Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

stallman.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 150 posts

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

#91

Post by MichaelGG »

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…

Financial transactions don't require ID. Cash, alternative currencies (not that BTC is anonymous), or prepaid credit cards all work.

The anti-progress-cause-jobs is silly and makes RMS look bad and hypocritical.

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

#92

Post by MichaelGG »

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…

Financial transactions don't require ID. Cash, alternative currencies (not that BTC is anonymous), or prepaid credit cards all work.

The anti-progress-cause-jobs is silly and makes RMS look bad and hypocritical. Of course, adding in crazy claims is part of the RMS marketing MO.

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

#93

Post by arihant »

A hole in RMS' line of thinking is this - he extends only one end of the argument, the end which says Uber will massively grow. He doesn't acknowledge the fact that there will undeniably be other competitors to Uber, a bunch of them might end up being free software. If history has taught us anything, somebody somewhere always tries to copy every closed source project in the name of freedom and open source. Why does RMS think this would be any different?

Also, he mentions only bad side of oversight. Even with such oversight, there are rape cases, mugging and other crimes done by Uber drivers. Without tracking, how does he propose he will solve the problem? Maybe he should protest for no oversight when his own daughter takes a GNU/Cab. Why mock what you don't understand? Contrary to RMS standard belief, the invisible hand in the world is not stupid, people put up with what he calls "sins" because there is an offsetting value they are receiving.

Uber in current world is equivalent of someone entering the room, trying to find a light switch, not knowing what we will find. RMS' complaint is that he is vegan and the guy finding the light bulb is wearing leather shoes.

And Uber does have competitors, and they are solving points he mentioned. In India, Ola is one competitor that allows cash, and allows anonymous bookings via a call centre that does not require me even telling my name. But even Ola knows it wouldn't exist without Uber in this world.

Why shoot the guy who is trying to push the envelope?

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

#94

Post by macspoofing »

onedev wrote: post #61
chippy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you book Uber cars using their website on your desktop?

Yes you can. I've done it when my phone was dead and I had forgotten my charging cable at work.

Simply running a web-app on desktop wouldn't satisfy Stallman. He'd want the entire stack to be open-source (front-end and back-end code).

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

#95

Post by macspoofing »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #90
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.

Cash? I'm not sure you can make an online business without disclosing some data about yourself.

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

#96

Post by macspoofing »

mb0 wrote: post #18

Couldn't it also be argued that the GNU limits user freedom by requiring users never use non-free software?

There's the rub. It all depends on how you define 'free'. Under the FSF definition, it isn't. They would (maybe) argue that this isn't a valid definition of 'free' because it would be like saying you're not 'free' unless you have the right to subjugate your neighbor.

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

#98

Post by macspoofing »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #69
click170 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tro…

The first half of the post is RMS's usual loaded rant on what 'freedom' means. He's a weird brand of anarchocommunist, and axiomatically doesn't believe in running any code that you can't see the source to and haven't compiled yourself. That sets him up to start off most of his rants that might otherwise have a point with a bunch of bullshit that we've all seen and laughed at before.

I like him around just because he expands the Overton window. In the last 10 years the conversion around proprietary (which includes web and mobile apps) vs. open-source software has really taken a back-seat.

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

#99

Post by macspoofing »

enoch_r wrote: post #40

> It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). As always, a nonfree program tramples its users' freedom. > 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. Which is a bigger case of "trampling freedom": v…

Good point. I'd guess Stallman would lean towards the former. His politics are leftist/socialist/anarchocommunist.

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

#100

Post by delucain »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #81
gnaritas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Currently, they certainly are not. Our education systems (non-higher education) are largely designed to produce good workers for a manufacturing/labor economy that we're (relatively) quickly automating out of existence. And our higher education systems are being "dumbed down" to handle the influx of students not capable of handling the old curriculum.

Anecdotally, most of my extended family couldn't write a line of code if their lives depended on it; nor could they design a serious science experiment or write a novel. They aren't trained for those things, and that training has to start young or come with serious motivation, time, and effort. Not one of those people have any interest in learning those things.

I think it's possible to have a knowledge based economy, but we would have to drastically redesign our education systems and our culture in ways that I find it hard to even imagine how we would do so.

But, I think it's only a matter of time before we gain more skill in writing programs that automate out even the most complex knowledge based jobs. Watson is already showing the potential to be a better doctor than any human. The program named "Emily Howell" can already write symphonies that pass whatever the musical version of the Turing Test is. How long before we apply those things to all the other knowledge based jobs? What'll be left? More automation and maintenance programmers? How many of those will we even need?

Post reply on HN