Hacker News Reader

I thought it was a great example. Reading it made me feel guilty, and it made me want to make accommodations for these people in our theoretical babysitting-as-a-service app.

But that doesn't make it any more feasible, possible, or even safe. We're talking about special needs that will be difficult or impossible for a non-targeted service to adequately meet. It would be better for a different service to specialize in this, as our theoretical service is likely woefully ill-equipped to handle the vetting of caregivers for the developmentally disabled (among other problems outside the original problem domain). I'd even be tempted to argue that attempting to address these problems simply for the sake of soothing guilt and/or avoiding lawsuits would be immoral itself.

Whether or not there should be legislation to cover issues like this is another discussion. (Maybe there should be! If AirBnB manages to kill off hotels in a few spots it would make for some very interesting discussion.) But I don't think this theoretical babysitting app is a good candidate to be targeted by such legislation, and I think it's a little silly to damn this example... There's other help and services out there specifically for the developmentally disabled, and nobody expects every babysitter or daycare to be able to handle the developmentally disabled either. Calm down.

This is a good point. Same with Uber. Most Cab companies are required to provide access to wheelchair bound and disabled members of society at no extra charge. Not sure if Uber has the same requirement - and if and when it starts moving cab's out of business it will definitely prove to be a problem.

> Not sure if Uber has the same requirement

It doesn't. I've a friend (who might be popping on this thread here soon) who's been working with adapt.org on pressuring Uber on this issue.

In theory, ridesharing should be much better for PWD than trying to hail a cab and cheaper than government services like the MBTA's The Ride. However it very much does not look like it is the case right now.

Uber has wheelchair vehicles at the same price as UberX: https://newsroom.uber.com/canada/uberwav/

Oh wait they are rolling that out? I had thought they were just doing a perfunctory trial run in philly that they then cancelled. Huzzah!

A new "Access" option containing UberWAV appeared in my Uber app today in san francisco, with a popup telling me about it. So I guess it just rolled out to SF.

It looks like UberWAV in NYC provides app-based access to the existing fleet of wheelchair-accessible taxis: Uber will find a taxi and dispatch it to where you are, and you pay taxi fare. That technically works (assuming the dispatched taxi shows up), but I'm not really sure it should count, especially because Uber's obvious goal is competing with taxis and driving them out of business.

> not really sure it should count

If the discussion is around "is a wheelchair user able to hail a car and get moved A->B?" Why shouldn't it count?

I suppose they it means that they aren't uprooting the medallion system in that corner of the economy, but that political goal shouldn't block providing access to wheelchair users. Plus, if we want WAVs to be able to operate medallionless, that can be more easily achieved through lobbying by activists who are upset about the higher costs. Uber can just funnel money to them.

> assuming the dispatched taxi shows up

I know there an issue with reliability of wheelchair repair appointments, but I'll admit myself ignorant of the current state of WAV hailing.

Is that only in Canada, though?

There's a few people with assistance dogs who get denied service by Uber.

Sometimes that's because the driver has an allergy, but often it's just because.

EDIT: here's one lawsuit from Arlington: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/bli...

Here's another from London: http://www.itv.com/news/london/2016-04-21/blind-woman-who-wa...

Note that London one has won repeated court cases for the exact same thing. Uber drivers keep refusing to take her and her dog; she takes them to court; she wins; she tries to get an Uber and the driver refuses to take the dog.

Here's a case that Uber settled for a couple of hundred thousand dollars: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-uber-really-thinks-abo...

Uber in New Zealand offers uberASSIST: https://newsroom.uber.com/new-zealand/uberassistnz/

Not sure if that's out of the kindness of their hearts, or because they've been made to do it by the govt.

Why is agreeing to help someone that you don't have the time, money or expertise to help a good thing? Isn't it extremely misleading to tell someone you'll help them when you can't deliver? Isn't it more responsible to direct that person to someone who does have the expertise to help?

(edit: There's an assumption here that because one company can't help, that none can. Should we make this assumption?)

I agree with your concerns as a whole, but maybe not your analysis of the accommodation. If the startup is merely a platform for connecting babysitters and parents, babysitters could choose whom they want to babysit. A babysitter who was not qualified to deal with a developmentally challenged kid or infant should not have to, and probably shouldn't.

Hmmm. That idea is definitely appealing, but the "platform" argument has some serious negative side effects that I think the government should legitimately be able to regulate. What if babysitters of one race didn't want to sit babies of another race? Should they be forced to?

This isn't a hypothetical example—Airbnb has this exact problem.

> What if babysitters of one race didn't want to sit babies of another race? Should they be forced to?

I have a hard time seeing where you think this is a tricky question. Let's imagine a terrible person, so terrible that there are no moral issues with just making them do whatever we want.

We've got a racist white babysitter who hates black children. Fortunately, we know better than they do, so we're going to... shut black children up alone with them for long periods? What parents do you think want to hire babysitters who personally hate their children? Why would it be a good idea to facilitate that?

OK, maybe not babysitters in particular, but in general society seems to have decided that's the right thing to do. If you have a racist white chef, you force them to serve food to black people, even though they could poison it, spit in it, etc. If you have a racist white teacher, you force them to teach and discipline black schoolkids. If you have a racist white taxi driver, you shut black people alone with them in their car for long periods.

You're missing the option of "kick them off the platform entirely".

Now suppose the supermajority of babysitters are racist.

If they all leave the platform, it shuts down. Nobody gets a babysitter. If they all pretend not to be racist, you get black kids being looked after by closet racists.

It's not obvious to me that this is better than the situation where babysitters are allowed to be racist, and black people have more trouble finding a babysitter than white people. There are certainly arguments that it's better, but I don't think it's a slam-dunk either way.

Fortunately, we don't live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are racist. But we do live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are unable to accomodate developmentally-disabled teenagers.

We can shut down the babysitting service, or we can make the service pretend to acccomodate DD teenagers while failing to actually take care of them. I'm not convinced that "force babysitting services to actually successfully accomodate DD teenagers" is even an option.

> If they all leave the platform, it shuts down.

If a platform can only sustain itself on the business of strong racists, maybe it should reconsider if it's doing good in the world.

>Fortunately, we don't live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are racist. But we do live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are unable to accomodate developmentally-disabled teenagers.

Being racist is discrimination, while not wanting to handle DD teenagers is because it's a totally different sort of job. I mean, a 10 year old with dyslexia is still getting a babysitter here. Because that's not a very different babysitting experience.

The two situations don't make a good analogy because of that.

Installing a ramp at the entrance to a building or on the side of a cab is a one time fixed cost. I'm not saying I disagree but I am curious, are these examples of regulations requiring businesses take on significant ongoing costs in order to provide for groups that may otherwise be marginalized?

Examples that spring to mind:

* Businesses required to have someone on staff at all times who can communicate via sign language.

* Daycare companies required to have staff capable of caring for children with physical, sensory or mental disability.

I don't disagree with your overall point but it's important to point out that the example translates to the real world just fine. There's no requirement that a childcare facility be able to accommodate children with special needs. They must be accessible for the disabled (parking, ramps, etc.) but caring for someone with developmental disabilities requires different training, staffing and accommodations.

It is not just accessibility. It also happens with sizes of clothes. Companies aim for the easy 1-sigma chunk of the bell curve, and ignore a large chunk of statistical "outliers". Or take airline seat space for example, where companies simply assume that people are no taller than 5.5 feet.

Well, at least in the case of high-end fashion brands, companies intentionally only produce slim-fitting/smaller-sized clothing in order to maintain an image of exclusivity.

Yeah, except with airline seat space, the 1-sigma chunk of the bell curve is outside what (comfortably) fits.

I'm not sure if you're arguing about data or personal comfort. Over half the adult human population is 5.5 feet or under if you recall that women exist and are half the people

I don't forget that women exist. My impression was that they averaged taller than that. But even if they don't, you seem to forget that, if women average 5'4", that still leaves many women at taller than 5'6".

I couldn't find a data source for average (better, median) population height and distribution for the US that combined both genders. Do you have a candidate handy?

Maybe if you're from Scandinavia are women typically over 5'6". Only a handful of countries register an "average female height" that large on this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_human_height_w...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height has graphs with percentile breakdowns, purportedly based on US CDC data, with median female height at around 5'3" to 5'4". Wolframalpha spits back 5'5" as the median human height though it says "weighted for USA demographics".

> that still leaves many women at taller than 5'6".

I didn't forget that at all, I just don't see how relevant it is, unless you think airlines moving hundreds of millions of passengers per year should be optimizing seat sizes for the long tail of the human form.

> What happens to that segment of the population when/if Airbnb completely kills off hotels in a particular geographic location?

Someone makes Airbnb for folk with mobility problems and makes a killing.

What if it's not profitable to do that on its own? The "free market takes care of everything" argument is an idealistic position, not something based in reality.

If it's not profitable then why should Airbnb be the one to subsidize it? Why not the government? Or some charity? Or you?

We don't expect anyone who meets a homeless person to offer them a place on their couch. That would be unfair. And an additional incentive to avoid homeless people. We have (well, not everywhere but at least we aim for) a systemic solution. There are homeless shelters for example, sometimes run as charities, sometimes tax-supported (ie. everyone is required to chip in).

It's weird when we try to offload these problems on the first person who touches them.

Why should anyone have to support them at all? It comes down to they and their supporters convinced society we should care about them and we decided those profiting off the majority to be the ones bearing the cost of the minority.

Why do I have to bake a cake for a gay wedding if I do such for straight weddings? Because the people who want that requirement have won the level of support needed to have legal support.

Circular reasoning.

Isn't it the way society works?

Why would that argument not apply to "It's 1960, and I don't want to seat black customers at my fancy restaurant because it's statistically likely to be less profitable than seating white customers"?

I've never worked in the restaurant industry, but, I've heard from people who have that it's STILL extremely common for black customers to be considered undesirable. I.e. a server will get upset at a host(ess) if they get "too many" black customers assigned to their tables.

Why? Servers claim that black customers - on average - tip less.

I don't know how prevalent this belief on the part of servers is. And I don't know how much of a numerically accurate basis in reality it has.

But, as a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that there exists an identifiable group [black people, star trek fans, old people, dentists, ...] that are likely to lead a server to go home with less money at the end of the night.

There can be a really fine line between statistics/machine learning and "bias"/"racism".

Where it gets even more complicated is that there might be variables which are not expressed as "is the customer black" which ultimately predict/are highly correlated with the question "is the customer black" - but are also predictive of the question "is the customer profitable".

I don't think there's a line between machine learning and bias. In the example I gave (black Americans in the 1960s), I'm pretty confident that any working machine-learning algorithm would conclude that this population is economically disadvantaged and therefore a less-profitable target market. Such a conclusion would also reinforce structural racism.

And that's the way we treated this in the 1960s. The government didn't ask Woolworth whether they had legitimate economic reason to refuse to seat those black college students, or whether their objection was based on them being college students, or because they only ordered coffee and not a meal, or anything else. As long as the effect of your policy was that you were discriminating on race, it became illegal. It doesn't matter whether you had valid reasoning based on race and economic status being correlated, or you were a card-carrying Klansman. A good-faith policy that discriminated on race is still illegal.

It seemed to work pretty well, and I don't think many of us regret the loss of ability of restaurateurs to make these particular economic decisions. The fact that we can now offload these decisions to algorithms (which aren't likely to be "racist" in the conventional sense) instead of humans shouldn't change things.

> I don't think many of us regret the loss of ability of restaurateurs to make these particular economic decisions

It's probably worth pointing out that the restaurateurs didn't have the ability to make those decisions; that was the point of the Jim Crow legal regime. Left to themselves, they kept wanting to serve blacks.

Hm. At least for the Woolworth sit-in, my impression was that this was store policy, and I'm not finding any source saying that Woolworth was in violation of any law when they gave into the boycott and dropped their policy. But you're right that Jim Crow laws involved mandatory segregation, and that the sit-in was a protest against those laws. Good point, I'm not entirely sure what happened there!

> There can be a really fine line between statistics/machine learning and "bias"/"racism".

There's no line. Learning and bias are the same thing.

The question is whether the bias is actually justified by experience.

Should it be legal to discriminate against a race if you have data indicating that they're economically disadvantaged?

Society's answer to that is a resounding "sometimes".

Because black customers pay the same prices and do not require additional accommodations. It would apply if the restaurateur was required to maintain separate dining rooms for whites and blacks or additional water fountains.

Everyone pays the same prices for what they order, but they can choose to order more or less expensive foods, more or less expensive wines (or none at all), etc., and they can tip differently.

If you have more customers trying to make reservations than tables to seat them, it is economically rational to seat the customers most likely to buy your more expensive items. We decided (correctly, IMO) that it is more important for society to fight entrenched racism than to enable business owners to make that particular locally-rational economic decision.

It would apply just as well, hence the "Why not the government?". You probably don't want to be the first/only fancy restaurant to fight racism.

>If it's not profitable then why should Airbnb be the one to subsidize it?

Because they're massive rent extractors.

Rent extractors should subsidize most things.

AirBnB is a rent extractor? That's a tendentious claim; the reason all the 'sharing economy' stuff works is that it's improving capital utilization and damaging cartels. I'd expect that real rent extractors are hotel owners in big cities with limited hotel zoning, who lobby for anti-AirBnB regulation to keep competition low and prices high. Or the politician/business alliances who build the local convention center by forcing a $N/night tax on local hotels.

The reason all that "sharing economy" stuff works is that you can afford to have worse capital utilization if you ignore existing regulations. For example, there's a big difference between what people can afford to pay for hotel stays and what they can afford to pay to live somewhere which means that dedicated AirBNB apartments can stay empty a large chunk of the time if you ignore zoning regulations intended to block this. Similarly, Uber cars can operate at much lower hours and mileage because there aren't the same restrictions on the number cluttering the streets or the same vetting of new staff.

> there's a big difference between what people can afford to pay for hotel stays and what they can afford to pay to live somewhere

... which means that the capital associated with "people living somewhere" is poorly allocated, and would be more profitable utilized as a nice hotel space. Capital utilization isn't just about the raw duty cycle of someone using that capital. You don't markedly improve your organization's capital utilization by running SETI@Home on idle computers, because SETI@Home is a worthless waste of cycles of little or no benefit to you or society at large.

> Uber cars can operate at much lower hours and mileage

Uber's more of the damage-cartels case, admittedly.

Only if you assume that the best utilization of scarce resources is the most profitable one. Filling the same number of people's needs about as well at about the same price using several times the real estate, meaning that other people can't find anywhere to live, is less efficient for any definition of efficiency other than "what capitalism decides". People actually having homes is not the equivalent of running SETI@Home on idle computers, nor does it become a worthless waste of little or no benefit to you or society at large just because it's more profitable to keep those units empty and use them as hotels for a few months of the year.

> Only if you assume that the best utilization of scarce resources is the most profitable one

Well, the best utilization is the one with the highest utility. In an efficient market that's the same as the most profitable, by definition. The usual caveats apply: no two individuals can ever agree how to measure utility, a free market won't be efficient unless there are no barriers to entry (city zoning may be a barrier to entry), transaction costs are low (the cost of moving from one apartment to another in the rental market is high), and property rights exist and are enforced (including both the obvious property rights and the ones that would apply to all the externalities like neighborhood character but don't exist and won't be enforced for a variety of good reasons)

So yes, caveats. Obviously. There's a moral character to some of these things. One can argue that people living in houses in a big city is morally superior to people vacationing in those houses. (Is that a thing you'd like to argue? Please do explain why, if it is.)

But to the point before: is AirBnB a rent extractor? Pointing out that caveat apply to the measuring of capital utilization in the abstract is not a strong argument in and of itself. Do they apply here? If they apply, would you care to quantify the impact in dollar figures for a typical city? (I recognize this can be hard for moral injuries, but it's not always clear when the injury ceases to be financial and becomes moral.) And even if these caveats apply, how do they apply to making the case that AirBnB actually extracts economic rents? The main thing it seems to be doing is lowering transaction costs associated with doing a short-term rental, and they do have competitors (HomeAway, Wimdu, Tansler, FlipKey, just plain Craigslist, etc, not to mention that the homeowners face competition from substitutes in the form of hotels) so it's not quite obvious that they're the ones collecting on this economic rent.

The core of the article is saying that you can't satisfy everyone, and the point of the replier was to point out that, if the need is that great, and there are such large amounts of people with the same issue, the free market will produce an alternative.

What if the need is great, but there isn't a lot of extra money to be made? Should the minority with disabilities be forced to pay extra to convince someone to provide them with otherwise identical functionality?

Many accommodations, if not federally mandated, simply wouldn't happen. For example, handicapped parking spots. People who use those spots are technically capable of using other parking locations as well, and the current handicapped parking spots are usually located in prime areas.

Yes to your second question.

Maybe the government can offer a tax return bonus to cover it. And pump more money into fully general cures for all disabilities. I'm not against making disabled peoples' lives better, but focusing entirely on the supplier side is a mistake.

> And pump more money into fully general cures for all disabilities

I find this a disingenuous interpretation of how certain disabilities work and how "curable" they may be. Certain degenerative conditions are hardly understood, or the treatment requires time and reasonable accommodations from society such as the need for ramps and wheelchair accessibility. I do not know a way for non-supply-side costs to factor in "being able to use a wheelchair and still function in society".

What is the cure for having amputated legs while being poor?

The cure for a lack of legs is typically prosthetics with extensive therapy. Incredibly expensive and labor intensive.

The cure for amputated legs while being poor is a wheelchair; not as easily managed without additional space when parked, and if there are no ramps up to your building, your business is effectively inaccessible.

But ramps cost extra money. So do wheelchair accessible curbs. You need more space in the isles, specialized bathroom stalls, special door handles, support for someone closer to the floor at your counters... Lots of things we take for granted today, but which didn't exist for many years before the ADA.

Yeah, and sometimes businesses have been able to collect credits from the government for compliance with such-and-such. When they're forced to bleed money though (in this instance all that extra space adds up by itself, plus the opportunity costs -- imagine the pushback if airplane seats had to be way bigger and roomier!), and not all bled money can be passed on to the consumers, and even if it's done in the name of some good cause, the fact that it's still forced bleeding is what I don't really like, and would appreciate less of.

I'm kind of big on cyborg technology and other futurist ideas (like brain emulations). Varying degrees are expensive and not even available right now, but a large part of that is a serious lack of funding which in turn cuts business opportunities. (I would bet if society focused more efforts and money on general human augmentation instead of just helping the disabled, the disabled would come along for the ride since the non-disabled market is so much greater. As I touched on in another comment, the second-order effects often provide more value for these niche markets than targeting the niche markets directly.) While we transition to better tech that even the poor can afford we can still consider forced money bleeding, but I'd like to consider demand side solutions too.

The original point was, however, that we do need to serve certain groups even if the number of such people is small and according to the free market it's clearly not worthwhile to produce an alternative.

The way we do currently is a social contract (enforced in law) that mandates exactly the point that you should serve everyone and are required to make accommodations for e.g disabled people.

You are still assuming that great need and profitability go hand in hand. The issue being discussed is specifically the cases where they do not.

Regulations catch up.

Often the reason the regulations are there in the first place is because otherwise the need wouldn't be met.

That is the reality around you now

The quoted statement above is blatant discrimination and incriminates the company who wrote it. I'm surprised the company's lawyers allowed it. Much of the legal system in the US says that you cannot ignore the needs of minority groups just because it's not profitable.

How is the statement discriminatory?

If a company decided to start a sharing economy-based babysitting service, but doesn't have the requisite resources (or training/certification among workers) to look after special needs children, it's okay for them to not cater to those individuals.

It's not as though they have the ability and are denying service - they are choosing not to develop a product or service with accessibility features. I can entertain a normative argument that it's ethically wrong to allow companies to operate in this way, but this is not legally considered discrimination.

I do think that a certain critical mass requires this to be reconsidered, because private companies without as much regulation could displace people who enjoyed accessibility features under older, more established and regulated companies. That said, there are many products and services on the market today which simply cannot be used by handicapped individuals, and for many companies making these products it would be strictly impossible for them to profitably offer a more accessible version.

EDIT: Initially I said taxi cabs are not required to be wheelchair accessible and made an Uber/Lyft comparison. After looking into it, it seems I'm wrong - NYC taxi cabs, at least, offer wheelchair accessibility, you just need to call for it through dispatch as not every vehicle is properly equipped.

> Taxi companies are not required to cater to handicapped individuals who are restricted to wheelchairs.

Actually, yes they are. http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/faq/faq_access_veh.shtml

Not just in NYC, this is an almost universal element of taxi regulation. The city will either require that taxi companies operate a certain number of ramp taxis as a condition of their medallions (thus implicitly subsidizing them off other taxi rides) or directly subsidize operators of ramp taxis.

The State of California recently required all of the ride-sharing companies to produce reports on how they "planned" to accommodate disabled riders, but so far as I know, nothing has come out of it.

Uber and Lyft both have ways for physically handicapped people to get a ride (the cars have wheel chair carrying devices attached to them)

Yes, I saw that right after I made the comment and made an edit :).

> It's not as though they have the ability and are denying service - they are choosing not to develop a product or service with accessibility features. I can entertain a normative argument that it's ethically wrong to allow companies to operate in this way, but this is not legally considered discrimination.

The same reasoning would apply to "It's not as though we have an elevator and are denying service - we are choosing to only install a staircase."

The author gave this (notional) example to simply point out that such users present a very different use case for the original company and are likely to be a huge distraction. And undeflected distractions are bad for a startup.

If it were a real example and you needed a legal way out (what country / jurisdiction?), maybe referring those cases to another service that is specifically set up to serve their needs would be sufficient.