11–20 of 70 posts
This article is stupid, Uber was not caught unawares and has been in repeated violation of several requirements for operating in London. This isn't the end of some libertarian utopian dream of innovation, but rather uber's continued blatant disregard of local laws.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, I have no idea how they have any customers with all the bad press they get. The goal is to kill the competition and treat their drivers and customers like crap in doing so.
They treat their customers very well, that's why they've been so successful.
This article is stupid, Uber was not caught unawares and has been in repeated violation of several requirements for operating in London. This isn't the end of some libertarian utopian dream of innovation, but rather uber's continued blatant disregard of local laws.
It's not really stupid if you realize it's very likely an Uber PR piece masquerading as an article :). In that sense, it makes quite a bit of sense!
I find it interesting that the article fails to mention the reason behind the bans. Perhaps they expect us to already know that it's due to problems with driver background checks. (correct me if I'm wrong) Then again, if the argument is that in a pure libertarian system consumers would drive out bad actors like this, I'm not sure that this line of thinking would hold. The convenience of a cheap ride would seem to be…
Black cabs are fairly expensive and mostly driven by white people (which is not the case for private hire vehicles: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/taxi-and-phv-demographic-stats.pdf)
People won't help feeling that this is a "Let's keep our good old ways and our white boys happy" move.
The article is right in saying that this general cultural shift to the right will definitely deter some foreigners from setting businesses in the UK.
This same argument was made when Austin required fingerprinting for drivers and Uber and Lyft left. What happened? Their was a flourishing of new ride share companies, including a local nonprofit, RideAustin. Yes, at first, these apps were nowhere near the level of Uber/Lyft, but they quickly improved, especially RideAustin. The prices were slightly higher, but it seemed those prices reflected the actual cost of the…
Is an outright ban "anti-innovation"? You can't do sensible regulation once you've banned entrants in favour of the taxis.
This same argument was made when Austin required fingerprinting for drivers and Uber and Lyft left. What happened? Their was a flourishing of new ride share companies, including a local nonprofit, RideAustin. Yes, at first, these apps were nowhere near the level of Uber/Lyft, but they quickly improved, especially RideAustin. The prices were slightly higher, but it seemed those prices reflected the actual cost of the…
This isn't sensible regulation. This is an outright ban, which is a whole different ball of wax. Is an outright ban "anti-innovation"? You can't do sensible regulation once you've banned entrants in favour of the taxis.
Brexit is UK's "Donald Trump": a manifestation of projected socioeconomic angst in a self-defeating manner that doesn't address inequality at the policy level. It's like suggesting California secede: good luck with trade policies, printing a currency, forming a military and so on. It's civilizational "reorg" churn that accomplishes nothing, eg, mob nonsense. If people collectively possessed integrity and moral courage, they would directly call out what they felt was inequity instead of scapegoating this group, that trade arrangement or a startup.