Uber loves operating by "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" proverb. But what they fail to realize or discount its importance is that the squeaky wheel is also the first one to be replaced.
Uber Stockholm throw a PR-tantrum when refused unfair advantages
121–130 of 261 posts
Re: Uber Stockholm throw a PR-tantrum when refused unfair advantages
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
"it makes life a heck of a lot more pleasant" "the libertarian model disgusts me" Do you agree that people have different standards of what is good and what is not? If you don't like something and I'm forcing you to swallow it, you won't feel any good (even if it's good for someone else). Now, one way to resolve it is to come up with some boundaries that we cannot cross (e.g. "do not kill") and then everyone does wha…
> Do you realise that any law is a threat of murder? Even if it does not say so. If I make some customers happy, but you get jealous and angry and use a law against me to make pay a fine or shut down business, you are basically threatening me with a violent police force. If I don't comply, police will take me. If I try to protect myself, they may kill me. dude, what's wrong with you.
Is there something incorrect about his comment? What is it?
Re: Uber Stockholm throw a PR-tantrum when refused unfair advantages
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I can tell (and I'm not an expert in swedish taxi law) what the law says is you can charge by time (as a limousine), or by time+distance (as a taxi), and if you charge by time+distance you must use a certified tamper-proof taxi meter and have a price sticker in your window. Which of these laws do you consider not to make sense?
The certified tamper-proof meter... and the sticker in the window. You're using an app to arrange transport. All of the information you need is there.
They have not, however, made any attempt to get the app approved to serve that function.
Re: Uber Stockholm throw a PR-tantrum when refused unfair advantages
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
As you pointed out, the rapes and assaults are ongoing. By making the bottom of the market illegal (by making it uneconomical), you haven't stopped these crimes from happening, you've simply forced them to occur in the black market where there is even less of a chance to prevent them. Again, the analogy with drug prohibition is clear. There is an incredible amount of violence occurring, but that isn't a justification…
As you pointed out, the rapes and assaults are ongoing. By making the bottom of the market illegal (by making it uneconomical), you haven't stopped these crimes from happening, you've simply forced them to occur in the black market where there is even less of a chance to prevent them. Except the numbers are now smaller, less people are put at risk and less people see that risk realised. It demonstrably has made the s…
Since the article doesn't get into your purported statistics, I can only speculate as to what you are referring to. People in the U.S. often try to retroactively justify tougher drug laws by pointing to lower crime rates, when in fact often times people are simply less likely to report being victimized because they were engaging in an illegal transaction.
Moreover, reality has a way of resisting controlled experiments. It is essentially impossible to control every variable that might influence reported crime rates, so the mere fact that there may be fewer reported taxi-related crimes after regulation increased than before would be an unconvincing argument.
This is really an epistemological argument. Due to the inherent uncontrollability of every variable, the only way to accurately understand the effects of a government policy are to look at the economic incentives it creates. Simply asserting that economic incentives that underly the drug market don't also apply to other black markets is arbitrary.
Re: Uber Stockholm throw a PR-tantrum when refused unfair advantages
#125Reading their press release (the Swedish one, I'm a native Swedish speaker) I get a feeling that they are, quite frankly, not a serious business. It's filled with paranoid tinfoil hattery where they claim the Big Nasty Government is out to get them without actually pointing out what rules they're asked to comply with. Sweden is fairly big on consumer protection, and price comparisons is generally a mandatory part of…
Seems to me like this is the double edged sword of consumer protection. I think Sweden has the right idea here but I can also see how someone starting a business might think that these consumer protection laws protect the existing players in an industry. In America we have a lot of laws governing the hotel industry. For the most part I think they are in place to protect the millions of Americans and tourists who stay…
On the flipside, sometimes it really makes new businesses think about the role they play in society. Just because Tom, Dick and Harry has money and wants to start a business, it doesn't mean that they can do whatever they like. There are bad apples looking to make a quick buck when they can. Of course, the good apples are the ones to suffer as well. It's a hard problem to solve. Should businesses be only about making money or should it also think about the services it's trying to provide and the role it plays in society? Sorry for the philosophical question :)
Re: Uber Stockholm throw a PR-tantrum when refused unfair advantages
#126The more I hear about Uber, the more it seems to be a tea-party style paranoid right-wing anti big evil government organization instead of a disruptive start-up. This kind of thing might fly in the US, but in most of Western Europe we take a slightly more nuanced view to the role of government regulation. Doesn't mean there isn't anything worth disrupting, hell no (somebody please disrupt the Amsterdam taxi market),…
If the devil didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Uber was built from the ground up to tangle with cantankerous and corrupt authorities whose first impulse is to outlaw it. Even if that enemy turns out not to exist, they operate as if it does. Its their nature.
Re: Uber Stockholm throw a PR-tantrum when refused unfair advantages
#127The more I hear about Uber, the more it seems to be a tea-party style paranoid right-wing anti big evil government organization instead of a disruptive start-up. This kind of thing might fly in the US, but in most of Western Europe we take a slightly more nuanced view to the role of government regulation. Doesn't mean there isn't anything worth disrupting, hell no (somebody please disrupt the Amsterdam taxi market),…
> a tea-party style paranoid right-wing anti big evil government organization
...
> we take a slightly more nuanced view
Yeah, sure sounds like it.
Re: Uber Stockholm throw a PR-tantrum when refused unfair advantages
#128Disruption for the sake of disruption.
Some of the taxi regulations are there for good reasons. If Uber cannot provide better, cheaper and safer service at lower price with the same rules they do not have right to exist. And if they want to bring a regulation down they should do it for the whole industry if it is already obsolete.
Re: Uber Stockholm throw a PR-tantrum when refused unfair advantages
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not work to change the law since it doesn't make sense? What's the point of keeping it?
As far as I can tell (and I'm not an expert in swedish taxi law) what the law says is you can charge by time (as a limousine), or by time+distance (as a taxi), and if you charge by time+distance you must use a certified tamper-proof taxi meter and have a price sticker in your window. Which of these laws do you consider not to make sense?
I think a good enhancement of the law would be an exception for charging by distance without a legacy meter, if the price and distance was quoted and agreed in advance and the client has means to compare the offer before accepting it (which they should, if they are using a smartphone)
Re: Uber Stockholm throw a PR-tantrum when refused unfair advantages
#130Reading their press release (the Swedish one, I'm a native Swedish speaker) I get a feeling that they are, quite frankly, not a serious business. It's filled with paranoid tinfoil hattery where they claim the Big Nasty Government is out to get them without actually pointing out what rules they're asked to comply with. Sweden is fairly big on consumer protection, and price comparisons is generally a mandatory part of…
>all groceries are mandated to list price per weight/volume/appropriate other unit so you can find out, say, which bag of rice is cheapest per kg, for instance - the same goes for taxi services and price per km That's actually really interesting and I had no idea that was the case. In a supermarket, would such a list be in the isle next to the food? Or would it just be available from management or something like that…
No, you will have to compare the individual products yourself. But since products of the same type is usually on display close to each other, and the price is displayed in the same unit, it's not very hard. In practice, this means that most products have two prices listed - first, the actual price of the product, second the "comparison price", per standard unit. For example:
Brand A, Orange Juice, 1L. 19.90 (Price per Litre: 19.90) Brand B, Orange Juice, 2L. 30.00 (Price per Litre: 15.00)
This is simply to spare the consumer of doing the math themselves, which can turn out to be quite tricky in some cases (although not in my example:)