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“Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

stallman.org

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Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#41
Yet another reason why working with or talking to RMS is impossible. I think we can apply many of these arguments to Taxi cabs as well.

Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards.

Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along with credit card receipts, just like Uber.

Taxis are a regulated market, but the medallion market is largel unregulated and a near-monopoly.

Taxi drivers complain they are underpaid and beholden to the medallion owners.

And so on...

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#42
post #19
post #7

That's all well and good. Except that I still need to get around, and Uber (and it's competitors) remains better than my local cab system. That's true of basically every city I've ever visited as well. Until that is no longer true, I'll continue to be an extremely satisfied Uber user.

Comfort/convenience vs principles/ethics. To each his own.

Actually all of this is almost certainly something like "where I draw the line is the right line anyone who does less has failed anyone who has done more is taking it to far".

As someone else is this thread has mentioned, RMS addressed the issue of Uber wanting to put drivers out of jobs as bad but ironically the comment pointed out that the "free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs."

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#43
post #3

> Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers. > It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed. Okay, so I am extremely liberal and everything, but "let's ban any new technologies that might make somebody lose their job to a robot" is seriously the most ridiculo…

It's nearly in the job description of every software engineer to create things that ease people's workloads or replace their jobs entirely. I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs. Also: basic income, or whatever it is that will make sense when there aren't enough jobs to go around, won't be preemptive.

" I bet Stallman's projects, and the free software movement itself, are responsible for the non-existence of numerous jobs."

No question about that. As someone who back in the day paid thousands for business software that is now almost always free, money went from our company to a company that had employees, sales people, programmers who made a living off the software that was being offered. Not to mention obviously the people that we didn't need anymore as a result of that software. (Bookeepers, anyone?)

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#44
post #41

Yet another reason why working with or talking to RMS is impossible. I think we can apply many of these arguments to Taxi cabs as well. Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards. Taxi destinations can be subpoenaed by local LEO and the government, along with credit card receipts, just like Uber. Taxis are a regulated market, but the medallion market is largel unregulated and a near-monopoly. Taxi drivers…

> Taxis run "non free" software to process credit cards.

"I have a credit card, but I use it as rarely as possible. Effectively, only for airline tickets, car rental, and hotel checkin — because they demand identification anyway."

https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#46
"until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed."

Hand-waving pleb magnets like this (the statement, not the person stating) show a painfully inept understanding of how autonomous labor is going to work.

Once Moore's Law crosses the processing power/price ratios where robots can perform "good enough" object acquisition and manipulation, (pre-Singularity phase) no nation on earth can deflate their currency fast enough to stop charlatans from promoting wholesale human elimination instead of inflationary appeasement.

Meaning, after the "good enough" threshold is crossed, nations will engage in inflationary policies to bide time while desperately seeking a clearing price for human labor. But they won't find it for most labor because of two factors:

1.) At the most efficient time usage (under politically impossible configurations and assuming equal productivity), in which people work 18 hour days forever and utilize 6 hours of sleep, 1 machine's labor equals 1.25 human's labor. Typically, 1 machine's labor equals 3 human's labor. Accounting for productivity enhancement, the comparison will be about as worthwhile to make as comparing engines to horses today. (My drone is 500 plebpower?)

2.) It takes 12 years (again, under politically impossible standards) and ~18,000 pounds of food to make a human productive. It takes a drone a few weeks to be born out of a few gallons of fuel, and a few pounds of materials.

The real cost of labor is staggering. And if you think people are stupid enough to fall for the trap (again) to use the productive gains of a new technology to do nothing more than cycle it all back into a mechanism to breed more humans into existence, I think you will be in for a rude awakening when human costs drop so low from endless inflation appeasement that using said drones to harvest these surplus humans for their physical materials becomes wildly profitable. And if the charlatans can make even HackerNews believe North Korea was behind the Sony hacks and clamor for invasion, just imagine how easy it will be to manufacture some social justice narrative for mining populations centers for biomaterials. ("Those evil sexists need to be mined! For great equality!")

TL;DR: Once the price of human labor drops to sub-zero levels due to political appeasement via inflation to counter "good-enough" drones, it will be more profitable to crush human organization than promote it.

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#47
post #28

> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). https://m.uber.com/ doesn't require the app to be installed.

install != run.

Using that mobile site still requires one to run non-free Javascript, which RMS also has a problem with.

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#48
One of RMS's points is that Uber exploits its drivers by paying them low wages. I've taken several Ubers in the past month. The drivers tell me that they get 80% of the cost of the ride. One guy said that his previous company took 60%. I also met a student who said that he liked being able to work the part time hours.

Re: “Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

#49

I agree that the government shouldn't have pervasive access to the records, but I WANT Uber to track my rides. That's how I can have recourse if a driver takes me for a spin. I WANT my driver to be identified and for them to track who picks me up. He claims that it's troublesome for a female passenger to be identifiable to a driver. How about if you're a female (or male) driver driving in your spare time? Would she n…

Granted there are several items that ... detract from the point, but there are some real problems here and I don't think it does them justice to gloss over them because of some errant points at the beginning.

We don't see eye to eye on the identification issue, but even if we put that one issue aside I can't agree that the list of complaints doesn't hold water for me personally.

Executives stalking passengers and trolling through passenger ride data to ferret out alarming narratives crosses a line in my opinion. This starts to get into discussions of which data belongs to whom, which is a discussion that I don't think has been had yet, and I don't like the assertion of ownership over my data that many companies are making.

We agree that part of building sharing apps is building trust and accountability, but I disagree that Uber has done a good job of earning our trust or demonstrating accountability.

Edit: changed some loaded phrasing

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