Chrome and what the FSF asks you to sign. If you want to call them both "CLAs", fine, but at least I hope you understand now how they're fundamentally very different. Not every bit of legalese is the same just because it's annoying legalese that you'd rather not have to deal with.
Well, the renaming of things would actually be useful. He understands that framing is important, and tries to give the discussions a frame that is advantageous to his ends.
Unfortunately, he just isn't overly successful / good at it. If you agree with him on the points, a better approach would be constructive criticism, i.e. thinking about ways of changing the framing of debates that might be more successful.
Reframing the debate can be useful - I actually agree with him wanting to use the term 'piecework subcontractor economy' rather than 'sharing economy' for example. That is replacing one term with certain connotations with another that is, at least in my view, more accurate. It's pushing people to use a descriptive term rather than a marketing term, and can add to a debate.
Wanting to call Uber 'Goober' or 'Guber' on the other hand, is just childish, and makes it hard to take anything else he says seriously.
It could be his way of determining his reach and effectiveness. If other people start using his original dumb, childish terms, then that might serve as a metric of some kind for him.
I appreciate posts like this because it gives insight into popular companies that the public adores but might not be so great for the workers or the economy in the long run. Although like you said it could be over-reaching and making the company look like The Dark Side. Like there are people in it conspiring and thinking of the next way to take advantage of it work-force deliberately.
A company like this was born cause Taxi's sucked in the first place. Taxis were inefficient, cab drivers can have racial prejudices and leave someone in a dangerous area cause they don't like the way they look, No feedback on cab drivers etc. So Uber came into a place that needed re-work and instead of people complaining about Uber's world domination and the cost of it, why won't people work to also change Uber the way it changed the world of Taxis?
I think informational posts like this are great, but the tone of it is off-putting.
I've always claimed that one of the primary reasons Uber is popular is because its drivers are predominantly white or Asian.
In contrast, many taxi companies employ immigrants from places like India and Africa, who often times have their culture in full display in front of the rider (wearing non-Western clothing, talking loudly on the phone in another language, having various cultural/religious decorations/texts around the car, etc.) all of which your average American views with a certain level of disdain.
I think that's more of a location based thing. I almost always get immigrant drivers from Uber and white drivers in taxis. I am in the south in an area where taxis are not as common as the costal cities. I don't have the cultural issues which I know are common in NYC, but this could be that the state of the car is a metric that Uber tracks via user feedback.
Could be. Personally, I don't care about their clothes, phone calls, decorations, etc. I do care when they intentionally take roundabout routes to jack up fares and sexually harass my female friends. This stuff seems to happen a lot less when there's a way to keep track of who the driver is and review them.
I've come to accept the fact that Stallman is just going to be Stallman. Both his virtues and his faults are magnified in person.
His brain seems to be wired up differently: He's frustrating, he's terrible at people skills, and he'd walk 10 miles out his way to avoid bending a minor ethical principle. Even when I disagree with one of his ethical principles, I do admire him for being committed to what he believes. I suspect he could have made a very profitable business off of GCC in the 80s—it was a remarkably good compiler for several chips back in the day—but he preferred to focus on writing more free software.
I've spoken with FSF staff in the past, and their attitude towards Stallman often seems to combine admiration and frustration. They work with him regularly, and most of them are fairly typical free software developers. They generally seem to believe that world has room for somebody like Stallman, who's horrible at PR but who takes principled stands.
Labeling is simply creating a reference to a body of analysis that has already been done. (A particular proposed label may or may not be accurate in a given case, but that's an entirely different issue.)
> They generally seem to believe that world has room for somebody like Stallman, who's horrible at PR but who takes principled stands.
We need more people like that not less unfortunately they often get creamed by the people who are unwilling to take a stand but pretty good at PR.
In the realm of politics you can see that happening now in the UK with Jeremy Corbyn (principled even if you disagree with his politics) and the way the press treats him.
I consider Elon Musk of a similar caliber but it's interesting to see how different both of them are portrayed: Stallman is weird, frustrating, and an Aspie, and Musk is eccentric, ambitious and a legend. (All real quotes from HN). The difference of course is that one is the father of the free software movement and the other is a billionaire.
Elon Musk has almost "manifest destiny" ideas about the inherent goodness of America. He talks about the virtues of unfettered capitalism while his lobbyists keep India from playing in American satellite markets. He donated to Marco Rubio as well as to democrat candidates.
I don't think Musk is particularly principled. We're just lucky that he thinks rockets and alternative energy are cool.
Just because he subscribes to a different ideology doesn't mean he isn't also very principled. I mean, his "manifest destiny" ideas (as you put it) led him to give his competitors open access to Tesla's patents.
Totally agree. His personal/family life is a shambles which is a real litmus test of character and integrity.
He has achieved great financial, business, and technology successes and is a visionary, but let's not confuse that with being a role model or hero to be emulated.
Stallman on the other hand gets nothing but respect from me for his personal integrity and values.
Musk has a great backing by a few enlightened persons that try to bring ideas that were floating 40-60 years ago to reality as due to technological advances some of them are now possible or viable and no longer need to reside in sci-fi world only.
Something that has always rankled me with respect to this view of Stallman as a high-caliber role model is the name calling the original commenter mentioned. Of all the people I look up to and aspire to be more like, not a single one employs that particular childish style of "discourse".
I think it'd be a mix of a couple things, it keeps things lighthearted for him, and it allows him to not have to keep typing out the name of something he dislikes very much.
He ain't writing strict legal discourse, he's writing out his own feelings in the way he feels most enjoyable. Personally I respect that.
For myself: I don't like using words like f*, and I prefer to censor them if I do use them, and I'd rather call someone a goob, instead of an idiot or a moron. My intent isn't to be mean!
In a rational world I'd agree but my old boss used to say (he was sales) "People buy People", I think the best case is a shared set of values represented by someone who can articulate them well and with integrity.
Which pretty much sounds like Bernie Sanders/Jeremy Corbyn, alas it doesn't seem to be enough these days.
The press treats him appropriately. He's a fringe left leader and is derided as such in a wider population. I applaud his commitment to ideology though.
> I suspect he could have made a very profitable business off of GCC in the 80s—it was a remarkably good compiler for several chips back in the day—but he preferred to focus on writing more free software.
The irony is that if he had made a business out of it, he could have had much more influence.
> I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
One of my favorite RMS quotes. We need people like him to fill out the spectrum.
Yeah, but you know, everyone needs an editor. Anyone who writes stuff should run it by another set of eyes.
Every single piece Stallman writes would be stronger if someone would say "take out the Goober bit" or "take out the Swindle" bit or whatever other goofy names he comes up with.
This 4th grade stuff just weakens his essays. It isn't good, it doesn't need to be there. All it tells me is that he's not running his stuff by anyone who'll challenge him to make his writing stronger.
I referred to them as The Company Which Cannot Be Named (Harry Potter reference) or 'duper.
I once pulled up to a bar 2 minutes after getting a call. The passenger got in the cab, and the passenger's (male) friend had assumed the pose that marked him as waiting for a 'ride'. (The observation is typically used by scumbags in Scottsdale to trick women waiting for a 'ride' into getting into random cars, which is why the taxi company I drove for lobbied to force ride-vehicles to have some sort of branding.)
Me: is your friend waiting for a 'duper?
Passenger: 'duper? (Confusion, then...) do you mean UBER?
Me: FRIENDS don't let friends get DUPED by eww-ber!
Passenger: LOL.
Really, though... "Ridesharing" is unsustainable for many reasons, the main one being that cars are expensive, and should the economy rebound, people won't be willing to wear out their cars for peanuts.
You can deliver pizza in a worn-out old car. 'Duper has standards for their vehicles.
The taxi company I drove for also lobbied to force 'duper's vehicles to be inspected by mechanics... Semi-annually, iirc.
Edit: the inspections were probably mandated every 3 months (quarterly); the taxi company inspected its version of ride-share vehicles bi-monthly (iirc), which just cost their drivers time (because the mechanics were already employed by the taxi company), whereas an inspection was another cost for 'duper drivers.
> The observation is typically used by scumbags in Scottsdale to trick women waiting for a 'ride' into getting into random cars, which is why the taxi company I drove for lobbied to force ride-vehicles to have some sort of branding.
I'm sure that the cost and bother to the competition had nothing to do with that lobbying effort.
The taxi company's lobbying efforts had two main points:
1. public safety.
2. fairness
Rideshare companies had no infrastructure for basic safety inspections, so they didn't think it was important.
Rideshare drivers had no insurance contract for the time they were on the clock. 'Duper said "we've got you covered", but their drivers didn't have any paperwork supporting this claim. The taxi company lobbied to force the ridesharing companies to provide certificates of insurance to their contractors, so that if their driver was involved in an accident they could provide the ridesharing company's insurance information, instead of their personal policy.
> The taxi company's lobbying efforts had two main points:
> 1. public safety. 2. fairness
Denying that taxicab companies lobby their own self-interest is completely unbelievable. All that is missing is to get "for the children" in there somehow and it'd be a perfect political BS speech.
No, I mean I get the point where taxicabs, being regulated up the wazoo, think that if they have to del with all that, why competition hasn't. But trying to sell the idea they are just saints looking for public's good and it has nothing to do with their own interest... right. Not buying that bridge.
"Only". Raising your "I think twisting names to sound like a four-year-old" flag is not an "only".
I mean, he's totally correct about the sharing economy stuff and I think "piecework subcontractor economy" is a way better description of the --but I literally can't send this to anybody I know because they'll think I agree with the childishness. This is kind of like an amplified version of the LessWrong silliness--when you have an epistemic closure in which you start redefining basic tents, you have to tone it down when you're talking to normal people or you sound like the kind of crazy person who'd you expect to be raving at you in the streets.
PR matters. If Stallman wants to just wave his hands in the air for the rest of his life, more power to him, but I'd think he'd want to actually achieve some of the goals he says he does.
Then again, he thinks taxis are a positive just because you can pay cash, and he lives near me so he has been exposed to the fine (cough hack wheeze) hackney cabs of the Boston area, so I'm not sure we're even living in the same universe at the basic level.
Hmmm. You are right, I somehow definitely missed the PR angle and overlooked it. Which is weird because I could have written your post if someone had used the `Micro$oft` childish spelling in any other conversation. Thanks.
I don't think the instinct to rename things in a suggestive way is a wrong one -- consider the success of Frank Luntz -- but he hasn't got an ear for it, that's for sure.
Hey I do use that;) But actually I was talking about a peer-to-peer ride selling and ride wanting matching system that cuts out the middle man. I use Uber but I cann't help but think the drivers should get a larger share of the fare.
You'll need to use Emacs and PGP to encrypt your coordinates and then post the message on blockchain. It's free, doesn't require a non-free device and everyone can see the transaction history!
I agree it sounds childish, but I think it can be a necessary counterbalance to the marketing-speak which will inevitably frame things in the most favorable possible light.
I mean, just look at the name - Uber. What does it mean? Superior, the best, etc. Ubermensch - "This place is uber cool!". I think if you're using the name and trying to criticize it, the name itself is contradicting and undermining your point every time you bring it up.
Maybe something like "Goober" is too far and silly. Maybe just use something neutral like "Ride-Sharing App U".
The name may mean "superior" but being an adult means recognizing that something named "superior" not necessarily is. By trying to rename it you implicitly admit your failure at that - so that the only way for you to not think about something as "superior" is not to use name that means "superior". I don't think it's an effective strategy in persuading somebody it's not actually superior. Most reasonable people would still see the difference between name and actual qualities.
Being an informed adult also means recognizing the inherent limitations of the human brain that allow for the framing, presentation, context, and social group perception of a thing (as seen in branding, marketing, opinion essays, and many other places) to considerably affect how we think and feel about different aspects of the world.
Some might even call this a feature -- such cognitive shortcuts and heuristics allow us to assess threats in our environment, enjoy the warmth and aesthetics of a newly purchased jacket, or complete a shopping trip to the grocery store in a reasonable amount of time.
Through large efforts of will we can begin to become aware of this in ourselves, and then attempt to mitigate the negatives to a small degree. However, we can't do much beyond that.
Yes. I also think his isolation creates a situation where he doesn't understand what makes Uber/Lyft et al, special.
> With real taxis, you can flag one on the street or phone in any fashion; you can pay cash; you can be anonymous.
The problem is that real Taxis only troll popular areas, and when you call for a pickup they aren't incentivized to actually arrive in a timely manner.
Uber/Lyft fixed this problem in a simple and elegant way. It's the value of the service and UX of asking for a car and getting it, unlike Taxis.
I thought Guber was a pretty clever joke. For those not aware, goober is a slang term for a peanut. So a service that pays it's driver peanuts could jokingly be called Guber.
Argh, stop saying that Stallman is redefining "free". Fine, "Guber" is all that anyone ever hears and the top comment and the most important thing to discuss about all the other points that Stallman is raising against Uber (sarcasm), but there isn't anything non-free about the GPL. Having laws that forbid others from removing freedom isn't itself non-free.
Freedom is always limited by the rights of others. Always. You are not "free" to punch people in the face or "free" to be a harmful member of society. Copyleft is just a way to ensure that you can never take away others' freedom, to secure the rights of people other than yourself. It is not a redefinition of freedom.
In the English language, saying that a product or service is "free" is commonly understood (and has always been understood) to mean "gratis, free as in beer." Stallman has spent the past several decades trying to get people to redefine "free" to primarily mean "libre" in the case of technology, a far less common usage of the word "free" in English.
This is what people mean when they say Stallman is trying to redefine "free."
> This is what people mean when they say Stallman is trying to redefine "free."
I don't think so. I usually hear this argument from weak free license advocates who specifically object to the GPL, not to calling free software "free". Even anti-GPL advocates like OpenBSD and FreeBSD call their software free, because they're both older than the term "open source" and because they think they're free-er than the GPL, and they really do mean "unfettered" when they say "free".
Everyone knows that "free" has two meanings, and free software isn't even a term that Stallman coined. It was called that before he came along, because there was no other name for open source. He just insisted on it.
I don't know how easy it is to take to court in the US, but here it is beyond obvious what is an attempt at circumvention or not.
When I was in Uni I did a lot of contract work, when you register for being self employed they run you through a great set of questions so that you know whether you are self employed or not in the eyes of the law and what your rights are.
Of course most dodgy employers try to say 'you should register for self employment.. and I have to tell you to do so legally, but if you were to forget to do it you won't pay any tax and nobody will know, so don't forget to do it!' in the hopes that you don't bother yourself and don't end up finding out.
Also in Italy, if you're free to work at any time of the day, for how many hours you want, you're easily classified as a contractor, not an employee. On top of that, taxi drivers are all independent contractors, not employees of dispatchers, so we can easily sat that Uber followed established best practice of labour arrangement in its market
True for certain kind of works, but for drivers or other non intellectual work that could be very hard to do. When in Italy you force the "contractor" POV, if the employee can show that she or he is not independent in the time of the work, location, and so forth (basically must show up), then the setup is illegal.
And not to taxi drivers either, I would point out, who are also considered independent contractors (like Uber drivers, they're in a lawsuit right now over the issue).
In theory, yes. Uber gets around minimum wage by categorizing their drivers as subcontractors rather than employees. This gets them out of paying for benefits (health insurance, etc.) as well.
The problem is payment. If you use the CC network, you're still getting tracked. Adding regular Bitcoin would not help much (most people would purchase them in a trackable way) but it'd vastly increase the difficulty in pushing for a switch.
The problem is the potential for dodgy drivers. No way in hell I'd get in a car that could be some random Joe Bloggs with no oversight. There has to be a central someone that says "this is one of our drivers" that can be held accountable.
I respect his views. He's been consistently right in the long term. Many of the problems he predicted are currently with us. I recently discovered the StallmanWasRight subreddit as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/
I haven't seen much in the way of specific predictions from Stallman. Basically his "predictions" amount to that closed source software allows corporations and governments to do bad things to users. We fairly regularly see evidence that this is the case, so hurray, the predictions were right. But it's not really a point I've ever heard someone argue against. Pretty much everyone agrees that yes, closed source software makes these bad things possible/easier and sometimes they do happen. Kind of reminds me of all the armchair economists predicting that the tech bubble will burst without ever providing a timeframe.
Anyways, people trot out the "Stallman has consistently been right" thing for every new Stallman article, as if the fact that a guy has made a series of uncontroversial, vague predictions is some sort of defense against the rest of the comments discussing the article's acerbic tone and/or starkly impractical conclusions.
I dont think it's fair to characterize Stallman as an "Armchair Economist". FSF/GNU are active efforts in response to the Stallman world view. It's the opposite of armchair IMO.
There is a distinction between frameworks, theories and models.
Stallman is probably not offering models that contain the real predictive juice you're after because he has seen the same story unfold over and over. I give Stallman credit for referencing events that support his general theories/framework.
> I haven't seen much in the way of specific predictions from Stallman.
Try The Right to Read[1], which predicted ebooks, DRM, restrictions on reverse-engineering, electronic marketing profiles and hardware which refuses to run free operating systems — in 1997. When I first read it, I thought it was well-intentioned hysteria, but it was completely, 100% correct.
Those things existed in 1997. What the article predicts is "the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books" which is every bit as hyperbolic and unrealised as Ray Bradbury's book-burning "fireman", and that hardware wouldn't run free operating systems because free operating systems were illegal. These predictions are not in any sense "100% correct".
This is all well and good. However, it doesn't matter if every person who is every heard of stallman never sets foot in an uber, because statistically no one has heard of stallman. Regardless, I think it's been pretty well shown at this point that as long as people are getting something for their lack of privacy (such a slimy but convenient taxi service) they're OK with it. Short term convenience trumps basically anything else.
Recently I was stuck outside of Rome with no way to get into the centre city because I made the (understandable) mistake of trying to use public transport on a public holiday, and getting stuck in the middle of nowhere with no trains running. Or taxis. Uber, to the rescue.
I really feel these days the only way to win is to compete. To build a better product that happens to also not invade your privacy. And I'm not sure there are market forces that make that possible.
Linux and Android has arguably made inroads with non-techs, not because of Stallman advocating Free Software, but because people who echo Stallman's words.
RMS is not expecting everybody to read this and go "Oh, OK, I won't use Uber". He's expecting a few thousand people to read it, choose not to use Uber and then explain to their friends the reasons why echoing his own words. If convinced, those friends will pass it on, and so on, in a network effect.
You forget just how close Linux was to being ousted from the enterprise back in the 1990s and early 2000s - if it wasn't for a similar network effect (specifically arguments around security), Microsoft would now basically be "the computer company", and we'd all be screwed.
Sure, so what I'm saying is: there has to be a "correct" alternative to uber (as linux was to ms) and then you're providing an actual reasonable proposition for switching.
I do not think telling people "don't use uber" when it's clearly cheaper and more convenient is going to be hugely productive.
Linux made inroads because of economics. Case in point 15 years ago Free Software and Open Source were competing slogans. Today Open Source won not Free Software.
I thought it was because a multi-billion dollar firm pushed onto other multi-billion dollar firms with long-term expectations of them making billions more if they made targets of market share. And this occurred for both sides.
Average VC startup isn't going to be a Linux or Android as one is an outlier (like Red Hat) and other happened due to investment by corporate behemoth that was pro-OSS. Probably also an outlier given most aren't pro-OSS.
>as long as people are getting something for their lack of privacy (such a slimy but convenient taxi service) they're OK with it.
There are more options than "use it or leave it".
We, as a society, can value Uber's service, and use it, and agree to pass privacy laws that would force them, upon user request, to delete every record of their transportation history from their servers. And they would be audited. Technically it is not hard.
The tech industry lobby would fight against it, the NSA and the FBI too, but I don't see why we the people would not support that.
Uber, Airbnb, delivery services and the like are nothing more than glorified communication and payment tools.
These services can only be called "sharing" economy if they operate at zero profit and their app code is open source.
I think they should and pretty soon will be public services, developed by the community and run by local non profit organisations, like Firefighters.
Furthermore, these should be local services, catering to the specific circumstances of the city or town they operate in, obeying the local customs and so on.
Then they'll soon get as effective and well developed as typical public services. Thanks, but no - I'd rather pay a little extra to someone who has a real incentive to do a good job than rely on charitable motivations of strangers.
>> Uber, Airbnb, delivery services and the like are nothing more than glorified communication and payment tools.
Let's focus on transportation services. Yes, their technology wasn't that big of a deal. But their largest contribution is building a thriving market. And that market could be used to offer interesting services like real sharing(UberPool).
Can communities build that market on their own ? well there's little effort and in general the results aren't encouraging. Even places who put a serious effort in such services(kutsuplus service in sweden), didn't seem to sucseed , and old services like dial-a-ride didn't seem to do so well with regards to scaling or sustainability.
Of course , it's hard to speak of the sustainability of current ride services(hopefully they wouldbe), but at least they seem take us a bit further.
Kutsuplus was in Finland. Some of the reasons it didn't succeed is that employing people in Finland is very expensive, there are a lot of regulations to be met, and Helsinki area a very small market so the payback period for any new investments is long (such as the information systems required).
Meanwhile Uber is successful in Finland alright but it's illegal and not really profitable for the drivers. (It's legal if the driver has a taxi permit which is very rare.)
Maybe(altough why do people still work? ) . But again, if they(or some other model) sucseed in scaling true sharing , maybe than would be the time to intervene a bit in behalf of drivers ?
A young man made the headlines driving Uber with his dad's car, where his dad paid for the gasoline and all. I don't remember the exact profit he made but I calculated that wouldn't cover the cost of servicing and fueling the car.
Someone else will make a better profit, of course. But enough to pay taxes, insurance, required employer costs? I don't think so.
I think the "sharing economy" is one of the most impressive rebrands of an idea. It sounds all nice and friendly, who doesn't like sharing? And so new! I've not heard of the sharing economy before!
And it's just people selling things to other people. The same thing we've been doing as a species since we understood the concept of trading, something it seems chimpanzees have a grasp of.
Uber perhaps not, but the main problem with AirBnb is the transformation of homes into de facto hotels. Long-term residential rentals are misallocated as short-term when the supply of the former is already tight.
My definition of hotel is multi-unit building with service workers. It sucks if your neighbour now has 500% more foot traffic, but it's not exactly opening a lumber yard next door.
Uber basically figured out how to be a cab company without having employees and without following laws. No overheads on salaries, employee benefits, taxes, or regulations. This is the "sharing economy", really: a libertarian dream. It appears that this has garnered Uber and Airbnb a lot of goodwill because whenever they're discussed online, they always seem to be portrayed as some champion against the evils of the cab or hotel industries. I personally have never felt as slighted by cabs or hotels as everyone seems to be whenever they are discussed online.
> Uber basically figured out how to be a cab company without having employees
Take a look around and you'll find that basically every company has been trying to do that in America for a long time.
The administration staff at many businesses is all outsourced to staffing agencies.
Hiring almost everywhere is outsourced to recruiting agencies.
I know a number of multi-billion dollar corporations pumping hundreds of millions into their tech divisions, where > 95% of the employees are staffed from IT staffing agencies/consultancies.
Nobody employs a landscaper, unless they're a landscaping company.
It appears to be a big secret, but everyone contracts out everything these days. Uber is doing it on the most individual scale, in the most streamlined way I've ever seen. I don't happen to think that's as bad as everyone else does.
Traditional cab companies don't have employees either. I feel like all the critics of Uber must live in a different universe from me, where cab drivers are never mistreated, are paid wonderfully, and consistently provide an on-time and courteous service.
How is that different from normal trading? Swapping something you don't need much for something you do, while your trading partner does the same. It's always been done, but some players (ebay for example) made it a bit easier. "Pay people for stuff more easily" doesn't sound as new and trendy as "the sharing economy" though.
I really don't understand how this is any different from regular trading. I've been able to pay people by the hour for jobs for a long time. I've been able to find small flatshares (for short periods too) in the past.
AirBNB are different, but the way I think that they're different is not what most people think. The thing they solved which was a real problem was insurance. Sure, there's a site for booking, some scheduling and payment transfer but they're not really key. It's the fact I can go to someone's house and say "Someone has checked my identity and here's a guarantee that if I break/steal things you'll get reimbursed" that smooths over the risks.
Uber, in the UK, is virtually identical to other taxi firms.
AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, etc. are all using assets that were not intended for paid services, whereas the people you are paying for services are using assets that have such intention.
The shared economy is (or was) more about accessing assets that were locked up by personal use, but still being underutilized. From an ethical perspective, it's maximizing value from something that wasn't easily accessible before.
If freedom respecting public services are destined to replace proprietary platforms that demonstrated markets where you can use a communications platform to replace business, than facebook and twitter would be losing to gnusocial and diaspora.
In practice, consumers are ignorant about the consequences of the businesses they do business with. This exists way beyond tech to how companies consumers will spend money on for goods or services will take that money to then lobby government to harm those citizens, yet the vast majority of people are apathetic to taking responsibility for that behavior.
Hopefully we see state intervention to stop Uber for simply breaking regulations, like we saw in Austin, where in the aftermath of knowing about Uber more open communication tools were used instead because the citizenry realized they didn't need an app to have a network of drivers and customers who could rate and pay one another.
> These services can only be called "sharing" economy if they operate at zero profit and their app code is open source.
That's a very weird claim. It's like saying information economy can be called so only if everybody uses open source and nobody is making profit from information. That's just nonsense. Making profit is part of the economy - in fact, a vital part, an engine that makes the economy move, and using open source has nothing to do with this at all. I get that Stallman wants everybody to use open source - but it has nothing to do with economy. It's a moral ideal Stallman strives to, and it's fine, but economy can be economy with or without it, so can sharing economy.
> I think they should and pretty soon will be public services
They won't, unless the government forces them to and kills them by that.
> Furthermore, these should be local services, catering to the specific circumstances of the city or town they operate in, obeying the local customs and so on.
Nobody prevents you from doing that, but it's harder than you think. And on local level taxi lobby will swat such service like a fly. Uber can resist it because they are big enough to put up a fight. Volunteer non-profit service won't stand a snowball's chance in a volcano.
> It's like saying information economy can be called so only if everybody uses open source and nobody is making profit from information.
No it's not. Sharing is a word that has a meaning. What it's like is saying that you can't call the trade in oranges the information economy, because trading oranges has little to with information. Selling is not sharing.
> Furthermore, these should be local services, catering to the specific circumstances of the city or town they operate in, obeying the local customs and so on.
Please no. I have precisely zero interest in downloading a new app every time I go to a city.
It's amazing how ignorant of basic economics people on HN are. Have you ever heard of economies of scale? Uber pays literally millions of dollars to their developers every year. I sure as hell don't want my taxes going to pay for my city to develop its own Uber knockoff.
When I saw the title and author, my first thought was... "Oh golly, another RMS rant about fundamentalism free software"... However, that wasn't the case. He presented a reasonable argument, with sources backing up his claims. I agree with many of his arguments..... but i'm still going to use Uber :(
That's okay, boycotts don't really work. Network effects and economies of scale are real. You are NOT a hypocrite for saying "I'm going to keep using this convenient but problematic and unethical service". It's admirable to make the sacrifice, but don't kid yourself. These issues are system-level and not about individual choices, even though that's what it is just aggregated.
> Uber has changed the regulations that cover charging passengers for making cars wait.
This decision itself may not be objectionable. Taxis typically charge for making them wait. But that regulation is set by a city agency which is at least somewhat responsible to the people. Uber is a business headquartered somewhere else, which accepts no responsibility to the people of any city.
We should not allow a company to privatize the making of the regulations that create our social order.
??
What is wrong with a company deciding their late arrival penalty?
Stallman's argument could apply to anything that a company decides.
Uber, Airbnb (and more of those modern "community feel good" services) are a slap in the face to all the workers who fought for workers rights and unions.
This conversation badly needs concrete examples. "Workers rights" sounds like a nice thing -- but what, exactly, does it mean? What specific policies are we talking about?
For example, you can have an interesting argument about minimum wages. You can have a different interesting argument about workplace safety standards. But you can't have an interesting argument about both of them at once.
I don't think it's fair to categorize it as a slap in the face. If people want to offer up their cars/home (or, in my experience of using AirBNB, their non-residence rental properties) to take part in a nascent/risky employer agreement, that's external to people that benefit from longer-stanging workplace regulations. It's not either/or and the success of Uber/AirBNB suggest that something was broken or missing in the taxi and hotel industries.
On the other hand, the taxi industry is a slap in the face to anyone needing to safely get to a destination beyond walking distance.
I used Uber a bunch while I was traveling around Southeast Asia. There were also times I had to take taxis. The taxis would routinely try to rip me off, refuse to run the meters, inflate the price at the destination and threaten to bring in police if I didn't pay the new amount that was 2-3 times the agreed upon rate. When running the meters, the taxis would routinely take long, roundabout routes to inflate the fare. And in cities without Uber, taxi fares were routinely as much as 5 times higher than in cities with Uber.
Meanwhile, Uber would tell me, in advance, the price I would pay, have a car show up without me having to flag it down and the drivers would use GPS to take me exactly where I wanted to go as fast a possible.
People like to focus on how Uber is exploiting their drivers and charging below-cost prices, but they ignore all the other ways that Uber is better than the taxi industry and all the ways that the taxi industry has needed to change for a long time now. I can respect Stallman's opinion, but when Uber is not only the cheaper option but also the safer option, I'm not going to choose to compromise my safety to make a principled point.
Uber as an experience is nothing new, IIRC eastern Europe had this model for ages: the company accepts client requests, the company posts request to drivers, fastest driver accepts and gets the requests, after the ride client pays drivers directly (usually cash only), driver pays % to the company. This was first implemented with pagers + mobile phones, than with sms, than with j2me apps, and nowadays with android apps usually. So the taxi company is just a proxy, and there are all kinds of flavor available: illegal taxis, virtual companies, etc.
The only things Uber did: great UX, wide availability in the world (you use the same app everywhere), possibility of deferred payments (aka ride now, pay at some point before next ride) and driver ratings.
As usual with any infrastructural international project: whoever goes first and behaves boldly - will stay for quite some time, see PayPal, Visa, eBay, etc. One can argue that Uber is not perfect ideologically on paper, but any reasoning "why we should make replacement for Uber" are doomed because ROI is simply not there, while struggles to forbid Uber are also doomed - you may block the company, but you cannot forbid better UX, so Uber is already here to stay.
In the end would be better to change discussions from "top 100500 reasons not to do something" to "top 100500 ways to make something better". There are concrete things available how to make Uber better, but instead everyone is just trying to forbid/destroy/etc.
Many people do want these systems to have vetted drivers, consumer protection against bad behavior, insurance & maintenance/condition requirements for the driver and vehicle, and other such things. Of course, the taxi system does provide these protections, although with much more overhead than owner-operator systems like Uber.
So while I'm not aware of an open source system, even if one were implemented, people would still want some sort of vetting, driver registration, and regulatory power over ensuring decent safety, which does require some centralization.
I find Uber gives me freedom. I recently went from working full-time plus consulting and training on the side, to consulting and training full-time (www.verticalsysadmin.com).
My client is across town (Los Angeles) and it can routinely take more than an hour (more than 2 on bad days) to get across town. Driving in traffic wears on my soul. With Uber and my trusty T-mobile hot-spot, I can get an extra 2+ hours of work in per day and arrive fresh! Uber's been a life-saver.
The price varies based on availability of drivers and Rider demand. It costs me about 30-35 bucks to go across town. My hourly rate is higher than that and I enjoy working more than I do slogging through LA traffic.
With uber I pay what I have to. With a real taxi I have to pay 3€ only for entering the taxi. Either the taxi company is changing its offer or I stick with uber.
That starting fee is called flagfall and you have to pay it with Uber as well. But that's somewhat irrelevant for short trips, as Uber has also has a set minimum fare. I don't know where you're located but it's typically more than 3 euros:
I use Uber for a lot of time and never used Paypal with them. They accept regular credit cards. If you think (like Stallman) that using a credit card is an intolerable invasion of your privacy, then you'd have a hard time using Uber. You would also have a hard time convincing many other people to stop using credit cards.
It allows foreign corporation (uber) not paying taxes in your country to effectively taxate working people with 20% ubertax.
Big one: uber tax is proportional to ride while their cost is fixed.
Also these days in sankt petersburg or other cities in europe, uber "driver" is a guy leasing 5 cars and hiring 10.. 15 drivers to drive them 24h. Similar to waht airbnb "shared" economy became: buying bigger flat, remodellibg it to three small " studios" and try to rent 365 days a year. It would be fine if openly told and admitted, but its not what airbnb/ uber tells what it does. Also normal driver/hosts can not compete ( economy of scale) with uber/airbnb middlemen.
Also airbnb taxate country's real estate while avoiding taxes itself. Also on proportional scale while having fixed cost.
They (uber/airbnb) should be banned.
*this would ruin their business model, so they choose to lie instead.
What are you talking about? Drivers in any country are still taxed on their income, and, since Uber is CC-only, it's harder to conceal this income from the tax authority. What do you think the under-reporting rate is on cash fares?
If you're having an affair or doing pretty much anything that you might not want people to know you're doing, there are a hundred and one ways for people to find you. Users aren't dumb. They know by the email receipt coming into their inbox complete with map that their movements are tracked. And they make a choice either way that suits their requirements or convenience. Having an affair? Get a cab and pay cash. Or take the risk. Personal choice, after all.
Uber might be a questionable company with questionable people in charge (referring to 'boob-er' by Travis Kalanick for one), but they're just flawed people, as apparently is the author with his quite childish style and apparent lack of reality or commercials.
Near me, Uber has made the previously shitty private hire cab industry up it's game, with more drivers and an app experience a bit like Uber. But, let's be clear. Uber probably weren't the first in this space, they're the ones that went out there, got funding, hired some smart people and delivered a good product and platform. And they existed because the industry, globally was pretty shitty, and bits of it still are. The good thing is that the consumer has choice.
And the calls in the comments that the platform should be free and open is lovely and idealistic. But do the talented engineers, designers and whoever else that works to make a well put together and scalable platform not deserve good pay for a job well done?
As a fair disclosure, I write, admire, build on-top-of free software and platforms when it meets my needs. I write this on a Mac, which also meets my needs. Choice exists and we're all leveraging it.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadI think that's a foolish assumption. Standard taxis not only remember the phone number / name / address association, they are likely tracking the cabs as well these days. They also often have CCTV.
> With real taxis, you can flag one on the street
Or not. Or they'll tell you they won't go where you want.
>Or not. Or they'll tell you they won't go where you want.
Which city/country? Honestly, I am surprised. Admittedly, i lived only in Europe (France/Germany/UK) - entire life - never ever has a Taxi driver refused to take me somewhere.
I don't go to France.
Presumably they'll not want to take someone out to the middle of nowhere, where they'll probably struggle to get a fare on the way back. Much more profitable if you're carrying passengers in both directions.
No. It was a quip by Peter Sellers.
taking to a play them deem not safe (even if it's safe)? not taking you.
If you're covered in vomit, if you are eating food, if you are clearly so drunk you are likely about to vomit, if you are being abusive or aggressive, if they have reason to think you can not or will not pay the fare, they can tell you why they're not taking you and not take you. You can complain by making a note of the license number on the back of the car. If you are found to be right, the driver will be at fined, and may be forced to compensate you.
Generally, they're going to take you.
In London there are competitor apps to Uber for black cabs and minicabs. Some of them are great and provide drivers who provide great service (Hailo, Addison Lee), some of them less so (Kabbee).
I've used Uber a few times as an experiment and had mixed results. I see why people like it, but I'm inclined to stop using it, mostly because I think Uber is exploiting the drivers to a certain degree.
Also, most people aren't aware that Uber drivers rate you, the passenger. Support the wrong team? Don't like the route they're choosing and tell them so, and they hate you? You're going to struggle to get an Uber next time. My g/f tells me when she's in an Uber she spends so much time trying to be "pleasant" to get a good rating, it's like that episode of Black Mirror, it's ridiculous.
Says a member of the majority ethnic group. If you are not a member of that group, this is simply not true. A black man in NYC or a person not speaking Marathi in Pune simply cannot expect the same service quality.
In any case, Uber also has regulations, and in my experience they are enforced far better than any cab rules.
The last time I had a problem with an Uber it was some idiot pretending he didn't understand my Hindi and running up the meter by taking a long non-highway route to the airport. I submitted a complaint while waiting for the flight and got a "your trip has been refunded" notification when I stepped off the plane.
Will the UK regulator provide a similar level of service?
It's possible that UK regulators have solved all the problems that no other taxi regulator has managed: limited supply, high prices, and a complaint process that involves more work than taking out your phone. But I don't find it that likely.
Sure, I bet your hindi is quite bad. Why blame him instead of taking responsibility for your own faults?
> Will the UK regulator provide a similar level of service?
Yes. Next question?
It's even rarer for a driver to also fail to understand the words "MG road" spoken by a person pointing their finger at MG road (which every other Uber or taxi driver knew to take), while their Uber map also says to take MG road.
I'd love to hear about a single instance of getting a bad UK taxi ride fixed in under 10 hours with a simple text message. Could you link me to a description of how that works?
Yeah... kind of. In bigger places, maybe it has a meaning. But for example in Bath the driver literally bragged to me that people can complain that the taxi is late or never arrived, but they're just contractors renting the radio equipment. The dispatch doesn't care even if you complain to them, so they can do whatever they want. As I was sitting in his cab... so not sure what that was supposed to achieve.
On the other hand the one time I actually noted feedback on the Uber drive, it resulted in follow up questions and generally was handled well. (that was in Singapore)
> My g/f tells me when she's in an Uber she spends so much time trying to be "pleasant" to get a good rating
Interesting. I just pretty much never talk to cab drivers. Yet some make a point of telling me I got 5 stars from them, so that I give them 5 stars too...
The law that covers taxis and private hire vehicles in Bath is Part 2 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976. It is at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1976/57/part/II . B&NES Council is one of several local authorities to have adopted what are essentially uniform local bylaws. Other local authorities retain their own (sometimes much earlier) bylaws, but their differences from the Act are usually that they are even stricter.
The person to complain to is not the dispatcher, but the Taxi Licensing Enforcement Officer of the local council, as explained at http://www.bathnes.gov.uk/services/business/taxis/private-hi... and at http://www.bathnes.gov.uk/services/business/taxis/hackney-ca...
It is interesting to contrast the actual U.K. law (which has been around since 1976) with discussion on this WWW page.
* It is illegal under section 69 of the Act for either hackney carriage or private hire vehicle drivers to prolong journeys.
* It is illegal under section 48 of the Act for licensing authorities to refuse to licence private hire vehicles simply in order to render licences a scarce commodity.
* It is illegal under section 64 of the Act for someone to park something other than a licensed hackney carriage on a hackney carriage stand (one of the ways that people could impersonate taxis).
* It is illegal under section 71 to tamper with taximeters.
* Section 66 of the Act prohibits the practice of charging something greater than what is on the meter just because the journey ends outwith the jurisdiction of the licensing authority, and "those rules don't apply out here, mate".
Examples of even stricter non-uniform bylaws are bylaws that ...
* ... require that the driver assist with luggage and not refuse a fare with luggage if the vehicle is designed to carry it;
* ... require that drivers carry all lost property to a police station;
* ... require that the meter not be run when not hired, not be hidden or obscured, and be lit at night;
* ... have detailed requirements on furnishing, such as cushions; or
* ... prohibit advertisements on the windows of such vehicles
... which can be found in various jurisdictions.
I can count on my fingers the number of times I've seen taxis in the wild, in my entire life.
But let's forget about all countries who don't have taxis. #FranceOutsideOfParis
If I see that I might have to sign a contributor agreement (often not in some straightforward manner, but involves reading multiple documents, postal mail, is only tangentially related to the core GNU product etc.) my first choice is usually just not to contribute. I hear myself saying internally "I don't want to have to deal with those people". Seems to me that this damages the Free Software world.
Also, the process has recently been transformed to be completely over email:
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-now-offering-paperle...
They can't use that to retroactively close off submitted works, but project using other licenses can't do that either.
> They can't use that to retroactively close off submitted works, but project using other licenses can't do that either.
I don't understand this sentence, can you elaborate? Who can use what to retroactively lock up what, and what other licences do not allow what?
Great to hear everything can be done electronically now. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I last checked and found the postal instructions.
Only if you already knew the difference between what Google asks you to sign when you submit patches to Chrome and what the FSF asks you to sign. If you want to call them both "CLAs", fine, but at least I hope you understand now how they're fundamentally very different. Not every bit of legalese is the same just because it's annoying legalese that you'd rather not have to deal with.
Unfortunately, he just isn't overly successful / good at it. If you agree with him on the points, a better approach would be constructive criticism, i.e. thinking about ways of changing the framing of debates that might be more successful.
Wanting to call Uber 'Goober' or 'Guber' on the other hand, is just childish, and makes it hard to take anything else he says seriously.
A company like this was born cause Taxi's sucked in the first place. Taxis were inefficient, cab drivers can have racial prejudices and leave someone in a dangerous area cause they don't like the way they look, No feedback on cab drivers etc. So Uber came into a place that needed re-work and instead of people complaining about Uber's world domination and the cost of it, why won't people work to also change Uber the way it changed the world of Taxis?
I think informational posts like this are great, but the tone of it is off-putting.
So do riders!
I've always claimed that one of the primary reasons Uber is popular is because its drivers are predominantly white or Asian.
In contrast, many taxi companies employ immigrants from places like India and Africa, who often times have their culture in full display in front of the rider (wearing non-Western clothing, talking loudly on the phone in another language, having various cultural/religious decorations/texts around the car, etc.) all of which your average American views with a certain level of disdain.
Not in my experience.
His brain seems to be wired up differently: He's frustrating, he's terrible at people skills, and he'd walk 10 miles out his way to avoid bending a minor ethical principle. Even when I disagree with one of his ethical principles, I do admire him for being committed to what he believes. I suspect he could have made a very profitable business off of GCC in the 80s—it was a remarkably good compiler for several chips back in the day—but he preferred to focus on writing more free software.
I've spoken with FSF staff in the past, and their attitude towards Stallman often seems to combine admiration and frustration. They work with him regularly, and most of them are fairly typical free software developers. They generally seem to believe that world has room for somebody like Stallman, who's horrible at PR but who takes principled stands.
We need more people like that not less unfortunately they often get creamed by the people who are unwilling to take a stand but pretty good at PR.
In the realm of politics you can see that happening now in the UK with Jeremy Corbyn (principled even if you disagree with his politics) and the way the press treats him.
More of his caliber.
Elon Musk has almost "manifest destiny" ideas about the inherent goodness of America. He talks about the virtues of unfettered capitalism while his lobbyists keep India from playing in American satellite markets. He donated to Marco Rubio as well as to democrat candidates.
I don't think Musk is particularly principled. We're just lucky that he thinks rockets and alternative energy are cool.
> He talks about the virtues of unfettered capitalism while his lobbyists keep India from playing in American satellite markets.
He has achieved great financial, business, and technology successes and is a visionary, but let's not confuse that with being a role model or hero to be emulated.
Stallman on the other hand gets nothing but respect from me for his personal integrity and values.
Another sells self driving electric cars and may even stop global warming.
He ain't writing strict legal discourse, he's writing out his own feelings in the way he feels most enjoyable. Personally I respect that.
For myself: I don't like using words like f*, and I prefer to censor them if I do use them, and I'd rather call someone a goob, instead of an idiot or a moron. My intent isn't to be mean!
Uber to Guber isn't that bad?
Which pretty much sounds like Bernie Sanders/Jeremy Corbyn, alas it doesn't seem to be enough these days.
The irony is that if he had made a business out of it, he could have had much more influence.
One of my favorite RMS quotes. We need people like him to fill out the spectrum.
Every single piece Stallman writes would be stronger if someone would say "take out the Goober bit" or "take out the Swindle" bit or whatever other goofy names he comes up with.
This 4th grade stuff just weakens his essays. It isn't good, it doesn't need to be there. All it tells me is that he's not running his stuff by anyone who'll challenge him to make his writing stronger.
See: Trump vis-à-vis "crooked Hillary."
I once pulled up to a bar 2 minutes after getting a call. The passenger got in the cab, and the passenger's (male) friend had assumed the pose that marked him as waiting for a 'ride'. (The observation is typically used by scumbags in Scottsdale to trick women waiting for a 'ride' into getting into random cars, which is why the taxi company I drove for lobbied to force ride-vehicles to have some sort of branding.)
Me: is your friend waiting for a 'duper? Passenger: 'duper? (Confusion, then...) do you mean UBER? Me: FRIENDS don't let friends get DUPED by eww-ber! Passenger: LOL.
Really, though... "Ridesharing" is unsustainable for many reasons, the main one being that cars are expensive, and should the economy rebound, people won't be willing to wear out their cars for peanuts.
Plus, in 10 years we have robot cars and the economics totally shift.
The taxi company I drove for also lobbied to force 'duper's vehicles to be inspected by mechanics... Semi-annually, iirc.
Edit: the inspections were probably mandated every 3 months (quarterly); the taxi company inspected its version of ride-share vehicles bi-monthly (iirc), which just cost their drivers time (because the mechanics were already employed by the taxi company), whereas an inspection was another cost for 'duper drivers.
I don't get the reference, but then again https://stallman.org/harry-potter.html ;)
I'm sure that the cost and bother to the competition had nothing to do with that lobbying effort.
1. public safety. 2. fairness
Rideshare companies had no infrastructure for basic safety inspections, so they didn't think it was important.
Rideshare drivers had no insurance contract for the time they were on the clock. 'Duper said "we've got you covered", but their drivers didn't have any paperwork supporting this claim. The taxi company lobbied to force the ridesharing companies to provide certificates of insurance to their contractors, so that if their driver was involved in an accident they could provide the ridesharing company's insurance information, instead of their personal policy.
Denying that taxicab companies lobby their own self-interest is completely unbelievable. All that is missing is to get "for the children" in there somehow and it'd be a perfect political BS speech.
No, I mean I get the point where taxicabs, being regulated up the wazoo, think that if they have to del with all that, why competition hasn't. But trying to sell the idea they are just saints looking for public's good and it has nothing to do with their own interest... right. Not buying that bridge.
Freeloading hurts everyone.
If you really want to discuss semantic I believe the point he raises on the "sharing economy" term being spun is much more worth talking about.
I mean, he's totally correct about the sharing economy stuff and I think "piecework subcontractor economy" is a way better description of the --but I literally can't send this to anybody I know because they'll think I agree with the childishness. This is kind of like an amplified version of the LessWrong silliness--when you have an epistemic closure in which you start redefining basic tents, you have to tone it down when you're talking to normal people or you sound like the kind of crazy person who'd you expect to be raving at you in the streets.
PR matters. If Stallman wants to just wave his hands in the air for the rest of his life, more power to him, but I'd think he'd want to actually achieve some of the goals he says he does.
Then again, he thinks taxis are a positive just because you can pay cash, and he lives near me so he has been exposed to the fine (cough hack wheeze) hackney cabs of the Boston area, so I'm not sure we're even living in the same universe at the basic level.
It's the same spirit that led him to use the word "copyleft."
GNUber
What's their deal? Are they just getting started?
GINU -- Ginu Is Not Uber
I mean, just look at the name - Uber. What does it mean? Superior, the best, etc. Ubermensch - "This place is uber cool!". I think if you're using the name and trying to criticize it, the name itself is contradicting and undermining your point every time you bring it up.
Maybe something like "Goober" is too far and silly. Maybe just use something neutral like "Ride-Sharing App U".
Goober is slang for peanut. He was making a joke.
Some might even call this a feature -- such cognitive shortcuts and heuristics allow us to assess threats in our environment, enjoy the warmth and aesthetics of a newly purchased jacket, or complete a shopping trip to the grocery store in a reasonable amount of time.
Through large efforts of will we can begin to become aware of this in ourselves, and then attempt to mitigate the negatives to a small degree. However, we can't do much beyond that.
> With real taxis, you can flag one on the street or phone in any fashion; you can pay cash; you can be anonymous.
The problem is that real Taxis only troll popular areas, and when you call for a pickup they aren't incentivized to actually arrive in a timely manner.
Uber/Lyft fixed this problem in a simple and elegant way. It's the value of the service and UX of asking for a car and getting it, unlike Taxis.
Freedom is always limited by the rights of others. Always. You are not "free" to punch people in the face or "free" to be a harmful member of society. Copyleft is just a way to ensure that you can never take away others' freedom, to secure the rights of people other than yourself. It is not a redefinition of freedom.
This is what people mean when they say Stallman is trying to redefine "free."
I don't think so. I usually hear this argument from weak free license advocates who specifically object to the GPL, not to calling free software "free". Even anti-GPL advocates like OpenBSD and FreeBSD call their software free, because they're both older than the term "open source" and because they think they're free-er than the GPL, and they really do mean "unfettered" when they say "free".
Everyone knows that "free" has two meanings, and free software isn't even a term that Stallman coined. It was called that before he came along, because there was no other name for open source. He just insisted on it.
This country just elected Trump. Yes, I think we are back in fourth grade now.
Aren't there minimum salary levels that must must guaranteed in US?
I don't know how easy it is to take to court in the US, but here it is beyond obvious what is an attempt at circumvention or not.
When I was in Uni I did a lot of contract work, when you register for being self employed they run you through a great set of questions so that you know whether you are self employed or not in the eyes of the law and what your rights are.
Of course most dodgy employers try to say 'you should register for self employment.. and I have to tell you to do so legally, but if you were to forget to do it you won't pay any tax and nobody will know, so don't forget to do it!' in the hopes that you don't bother yourself and don't end up finding out.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37802386
[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15462-f94/public...
(Only half joking ;-)
Anyways, people trot out the "Stallman has consistently been right" thing for every new Stallman article, as if the fact that a guy has made a series of uncontroversial, vague predictions is some sort of defense against the rest of the comments discussing the article's acerbic tone and/or starkly impractical conclusions.
There is a distinction between frameworks, theories and models.
Stallman is probably not offering models that contain the real predictive juice you're after because he has seen the same story unfold over and over. I give Stallman credit for referencing events that support his general theories/framework.
Edit:Grammer
Try The Right to Read[1], which predicted ebooks, DRM, restrictions on reverse-engineering, electronic marketing profiles and hardware which refuses to run free operating systems — in 1997. When I first read it, I thought it was well-intentioned hysteria, but it was completely, 100% correct.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/33880/dcs-libraries...
I hope no one here is surprised by this decline...
In SF: http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000005001
Examples?
From what I can tell, he's sometimes right and sometimes wrong, which makes him as effective for predictions as a coin toss.
Recently I was stuck outside of Rome with no way to get into the centre city because I made the (understandable) mistake of trying to use public transport on a public holiday, and getting stuck in the middle of nowhere with no trains running. Or taxis. Uber, to the rescue.
I really feel these days the only way to win is to compete. To build a better product that happens to also not invade your privacy. And I'm not sure there are market forces that make that possible.
RMS is not expecting everybody to read this and go "Oh, OK, I won't use Uber". He's expecting a few thousand people to read it, choose not to use Uber and then explain to their friends the reasons why echoing his own words. If convinced, those friends will pass it on, and so on, in a network effect.
You forget just how close Linux was to being ousted from the enterprise back in the 1990s and early 2000s - if it wasn't for a similar network effect (specifically arguments around security), Microsoft would now basically be "the computer company", and we'd all be screwed.
I do not think telling people "don't use uber" when it's clearly cheaper and more convenient is going to be hugely productive.
Average VC startup isn't going to be a Linux or Android as one is an outlier (like Red Hat) and other happened due to investment by corporate behemoth that was pro-OSS. Probably also an outlier given most aren't pro-OSS.
There are more options than "use it or leave it".
We, as a society, can value Uber's service, and use it, and agree to pass privacy laws that would force them, upon user request, to delete every record of their transportation history from their servers. And they would be audited. Technically it is not hard.
The tech industry lobby would fight against it, the NSA and the FBI too, but I don't see why we the people would not support that.
"Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death"
("Why not both?" has been added lately to the trope repertory as a witty rejoinder ;-)
This sounds genuinely terrifying. Divorce lawyers will have their day if they can get a hold of that data.
Uber, Airbnb, delivery services and the like are nothing more than glorified communication and payment tools.
These services can only be called "sharing" economy if they operate at zero profit and their app code is open source.
I think they should and pretty soon will be public services, developed by the community and run by local non profit organisations, like Firefighters.
Furthermore, these should be local services, catering to the specific circumstances of the city or town they operate in, obeying the local customs and so on.
Let's focus on transportation services. Yes, their technology wasn't that big of a deal. But their largest contribution is building a thriving market. And that market could be used to offer interesting services like real sharing(UberPool).
Can communities build that market on their own ? well there's little effort and in general the results aren't encouraging. Even places who put a serious effort in such services(kutsuplus service in sweden), didn't seem to sucseed , and old services like dial-a-ride didn't seem to do so well with regards to scaling or sustainability.
Of course , it's hard to speak of the sustainability of current ride services(hopefully they wouldbe), but at least they seem take us a bit further.
Meanwhile Uber is successful in Finland alright but it's illegal and not really profitable for the drivers. (It's legal if the driver has a taxi permit which is very rare.)
Maybe(altough why do people still work? ) . But again, if they(or some other model) sucseed in scaling true sharing , maybe than would be the time to intervene a bit in behalf of drivers ?
Someone else will make a better profit, of course. But enough to pay taxes, insurance, required employer costs? I don't think so.
And it's just people selling things to other people. The same thing we've been doing as a species since we understood the concept of trading, something it seems chimpanzees have a grasp of.
Take a look around and you'll find that basically every company has been trying to do that in America for a long time.
The administration staff at many businesses is all outsourced to staffing agencies.
Hiring almost everywhere is outsourced to recruiting agencies.
I know a number of multi-billion dollar corporations pumping hundreds of millions into their tech divisions, where > 95% of the employees are staffed from IT staffing agencies/consultancies.
Nobody employs a landscaper, unless they're a landscaping company.
It appears to be a big secret, but everyone contracts out everything these days. Uber is doing it on the most individual scale, in the most streamlined way I've ever seen. I don't happen to think that's as bad as everyone else does.
Then through economies of scale people became dedicated suppliers with dedicated assets, and it's now no longer that unique or altruistic.
AirBNB are different, but the way I think that they're different is not what most people think. The thing they solved which was a real problem was insurance. Sure, there's a site for booking, some scheduling and payment transfer but they're not really key. It's the fact I can go to someone's house and say "Someone has checked my identity and here's a guarantee that if I break/steal things you'll get reimbursed" that smooths over the risks.
Uber, in the UK, is virtually identical to other taxi firms.
The shared economy is (or was) more about accessing assets that were locked up by personal use, but still being underutilized. From an ethical perspective, it's maximizing value from something that wasn't easily accessible before.
In practice, consumers are ignorant about the consequences of the businesses they do business with. This exists way beyond tech to how companies consumers will spend money on for goods or services will take that money to then lobby government to harm those citizens, yet the vast majority of people are apathetic to taking responsibility for that behavior.
Hopefully we see state intervention to stop Uber for simply breaking regulations, like we saw in Austin, where in the aftermath of knowing about Uber more open communication tools were used instead because the citizenry realized they didn't need an app to have a network of drivers and customers who could rate and pay one another.
That's a very weird claim. It's like saying information economy can be called so only if everybody uses open source and nobody is making profit from information. That's just nonsense. Making profit is part of the economy - in fact, a vital part, an engine that makes the economy move, and using open source has nothing to do with this at all. I get that Stallman wants everybody to use open source - but it has nothing to do with economy. It's a moral ideal Stallman strives to, and it's fine, but economy can be economy with or without it, so can sharing economy.
> I think they should and pretty soon will be public services
They won't, unless the government forces them to and kills them by that.
> Furthermore, these should be local services, catering to the specific circumstances of the city or town they operate in, obeying the local customs and so on.
Nobody prevents you from doing that, but it's harder than you think. And on local level taxi lobby will swat such service like a fly. Uber can resist it because they are big enough to put up a fight. Volunteer non-profit service won't stand a snowball's chance in a volcano.
No it's not. Sharing is a word that has a meaning. What it's like is saying that you can't call the trade in oranges the information economy, because trading oranges has little to with information. Selling is not sharing.
Please no. I have precisely zero interest in downloading a new app every time I go to a city.
It's amazing how ignorant of basic economics people on HN are. Have you ever heard of economies of scale? Uber pays literally millions of dollars to their developers every year. I sure as hell don't want my taxes going to pay for my city to develop its own Uber knockoff.
We should not allow a company to privatize the making of the regulations that create our social order.
??
What is wrong with a company deciding their late arrival penalty?
Stallman's argument could apply to anything that a company decides.
For example, you can have an interesting argument about minimum wages. You can have a different interesting argument about workplace safety standards. But you can't have an interesting argument about both of them at once.
I used Uber a bunch while I was traveling around Southeast Asia. There were also times I had to take taxis. The taxis would routinely try to rip me off, refuse to run the meters, inflate the price at the destination and threaten to bring in police if I didn't pay the new amount that was 2-3 times the agreed upon rate. When running the meters, the taxis would routinely take long, roundabout routes to inflate the fare. And in cities without Uber, taxi fares were routinely as much as 5 times higher than in cities with Uber.
Meanwhile, Uber would tell me, in advance, the price I would pay, have a car show up without me having to flag it down and the drivers would use GPS to take me exactly where I wanted to go as fast a possible.
People like to focus on how Uber is exploiting their drivers and charging below-cost prices, but they ignore all the other ways that Uber is better than the taxi industry and all the ways that the taxi industry has needed to change for a long time now. I can respect Stallman's opinion, but when Uber is not only the cheaper option but also the safer option, I'm not going to choose to compromise my safety to make a principled point.
The only things Uber did: great UX, wide availability in the world (you use the same app everywhere), possibility of deferred payments (aka ride now, pay at some point before next ride) and driver ratings.
As usual with any infrastructural international project: whoever goes first and behaves boldly - will stay for quite some time, see PayPal, Visa, eBay, etc. One can argue that Uber is not perfect ideologically on paper, but any reasoning "why we should make replacement for Uber" are doomed because ROI is simply not there, while struggles to forbid Uber are also doomed - you may block the company, but you cannot forbid better UX, so Uber is already here to stay.
In the end would be better to change discussions from "top 100500 reasons not to do something" to "top 100500 ways to make something better". There are concrete things available how to make Uber better, but instead everyone is just trying to forbid/destroy/etc.
Where I live, we've had something similar for a long time: jitneys[0].
[0] http://www.post-gazette.com/news/transportation/2013/09/07/P...
So while I'm not aware of an open source system, even if one were implemented, people would still want some sort of vetting, driver registration, and regulatory power over ensuring decent safety, which does require some centralization.
My client is across town (Los Angeles) and it can routinely take more than an hour (more than 2 on bad days) to get across town. Driving in traffic wears on my soul. With Uber and my trusty T-mobile hot-spot, I can get an extra 2+ hours of work in per day and arrive fresh! Uber's been a life-saver.
Since I do not have Paypal due to being banned (they never told me why) that was that...
I just tried it again and see its a credit card form and no mention of paypal anymore, great i can actually use it now!
It allows foreign corporation (uber) not paying taxes in your country to effectively taxate working people with 20% ubertax.
Big one: uber tax is proportional to ride while their cost is fixed.
Also these days in sankt petersburg or other cities in europe, uber "driver" is a guy leasing 5 cars and hiring 10.. 15 drivers to drive them 24h. Similar to waht airbnb "shared" economy became: buying bigger flat, remodellibg it to three small " studios" and try to rent 365 days a year. It would be fine if openly told and admitted, but its not what airbnb/ uber tells what it does. Also normal driver/hosts can not compete ( economy of scale) with uber/airbnb middlemen.
Also airbnb taxate country's real estate while avoiding taxes itself. Also on proportional scale while having fixed cost.
They (uber/airbnb) should be banned.
*this would ruin their business model, so they choose to lie instead.
For Uber "sharing" is a way to get around employment laws and taxi regulations.
For AirBnB it is a way to get around zoning laws and hotel regulations.
Was in St. Petersburg last month. Most Uber rides were around $4-$6.
Many of the drivers drove taxis during their regular shift.
Uber might be a questionable company with questionable people in charge (referring to 'boob-er' by Travis Kalanick for one), but they're just flawed people, as apparently is the author with his quite childish style and apparent lack of reality or commercials.
Near me, Uber has made the previously shitty private hire cab industry up it's game, with more drivers and an app experience a bit like Uber. But, let's be clear. Uber probably weren't the first in this space, they're the ones that went out there, got funding, hired some smart people and delivered a good product and platform. And they existed because the industry, globally was pretty shitty, and bits of it still are. The good thing is that the consumer has choice.
And the calls in the comments that the platform should be free and open is lovely and idealistic. But do the talented engineers, designers and whoever else that works to make a well put together and scalable platform not deserve good pay for a job well done?
As a fair disclosure, I write, admire, build on-top-of free software and platforms when it meets my needs. I write this on a Mac, which also meets my needs. Choice exists and we're all leveraging it.