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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?

#81

Post by xvector »

koheripbal wrote: post #25
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.

Uou are assuming the forms have meaningful purpose. The reality is that the bureaucrats just don't wantT more startups and so they use excuses to obstruct them.

I think the reality is much less agenda-based and much more depressing: a lot of bureaucrats couldn’t give two shits about their job and are just there to put in the minimum required effort to get their paycheck, without regard for who they might hurt along the way.

Certainly sounds like what happened here - a bored, lazy bureaucrat scanning the application for a heading and tossing it in the bin when they didn’t find it.

I’d far prefer a bureaucracy where the employees cared, even if it was caring about the “wrong” reasons.

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

#82

Post by bradleyjg »

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…

What AirBnB and uber proved is that our white collar criminal laws are totally inadequate. We throw people in jail for stealing a six pack but not for blatantly conspiring to externalize billions onto the public at large in direct contraction of local laws. When the rewards of antisocial behavior are so high, only prison is adequate deterrent.

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

#84

Post by bildung »

Spooky23 wrote: post #49
mstade wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 applic…

Bureaucracy values consistency over all else. People are held accountable for not following the process, not for customer experience. That means either training people to be experts in whatever they are doing or removing agency from the individuals in the system. Having people with the right training, etc is obviously the better path, but it costs more. End of the day, this is why devops is a thing — traditional IT o…

This. The opposite of bureaucracy slavishly following process usually is not good customer experience but corruption. If you open the pandora's box of following process being optional, usually the person with cash in hand wins.

This obviously isn't an excuse for dump or inefficient processes, though.

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

#85

Post by dnautics »

bradleyjg wrote: post #82
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…

What AirBnB and uber proved is that our white collar criminal laws are totally inadequate. We throw people in jail for stealing a six pack but not for blatantly conspiring to externalize billions onto the public at large in direct contraction of local laws. When the rewards of antisocial behavior are so high, only prison is adequate deterrent.

That's because the antisociality of breaking those laws is less provable than a violation of a materialized enumeration, in this sense: If you steal something from a shop, I can point a finger at the shopkeeper and say, yes that person was hurt, and by this much. Then I can point at the thief, and say that person gained, and by this much. If the identities of the victim and perpetrator are nebulous, and the externality is vague, and the laws being broken themselves are inconsistent across jurisdictions and have a history of abuse by those in power, and have in places themselves been a source of questionable action (like racist policy and blatant theft from the poor by municipalities), what you are asking for is far more challenging.

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

#86

Post by xvector »

nabdab wrote: post #44
isoskeles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

> It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance Absolutely. It is trivial! And the company making the submission is expected to do that. Which I think is very reasonable, considering that they know the requirements and make the actual submission in the first place. It’s silly to want the reviewers to take on an additional burden in the process just because this one company made a dumb mi…

Reviewers are human. If they can’t use their human reasoning skills deal with something trivial like “Heading A3 should be above this paragraph” then frankly society would be much better off without them, and we should just automate them away rather than wasting our tax dollars on them.

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

#87

Post by cortesoft »

jakobegger wrote: post #65
jimmaswell wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some price controls and restrictions on renting out whole domiciles would be nice but the aspect of renting out a portion of an already-occupied space like I used it for is great.

If that's all AirBnB was used for, nobody would complain. But at least 90% of listings on Airbnb are for whole apartments that nobody lives in. If people just rented out their guest room, or rented their apartment out while they're on vacation, I don't think anybody would complain.

Hotels would

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

#89

Post by zacharycohn »

_v7gu wrote: post #29
mrighele wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it exactly what it expects. If you give to a JSON parser an object with single quoted strings it is your fault if the parser complains even though it is quite clear what you meant. In the case of software, being clever means that you open yourself to unintended result, vulnerabilities and such, in the case of bureaucracy you open yourself to lawsui…

I don't buy this. The government has more resources to fix UX readibility more than any other company, and I know how nitpicky a HN reader can get on UX details. So why should the government get a pass? It won't get better unless we raise our voices to the point it is heard by them.

There are almost 90,000 governments in the United States. Each of them maintains x websites.

That is a lot of UX designers.

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

#90

Post by dennis_jeeves »

cowpig wrote: post #41
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…

> Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying. This does not match with my experience. Bureaucracies, like human being, vary greatly. I was able to incorporate in Colombia at the department of commerce four years ago barely speaking Spanish, in just a couple hours as the bureaucrats there were very helpful. I've also tanked tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers and spent over…

>This does not match with my experience.

How old are you and how long have you been working?

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