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SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

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Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#91

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jakobegger wrote: post #55
jimmaswell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've stayed in AirBnB's. The only way any other tenants would even know I was there was that I was taking up a parking spot. Someone would have been insane to be mad about my being there, yes.

The problem is that investors buy up cheap apartments and put them on AirBnB to make insane profits. This drives up prices for locals. The other tenants are mad because landlords prefer renting apartments to tourists for 5k a month instead of renting to locals for 1k a month.

> The other tenants are mad because landlords prefer renting apartments to tourists for 5k a month instead of renting to locals for 1k a month.

If this is happening it's because your city has a massive shortage of short-term rental properties. If you can make $5k a month then people should be building those properties left and right since it's so profitable -- but what most likely happened is that your city passed rules effectively prohibiting that construction, so now there's an arbitrage opportunity by converting long-term rentals to short-term rentals.

You should direct your anger at your local government for doing nothing to address the high short-term rental demand, because if they did then that wouldn't happen. And the same rules tend to restrict the availability of long-term rentals as well, which means that they were causing your rent to be higher than necessary even before people started converting neighboring units.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#92

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

rolltiide wrote: post #46
argonaut wrote: post #15

Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying. But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior. That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech…

People that defer too much respect to the state are at a disadvantage. What I mean by that is that some people will conclude "well that's the law! so don't break it" as opposed to looking at the consequences or seeing the relativity of the law, or the influence you can have on the law. Many laws don't have a consequence. Many laws were written by your rival. Many laws have consequences that have nothing to do with cl…

Yeah, and I got a $200 ticket a few days ago for going over the speed limit while avoiding a nighttime crash recently.

Disagreeing with why you got a ticket doesn't matter once it's written.

Breaking a law doesn't matter until it does, and then it can hurt quite a bit- that ticket cut into my Christmas present money. Similarly, breaking laws with you company can impact your bottom line, and your credibility.

I'm still going to enjoy the accelerator, but I have learned not to do stupid stuff when you can't see everything that's going on.

Same with laws, and car parts- if you don't know why they're there, you oughtn't break / remove them.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#93

Post by marcinzm »

xvector wrote: post #77
souterrain wrote: post #69

Forget for a moment that a bureaucracy is involved. If your company was bidding on a request for proposal (RFP) for a potential client, wouldn't you want to follow the customer's requirements? Often RFP teams use failure to follow directions or specifics in a proposal submission as an informal measure of the likelihood the respondent will fail to deliver on other requirements. I have worked for a company where I had…

I think this is ridiculous. Formality to the absurdist extreme. Any mildly competent human being would overlook the letters “A3” not being above a certain safety paragraph. If a robot were processing these applications then the error might be forgivable. But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human. I think the sort of person that would reject Skip’s application is some…

>But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human.

Except it doesn't. Then society labels the process as biased, unfair, subject to the whims of the reviewer, open to corruption, and so on. One of the down voted comments jumped right to bribery for example.

Bureaucracy is this way not because it has to be but because society actually wants it to be.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#94

Post by zozbot234 »

jakobegger wrote: post #55
jimmaswell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've stayed in AirBnB's. The only way any other tenants would even know I was there was that I was taking up a parking spot. Someone would have been insane to be mad about my being there, yes.

The problem is that investors buy up cheap apartments and put them on AirBnB to make insane profits. This drives up prices for locals. The other tenants are mad because landlords prefer renting apartments to tourists for 5k a month instead of renting to locals for 1k a month.

> This drives prices up for locals.

Yes, so what? Why should a tourist be forced to pay more than a "local" (who might nonetheless move out of town at a moment's notice) for what boils down to the exact same service?

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#95

Post by jseliger »

souterrain wrote: post #69

Forget for a moment that a bureaucracy is involved. If your company was bidding on a request for proposal (RFP) for a potential client, wouldn't you want to follow the customer's requirements? Often RFP teams use failure to follow directions or specifics in a proposal submission as an informal measure of the likelihood the respondent will fail to deliver on other requirements. I have worked for a company where I had…

I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses, and we endlessly tell clients to follow all RFP requirements religiously and precisely. See https://seliger.com/2008/02/25/what-does-a-grant-proposal-lo... for example:

Read the RFP carefully for formatting instructions and follow them precisely. For example, if the RFP says the proposal is to be double spaced, and does not make an exception for tables, double space all tables, no matter how silly this looks. The Department of Education, for example, will often reject proposals for non-compliance for just such nitpicking instructions.

We've seen innumerable proposals rejected for slight page limit violations, font violations, and similar minutia. Is this bullshit? Maybe. But if a funder is looking for reasons to reject you, and some are, try to give them as few reasons as possible.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#97

Post by Consultant32452 »

mikojan wrote: post #72
Consultant32452 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Uber is contributing to traffic jams Who are you trying to alleviate traffic jams for? Which group of people do you think has a greater right to traffic free car travel?

Traffic jams are bad for the environment because in general acceleration is more costly than constant speed. This is about every bodies right to clean air and a world permitting organized human life.

Right, and in order to get to this new better world with cleaner air and less stop and go traffic, who will be granted the special driving right and who will get denied? Please be as specific as possible. I want to know if I'm getting to drive on the traffic free roads or if I'll be stuck in public transportation with the peasants. This will impact my vote.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#98

Post by xvector »

marcinzm wrote: post #93
xvector wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is ridiculous. Formality to the absurdist extreme. Any mildly competent human being would overlook the letters “A3” not being above a certain safety paragraph. If a robot were processing these applications then the error might be forgivable. But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human. I think the sort of person that would reject Skip’s application is some…

>But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human. Except it doesn't. Then society labels the process as biased, unfair, subject to the whims of the reviewer, open to corruption, and so on. One of the down voted comments jumped right to bribery for example. Bureaucracy is this way not because it has to be but because society actually wants it to be.

I really think that no one would judge a reviewer for adding a heading where it needed to be. This is trivial, there isn’t really a political connotation here.

If a reviewer cannot do something trivial like this, then we don’t need them anyways. If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated, just run the application through a software that checks for word count and header presence and call it a day, and use those tax dollars towards a cause that would actually benefit society.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#100

Post by kd5bjo »

randomsearch wrote: post #76
kd5bjo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who is down voting this? It is correct. Simply being correct is not the only criterion for a comment being a positive contribution to the conversation. The comment also needs to relate its new information to the topic at hand. At a guess¹, the unsupported assertion that AirBnB and Uber have been disasters is the major problem with the comment, in addition to the fact that they are not the primary subject of the conv…

> the unsupported assertion that AirBnB and Uber have been disasters ...quick examples, just grabbed these articles but they're representative of the problems Airbnb has caused people and cities I have first-hand experience of: > Uber has been stripped of its London licence after authorities found that more than 14,000 trips were taken with drivers who had faked their identity on the firm’s app. > TfL said on Monday…

I didn’t mean to imply that your assertion was unsupportable, but rather to draw attention to the fact you didn’t provide any justification for it. Had you referred to one or two of these in your original comment, it would have gone a long way. Especially so if you had explicitly drawn a connection between your chosen examples and failed regulations or bureaucracy, which would have tied it into the wider conversation by an additional thread than argonaut’s name-dropping.
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