61–70 of 103 posts
Completely unrelated to Uber but I wish I could hear a similar confession from Bill Gates before I die. The amount of greyish and plain bad things in the 90s and early 20s he is responsible for is enormous. Still, no single "I'm sorry, what we did at that time was wrong."
Oh no, please no more COVID crap...
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I didn't realise this until going through JFK recently. Cabs: no wait, fixed price, professional driver. Uber: long wait, twice as expensive, driver and car a complete crap-shoot. Feels like the economies of scale only work when you own the taxi fleet itself. I.e. you have dedicated mechanics etc etc. As soon as the consumer has to pay the true price of a taxi ride, Uber crumbles. There's another world in which Uber…
If the cabs are half the price of a rideshare and they have typically have to wait in those long taxi lines before a fare, how are those drivers not the ones being more exploited? Lyft/Uber take 20-25% of the fare, so the ride share drivers are making more on the trip. They have variable vehicle upkeep costs, but taxi drivers renting medallions and the vehicles are hardly better off.
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It's funny though: cabs have gotten better and Uber has gotten worse. I've switched back to taking cabs from the airport. Ubers are slower (cabs are sitting there just waiting) and much, much expensive now (like 2x the cost of a cab). The product isn't any better anymore. The cars are rundown and often smelly. It is nice to be able to put in an address and not deal with a credit card payment at the destination -- but…
On a recent trip to Chicago, from the airport, the taxi was about half the price of Uber to downtown, which my wife and I waited about 20 minutes for. Uber would have been a faster pickup at that point, however. The taxi picked us up, proceeded to drive us Downtown and upwards of 85-90mph on the highway (was about 11pm at night at this point). The car was probably at least 15 years old and the shocks nearly as old. A…
I don't think this guy deserves the title whistleblower. A whistleblower leaks the crimes as they're happening in order to stop them. Not 6 years after participating in the crimes to settle a grudge.
That's actually an interesting point! Other than the term "informant" or "insider" I can't really think of how you would describe this type of thing. There's whistleblowers, and death bed confessions. I suppose someone could simply be called a "tattle tale" or a "former employee", but neither really describes the act of revealing knowledge that was not publicly available. "Leaker" might fit, but that seems to be more…
Also, what Uber did is what every single corporation does with respect to its interactions with the regulatory states across the world.
People have this fantasy that regulations are these perfect bodies of law that really do accomplish their stated goals. WRONG! They are more often counterproductive crap that people work around because they have to. The regulations create incumbents who have an interest in maintaining regulations because it cements their market power. The citizens are bamboozled by useful idiots like The Guardian journalists who just spout the party line without actually investigating how regulations actually work on the ground.
Is there a single person at the Guardian who is aware that Private Equity firms and other investors bought up all the taxi medallions in NYC and were extracting monopoly rents to consumers, while simultaneously abusing a pliant population of renter/drivers. The profits were going to the medallion holders. Consumers were being f'ed by a corrupt and inefficient system, and drivers were getting the shaft. Only politicians and the investors were pleased.
Yeah Uber busted that wide open. Drivers don't like the situation now? Guess what, if you stay off Uber and use a competitor, you will shrink Uber's dominance over time. There are competitors in every city.
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I would be interested in why Uber got so bad compared to traditional cabs. In Spain they forbid all this stuff because they sold cab licenses, but the prices are abusive.
Because pay for the drivers is awful when you consider the actual cost of maintaining a car that runs for hundreds of miles every day. So the only ones that survive are those that do not do proper maintenance and those that game the system (e.g. by reporting fake customer no-shows).
I started taxi driving in early 2012. I'd drive my little 1994 Honda Civic Hatchback to the taxi yard and check out a cab for 12 hours or 24 hours. It was a pretty good deal: the taxi company took care of complying with Arizona's minimal taxi regulations, provided insurance and customers. I could do anything I wanted with their taxi, I just had to pay them at the end of the shift. I always made money, even on my 4th…
If you leak private emails of any arbitrary company, there's a 100% chance some things will be taken out of context.
I suggest Travis was in some ways a kind of a giant turd, but that's definitely his right, unless it involves something illegal.
I'm wary of the press misrepresenting the issue like they did the FB CA scandal, which was actually a scandal, just presented as the wrong kind of scandal.
> They include Travis Kalanick, Uber’s combative co-founder and then chief executive, David Plouffe, a former Barack Obama campaign aide who became a senior vice-president at Uber, and Rachel Whetstone, a British PR executive who has also held senior roles at Google, Facebook and now Netflix. Why is this so common and acceptable? You have these towering technological firms who already possess vast amounts of power wh…
> if a person has just gotten done working for a candidate or someone in office, they should be barred from private industry until they are politically irrelevant. That's not how democracy works. You'd be creating a second class of people who are ineligible to participate in their own society. And you'd be selecting along the dimension of those who actually do participate. I am a data engineer. If my state representa…
The current situation is affording a whole host of people who make everyone else second class citizens to their reach and ideas.