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SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

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Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#11

Post by isoskeles »

nabdab wrote: post #6

Sounds like standard bureaucracy. They didn’t submit the required information in the required form. SF wants startups to behave, that doesn’t mean that behaving startups get to ignore the standard procedures or get exceptions from requirements.

Sounds like they made a mistake in their submission, rather than they wanted to ignore something or get an exception.

For such a large city with a huge amount of tax revenue, I would expect the bureaucracy in SF to do a little better with processes like this one. It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance or to give companies time to submit corrections. Obviously this isn’t how it works, like you stated “standard bureaucracy”, but I’d love to see certain parts of government move further away from this mentality of being some punishing Old Testament god to serving the community.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#13

Post by barney54 »

nabdab wrote: post #6

Sounds like standard bureaucracy. They didn’t submit the required information in the required form. SF wants startups to behave, that doesn’t mean that behaving startups get to ignore the standard procedures or get exceptions from requirements.

I hear you, but let’s be honest about what this means—more work for attorneys...

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#14

Post by tsimionescu »

trophycase wrote: post #7
jessaustin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've lost the ability to evaluate behavior as it is in itself. Before we judge, we have to find out whether it was a "good" or "bad" person who did it. If that doesn't help, we can perhaps find some innuendo to the effect that the actor acted as an "agent" or even "asset" of some known-"bad" "foreign" power. When we fill our brains with garbage, only garbage can come out of them.

In an extremely complex modern society it's nearly impossible to tell the effects that certain actions and policies will have. Popular discourse around politics and economics support this theory, since almost nobody can seem to agree. This leads to one of the best heuristics for evaluating the merits of an action as the intention of the actor or the ethics of the actor.

That is possibly the worst heuristic for evaluating an action. You may be right that it is somewhat natural to arrive at it, but it is by no means a good heuristic.

And why is it bad? For one, real intentions are inscrutable, so it is very easy to ascribe whatever intentions you want to an action. For another, the intentions behind an action have essentially no correlation with the effects of the action, at least insofar as the intentions are not explicitly malicious (e.g. 'hurt people').

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#15

Post by argonaut »

Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying.

But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior.

That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech entrepreneurs already know this: Airbnb and Uber proved this point long ago.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#17

Post by IshKebab »

kd5bjo wrote: post #8

The application form requires a paragraph labeled A3, and their application had the required information but didn’t label it as A3. That’s the sort of mistake that can land you in bureaucratic purgatory anywhere in the world, which is exactly what happened, and there’s an ongoing appeal right now. The founder’s take-away from this should have been “double-check the details, especially when dealing with a bureaucracy”…

Classic victim blaming / blaming the user. The takeaway should be that this bureaucracy is broken, not that applicants shouldn't be able to make trivially fixable mistakes.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#18

Post by mstade »

argonaut wrote: post #15

Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying. But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior. That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech…

> But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior.

This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale. E.g. when I incorporated my company, I had to send in the same application four times, each time paying an additional fee. Reason was I had minor, pointless really, mistakes in the application, a box I didn't realize had to be ticked, name in the date field and date in the name field, that sort of thing. The data entry people at the government agency could have easily resolved any mistakes with a phone call, but instead I get a letter in the mail a couple of weeks later, saying there's an error but not what the error is. So I have to call and ask, and of course they had no record of what the error was so we had to go over the application on the phone and find them. You'd think they'd tell me about the other errors then, but no, I had to do this four times. It took almost two months to get a simple form approved.

I wish that was my only story of wasting time on bureaucracy, but there are plenty more where that came from.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#20

Post by Waterluvian »

IshKebab wrote: post #17
kd5bjo wrote: post #8

The application form requires a paragraph labeled A3, and their application had the required information but didn’t label it as A3. That’s the sort of mistake that can land you in bureaucratic purgatory anywhere in the world, which is exactly what happened, and there’s an ongoing appeal right now. The founder’s take-away from this should have been “double-check the details, especially when dealing with a bureaucracy”…

Classic victim blaming / blaming the user. The takeaway should be that this bureaucracy is broken, not that applicants shouldn't be able to make trivially fixable mistakes.

I've made non-trivial numerical errors on my tax returns and the CRA just calls me up and asks, "did you mean X?"

It's absurd to punish someone because the formatting was wrong.

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