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Uber Boston Has Been Served

blog.uber.com

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Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#61

Post by jhcoaps2 »

bengl3rt wrote: post #55
jhcoaps2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of zimride/lyft is that they're more about arranging carpooling than acting as professional taxi service. Does Lyft let random people sign up to work as gypsy cab drivers? If so, I think that's insane.

Zimride arranges carpools for long trips, but Lyft is pretty much just an Uber clone with private individuals operating their personal cars. There is some vetting but no insurance or anything as far as I know.

Then confirmed, I think that's irresponsible and insane.

At some point there will be a serious accident and both the driver and passenger's lives will be ruined, since driving people professionally is disallowed by car insurance policies.

Totally amoral. Disgusting.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#63

Post by rhizome »

pjscott wrote: post #56
rhizome wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also be interested in the concept of regulatory capture, which is kind of rent-seeking's opposite (IANAE). Say you have a company that provides web-security audits and you help press for a law requiring websites to have current security audits. Boom, guaranteed business.

That example you gave is also an example of rent seeking.

IANAE indeed!

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#64

Post by mindslight »

jhcoaps2 wrote: post #24
tptacek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two reasons (neither dispositive): (i) The cities in which Uber operates usually have dysfunctional cab systems. San Francisco, for instance, is notoriously underserved. (ii) Much of the regulatory overhead in running a cab/livery service really is an artifact of top-down market controls from the turn of the last century that have been exploited to lock the market to a privileged few operators.

Marijuana shouldn't be regulated as it is. Should startups be allowed to sell Marijuana? Of course not, either everyone should, or nobody should. Level playing fields and all that.

You were able to use marijuana as an example because legalization of it is considered a reasonable opinion. This is only possible due to its existing prevalence, which is only due to the brave/stupid people risking their lives to distribute it in spite of the fiat against it. Reality drives the model, not vice-versa.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#65

Post by defen »

rhizome wrote: post #43
tarr11 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had to look up "rent seeking", I'm sure I'm not the only one In economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth, for example, spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created. A famous example of rent-seeking is the limiting o…

You might also be interested in the concept of regulatory capture, which is kind of rent-seeking's opposite (IANAE). Say you have a company that provides web-security audits and you help press for a law requiring websites to have current security audits. Boom, guaranteed business.

The most ridiculous example of this that I've seen is that some states require a license for the practice of interior design. Louisiana comes to mind but I believe there are others. It's really an example of the phenomenon that a small group of dedicated individuals with a vested interest in an outcome are often able to overcome a much larger group that has a small, diffuse, or unknown interest in the opposite outcome. In the interior design case, if you're a person who hires an interior designer, you're probably not going to notice the extra $50-$100 it costs you (made up numbers) because of the licensing requirements - in fact you might not even know that the licensing requirement exists. But the people collecting that money certainly notice it when you multiply by the total number of customers. It's a legal way to do the Office Space trick of stealing a small amount from a large number of people.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#66

Post by DannoHung »

gojomo wrote: post #48
tptacek wrote: post #4

Two tickets were apparently issued: (i) For operating an unlicensed livery service (ii) For using a non-approved mechanism for metering the ride The C&D at issue here covers (ii). At its heart, the complaint is that Boston has standardized on a way of metering passengers, and Uber has replaced that standard with GPS. Presumably, cab drivers in Boston could not simply choose to replace their meters with GPS monitors,…

The small parts of the regulation that weren't rent-seeking -- a legitimate interest insuring a certain level of safety and responsibility, back when it was hard to hold bad-actors accountable -- have been made obsolete by mobile/reputation/marketplace technology. Now, bad or inconsistent service can be made widely known almost instantly -- not just through Uber's own mechanisms, but also other review/complaint platf…

> The small parts of the regulation that weren't rent-seeking -- a legitimate interest insuring a certain level of safety and responsibility, back when it was hard to hold bad-actors accountable -- have been made obsolete by mobile/reputation/marketplace technology.

What? No they haven't. And it's still hard to hold bad actors accountable. Especially if you don't have the foresight to identify them perfectly.

> Now, bad or inconsistent service can be made widely known almost instantly -- not just through Uber's own mechanisms, but also other review/complaint platforms.

And there is moral hazard in every single company providing business reviews as its principle service.

> The whole legacy regulatory architecture now can and should be discarded, replaced with a minimal kernel of regulations about clearly identifying a service provider and its terms, to enable the new market-oriented feedback mechanisms to work.

Yeah, sure. The blind marketplace god will solve all our problems. OR powerful actors will rise up, quash competition and make things awful.

Seek a bit of fucking balance, man!

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#67

Post by andylei »

uuilly wrote: post #35

Uber, AirBNB and Food Trucks are interesting for two reasons: 1) They are on a collision course with the regulatory state. 2) Their employees are, by and large, young liberals. Cab medallions are not much different in concept than wind and solar subsidies. In both cases, the government is picking a winner. Our types of companies have been happily immune from the meddling of the regulatory state. As we crawl out into…

> wind and solar subsidies

> the government is picking a winner.

Sometimes picking a winner is a good thing.

Burning coal and oil pollutes air and exacerbates global warming. These are bad things. As a society, we should pay a little extra to avoid them. Wind and solar subsidies are probably less efficient than, say, a carbon tax, but probably better than nothing.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#68

Post by emmett »

mindslight wrote: post #58
calciphus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine for a moment you got into a taxi and instead of the meter, he had an hour-glass with tick marks on the side and a bike odometer. Would you feel secure about what you're being charged? Most of the Uber drivers use iPhones, which (especially the older models) have notoriously bad GPS. If it skips off to the wrong street for a few blocks and adds 1/4 mile to my trip, and I don't notice by staring at his screen,…

Phone-based GPS, really?! They probably should be taken to task by weights and measures. But why is Uber even metering the trip distance? If they incorporated the destination address to the booking, they could calculate an exact price based on time of day/projected congestion/etc. Then they'd have even better consumer protection than a taxi cab (where the driver still has an incentive to go a more expensive route).

They know your start location because you call them there. They use GPS to determine your end location, to save time.

Uber doesn't really even publish a rate schedule for how much you pay, and it doesn't have stable prices. They go up during periods of high demand, for example. So it's unclear why you'd object to the GPS, except to mess with them; you don't know what you're going to pay in any case.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#69

Post by emmett »

tptacek wrote: post #4

Two tickets were apparently issued: (i) For operating an unlicensed livery service (ii) For using a non-approved mechanism for metering the ride The C&D at issue here covers (ii). At its heart, the complaint is that Boston has standardized on a way of metering passengers, and Uber has replaced that standard with GPS. Presumably, cab drivers in Boston could not simply choose to replace their meters with GPS monitors,…

So with #1, that's the Boston's right. But it's not what the C&D is about, so we should set that aside. This is about #2.

With regards to #2, it's clearly reaching. You can make an argument that they're "measuring the distance with the iPhone", but clearly they're measuring it with GPS. The iPhone is not a measuring device. If they used the accelerometer in the iPhone to measure distance, it might be a fair point.

If they don't want GPS used in commercial transactions it's within the city's power to ban it. But that's what they're doing: banning the use of GPS in commercial transactions. Not banning Uber's iPhone app.

I don't think the city is willing to do that, since this is really about screwing with Uber using whatever regulation they can find and not about fairly enforcing the rules.

Re: Uber Boston Has Been Served

#70

Post by emmett »

rhizome wrote: post #43
tarr11 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had to look up "rent seeking", I'm sure I'm not the only one In economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth, for example, spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created. A famous example of rent-seeking is the limiting o…

You might also be interested in the concept of regulatory capture, which is kind of rent-seeking's opposite (IANAE). Say you have a company that provides web-security audits and you help press for a law requiring websites to have current security audits. Boom, guaranteed business.

Regulatory capture is when you make it more difficult to work in your industry on purpose through regulation, in order to discourage competition.

For example, McDonald's could push for a law that would require anyone who wants to run a chain restaurant to post a $100 million bond. Sure, they have to put up the bond too, but they have plenty of money to do so. The burden would probably stop many new chains from ever getting started.

It is similar to rent seeking though.

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