A major point of this article is that Uber skirts regulations by sticking to the letter of the law while violating its spirit, which a lot of people (falsely, in the author's eyes) see as Uber thinking its above the law.
I was under the impression that Uber outright broke the law in many places. The author describes how things went for them in San Francisco: the laws never considered smartphone apps, so Uber was able to legally operate as a "limo service." In that particular case, I agree with the author. But I thought that in many other cities, Uber came in and started operating in clear violation of the letter of the law, not just the spirit.
You are not. Here is a list of scummy things Uber does that I put together recently for another thread.[1] All are pretty gross, many are "word but not spirit" issues, but at least a few of them are outright, flatly illegal.
The funny thing is it's not even complete. There is definitely much more out there; I just ran out of time to compile it all.
In fairness, I'm not sure I would go so far as saying the article's pretenses are false - rather, the article is assuming good faith when it probably shouldn't. I also think that it's talking mostly about Uber's core business idea being a gray area (which it is), rather than all the myriad bad things Uber does that aren't directly related to its actual business.
Uber is careful to violate local (civil) laws where it has popular backing, as opposed to state or federal laws that can carry criminal penalties. Think: Zenefits or Theranos versus Airbnb.
Richard Petty, the legendary Nascar driver, once said that the secret to winning at Nascar is knowing how to "cheat neat."
There's great art in knowing how to rejigger a car that must look like a Toyota Camry, but obviously is not the same Camry that you or I could buy from the local dealer for $30,000.
There's a blog post for someone to write about Silicon Valley's efforts to put the Petty Principle in action. Lots of gray in the middle on this one. I'd love to see someone's comprehensive take on what's forgivable these days vs. unforgivable.
He basically scaled down a car's dimensions to make it lighter while still looking similarly to the full size version. This made NASCAR introduce jigs to measure the cars. A rule that is still very much in use.
In Philly, Uber asked for a license, was denied, then told its drivers they would cover the costs of any fines and they should drive anyway. Offering upfront to pay fines doesn't sound like they thought they found a loophole.
>The company is said to have lost at least $2 billion last year and is on track to pile up a loss of at least $3 billion this year. Those are rough figures that may underestimate how much money Uber is losing and don't include interest, taxes or stock-based compensation.
Yeah, I don't think that's too bad. If you know you're breaking the law and accept the fines and pay them willingly because it's worth the cost, I don't see a big problem with that. Where I start having trouble is when they try to hide their lawbreaking, or fight against enforcement.
For a similar example, UPS and FedEx both rack up an unbelievable amount of parking tickets in major cities for stopping their delivery vehicles in places where they're not allowed. These companies do this deliberately, because it's cheaper to pay the tickets than to have drivers take the extra time and effort of locating a legal place to stop. Some big cities have gone so far as to set up special accommodations for these companies to pay their tickets in bulk rather than dealing with each one individually. In effect, these parking tickets work as a tax on delivery companies. Doesn't seem particularly evil.
Interesting side note: USPS, as a federal agency, apparently has immunity from local laws like this, so they don't get ticketed. This gives them a substantial advantage over their non-governmental competitors in big cities.
No, but then that's an issue with the way fines and punishments for said crimes are structured, not the fault of those who takes advantage of the loophole.
There are 2 types of fines: fines that are meant to stop things from happening and fines that are there to basically make the city money. Most traffic fines seem to be structured for the latter.
Good to know it's up to you to pick and choose which laws inconvenience you, I mean which laws are there to make those fat cats at the city office the big bucks.
Do you ever exceed the speed limit? Pass on the right? Rip your music or movies? Download torrents? Take pens from work? Park inches over the line? Throw away mail addressed to the previous resident of your house (federal felony)? Participated in an office pool? Smoke weed?
If so, kindly do not speak from the glass house about picking and choosing which laws to follow. You do it, I do it, everybody does it. Society still functions somehow.
I don't think that was the point of my argument. I don't agree that rich people should be above the law, but that doesn't mean I can't disagree with the way the punishments are structured. I'm all for punishing all equally under the law whether you are rich or not. With that said, that also means that I think financial punishments for laws should be redesigned. A good start would be to fine people based on their networth instead of a fixed sum. Even then, the impact of a $900,000 fine on a wealthy person is likely less than a $900 fine for a poor person.
They stated that different laws exist for different reasons. That's not picking and choosing laws. And they didn't say that laws to make money are inherently bad either.
If you want the rich to not be above the law then the punishment for breaking said law should not be financial in nature. Any punishment that is financial in nature will ALWAYS be less impactful to the rich than to the poor.
An improvement to this would be to structure fine based on networth rather than a fixed amount. Yet even then, a millionaire paying $900,000 in fines is still not as devastating as a poor person paying $900. So I would say that the issue is still the structure of the punishment.
Someone with money to burn can already get priority access to so many things. I don't mind if they can buy priority access to roads and reduce the amount of funding that has to come from everyone. When there's no harm or risk of harm, it's a pretty big exaggeration to use a phrase like 'above the law'.
Let's say you're in a really big hurry for something, and you park illegally knowing that it's illegal and accepting the chance that you'll get a ticket. When you do in fact get a ticket, you pay it willingly.
Does it matter when it comes to the morality of breaking the law? You might consider the latter action to be morally wrong, but it seems like it would be because of its impact on others, not because it's breaking the law.
There is no inherent morality, positive or negative, in obeying the law; the law is not meant as a moral authority, but a social one. To be consistent in your logic, you would have to argue that helping slaves escape their condition in 1800s America would be morally wrong, as it would be breaking the law.
I think you might have me backwards. I'm arguing that there is no inherent immorality to breaking the law, and that deliberately breaking a law and paying the resulting fines is a reasonable thing to do.
Sure, let's say that. Let's say I have, for all practical purposes, infinite money. And every single day I park outside your house, in a way that it blocks your parking garage. And I do that illegally, knowing it's illegal, and accepting the chance that I'll get fined, knowing that any fine has absolutely no consequence.
Is that morally wrong, in your eyes?
Uber has been consistently breaking the law (or parking into society's collective parking space, if the metaphor is lost). And your response is that they are wealthy enough right now to do it, so no big deal.
The act of breaking parking law wouldn't be wrong. The act of harassing me would be. I believe the state would agree with me on that, and would escalate beyond simple fines before too long.
In any situation where illegal parking blocks an exit, it is possible to get the car towed. My experience is that the police become very prompt about repeat tow requests. I realize I'm quibbling about the analogy, but there is a big difference between blocking a garage and sitting in a curbspace for too long, and these large companies are only doing the latter.
In general, I expect that most people would find actions that are (in their eyes) most directly tied to inconveniencing others, putting them at risk, etc. are different. I suppose all laws are theoretically about reducing actions that are viewed as harmful to individuals or society as a whole. But clearly some have a more direct linkage to others.
I doubt many people would think feeding a parking meter (which is not allowed in a lot of places) is "wrong" in any material way even though you can get fined for it. Taking a handicapped space, blocking a bus stop, or parking in front of a fire hydrant, on the other hand, would be widely considered as icky behaviors totally irrespective of any difference in fines.
That's now what this is. They're breaking the law and willingly serving the penalty. You can argue that the penalty isn't strong enough, but then your issue is with the legislature, not the criminal.
What you're saying is tantamount to saying a thief who likes prison food is also above the law, because he actually enjoys the penalty for the laws he breaks.
And if you had done that, I'd have never responded. What you said was:
>You're advocating for wealth being over the law.
Which no one has yet done, not even close. Justice, according to the law, is being served. You can argue that the penalty is unjust, which you have failed to do so far.
You can also argue that it's wrong to break the law, which is a new argument in the thread starting with your "over the law" comment.
Saying an entity isn't subject to the law because of wealth and saying that an entity shouldn't break the law are two completely different things. The first argument doesn't work because the companies in question are proving they are subject to the law by paying the fines. The second argument is new, nebulous, not particularly substantive, and otherwise better left ignored.
It's not about being rich at all. Someone barely making ends meet running their own courier service could do the same thing. It's up to them to figure out if the increase in deliveries per day is worth the cost of the tickets.
There are fines that impact big companies and rich people less because of deep pocketbooks. But parking tickets on delivery trucks are not such a fine. They scale linearly with bad-parking activity. As mikeash said, this case is effectively a tax.
"Someone barely making ends meet running their own courier service could do the same thing."
This statement reeks of ignorance. That's like saying a poor person could easily afford chemo, while ignoring the fact that they won't be able to afford food or shelter at the same time.
Because it is a risk per delivery, it averages out over the work week to simply be a certain number of pennies per delivery. Rich and poor alike can survive a percentage cost like that. It's the exact opposite of a huge fixed cost like chemo.
I assume that you have a couple of things going on.
On the one hand, cities recognize that it's more or less impossible to make deliveries in a city without violating the law a decent portion of the time. But people want to get packages delivered.
On the other hand, they want to provide incentives to at least try to obey the law. (And they're almost certainly not averse to having the revenue stream either.)
UPS and Fedex pay New York millions in parking fines as a cost of doing business[1]. How come we don't really think of them as scofflaws, but we do with Uber? (I include myself when asking this question)
That happens a lot around here too. Actually, I know (by sight) both the UPS drivers and the parking enforcement people. The UPS drivers, at least that I can see, usually try to park somewhere slightly out of the way, so they're not blocking traffic or creating a dangerous diversion. Uber drivers generally seem to act like they're the only car on the road. That's more of a driver thing than a company thing, but culture comes from the top.
I feel like this behavior comes from the riders -- people give bad ratings if they don't get picked up exactly at their door, double parking be damned.
In general, in sports there's something of a distinction between fouls that are simply a violation of a game's rules and fouls that also cause or at least risk injuries. The former are generally regarded to be just part of the game and, presumably, penalties are commensurate with the foul. It's not uncommon for "dirty" play to have consequences in addition to the foul called at the time.
The basketball example is an interesting one. One assumes that if the league wanted to eliminate that type of play they'd change the rules to increase the penalty in some way by docking points or whatever.
Wouldn't a "scofflaw" be someone who got a ticket and did not pay it? Also parking citations are civil offenses not criminal ones. Most cities are actually quite dependent on revenue generated from parking tickets. I am sure New York City is quite happy with the relationship.
Where I'm from (in the EU), any profits from illegal activity are confiscated upon conviction, sometimes also including "the tools" used to commit the crime.
After several Uber drivers had to pay back all their earnings, lose their car and get a fine on top, there has been significantly less drivers willing to take the risk.
Outside of some peak hours (new years, etc) where the risk of getting caught is minimal, the only ones left are the really shady drivers with their crappy cars.
This is often true in the US when the illegal activity is a crime punishable by imprisonment. It usually isn't when the illegal activity is some form of doing business without the required license.
In Sarasota, FL, rather than trying to regulate Uber, the city removed regulation on taxis. This was more than a year ago. I wonder why more cities don't take this approach?
I think you misinterpreted this article, the author claims that Uber is not violating the spirit of the law, since the spirit of the law is to promote safety, not a government run monopoly.
Given how popular Uber is, and how much people dislike the Taxi industry, it is enlightening to think about why taxi reform was never on anyone's agenda.
Then Uber disregarded the California Public Utilities Commission law designed purely for safety that does not promote the Taxi industry. It was actually made for the likes of Uber and Lyft to allow them to operate while providing the public with trust that the vehicles are safe, passengers with accessibility needs had access and to thwart racial discrimination.
To me it is a clear case Uber is being systematically attacked. Most likely by Google. They fear Uber will get credit for self driving cars before them and they are horrified. So they use the full weight of their online power to bring the narrative Uber is evil. The easiest way to do that is trot out the good old "sexist" card. That gets the ball rolling and it's all downhill from there.
The article makes a good point: Uber seems to have conflated pushing regulatory boundaries with pushing the boundaries of decent behavior. For a company trying so hard to overturn regulatory capture they sure did let their own house become a shambles.
It's like if Edward Murrow went after McCarthy without bothering to double-check his own staff for anything that could be used against him.
On the flipside, I, for one, view Uber’s regulatory maneuvering in a much more positive light. After all, thinking about the “spirit of the law” can lead to a very different conclusion: the purpose of taxi regulation, at least in theory, was not to entrench local monopolies but rather to ensure safety. If those goals can be met through technology — GPS tracking, reputation scoring, and the greater availability of transportation options, particularly late at night — then it is the taxi companies and captured regulators violating said spirit.
I agree with this. Taxi regulations might have started with noble intentions, but quickly evolved into protecting a monopoly at the expense of consumers.
"consistent" is exactly what you'd hope for when attempting to systematically demonstrate an improvement that a class of regulations prevents; "consistent" here means alignment with a clear goal, focusing on the things that achieve that goal, and treating every restriction preventing that goal in the same way.
The article suggests, and I'd agree, that the problem wasn't Uber avoiding or ignoring taxi regulations; the problem was them applying that same gleefully transgressive attitude towards other areas that had nothing to do with their goal.
While true, that still doesn't justify Uber's actions. Uber doesn't give a crap about those regulations, or reforming them. In fact, they want them to stay in place so they can have an unfair advantage.
Absolutely true. But just like we shouldn't forgive Uber their sins because they improved the market, nor should we condemn their market changes because of their wrongdoing.
And "caring" is something almost no companies do. Even in pure capitalism, companies don't WANT competition. They don't CARE about their consumers - they just want to make as much money as they can.
Uber's biggest problem is the confrontational way they've expanded their business, often thumbing their nose at regulators the entire time and pissing off a lot of the local communities. Lyft is in the exact same business but you don't see headlines every other day about Lyft going to war with some city or another.
I think Uber's about to be a very expensive lesson about Karma and will hopefully show some of these VC babies that "move fast and break stuff" is a great strategy for software, and a terrible strategy for people.
> Uber's biggest problem is the confrontational way they've expanded their business, often thumbing their nose at regulators the entire time and pissing off a lot of the local communities.
I think regulators' attitude is just as controversial: 'you must do this because we say so,' not 'you must do this because it's a good idea.'
I don't see why it's suddenly up for debate whether companies need to abide the letter of the law. Origin of the law is irrelevant, if you disagree with a law you can campaign to have it changed. Corporations should not be allowed to violate the law to execute their business model.
We break many laws every day without consequence and often with necessity (speed limit on freeways in large cities for instance). Law isn't quite so straightforward. The Myth of The Rule of Law: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
I'd wager that most corporations are violating one law or another, without any complaints from the people.
I wasn't trying to imply that. I was merely pointing out that the parent's assertion that:
> I don't see why it's suddenly up for debate whether companies need to abide the letter of the law.
Wasn't exactly true. I also have disagreements with other parts of the post, including "Origin of law is irrelevant" (what if the law arose from lobbying by a powerful industry vs for the common good) and "If you disagree you can campaign to have it changed" (and I assume obey it in the meantime) vs something like civil disobedience or jury nullification.
I'm just going to point out that Uber is sidestepping all those "useless regulations" and in the process has had issues ranging from abused customers to abused drivers or combinations of the two, repeatedly, since it's inception.
I'm not saying ALL the regulations were put in place for good reasons, and I'm not going to argue that cab companies don't have a monopoly in most places because they do indeed have that. But then to turn that around and say therefore, the Government shouldn't regulate Taxis in any capacity is equally stupid and not supported by the evidence.
And before you say "Well I didn't say they shouldn't regulate at all" please bear in mind that you just said a corporation should be able to violate laws deemed useless by that corporation and/or the general public, meaning the regulations have no teeth and therefore might as well not exist.
No disagreements, though I am sort of offended that you'd try to straw man me into being some sort of anarchist. There is plenty of subtlety in the interpretation of law, and I'd argue that the origin of law definitely matters, as does intent, which is why we have a process through trials in the judicial system.
I also have very little to say about Uber in particular, I was just responding directly to your comment about how we should follow laws to the letter.
I'm not trying to strawman you, I'm pointing out that you're comparing Uber breaking transportation regs to you going a little too fast on your daily commute. If those things are equal in the eyes of the law, might as well burn the regulations, they aren't useful.
Sorry if that came across a little aggressive, not my intent at all. :)
I see, okay that's fair. I think that the fact that laws are flexible and fuzzy doesn't mean we shouldn't have laws, but it means that until an actual court decision, who knows if uber was "right" or "wrong" in the eyes of the law. For instance like the article mentioned, Uber initially started by breaking the spirit of the law, not the actual law, since the existing regulations didn't take into account the possibility of cellphones as dispatching tools. I don't know if that was ever taken to court but a sharp judge could have nailed Uber for that despite Uber technically obeying the law.
After the conciliatory approach of Night School in San Francisco got them attacked and shut down by the taxi industry, Uber's approach became inevitable. Lyft consistently operates in cities that Uber has already opened up.
It's one thing to suggest that maybe a nicer, kinder, friendlier approach could have been used. It's another to have an environment where such an approach can succeed in isolation.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. You can have the best damn idea in the world, if you're an arrogant ass about it, no one is going to listen to you.
I understand why you think that way. Nobody likes an asshole! Nobody wants to work with an asshole! Just play nice, and people with work with you!
Night School believed as you do. They figured they would be most successful by playing ball, cooperating with regulators, and not pissing people off. For their pains, they were shut down by the very people they bent over backwards to play nice with. They caught no flies with honey. Uber, on the other hand...
This is a long-winded way of saying that it's possible that one might consider adapting to the scenario.
This is hardly an apt comparison. Uber is one of the most bloated of the fat VC babies, it's received at this point what must be billions of dollars in burn startup cash, where Night School had none (wasn't around long enough to really get anything.) Night School was also entirely beholden to the regulators because it was planning to use school busses, which if you've ever even tried to book one you already know the issues there.
I mean if we're really committed to the Night School idea that would probably be best done as a Government program, since it's so intertwined with assets that are used heavily by the Government. But I'm also willing to bet if we gave them a couple Billion to burn, they could also make it happen. The question of whether that's worth it or not is quite different, though.
You're absolutely right! It's not reasonable to compare Uber as it is today to Night School. Instead, I suggest comparing Uber of multiple years ago to Night School. Uber wasn't always huge with lots of money behind it, after all.
Uber got to the position of being the most bloated of fat VC babies by not playing nice. Night School never got that far because they insisted on playing nice. They also ran afoul of the taxi industry, who felt threatened by their business model.
We might want to give serious consideration to the possibility that one behavior pattern is not privileged above all others in all possible scenarios.
What's the difference? Please elaborate. As I see it, there are only a few citizens who benefitted-- those involved in the ownership of taxi companies & medallions.
Other people on the road benefitted, at least in some places. A major reason for taxi regulation in NYC was to reduce road congestion - they calculated that adding more taxis would increase the average travel time. Now Uber has upended this.
I think that pricing congestion directly would be better, but in the absence of that, this is an example of Uber hurting some citizens who are not taxi companies.
The road congestion theory is a backwards rational -- someone was trying to come with reason for why medallions should still exist and came up with it. There's no way that anyone in 1937 had congestion in mind when they were creating the taxi medallions; to call it a "major" reason for why tax medallions were created is completely absurd.
To cite road congestion as being part of the "spirit" of why taxi medallions were created leaves me with the impression of someone being disingenuous.
> There's no way that anyone in 1937 had congestion in mind when they were creating the taxi medallions
What on earth makes you assert this? The intense and (to modern eyes) borderline insane levels of traffic congestion in NYC at the dawn of the automobile age are very well documented. There are pictures and videos you can easily find, that make today's horrible congestion look bearable and civilized. A lot of traffic rules and devices have their dawn in the same era.
Untrained Uber and Lyft drivers are all but required to violate the law and endanger others, in pursuit of "customer service." Pull over RIGHT HERE. Flip a U-turn RIGHT HERE. Customer must not walk FIVE FEET. Customer can open door RIGHT HERE. Ad nausuem.
I bike commute in San Francisco and on a typical day I dodge literally dozens of illegally double-parked ride share cars occupying marked bike lanes. I have been nearly doored multiple times, nearly run into parked cars multiple times, been forced into traffic innumerable times, etc.
This is not the 'fault' (sic) of individual drivers. It's the business model, and I hold Uber and Lyft accountable.
EDIT: taxi drivers do this 2% as often; I've bike commuted in the city 20 years and it is apples and oranges
Agree 100% that the experience is similar in NYC. Non-yellow cabbies in NYC seem much less experienced (I mean on average, of course) with urban traffic -- when I'm cycling, I am much warier of the black uber cars than of the yellow cabs -- the yellow cabs are aggressive too, but are very experienced and their aggressiveness is thus very practiced and predictable, easy to deal with and not really usually a danger as long as you know the drill
And when I'm on the other side and need to take a cab, I much prefer to take a yellow cab, because they get there faster. Even with GPS, a dense urban environment is filled with little foibles and tricks that only experience can handle
Anecdote, not data, but my experiences using Uber have been universally better than using taxis and the same is true for everyone I know who has moderate recent experience with both in the US.
There may still be arguments to make that it's detrimental, or at least not beneficial for other reasons, or there may be data that contradicts my anecdote (if so, please link it), but I'm glad Uber exists and probably opposed to any regulation that makes it difficult or impossible for it to operate in a given place.
A lot of people say the same thing you do -- their diverse anecdotes agree that regular cabs are obviously (better, worse) than uber/lyft/etc.
The trouble is, they don't agree which way it goes.
I think the resolution to this conondrum is, it varies based on city/region. Some areas had traditional taxis that are worse than ridesharing, and some better.
It might be hard to believe, but there are urban places, outside the US, where public transportation works (so Uber and taxis are still luxury items, so taxis themselves are nice and clean), where taxis are plentiful (so no problems finding one, even at 3am) and either electronic cash works (ie; not credit cards that drivers accept), or credit card readers are required (and effectively enforced so there are no problem paying with credit card), or cash is still king (if your job is paying you in cash, paying cabs with cash is not a burden). On top of that, Google maps/GPS/whatever is unfortunately terrible in many places, so an Uber driver being directed by an app may never get you where you're going, greatly hurting adoption.
Makes sense. However, I travel frequently, but have yet to encounter this situation. In the US the taxi monopoly results in poor customer service and/or difficulty getting a ride. In the various countries I've visited outside, the wealthy countries have had slightly better Ubers than taxis. In the poor countries, I'm incredibly happy to find Uber has arrived as I no longer fear for my life or worry that I'm being cheated. And no, I'm not exaggerating. These are places where the tourism office says to avoid taking public transport for fear of robbery/murder. Thus my belief that Uber is wonderful.
Come to Stockholm, the situation is 90% close what your parent comment said.
And taxis are allowed to be Ubers too, we have Teslas S, Mercedes-Benz E and S classes and normal VW Passat taxis, all of them probably working also for Uber.
Taiwan. I'd definitely take standard taxis in Taiwan over Ubers. In fact, I've made that choice at least a hundred times.
Especially in Taipei, they hit a price and convenience point where taking an Uber is essentially doing a task on my phone in exchange for having to wait longer to get a ride. To be clear, it usually takes about 15 to 90 seconds of waiting to get a cab.
Outside of Taipei, any convenience store (which are basically all over the place) will call a cab for you and again, it's still a pretty short wait unless you're in a remote area in the mountains or something.
NYC. Ask anyone who's recently tried both yellow cabs and uber a bunch of times. Yellow cabbies tend to be more experienced, and it shows in their driving.
Xapata, you must really be a heck of a globetrotter to be able to so confidently ask a question like that!
A taxi monopoly can help citizens at the expense of consumers only to the extent that citizens are not consumers. If few citizens are consumers, it seems the taxi monopoly is not serving most citizens well. Isn't that a contradiction?
That's just a bullshit excuse. Uber attacked healthy markets with proper consumer protection, and more importantly: wider social protection. And it did so with blatantly illegal tactics that were clearly detrimental and socially undesirable.
Uber is just a criminal organization acting solely out of greed.
Taxies are a regulated monopoly, definitely not a healthy market. Hordes of consumers moved to a better alternative like Uber at the first chance they had.
> Uber is just a criminal organization acting solely out of greed.
Uber, whether you like it or not, has revolutionized personal transportation for better. Consumers are using Uber because Uber is a better product. That's a fact.
I deleted Uber after all of this, but You are wrong. I lived in SF during 2010-2012 and calling taxis was a huge pain. I started using Uber when it was only black cars because they showed up. I would call yellow cab and after an hour they didn't even show up, so I called them again and they said "well, if you didn't see a car after 20 mins, you should have called back."
I had another experience in LA in 2014 where I got yelled at by a taxi driver because HIS card reader was broken and my credit card was flat so he couldn't use the old style imprint.
The taxis can suck it. They are unclean, expensive, and have irrational drivers that think they can push around their customers because they know there was no need to improve due to regulation.
While I support Lyft now instead of Uber, the ride sharing business is just the competition the industry needs to shake it's complacency.
> I had another experience in LA in 2014 where I got yelled at by a taxi driver because HIS card reader was broken and my credit card was flat so he couldn't use the old style imprint.
> The taxis can suck it. They are unclean, expensive, and have irrational drivers that think they can push around their customers because they know there was no need to improve due to regulation.
Unfortunately, these Taxi drivers are now working for Uber and Lyft.
I take Lyft a lot (and I used Uber for a while but went back to Lyft after reading Susan Fowler's post); I've been riding for about two and a half years, and I typically take dozens of rides a month. Most drivers I've dealt with are perfectly pleasant people, but I've encountered a few who are just horrendous. I'm fairly sure most of these people are former cab drivers.
Some examples:
- At my last job, there were multiple drivers who insisted on parking a block away and making me walk to their car, typically through an unlit area at night. This was in a suburban office park, not a crowded city street; there was no excuse to make me walk, and over time I developed a theory that it's because I'm a woman and they want to assert their dominance. I always cancel when they pull this shit, and I eventually memorized their names and began cancelling every time someone with a history of this accepted one of my requests.
- One of the above was particularly bad. This was pretty early on, and it was one of the only times I actually walked over to him. As soon as I got in the car, he started yelling "You kept me waiting for three minutes!". I then said "I was expecting you to come to where I actually am". He then told me to get out. As I was getting out, I told him I was reporting him to Lyft, at which point he said "Yeah, well I work for myself" (people like him are why I just want Uber and Lyft to declare their drivers as employees and not contractors). As I was walking back to my office building to call another, I see his car double back towards me. As he pulls into the parking lot, I start walking faster, and he gets out of his car and chases me into the building. Luckily, I got into the elevator before he could, took it up to where I worked, and told my boss what happened. My boss called 911, we waited until the cops made sure he was gone before I left again, and then a co-worker gave me a ride home.
- Driver once stopped at a street corner before picking me up and texted me demanding to know my destination address. When I told him I already put my destination into the system, he cancelled on me.
- A few drivers think it's acceptable to drive out of the way and get gas after they accept the ride, before picking me up. I cancel on them. One of them, after I cancelled on him, drove up to my house about 10 minutes later while I was waiting outside for the driver I called after I cancelled on him and said "Hey you, you called a ride?". I screamed and went back inside. I came within a hair of calling the cops.
- One driver kept a logbook of every passenger's name plus their source address and destination address. He was perfectly pleasant to talk to, but that logbook creeped me out.
- Back when I was new to Lyft, I thought I had to stay in the car while I rated and tipped the driver after the ride (I think this was when Lyft was still operating on a donation model in Dallas). Of course, my phone was acting slow then (it was a recurring problem with my old Nexus 5), so it was taking a while. During this time, the driver repeatedly screenshotted the Lyft app on his phone with my profile picture visible and kept asking over and over how much Lyft charged me for the ride. I found it creepy, so I just kept lying to him and saying that the screen hasn't loaded yet. It gets weirder. He dropped me off at a bar, and my usual MO at that bar was to get a drink at the bar and then go out on the patio. When I got to the patio, he was still parked in the same spot he dropped me off at...
> One driver kept a logbook of every passenger's name plus their source address and destination address. He was perfectly pleasant to talk to, but that logbook creeped me out.
I don't know what kind of information Uber/Lyft sends back to their drivers, so this could easily be a mileage record for tax purposes.
That's a weird thing to complain about. In a capitalist country, how would you prefer companies act? Not greedy? The whole point of a free market is that everyone tries to maximize profit. There are a lot of things you can point at to claim that Uber is evil, but I don't think greed is one of them.
No, they're a criminal organization that took over for another criminal organization. It's true that in the end, two wrongs failed to make a right, but there's no need to demonize the notion of upending the disgusting monopoly taxis have enjoyed.
This is one the few times I've felt actually disappointed in Thompson. He is exactly right that Google (and basically every other company in SV) is totally implicated with the same problem. But saying that Kalanick should get another chance to turn around the company? Look back to 2014: Kalanick tweeted out an apology for one of his execs threatening a (female, natch) journalist, but decided not to fire the exec in question, because "I believe that folks who make mistakes can learn from them- myself included." 2014 was his opportunity to turn around the culture. He failed, utterly and massively- and Fowler (who didn't join the company until almost a year after that tweet storm) and plenty of other women paid the price for his failure. We're now three years later and clearly the culture is even worse, and there is no evidence of improvement. Again, she didn't join the company until a year after he promised to work to show "that Uber is and will continue to be a positive member of the community. And furthermore, I will do everything in my power towards the goal of earning that trust." Where is the evidence that he should get another chance? Ultimately, it's that Kalanick is a high performer, the same excuse Uber gave Fowler.
> Note the easy conflation: avoiding regulators, allegedly tolerating sexual harassments, it’s all the same thing. Well, I disagree.
I would say there's an equal danger of conflating their disrupting regulations with innovation or progress. There's some relation, but it's not equivalent. Treating them the same is only good for Uber.
Or maybe it's that "innovation" and "progress" are mistaken to be only good things.
The most critical quote from the article: "Kalanick’s mistake was in not clearly defining, communicating, and enforcing accountability on actions that pushed the line but had nothing to do with the company’s regulatory fight. In fact, it was even more critical for Uber than for just about any other company to have its own house in order; the very nature of the company’s business created the conditions for living above the law to become culturally acceptable — praised even."
This seems like an excellent description of the problem: if you're going to run a company that intentionally pushes the boundaries of specific regulatory restrictions (in order to demonstrate a better result that can only happen without them, to get popular backing for removing them), then you need to draw a clear internal dividing line between the risky actions taken in support of that goal and all the other areas in which the company should act as a model for upstanding behavior.
Travis fits the mold of a ruthless kind of CEO, always pushing the ethical line as far as he can get away with. Bill Gates in his first incarnation as ruthless CEO has engaged in all sorts of questionable behavior. For example, interview a bunch of people from a rival, figure out who's key, and hire them all away at once. Or structure the agreement with IBM to eventually own the rights to Windows, then screw IBM over by slow-pedalling and malingering on OS/2, and then release Windows in co-ordination with the newly created clone PC market, which he relentlessly encouraged behind IBM's back.
Note that I'm not judging - I have come to realize (sadly) that a certain ruthlessness may be necessary for large-scale success in business, especially in the tech industry.
Who cares if Uber is a tad dirty in breaking down down the status quo. The public didn't cared previously about this until they realized that Uber treats everyone(their employees, contracted drivers, customers, stealing from their competitor, the common man driving to work who could get killed by an unproven Uber robot car and more) like trash and steamrolls over all who is not a KalaDick bro!
"Otto having stolen intellectual property are very serious, it’s worth remembering that the entire industry is basically built on theft"
There's an interesting argument in the article, but the amount of squid-ink being squirted overwhelms it. A big chunk of the article is pretty much "They didn't do it, and if they did, look at everyone else." Which is pretty much bullshit.
Where it lands for me: If the CEO wants to disclaim responsibility for the culture, he needs to step down as incompetent.
If the CEO wants to take responsibility for the culture, he needs to step down for running an institution that routinely breaks the law. (There's a legal term for that...)
>A big chunk of the article is pretty much "They didn't do it, and if they did, look at everyone else." Which is pretty much bullshit.
Yes this left a bad taste in my mouth. Quote from article:
"The fact of the matter is that we as an industry are responsible for Uber too. We’ve created a world that simultaneously celebrates rule-breaking and undervalues women (and minorities), full of investors and companies that are utterly ruthless when money is on the line, while cloaking said ambition in fluff about changing the world."
Soo.. its our fault for enabling this behavior, but we shouldn't punish Uber for it? Nooo. The majority of us don't create the rules/hierachy of what is valued, we can only vote with our feet and wallets and we should.
>Where it lands for me: If the CEO wants to disclaim responsibility for the culture, he needs to step down as incompetent.
If the CEO wants to take responsibility for the culture, he needs to step down for running an institution that routinely breaks the law. (There's a legal term for that...)
Watch him aim for the middle ground... weaseling and PR with the fervent prayers that attention will shift and he can keep eating the sweet cake he gets to keep. When most people can't formulate or even understand the logical proposition you're offering, heartless people are left with amazing leeway.
I work at Google, though not on anything remotely related to cars/transportation, nonetheless I'm clearly not unbiased here.
At any rate this part of Ben Thompson's post annoyed me for a different reason - he conflates and equates patent infringement with theft of trade secrets, while those are in fact quite different things, and have correspondingly quite different forms of relief/punishment.
I don't have a strong position on whether or not that should be the case, but the fact remains that theft of trade secrets is actually a federal crime.
My thoughts exactly. Having read the lawsuit in its entirety, if true the claim by Waymo against Otto/Uber is not only a tale of egregious theft by a rogue former employee, but also an indication of Uber's lack of competence when it comes to self-driving technology.
The following quote from Bloomberg's piece revealing the acquisition shows the panic Uber felt:
“The minute it was clear to us that our friends in Mountain View were going to be getting in the ride-sharing space, we needed to make sure there is an alternative [self-driving car],” says Kalanick. “Because if there is not, we’re not going to have any business.” Developing an autonomous vehicle, he adds, “is basically existential for us.”
This observation understandably led them down the path to acquire Otto, which by all accord would provide much needed technology and legitimacy in this arena. However, their diligence failed to uncover that Otto's progress was completely unrealistic for having been incorporated for just 6 months. One may argue that Otto was meant for the sole purpose of trucking/logistics, but again from the same Bloomberg piece:
"The Otto deal will help; the company makes its own laser detection, or lidar, system, used in many self-driving cars. Kalanick believes that Uber can use the data collected from its app, where human drivers and riders are logging roughly 100 million miles per day, to quickly improve its self-driving mapping and navigation systems. “Nobody has set up software that can reliably drive a car safely without a human,” Kalanick says. “We are focusing on that.”
Is it fair to question the expertise and go-to-market viability of a company that cannot even understand what they are purchasing could not have possibly been stood up from a cold start in 6 months? I think so.
This leads me to revisit Uber's viability as a business that can one day go public, make a profit, and return the unprecedented amount of capital it has raised. While this has been dissected from almost every angle, most opinions have baked in the assumption that eventually Uber will execute seamlessly on the transition to self-driving cars and further entrench the advantage they have created by controlling demand. Well, this lawsuit throws a major wrench into that assumption. From Wired:
"First, it allows plaintiffs to ask the court for an immediate, temporary injunction, giving Waymo the power to shut down Uber’s self-driving truck and car experiments until this is sorted. Second, it lets the accuser seek permanent injunctive relief—complicated legalese for forcing Uber to halt any part of autonomous program dealing with the allegedly swiped lidar. Third, the plaintiff can seize the products of its trade secrets, even before the case is decided. In other words, Google could use this legislation to not only temporarily halt Uber’s progress, but take away its toys."
Safe to say that if these implications play out, Uber will be extremely handicapped in the race to autonomy. Public progress reveals Tesla and Waymo are both further along than most people realize. Were one of them to launch a fleet of self-driving cars offering a ride sharing service (as Waymo plans to by the end of 2017), it would seem they could quickly chip away at Uber's demand advantage by competing on the lower prices afforded by not having drivers.
Timelines and technology costs are always major variables in such nascent areas, but the technology gap for Uber to close becomes that much bigger if this suit goes against them - probably too big a gap for their network of riders, routing expertise, or a group of engineers from Carnegie Mellon to defend against.
The idea that there's going to be a robo ride-sharing service by the end of 2017 is... optimistic. Maybe 2037? Maybe 2047? Longer?
It's not so much that Uber is behind on self-driving but the idea that Uber is in any way dependent on self-driving as a business. If they're covering their bets just in case that's one thing. If they think their business model depends on it, I wouldn't go anywhere near them as an investor.
Obviously no guarantee, but it's their stated ambition and they've been on the streets for years. It's such a monumental change it will be hard for people to comprehend until it's actually functioning live in the world. Hard to believe Uber can catch up from what seems to be a cold start if the lawsuit's allegations are true.
One very serious shortcoming of this article is the claim that the theoretical spirit of taxi regulation is exclusively (or even primarily) rider safety. Regardless of how we believe it has all worked out in practice, taxi regulation has long been earnestly pushed for a multitude of reasons: traffic congestion, driver pay and rights, consumer protection (from fare abuse), road safety (independent from rider safety), and, yes, the kind of rider safety that Uber is far better at through GPS tracking and driver reputation.
There are many attitudes to have about taxi regulation. Some would argue that the market will eventually provide better solutions; even for issues like traffic congestion. Others might contend that the regulation is necessary because the market will either not find solutions or the cost of finding those solutions via the market is prohibitive. Some might take a less principled approach and consider whether the current regulations are better at solving problems or creating them. Regardless, we have to honestly consider the whole story. It's easiest to argue for Uber's approaches when you consider only the small part of the argument where Uber and its ilk clearly best the entrenched taxi system.
This is a good point, but I think regardless reform is in order.
Sometimes the best way to reform a thing is to tear it down, and I think that's where Thompson's cautiously optimistic post about Brexit landed. (Perhaps this one? https://stratechery.com/2016/the-brexit-possibility/)
Here's a devils advocate take on it: Taxi regulation is as much and more about "Guilds", Ghettos, and outright racism. It's been used as a blunt instrument to keep many people out of doing a simple, everyday activity that many view as a form of entertainment - driving around - for cash. The effect, if not the goal, of medallions has been to enforce the assumption that drivers are underpaid immigrants. The assumption of the driver as a criminal has lead to their mistreatment. The serfdom that medallion enforcement has created - Where drivers do not own their job, merely rent it from landlords demanding an increasingly greater cut - Has created the toxic environment that has allowed even awful competitors an advantage.
Moreover, one of Uber’s other “scandals” — the fact that Kalanick asked Amit Singhal to step down as Senior Vice President of Engineering after not disclosing a sexual harassment claim at Google — reflected far worse on Google than Uber: if Singhal committed a fireable offense the search giant should have fired the man who rewrote their search engine; instead someone in the know dribbled out allegations that happened to damage a company they view as a threat.
It's not clear when Uber learned about these allegations of sexual harassment. I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they acted immediately after all the other cultural problems with harassment they seem to have.
> Google at least pushed Amit out as soon as the allegations were substantiated.
We don't have any evidence that the allegations were substantiated. We have some internal, anonymous leaks that claim that Google found the allegations were "credible".
I'm getting the sense that there's some kind of orchestrated effort to take down Uber. The whole "Kalanick must step down" talking point is ridiculous. There was an HR problem he wasn't personally connected to, so now he must be removed despite being an incredibly effective CEO? Because SJWs now rule Silicon Valley and investors bow to them? Um, no, they don't.
The fake "I'm an Uber survivor" anonymous blog post and the leaked cab video seem like they're possibly the work of anti-Uber conspirators. And then you have other bloggers cashing in on the situation by writing these kinds of posts to get page views.
"I'm getting the sense that there's some kind of orchestrated effort to take down Uber."
If there is, it's from Uber itself. Everything that has come out are things that Uber has done by itself. No one else's fault but Uber and it's leadership.
"The whole "Kalanick must step down" talking point is ridiculous. There was an HR problem he wasn't personally connected to, so now he must be removed despite being an incredibly effective CEO? "
The buck stops there. He is completely, 100% responsible for the culture of his company.
"Because SJWs now rule Silicon Valley and investors bow to them? Um, no, they don't."
No one who uses the phrase "SJWs" should be taken seriously.
"The fake "I'm an Uber survivor" anonymous blog post and the leaked cab video seem like they're possibly the work of anti-Uber conspirators."
Because there's no way they actually happened. They hired an actor to defame Kalanick. And no one had ever experienced sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments at Uber before.
>He is completely, 100% responsible for the culture of his company.
The term "culture" is not compatible with the idea of assigning 100% responsibility to one person. In fact it's practically the antithesis.
> No one who uses the phrase "SJWs" should be taken seriously.
Why?
> Because there's no way they actually happened. They hired an actor to defame Kalanick. And no one had ever experienced sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments at Uber before.
Not an actor, but possibly someone was trawling for embarrassing footage that otherwise would probably never see the light of day. The blog post was clearly fake and I'm just wondering if it was part of a viral marketing campaign for New Balance sneakers, or a party with a grudge, or possibly just a regular troll.
Nothing negative that has come out of Uber has been faked. You have absolutely no evidence to say otherwise. And of course a video of the CEO of Uber berating one of his drivers was always going to see the light of day.
"The term "culture" is not compatible with the idea of assigning 100% responsibility to one person. In fact it's practically the antithesis."
Again, the buck stops there. EVERYTHING at Uber is Kalanick's responsibility. EVERYTHING. Otherwise he does not deserve the title of founder, and all the money that's come with it.
CEO has 100% responsibility that his/her company fulfils its fiduciary duty to investors. They do not have this more nebulous "duty to society" responsibility that puts them on the hook for every single instance of bad behaviour by any of the employees. It would be more than adequate for Kalinack to simply order a review of HR policy.
True I don't have evidence that the #UberSurvivor blog was fake but there's also been zero proof that it is real and I would be willing to bet money that none will ever appear.
"They do not have this more nebulous "duty to society" responsibility that puts them on the hook for every single instance of bad behaviour by any of the employees."
Yes, they do. Again, they are entirely responsible for their company.
"It would be more than adequate for Kalinack to simply order a review of HR policy."
Like the several other times he's done that, and it failed to change anything?
I cited the fiduciary duty which is a widely recognized standard for the practice of running a company. What standard are you alluding to, exactly, when you say the CEO is "entirely responsible" for everything that happens within the walls of their company? Are you just making an arbitrary assertion? Who exactly does the CEO need to answer to for these kinds of employee misconduct?
Gee, and there was me thinking that the rise of Trump had put an end to the argument that these types of unethical behaviour are not symptoms of the same problem.
Defending a lack of ethics with ideology is a nothing more than a cheap trick. And I'm not falling for it anymore.
This is super interesting. I guess one of the reasons why Uber has been so successful in taking on powerful regulations and a lot of push back from different players is BECAUSE of their super aggressive business cultural.
And I could easily see this "fuck the world, we do what we do" attitude creating a hyper-alpha atmosphere where sexual harassment is scoffed at.
So, one could argue that without this attitude, Uber would have run out of steam or lacked the hustle to take on the Taxi companies and government regulations.
Still, regardless of the success that this culture has achieved, you can't treat your workers like shit and ignore sexual harassment.
I could easily see Uber being replaced by another company after Uber does all the hard legwork of taking on the Taxi companies and governments.
Especially if Uber lacks the ability to fix its' image.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadI was under the impression that Uber outright broke the law in many places. The author describes how things went for them in San Francisco: the laws never considered smartphone apps, so Uber was able to legally operate as a "limo service." In that particular case, I agree with the author. But I thought that in many other cities, Uber came in and started operating in clear violation of the letter of the law, not just the spirit.
Is that true, or am I just misinformed?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13793923
In fairness, I'm not sure I would go so far as saying the article's pretenses are false - rather, the article is assuming good faith when it probably shouldn't. I also think that it's talking mostly about Uber's core business idea being a gray area (which it is), rather than all the myriad bad things Uber does that aren't directly related to its actual business.
There's great art in knowing how to rejigger a car that must look like a Toyota Camry, but obviously is not the same Camry that you or I could buy from the local dealer for $30,000.
There's a blog post for someone to write about Silicon Valley's efforts to put the Petty Principle in action. Lots of gray in the middle on this one. I'd love to see someone's comprehensive take on what's forgivable these days vs. unforgivable.
He basically scaled down a car's dimensions to make it lighter while still looking similarly to the full size version. This made NASCAR introduce jigs to measure the cars. A rule that is still very much in use.
If the fines incurred are less than margins, then you have a profitable strategy.
>The company is said to have lost at least $2 billion last year and is on track to pile up a loss of at least $3 billion this year. Those are rough figures that may underestimate how much money Uber is losing and don't include interest, taxes or stock-based compensation.
For a similar example, UPS and FedEx both rack up an unbelievable amount of parking tickets in major cities for stopping their delivery vehicles in places where they're not allowed. These companies do this deliberately, because it's cheaper to pay the tickets than to have drivers take the extra time and effort of locating a legal place to stop. Some big cities have gone so far as to set up special accommodations for these companies to pay their tickets in bulk rather than dealing with each one individually. In effect, these parking tickets work as a tax on delivery companies. Doesn't seem particularly evil.
Interesting side note: USPS, as a federal agency, apparently has immunity from local laws like this, so they don't get ticketed. This gives them a substantial advantage over their non-governmental competitors in big cities.
There's a distressing trend on HN recently of people citing "the law" as if it were the end of any kind of practical or moral discussion.
There are 2 types of fines: fines that are meant to stop things from happening and fines that are there to basically make the city money. Most traffic fines seem to be structured for the latter.
If so, kindly do not speak from the glass house about picking and choosing which laws to follow. You do it, I do it, everybody does it. Society still functions somehow.
They stated that different laws exist for different reasons. That's not picking and choosing laws. And they didn't say that laws to make money are inherently bad either.
An improvement to this would be to structure fine based on networth rather than a fixed amount. Yet even then, a millionaire paying $900,000 in fines is still not as devastating as a poor person paying $900. So I would say that the issue is still the structure of the punishment.
I can't say I really favor this but it has been done.
Is that morally wrong, in your eyes?
Is that morally wrong, in your eyes?
Uber has been consistently breaking the law (or parking into society's collective parking space, if the metaphor is lost). And your response is that they are wealthy enough right now to do it, so no big deal.
Pay a fee to the victim?
I doubt many people would think feeding a parking meter (which is not allowed in a lot of places) is "wrong" in any material way even though you can get fined for it. Taking a handicapped space, blocking a bus stop, or parking in front of a fire hydrant, on the other hand, would be widely considered as icky behaviors totally irrespective of any difference in fines.
What you're saying is tantamount to saying a thief who likes prison food is also above the law, because he actually enjoys the penalty for the laws he breaks.
And if you had done that, I'd have never responded. What you said was:
>You're advocating for wealth being over the law.
Which no one has yet done, not even close. Justice, according to the law, is being served. You can argue that the penalty is unjust, which you have failed to do so far.
You can also argue that it's wrong to break the law, which is a new argument in the thread starting with your "over the law" comment.
Saying an entity isn't subject to the law because of wealth and saying that an entity shouldn't break the law are two completely different things. The first argument doesn't work because the companies in question are proving they are subject to the law by paying the fines. The second argument is new, nebulous, not particularly substantive, and otherwise better left ignored.
There are fines that impact big companies and rich people less because of deep pocketbooks. But parking tickets on delivery trucks are not such a fine. They scale linearly with bad-parking activity. As mikeash said, this case is effectively a tax.
This statement reeks of ignorance. That's like saying a poor person could easily afford chemo, while ignoring the fact that they won't be able to afford food or shelter at the same time.
On the one hand, cities recognize that it's more or less impossible to make deliveries in a city without violating the law a decent portion of the time. But people want to get packages delivered.
On the other hand, they want to provide incentives to at least try to obey the law. (And they're almost certainly not averse to having the revenue stream either.)
[1] - http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20130526/ECONOMY/305269...
In most other sports, doing that would be "breaking the rules."
Not sure how such a division arises. (Maybe if the authorities make no attempt to "close" said loophole?)
The basketball example is an interesting one. One assumes that if the league wanted to eliminate that type of play they'd change the rules to increase the penalty in some way by docking points or whatever.
After several Uber drivers had to pay back all their earnings, lose their car and get a fine on top, there has been significantly less drivers willing to take the risk.
Outside of some peak hours (new years, etc) where the risk of getting caught is minimal, the only ones left are the really shady drivers with their crappy cars.
Given how popular Uber is, and how much people dislike the Taxi industry, it is enlightening to think about why taxi reform was never on anyone's agenda.
Lyft had no issues with complying, but Uber did.
http://www.recode.net/2015/7/15/11614750/uber-fined-7-3-mill...
It's like if Edward Murrow went after McCarthy without bothering to double-check his own staff for anything that could be used against him.
I agree with this. Taxi regulations might have started with noble intentions, but quickly evolved into protecting a monopoly at the expense of consumers.
Your argument is basically valid, but fails to account for Uber's consistent violations of law at several levels of government and geographic areas.
The article suggests, and I'd agree, that the problem wasn't Uber avoiding or ignoring taxi regulations; the problem was them applying that same gleefully transgressive attitude towards other areas that had nothing to do with their goal.
And "caring" is something almost no companies do. Even in pure capitalism, companies don't WANT competition. They don't CARE about their consumers - they just want to make as much money as they can.
I think Uber's about to be a very expensive lesson about Karma and will hopefully show some of these VC babies that "move fast and break stuff" is a great strategy for software, and a terrible strategy for people.
I think regulators' attitude is just as controversial: 'you must do this because we say so,' not 'you must do this because it's a good idea.'
I'd wager that most corporations are violating one law or another, without any complaints from the people.
> I don't see why it's suddenly up for debate whether companies need to abide the letter of the law.
Wasn't exactly true. I also have disagreements with other parts of the post, including "Origin of law is irrelevant" (what if the law arose from lobbying by a powerful industry vs for the common good) and "If you disagree you can campaign to have it changed" (and I assume obey it in the meantime) vs something like civil disobedience or jury nullification.
I'm not saying ALL the regulations were put in place for good reasons, and I'm not going to argue that cab companies don't have a monopoly in most places because they do indeed have that. But then to turn that around and say therefore, the Government shouldn't regulate Taxis in any capacity is equally stupid and not supported by the evidence.
And before you say "Well I didn't say they shouldn't regulate at all" please bear in mind that you just said a corporation should be able to violate laws deemed useless by that corporation and/or the general public, meaning the regulations have no teeth and therefore might as well not exist.
I also have very little to say about Uber in particular, I was just responding directly to your comment about how we should follow laws to the letter.
Sorry if that came across a little aggressive, not my intent at all. :)
It's one thing to suggest that maybe a nicer, kinder, friendlier approach could have been used. It's another to have an environment where such an approach can succeed in isolation.
Night School believed as you do. They figured they would be most successful by playing ball, cooperating with regulators, and not pissing people off. For their pains, they were shut down by the very people they bent over backwards to play nice with. They caught no flies with honey. Uber, on the other hand...
This is a long-winded way of saying that it's possible that one might consider adapting to the scenario.
I mean if we're really committed to the Night School idea that would probably be best done as a Government program, since it's so intertwined with assets that are used heavily by the Government. But I'm also willing to bet if we gave them a couple Billion to burn, they could also make it happen. The question of whether that's worth it or not is quite different, though.
Uber got to the position of being the most bloated of fat VC babies by not playing nice. Night School never got that far because they insisted on playing nice. They also ran afoul of the taxi industry, who felt threatened by their business model.
We might want to give serious consideration to the possibility that one behavior pattern is not privileged above all others in all possible scenarios.
I think that pricing congestion directly would be better, but in the absence of that, this is an example of Uber hurting some citizens who are not taxi companies.
To cite road congestion as being part of the "spirit" of why taxi medallions were created leaves me with the impression of someone being disingenuous.
What on earth makes you assert this? The intense and (to modern eyes) borderline insane levels of traffic congestion in NYC at the dawn of the automobile age are very well documented. There are pictures and videos you can easily find, that make today's horrible congestion look bearable and civilized. A lot of traffic rules and devices have their dawn in the same era.
I bike commute in San Francisco and on a typical day I dodge literally dozens of illegally double-parked ride share cars occupying marked bike lanes. I have been nearly doored multiple times, nearly run into parked cars multiple times, been forced into traffic innumerable times, etc.
This is not the 'fault' (sic) of individual drivers. It's the business model, and I hold Uber and Lyft accountable.
EDIT: taxi drivers do this 2% as often; I've bike commuted in the city 20 years and it is apples and oranges
And when I'm on the other side and need to take a cab, I much prefer to take a yellow cab, because they get there faster. Even with GPS, a dense urban environment is filled with little foibles and tricks that only experience can handle
There may still be arguments to make that it's detrimental, or at least not beneficial for other reasons, or there may be data that contradicts my anecdote (if so, please link it), but I'm glad Uber exists and probably opposed to any regulation that makes it difficult or impossible for it to operate in a given place.
I know of no one in any of the dozen or so cities I've lived who doesn't prefer a typical uber driver to a typical cab driver.
The trouble is, they don't agree which way it goes.
I think the resolution to this conondrum is, it varies based on city/region. Some areas had traditional taxis that are worse than ridesharing, and some better.
And taxis are allowed to be Ubers too, we have Teslas S, Mercedes-Benz E and S classes and normal VW Passat taxis, all of them probably working also for Uber.
Especially in Taipei, they hit a price and convenience point where taking an Uber is essentially doing a task on my phone in exchange for having to wait longer to get a ride. To be clear, it usually takes about 15 to 90 seconds of waiting to get a cab.
Outside of Taipei, any convenience store (which are basically all over the place) will call a cab for you and again, it's still a pretty short wait unless you're in a remote area in the mountains or something.
Xapata, you must really be a heck of a globetrotter to be able to so confidently ask a question like that!
Confidently? More curious than confident. It's best not to assume tone in text.
Clean, cheap usually friendly drivers with lots of local insight and you're guaranteed not to be cheated.
Uber is just a criminal organization acting solely out of greed.
Taxies are a regulated monopoly, definitely not a healthy market. Hordes of consumers moved to a better alternative like Uber at the first chance they had.
> Uber is just a criminal organization acting solely out of greed.
Uber, whether you like it or not, has revolutionized personal transportation for better. Consumers are using Uber because Uber is a better product. That's a fact.
I had another experience in LA in 2014 where I got yelled at by a taxi driver because HIS card reader was broken and my credit card was flat so he couldn't use the old style imprint.
The taxis can suck it. They are unclean, expensive, and have irrational drivers that think they can push around their customers because they know there was no need to improve due to regulation.
While I support Lyft now instead of Uber, the ride sharing business is just the competition the industry needs to shake it's complacency.
> The taxis can suck it. They are unclean, expensive, and have irrational drivers that think they can push around their customers because they know there was no need to improve due to regulation.
Unfortunately, these Taxi drivers are now working for Uber and Lyft.
I take Lyft a lot (and I used Uber for a while but went back to Lyft after reading Susan Fowler's post); I've been riding for about two and a half years, and I typically take dozens of rides a month. Most drivers I've dealt with are perfectly pleasant people, but I've encountered a few who are just horrendous. I'm fairly sure most of these people are former cab drivers.
Some examples:
- At my last job, there were multiple drivers who insisted on parking a block away and making me walk to their car, typically through an unlit area at night. This was in a suburban office park, not a crowded city street; there was no excuse to make me walk, and over time I developed a theory that it's because I'm a woman and they want to assert their dominance. I always cancel when they pull this shit, and I eventually memorized their names and began cancelling every time someone with a history of this accepted one of my requests.
- One of the above was particularly bad. This was pretty early on, and it was one of the only times I actually walked over to him. As soon as I got in the car, he started yelling "You kept me waiting for three minutes!". I then said "I was expecting you to come to where I actually am". He then told me to get out. As I was getting out, I told him I was reporting him to Lyft, at which point he said "Yeah, well I work for myself" (people like him are why I just want Uber and Lyft to declare their drivers as employees and not contractors). As I was walking back to my office building to call another, I see his car double back towards me. As he pulls into the parking lot, I start walking faster, and he gets out of his car and chases me into the building. Luckily, I got into the elevator before he could, took it up to where I worked, and told my boss what happened. My boss called 911, we waited until the cops made sure he was gone before I left again, and then a co-worker gave me a ride home.
- Driver once stopped at a street corner before picking me up and texted me demanding to know my destination address. When I told him I already put my destination into the system, he cancelled on me.
- A few drivers think it's acceptable to drive out of the way and get gas after they accept the ride, before picking me up. I cancel on them. One of them, after I cancelled on him, drove up to my house about 10 minutes later while I was waiting outside for the driver I called after I cancelled on him and said "Hey you, you called a ride?". I screamed and went back inside. I came within a hair of calling the cops.
- One driver kept a logbook of every passenger's name plus their source address and destination address. He was perfectly pleasant to talk to, but that logbook creeped me out.
- Back when I was new to Lyft, I thought I had to stay in the car while I rated and tipped the driver after the ride (I think this was when Lyft was still operating on a donation model in Dallas). Of course, my phone was acting slow then (it was a recurring problem with my old Nexus 5), so it was taking a while. During this time, the driver repeatedly screenshotted the Lyft app on his phone with my profile picture visible and kept asking over and over how much Lyft charged me for the ride. I found it creepy, so I just kept lying to him and saying that the screen hasn't loaded yet. It gets weirder. He dropped me off at a bar, and my usual MO at that bar was to get a drink at the bar and then go out on the patio. When I got to the patio, he was still parked in the same spot he dropped me off at...
I don't know what kind of information Uber/Lyft sends back to their drivers, so this could easily be a mileage record for tax purposes.
That's a weird thing to complain about. In a capitalist country, how would you prefer companies act? Not greedy? The whole point of a free market is that everyone tries to maximize profit. There are a lot of things you can point at to claim that Uber is evil, but I don't think greed is one of them.
I would say there's an equal danger of conflating their disrupting regulations with innovation or progress. There's some relation, but it's not equivalent. Treating them the same is only good for Uber.
Or maybe it's that "innovation" and "progress" are mistaken to be only good things.
Downvotes not going to fix Uber.
This seems like an excellent description of the problem: if you're going to run a company that intentionally pushes the boundaries of specific regulatory restrictions (in order to demonstrate a better result that can only happen without them, to get popular backing for removing them), then you need to draw a clear internal dividing line between the risky actions taken in support of that goal and all the other areas in which the company should act as a model for upstanding behavior.
Note that I'm not judging - I have come to realize (sadly) that a certain ruthlessness may be necessary for large-scale success in business, especially in the tech industry.
There's an interesting argument in the article, but the amount of squid-ink being squirted overwhelms it. A big chunk of the article is pretty much "They didn't do it, and if they did, look at everyone else." Which is pretty much bullshit.
Where it lands for me: If the CEO wants to disclaim responsibility for the culture, he needs to step down as incompetent.
If the CEO wants to take responsibility for the culture, he needs to step down for running an institution that routinely breaks the law. (There's a legal term for that...)
Yes this left a bad taste in my mouth. Quote from article:
"The fact of the matter is that we as an industry are responsible for Uber too. We’ve created a world that simultaneously celebrates rule-breaking and undervalues women (and minorities), full of investors and companies that are utterly ruthless when money is on the line, while cloaking said ambition in fluff about changing the world."
Soo.. its our fault for enabling this behavior, but we shouldn't punish Uber for it? Nooo. The majority of us don't create the rules/hierachy of what is valued, we can only vote with our feet and wallets and we should.
If the CEO wants to take responsibility for the culture, he needs to step down for running an institution that routinely breaks the law. (There's a legal term for that...)
Watch him aim for the middle ground... weaseling and PR with the fervent prayers that attention will shift and he can keep eating the sweet cake he gets to keep. When most people can't formulate or even understand the logical proposition you're offering, heartless people are left with amazing leeway.
At any rate this part of Ben Thompson's post annoyed me for a different reason - he conflates and equates patent infringement with theft of trade secrets, while those are in fact quite different things, and have correspondingly quite different forms of relief/punishment.
I don't have a strong position on whether or not that should be the case, but the fact remains that theft of trade secrets is actually a federal crime.
The following quote from Bloomberg's piece revealing the acquisition shows the panic Uber felt:
“The minute it was clear to us that our friends in Mountain View were going to be getting in the ride-sharing space, we needed to make sure there is an alternative [self-driving car],” says Kalanick. “Because if there is not, we’re not going to have any business.” Developing an autonomous vehicle, he adds, “is basically existential for us.”
This observation understandably led them down the path to acquire Otto, which by all accord would provide much needed technology and legitimacy in this arena. However, their diligence failed to uncover that Otto's progress was completely unrealistic for having been incorporated for just 6 months. One may argue that Otto was meant for the sole purpose of trucking/logistics, but again from the same Bloomberg piece:
"The Otto deal will help; the company makes its own laser detection, or lidar, system, used in many self-driving cars. Kalanick believes that Uber can use the data collected from its app, where human drivers and riders are logging roughly 100 million miles per day, to quickly improve its self-driving mapping and navigation systems. “Nobody has set up software that can reliably drive a car safely without a human,” Kalanick says. “We are focusing on that.”
Is it fair to question the expertise and go-to-market viability of a company that cannot even understand what they are purchasing could not have possibly been stood up from a cold start in 6 months? I think so.
This leads me to revisit Uber's viability as a business that can one day go public, make a profit, and return the unprecedented amount of capital it has raised. While this has been dissected from almost every angle, most opinions have baked in the assumption that eventually Uber will execute seamlessly on the transition to self-driving cars and further entrench the advantage they have created by controlling demand. Well, this lawsuit throws a major wrench into that assumption. From Wired:
"First, it allows plaintiffs to ask the court for an immediate, temporary injunction, giving Waymo the power to shut down Uber’s self-driving truck and car experiments until this is sorted. Second, it lets the accuser seek permanent injunctive relief—complicated legalese for forcing Uber to halt any part of autonomous program dealing with the allegedly swiped lidar. Third, the plaintiff can seize the products of its trade secrets, even before the case is decided. In other words, Google could use this legislation to not only temporarily halt Uber’s progress, but take away its toys."
Safe to say that if these implications play out, Uber will be extremely handicapped in the race to autonomy. Public progress reveals Tesla and Waymo are both further along than most people realize. Were one of them to launch a fleet of self-driving cars offering a ride sharing service (as Waymo plans to by the end of 2017), it would seem they could quickly chip away at Uber's demand advantage by competing on the lower prices afforded by not having drivers.
Timelines and technology costs are always major variables in such nascent areas, but the technology gap for Uber to close becomes that much bigger if this suit goes against them - probably too big a gap for their network of riders, routing expertise, or a group of engineers from Carnegie Mellon to defend against.
It's not so much that Uber is behind on self-driving but the idea that Uber is in any way dependent on self-driving as a business. If they're covering their bets just in case that's one thing. If they think their business model depends on it, I wouldn't go anywhere near them as an investor.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...
There are many attitudes to have about taxi regulation. Some would argue that the market will eventually provide better solutions; even for issues like traffic congestion. Others might contend that the regulation is necessary because the market will either not find solutions or the cost of finding those solutions via the market is prohibitive. Some might take a less principled approach and consider whether the current regulations are better at solving problems or creating them. Regardless, we have to honestly consider the whole story. It's easiest to argue for Uber's approaches when you consider only the small part of the argument where Uber and its ilk clearly best the entrenched taxi system.
Sometimes the best way to reform a thing is to tear it down, and I think that's where Thompson's cautiously optimistic post about Brexit landed. (Perhaps this one? https://stratechery.com/2016/the-brexit-possibility/)
It's not clear when Uber learned about these allegations of sexual harassment. I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they acted immediately after all the other cultural problems with harassment they seem to have.
We don't have any evidence that the allegations were substantiated. We have some internal, anonymous leaks that claim that Google found the allegations were "credible".
The fake "I'm an Uber survivor" anonymous blog post and the leaked cab video seem like they're possibly the work of anti-Uber conspirators. And then you have other bloggers cashing in on the situation by writing these kinds of posts to get page views.
If there is, it's from Uber itself. Everything that has come out are things that Uber has done by itself. No one else's fault but Uber and it's leadership.
"The whole "Kalanick must step down" talking point is ridiculous. There was an HR problem he wasn't personally connected to, so now he must be removed despite being an incredibly effective CEO? "
The buck stops there. He is completely, 100% responsible for the culture of his company.
"Because SJWs now rule Silicon Valley and investors bow to them? Um, no, they don't."
No one who uses the phrase "SJWs" should be taken seriously.
"The fake "I'm an Uber survivor" anonymous blog post and the leaked cab video seem like they're possibly the work of anti-Uber conspirators."
Because there's no way they actually happened. They hired an actor to defame Kalanick. And no one had ever experienced sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments at Uber before.
The term "culture" is not compatible with the idea of assigning 100% responsibility to one person. In fact it's practically the antithesis.
> No one who uses the phrase "SJWs" should be taken seriously.
Why?
> Because there's no way they actually happened. They hired an actor to defame Kalanick. And no one had ever experienced sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments at Uber before.
Not an actor, but possibly someone was trawling for embarrassing footage that otherwise would probably never see the light of day. The blog post was clearly fake and I'm just wondering if it was part of a viral marketing campaign for New Balance sneakers, or a party with a grudge, or possibly just a regular troll.
"The term "culture" is not compatible with the idea of assigning 100% responsibility to one person. In fact it's practically the antithesis."
Again, the buck stops there. EVERYTHING at Uber is Kalanick's responsibility. EVERYTHING. Otherwise he does not deserve the title of founder, and all the money that's come with it.
True I don't have evidence that the #UberSurvivor blog was fake but there's also been zero proof that it is real and I would be willing to bet money that none will ever appear.
Yes, they do. Again, they are entirely responsible for their company.
"It would be more than adequate for Kalinack to simply order a review of HR policy."
Like the several other times he's done that, and it failed to change anything?
Defending a lack of ethics with ideology is a nothing more than a cheap trick. And I'm not falling for it anymore.
Well, except the bit where they didn't do that either.
And I could easily see this "fuck the world, we do what we do" attitude creating a hyper-alpha atmosphere where sexual harassment is scoffed at.
So, one could argue that without this attitude, Uber would have run out of steam or lacked the hustle to take on the Taxi companies and government regulations.
Still, regardless of the success that this culture has achieved, you can't treat your workers like shit and ignore sexual harassment.
I could easily see Uber being replaced by another company after Uber does all the hard legwork of taking on the Taxi companies and governments.
Especially if Uber lacks the ability to fix its' image.