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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?

#101

Post by tempsy »

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…

There's probably a lot more to the story.

And if you can't follow a simple set of instructions that is life or death for your startup then the management that oversaw the application (the legal team?) should be fired immediately.

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

#102

Post by bradleyjg »

dnautics wrote: post #85
bradleyjg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 externali…

It’s not more challenging in the sense of we don’t know how to write laws that would work or that those laws would be unconstitutional.

Corporations have figured out how to use incentives, winks, and nods to avoid having anyone but the lowest level employees end up with provable beyond a reasonable doubt intent level mens rea. But we have solutions to that in our toolkit. We can define crimes as requiring only negligence or even strict liability crimes.

We need only summon the collective will.

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

#103

Post by souterrain »

mrighele wrote: post #28
IshKebab wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Perhaps one day bureaucracies will accept proposals via JSON (or other open data format... XML anyone?) rather than Word or PDF.

One could argue that these formats are more accessible than their equivalent pseudo-paper formats. It would eliminate the nitpicking over document format, as the low bar to enter would be enforced programmatically.

This would allow technologists with lesser experience in the minutia of proposal writing to compete with huge government contractors with specialists who deal in final proposal preparation. At least it would in the short term until the big contractors retooled.

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

#104

Post by kd5bjo »

xvector wrote: post #98
marcinzm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human. Except it doesn't. Then society labels the process as biased, unfair, subject to the whims of the reviewer, open to corruption, and so on. One of the down voted comments jumped right to bribery for example. Bureaucracy is this way not because it has to be but because society actually wants it to be.

I really think that no one would judge a reviewer for adding a heading where it needed to be. This is trivial, there isn’t really a political connotation here. If a reviewer cannot do something trivial like this, then we don’t need them anyways. If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated, just run the application through a software that checks for word count and header presence and call it a…

I would not be surprised if they had a safety specialist assigned to evaluate paragraph A3 of each proposal, in isolation from everything else. For fairness, that specialist may not have even been given access to the other parts of the applications.

In this case, the employee tasked with separating out the application pieces and sending them to the relevant specialists is likely not highly-trained, and there may be no-one in the organization competent to do this: the people that process the application as a whole aren’t qualified, and the people that are qualified can’t look at the whole application for fear of introducing bias.

> If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated...

I saw no indication that the contents of properly-formatted applications were being ignored. I believe it’s more likely that they set up a complicated review process that relied on applications being formatted as requested, so Skip’s application couldn’t be put through the pre-planned approval process.

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

#105

Post by llampx »

mikojan wrote: post #36
zozbot234 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deterioration of public transport is political. NIMBY's don't want public transport in their backyard, out of fear that it might bring in "undesirable" folk. Uber and Lyft have zilch to do with this. If anything, these services make public transport more effective by solving the "last mile" problem for its users and thus obviating the need for a privately-owned car. Airbnb is contributing to a housing crisis? You kno…

This is just corporate propaganda. Studies have repeatedly shown that a significant number of people are using Uber INSTEAD of public transport

Make public transportation infrastructure more convenient than cars and cheaper than cars, and the problem solves itself.

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

#107

Post by j88439h84 »

jseliger wrote: post #95
souterrain wrote: post #69

Forget for a moment that a bureaucracy is involved. If your company was bidding on a request for proposal (RFP) for a potential client, wouldn't you want to follow the customer's requirements? Often RFP teams use failure to follow directions or specifics in a proposal submission as an informal measure of the likelihood the respondent will fail to deliver on other requirements. I have worked for a company where I had…

I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses, and we endlessly tell clients to follow all RFP requirements religiously and precisely. See https://seliger.com/2008/02/25/what-does-a-grant-proposal-lo... for example: Read the RFP carefully for formatting instructions and follow them precisely. For example, if the RFP says the proposal is to be double spaced, and does not make a…

"A sequentially numbering stamp"? Can't Word add page numbers by itself?

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

#108

Post by tempsy »

FWIW I hardly ever see people riding scooters in San Francisco anymore.

They all more than doubled their prices in the last year to $1 + .32/min + tax, which works out to more than $20/hour! At that price, it’s cheaper to just use Uber.

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

#109

Post by dnautics »

bradleyjg wrote: post #102
dnautics wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 externali…

It’s not more challenging in the sense of we don’t know how to write laws that would work or that those laws would be unconstitutional. Corporations have figured out how to use incentives, winks, and nods to avoid having anyone but the lowest level employees end up with provable beyond a reasonable doubt intent level mens rea. But we have solutions to that in our toolkit. We can define crimes as requiring only neglig…

Those laws that you propose will still themselves be used against less powerful companies, even weaponized, by more powerful companies. Or worse, weaponized by politicians.

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

#110

Post by tempsy »

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…

The bigger problem with scooters is that they keep raising their prices. It was $.15/min a year ago and checking Lime and Uber it’s now $.32-.33/min or more than $20/hr!

I hardly see anyone using them in SF anymore. It’s cheaper to use just a regular Uber.

I’m convinced the only people using it now can’t do basic math.

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