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

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

#81

Post by jsprogrammer »

gnaritas wrote: post #55
rando3826 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, that's not what he said. Secondly, lots of smart people have been talking about the need for basic income when robots take over large portions of the labor force. I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy.

> I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy. Why? It's quite inevitable that it will, unlike all previous eras, there won't be new jobs for humans because it's human thinking that's going to be automated. Robots destroy jobs, that's a fact; sometimes, that creates new jobs, but it's usually always far less jobs for far more skilled humans and that pattern is and must…

Why are the 'masses' not capable of knowledge jobs?

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

#82

Post by Igglyboo »

michaelvkpdx wrote: post #53

"Then what will you do, if you don't want to tell Big Brother where you are going?" RMS is right on again, as always. The problem is that the younger generation wants Big Brother to know everything, and that is sad and scary. One need look no further than the comments on this thread for proof. We are not teaching our children the value of humanity, and the way that privacy creates a sense of self. "Self" is now what…

>Even the term "Big Brother". It's from George Orwell's book "1984". I wonder how many younger programmers would know that.

Probably most of them. 1984 is required reading in many highschools in america.

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

#83

Post by jpatokal »

johnloeber wrote: post #37
blhack wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More marketable" is how you end up compromising on your ideals. Stallman is nuts, but he is an extremely important type of nuts. The world needs more people like him.

On that note, can you think of more people quite like RMS? In other fields, perhaps?

Plenty of political prisoners fit the bill. Here's one guy who spent 23 years in prison in Singapore because he refused to sign a statement renouncing violence -- not being he likes violence, but because that would have implied he supported violence earlier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Thye_Poh

On release into house arrest, he refused a government job because that would have "muzzled" him. 32 years aftert his initial arrest, all restrictions were finally lifted -- and the first thing he did was call for the abolition of the act used to arrest him.

Also Mandela, Gandhi, etc.

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

#84

Post by eltondegeneres »

I'm not a fan of Uber either, but there is an unofficial python client out there.[1] If you've already made an Uber account and have issues with running nonfree software, but not sketchy business practices, you can still use Uber through the terminal.

[1]: https://github.com/tals/uber.py

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

#85

Post by chroma »

smacktoward wrote: post #67
chroma wrote: post #57

Stallman isn't quite right on a few points. For example, you can summon an Uber via SMS or a mobile site. No app or smartphone required. But let's address the core of his argument instead of nitpicking. Yes, Uber's behavior has been pretty unethical. They track customers and drivers. They mine their data to figure out who had one-night stands. They shirk regulations so they can expand quickly. But all of those points…

> If you want to sink Uber, the activism route is not effective. "If you want to sink Big Tobacco, the activism route is not effective." "If you want to sink child labor, the activism route is not effective." "If you want to sink slavery, the activism route is not effective." &etc. Your fatalism is unwarranted. There's plenty of examples in history of people making real, substantial change in society via activism. Mo…

RMS isn't calling for Uber to be outlawed. He's calling for a boycott. I'm glad the problems you listed are much smaller than they used to be, but none of them were solved with grassroots boycotts. Many of them went away due to changes in economic conditions and an expanding moral sphere.

And I was being realistic, not fatalistic. There are countless examples of people engaging in immoral behavior for better quality of life. Here are a few:

- Eating meat. It's bad for the environment, not-that-great for one's health, and visits immense suffering upon animals. But bacon tastes good, so people rationalize their behavior.

- Driving a gas car. It pollutes the environment, aids immoral regimes such as Saudi Arabia, and contributes to climate change. But again, they're so convenient. Except for Tesla, electric cars are slow, small, and short range. The reason Tesla is an exception is because Elon Musk recognizes that, in order to be successful, electric cars must be better than gas cars.

- Pirating content. Piracy deprives artists of income and violates the principles of contract law. If you don't like the cost or terms, then don't consume the content.

- Not conserving resources (electricity, water, etc).

Some individuals do some of these things, but never civilization as a whole. At the macro scale, this sort of activism is a rounding error.

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

#86

Post by jpatokal »

diminoten wrote: post #75
lambda wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no. You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your information in a database that can be used against you later. While I don't agree with all of his reasoning here, he is correct that taxis offer you substantially more privacy than Uber, and Uber has been known to abuse the data they collect on passengers in several instances, so it's far more than just a theoretical concern.

> You can hail a taxi by hand, and pay with cash, and no one will have your information in a database that can be used against you later. No you can't. Plenty of taxis record the backseats of their cars, and you have no way of knowing which do/don't. Taxis don't offer you enough privacy over Uber, and the reason he's coming after Uber is because he wants to stay relevant, not because Uber is particularly bad.

But if you pay by cash, there's no easy way to match that recording to you.

Also, I'm pretty sure RMS doesn't give a fig about "relevance". He's just applying his principles to the world as he sees it, and he's been doing this literally for decades:

https://stallman.org/~rms/archives/index.html

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

#87

Post by macspoofing »

>Uber requires you to identify yourself, both to order a cab and to pay.

Yeah. If you deal with money, there is no other way to build a business. Right or wrong, you just can't anonymize financial transactions.

>Uber's clever policy of not being directly responsible for anything that goes wrong extends to harassment by drivers, and its practice of identifying passengers enables drivers to find out who the passenger is.

That's a good point. I don't think it would hold up in court if something were to happen (e.g. driver robs or kills a passenger).

>Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers.

If Uber doesn't do it, somebody else will. Can't stop progress.

The privacy issues that he raises in other points are pretty good as well.

On a separate matter, though I was never a FSF zealot it pains me to see how irrelevant the FSF and Stallman became this decade.

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

#89

Post by smacktoward »

larrys wrote: post #70
cjbprime wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be more skeptical when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs, especially given the presence of numerous press articles quoting many dissatisfied Uber drivers. There's a significant chance that they are telling you they love their jobs because if they told you they hate Uber and feel trapped by it, you would give them a bad rating and they would get fired.

"when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs" Parent comment doesn't say the drivers said "love" and the comments made don't appear to be over the top in any way. Also you are discounting the parent commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting emotion. (Not saying you aren't right to be skeptical as you raised a valid point).

The point is that taxi driving is a service industry, and nobody makes money in a service job by appearing unhappy or bitter. Customers come back more often and tip better if you seem cheerful, not if you confront them as cogs in a system that's screwing you. We want our baristas to be Manic Pixie Dream Girls, not overworked, underpaid people who resent our taking 15 minutes to decide what flavor syrup we want in our latte.

The result is what David Foster Wallace, in his classic essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_N...), called the "professional smile":

This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry... at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, and on and on. You know this smile-the one that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee...

Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?

And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who's ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker's scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile.

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

#90

Post by waterlesscloud »

macspoofing wrote: post #87

>Uber requires you to identify yourself, both to order a cab and to pay. Yeah. If you deal with money, there is no other way to build a business. Right or wrong, you just can't anonymize financial transactions. >Uber's clever policy of not being directly responsible for anything that goes wrong extends to harassment by drivers, and its practice of identifying passengers enables drivers to find out who the passenger i…

I make regular financial transactions all the time with people who have not the slightest clue what my name is.
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