Heh, from the sounds of things it’s more likely the Waymo would have simply driven to their actual destination. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44281694
these tales are generally the apocryphal dreams of suburbanites. the uber driver would have pulled a gun on you? i’m sorry but i grew up in urban America, nobody is mugging people under an account tied to their name/DL
I grew up in substantially more dangerous environs than urban America.
It's entirely possible to live quite safely, in urban US areas, but the opposite is also true, and those folks are the ones that like people that live in the bubbles.
Whether one cares depends very strongly on what "retaliation" means. If they ban your account, not a big deal - you were getting bad service and didn't want to do business with them anyway. If they send an armed hit squad to kill you, that would be worth being concerned about though.
I "purchased" a digital game once on the PlayStation Store. It wasn't clear from the description that it was completely useless without an active subscription to PSN, so I tried to return it. They said no way, sales are final and you've already launched the game. I did a chargeback, and they basically locked down my account until I filed a support ticket and had to lie, saying someone else made a purchase on my accou…
If they don't want you as a customer, it's not wise to fight them on that.
What makes you think this? It was flagged by users. No moderators had touched it, or seen it.
Flagging is one thing, but I assume that there is a human in the loop before a user is put in the dead state.
There isn't. Almost everything you see that's killed has been put into that state without any moderator action. We review the ones we have time to review but that can be hours or days later, and we don't get to them all because there are so many (though users can vouch them or email us to bring anything to our attention to be reviewed).
Further, even if we leave something dead, it's no indication of any "agreement" or "endorsement" of anything. We're not here to promote any editorial line. All we care about is whether a comment is within the guidelines:
Same here. To alter-quote The Simpsons, "My eyes! The classes do nothing!" Shortly after pandemic, I noticed "corridor fees" on vastly different routes which, mysteriously, bumped-up the price by the same percentage across each route--but only after the ride had completed. The price I was quoted was not remotely close to the price I was charged. I did the customer service messaging thing. The first time, they removed…
As much as I love to hate on Uber and Lyft, tacked on fees like this are often due to state / federal government, and the rideshare service hands are tied. Uber tags on a very long list of random fees when I Uber out of SFO, but when I investigated them, they were all random taxes from the city / state. If they want to jack up the prices they can just increase them - they don't need to add random fees.
My core concern was the amount charged differed greatly than the amount quoted by not by any intra-route traffic or temporary circumstance, and it was the same percentage across all three rides. This also occurred in 3 different parts of the U.S. during the same few months.
Additionally, these municipal fees are fixed so if that were the case, Uber would know about them in advance, be label them as such, and/or fold them into the quoted price.
Obviously the opposite. Competition keeps prices low and quality high. "Publicly-owned" would be expensive and low quality, and would make the people running the operation filthy rich. Non-profit would mean that whoever is running it would increase their salaries until there's no profit. There would be no reason to lower prices or increase quality, if competition is non-existent.
> "Publicly-owned" would be expensive and low quality, and would make the people running the operation filthy rich. By publicly owned, I mean “owned by the public”, not “owned by a publicly traded company” (which is, ironically, private property). You’re thinking the latter, which counts as corporate-owned. I used a bad choice of words. In most of the world “public owned” means the former, whereas in the US it means…
No, I really did mean "owned by the public". Which means that the company is actually 100% owned by the state and they would have a monopoly, assuming that you'd want to ban commercial operators. This is the usual interpretation of "public ownership".
This would be extremely bad compared to a situation where there's a dozen of companies competing in the same market.
Let's retain a sense of proportion here; it was $3.
IMO it's attitudes like this that allow companies to continue ripping us all off for small amounts here and small amounts there. They know it's a small amount and most people won't push back, so they keep getting away with it. I suppose the only thing that stops me from hitting the nuclear button every time this happens is that there are a limited number of companies offering many categories of services, and I'd even…
> IMO it's attitudes like this that allow companies to continue ripping us all off for small amounts here and small amounts there
I'm not asking for inaction, but for a response proportionate to the injury. If you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for a service and they make what may be a $3 mistake, is it worth it to you to burn the service immediately?
People are excited by driverless cars but it also means a car with no social barriers and no person who considers the cars condition important. For now they’re well surveilled and a premium vehicle. Soon they will be filthy pods in a race to the bottom with all the charm of a public bathroom. They’ll be cheap, but you’ll get what you pay for. Private driverless cars will be the premium alternative.
Why do you assume the surveillance will go away as they become cheaper? The taxi company know who is in their car and they have access to interior cameras if something happens. In many respects, it is going to be even more difficult to take a dump in one and get away with it than if a human was driving it. They have your credit card number and visual evidence of what you did, they will just charge your card automatic…
I assume it’ll become less manned and less action taken because manning and taking action costs money, reduces margin, and removes cars from circulation. Certainly for crimes they’ll go after you. But leaving litter, spilling stuff, even leaving bodily fluids, I suspect will get through the cracks more and more as margins compress.
Because if they ever become super popular, it will be prohibitively expensive to actually police all the surveillance. Likely to store / process it all. AI does an alright job summarizing videos today (Gemini Flash) but it has to get a lot better if they're going to actually police at scale.
it's actually pretty easy to automate the state of the vehicle. if anything is left in the car the video is sent to an operator. The service instructs a cleaner to check the car and the passenger is sent a warning and eventually is banned from using the service.
And when margins compress the first thing that will go is the threshold for cleaning. Cleaning is not just expensive in labor but also taking a car out of circulation. All incentives point towards lowering standards to the absolute minimum people will tolerate.
Reading the comments here, the experiences people are sharing feels out-of-world since I live in Tokyo and it's unthinkable to have a bad experience in a Taxi/Shareride like that. They've always been very professional, the highest quality I could expect. Cars always clean, driver always polite, etc. Sure, there WILL be some edge case out there, but I've ridden taxis and Uber many times here and not a single odd exper…
I live in Japan outside of Tokyo and over COVID about a quarter of the taxi drivers retired/quit the business, now on a weekend it can be impossible to get a cab at all. Waymo would be a godsend here!
> For now they’re well surveilled and a premium vehicle. Soon they will be filthy pods in a race to the bottom with all the charm of a public bathroom. So, like transit? I will likely have my own personal self-driving vehicle. And I'm 100% sure that there'll be an upmarket segment with slightly more expensive cars that are kept more clean than the rest.
> I will likely have my own personal self-driving vehicle. The self-driving car ”utopia” (or rather moderate improvement) very much hinges on the space savings on roadways and parking, to increase utilization, reduce congestion and allow dead space to be reclaimed. If people think like you (no value judgment, I suspect this might be the future norm), then you’ll see almost no change to the urban landscape as a whole.…
Actually this is untrue. The congestion improvement comes from cooperation between vehicles. Basic control theory applied to cooperative vehicles found 5% of cars participating can eliminate stop and go traffic conditions, and in general as you approach 100% penetration all traffic moves at maximum rate effectively like a self assembling mass transit system. Only if you effectively replaced human drivers as adversarial agents with AI adversarial agents would things stay the same. Even at lower levels of 30% penetration you see most congestion resolve even in urban roads.