Earlier quoted context omitted.
>, can you elaborate on this? Not the person you were replying to but sexual harassment or just creepiness is a common one here in Indianapolis. This year alone: - one friend had an Uber driver offer her perfume when she took an Uber home which creeped her out - A co-worker driving Uber on the side had a couple invite her into their home offering her use of their hot tub and telling her that she could borrow clothes…
Anecdata: information or evidence that is based on personal experience or observation rather than systematic research or analysis.
Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
471–480 of 520 posts
Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
>, can you elaborate on this? Not the person you were replying to but sexual harassment or just creepiness is a common one here in Indianapolis. This year alone: - one friend had an Uber driver offer her perfume when she took an Uber home which creeped her out - A co-worker driving Uber on the side had a couple invite her into their home offering her use of their hot tub and telling her that she could borrow clothes…
wow, not sure if you just had a lot of bad luck or what... I downloaded both Uber and Lyft, signed up for them just to check them out, but not in this area... but useful if I ever traveled somewhere. Which at some point I'd like to be able to go on a solo trip a year. I heard bad things about Uber though in the news, but not sure how much it differs since i'm sure Taxi drivers do bad things too... but I think since U…
The crowd was INSANE. It was effectively crotch to butt for a block or more in some spots with no movement at times and the collective body heat actually making it difficult to breathe on the street that had the barricades, then you'd duck down a street going the opposite direction and it was much more sane. I landed I guess as the parade was starting, by the time I actually got to my room the last few floats were passing by outside it.
Just apically bad timing/bad planning on the assistant that booked my room and flight (to be fare when she asked how my trip was when she saw me before one of my meetings she admitted she hadn't even thought about the parade and apologized for not looking at the parade route and wher the hotel was.
If my plane had landed an hour later I imagine things would have been quite different as far as getting directions on how to get around the barricades (under the street as it happened to be).
>Also not sure if people running around Naked is normal, but maybe doing it just because of pride?
So my boss back here in Indy actually recognized the guy (on description alone, before showing the photo) from when they lived there for a few years before transferring back to our office. I guess it's just his thing and based on research when I returned apparently San Francisco allows public nudity via permit for events.
Not gonna lie, the naked guy made the whole trip. I followed him for several minutes just watching people's reactions and that woman in the photo, catching her looking down at his crotch and that expression was completely an accident, I wasn't even paying attention to the crowd.
Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry I confused the term. What’s a non taxi service called some times? “Black car”? In any case: being able to hail a taxi on the street doesn’t mean it can’t be useful to pre book one with an app too. I you want to go to the airport in the morning from a house where few taxis pass, that’s what you need to do. In the 90s that meant calling a phone number but these days you want to use an app, pre pay in the app and…
They're all called taxis for the most part. 'Black cab' specifically refers to the famous London cars that have a particular shape. I agree. Black cabs are hailed though, that's the point. You don't call a black cab, that's not how they work. That's what private hire (e.g. Uber) is for. WRT buses: almost everywhere in the UK is request stop, or at least I wouldn't rely on just expecting the driver to guess. There mig…
Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
The affordability is only one thing that draws people to Uber. The convenience of the app and the fact that the fare is prepaid (and therefore there is no incentive for the driver to fuck around to inflate their fare) are imho at least as important. If the fare is known in advance I can make an informed decision about whether I can afford this ride. Taking a normal taxi is just always a gamble: will they try to win m…
In London, for decades there have been competing services to the black cabs: minicabs. They had to be booked in advance (by phone, but that translates easily to booking by app), and the price had to be agreed in advance. From my understanding, this might be called "limousine service" in the USA, although unless you make a special request it will just be a fairly normal car. Mobile phones and then apps made the border…
Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not conflate Uber with ride sharing/app-taxi in general. Uber wasn't the first company of its type, it's only the one that became most known. It also wasn't like all the other ride share companies, it was well-known for utter disregard for laws and deeply sociopathic management. And it's not like this behavior was necessary to bring in all the innovation; disruption of the taxi space by private companies was ha…
Very interesting, I sense you're right. Got examples?
Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're all called taxis for the most part. 'Black cab' specifically refers to the famous London cars that have a particular shape. I agree. Black cabs are hailed though, that's the point. You don't call a black cab, that's not how they work. That's what private hire (e.g. Uber) is for. WRT buses: almost everywhere in the UK is request stop, or at least I wouldn't rely on just expecting the driver to guess. There mig…
It just seems extremely inefficient to not be able to pre-book a black cab too? If they get a ride to a suburb where they are unlikely to get a return ride, they must drive empty back into the city to get another ride? A good dispatcher would ensure they just pick up a customer nearby after dropping one off?
You should think of black cabs as vehicles for the wealthy to potter around Central London avoiding public transport, or for tourists to get mugged.
The average Londoner doesn't really use them.
Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not conflate Uber with ride sharing/app-taxi in general. Uber wasn't the first company of its type, it's only the one that became most known. It also wasn't like all the other ride share companies, it was well-known for utter disregard for laws and deeply sociopathic management. And it's not like this behavior was necessary to bring in all the innovation; disruption of the taxi space by private companies was ha…
And the mafia connected taxi regime isn't sociopathic? The government granted a cap on drivers to guarantee its buddies got to earn a lot of money off the backs of taxi drivers. Here in NYC, drivers rent a medallion to be allowed to drive. They start off the day in the hole. If we're going to judge Uber for breaking this monopoly, let's also turn that same critical eye on the monopoly it broke.
That's quite an accusation (going from "taxi mafia" to taxis connected to actual mafia), though I suppose it's true in some parts of the world.
Either way, sure, plenty of cities had their taxi services thoroughly broken. However, that doesn't justify fighting the bad with the worse. Despite the PR narrative they pushed, Uber wasn't some tiny upstart bravely fighting against the great taxi mafia - it was a VC backed corporation (later on, a multinational) fighting individual taxi networks in a divide-and-conquer fashion. And when I call Uber sociopathic, I don't just mean I don't like them - this particular company has a long documented history of antisocial behavior.
> If we're going to judge Uber for breaking this monopoly, let's also turn that same critical eye on the monopoly it broke.
Again, multinational corporation breaking city after city, in isolation? Also, I'm not judging Uber for being a monopoly. I'm judging them for being a morally bankrupt company that achieved market domination by breaking the law and only got away with it because they moved fast and burned through lots of investor money.
Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I'm always amazed at how quickly people crap on Uber. In hindsight it's not a particularly revolutionary service. But does everyone remember how much the Taxi system sucked?
London has had 10,000's of mini-cabs for decades that served a big chunk of this non-Black cab market. They weren't perfect but they were cheap, pretty ubiquitous and served most (if not all) of the spaces left in the market by black cabs. So Uber as a service hasn't been that revolutionary in London, the things they HAVE done is improve the ordering UX and making CC's ubiquitous.
Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's indeed so hard to find a good Uber driver, you'd expect them to be driven out of the market by customers themselves. And if they compensate for that by eg. lower price, then how is it different from any other market. You want premium quality, you pay extra - you're fine with compromising on it, you go for the cheaper option.
>If it's indeed so hard to find a good Uber driver, you'd expect them to be driven out of the market by customers themselves. I doubt that there are many Uber drivers that do it long term. Eventually at some point they have to realize that they're making peanuts (if not operating at a loss) after they factor in routine AND long-term maintenance costs of their vehicle. Or they simply get 'real' jobs and were using Ube…
It is human to not do a shit job perfectly all the time and I won’t make their day any shitier, just because they hurt my sensitive soul by not treating me like a member of the royal family.
I’d rather blame the systems that organize their days.
Re: Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's indeed so hard to find a good Uber driver, you'd expect them to be driven out of the market by customers themselves. And if they compensate for that by eg. lower price, then how is it different from any other market. You want premium quality, you pay extra - you're fine with compromising on it, you go for the cheaper option.
The market is skewed as Uber runs huge losses and is operating at a loss, that's how it's different to other markets. Also, Uber are paying under the minimum wage in the UK, or at least the regional minimum living wage in London. Uber don't pay taxes in the UK like a London minicab company would, then they underpay their drivers and expect our welfare system to pick up the slack on their crummy wages. Minimum wages s…
According to Q3 financials, I believe that is longer true for ridesharing.