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> Uber...has more or less completely fixed the issue of racism in taxi cabs

When I first moved to New York, I had a roommate. He was Brown educated, on prominent City boards and sharply dressed. Regularly, I'd have to climb out of bed and walk to our corner of 30th Street and 5th Avenue, a decent neighbourhood, to hail him a cab.

The reason? He's black.

I got used to quibbling with cab drivers over "broken" credit-card machines (magically resurrected when I threatened to call the TLC, their regulator). And dealing with my out-of-borough destinations being inconvenient. Or having drivers on their phones the whole way.

Yellow Taxis have gotten measurably better since Uber entered the scene. Credit owed where it's due.

I live in the South Bay, and every time I try to take Uber to SFO, the driver arrives, finds out the destination is SFO, apologizes, and cancels the ride. So apparently the problem is not fully solved.

Isn't SFO a good fare? It's a long drive from the South Bay, and the driver is certain to find another passenger quickly after dropping you off.

Maybe I don't understand what makes a good fare.

They have somewhere to go to and by the time they drop you off at SFO, they wont be able to make their appointment. Or they don't want to be stuck in inefficient traffic.

Also incentives are based on trip count, not trip length as far as I understand.

It's a problem that needs to be fixed in big cities with these apps.

But the reason why they reject in these cases has nothing really to do with the person, but the action/destination. Definitely an improvement.

Yeah, that really surprised me when I saw an ad for driver recruitment that the initial incentive is a trip count one. Sure they have some anti-abuse system in there, but seems like a weird one to lead with in big cities where you could rack up 20 short trips in quick succession.

At least they apologize. I've noticed a recent trend with bay area Uber drivers calling immediately after accepting the ride, asking the destination, and trying to strong-arm me into cancelling the ride if they don't feel like trip is worth it (the answer of course is hell no dude). I've been curious whether there has been a recent major change on their side of the app.

I don't think it's gotten any better as far as cracking down on drivers. When I try to get picked up at NYC area airports, if the driver calls right away and asks where I'm going, I hang up, cancel and report them for violating the TOS, and request a refund (which I've always gotten).

Drivers are able to do this because they can't be rated if the trip is canceled.

Passengers should never cancel accepted trips. That's what I explain to my passengers when they complain about other drivers doing this.

I never cancel my trips if the passenger is ready to go (some are too drunk or otherwise unable). Drivers who cherry pick can still be reported, but that's a manual process.

The leading cause for driver deactivation is excessive cancel rate. For that reason, the passenger should insist that driver cancel the trip.

I run into this when I call the passenger to confirm that they indeed wanted to order Plus service and that they are willing to wait 15-20 minutes for me to get there. They often think I am calling to cancel, but I never ask the destination since that's at least unethical and possibly illegal.

My girlfriend gets harassed by Uber drivers all the time, to the point where she had to switch to using Lyft or call the regular car services here in NYC (which used to be amazing pre-Uber, by the way).

The one time I took Uber Pool in Brooklyn the driver refused to let a black couple into the car, which we all protested and complained about, but nothing came of it.

In New York Uber isn't necessarily safer or less racist, although I'd concede it probably is in other countries.

Does your girlfriend give those drivers 1 star reviews?

For what it's worth, my girlfriend has taken an uber in NYC 100+ times, and has never complained about any kind of harassment from an Uber driver. She's complained to me about sidewalk/subway harassment, and workplace harassment, so I don't think there is a reason she would hide Uber harassment from me.

Also: Regular car services were horrible pre-Uber...which is why Uber took over NYC car transit.

It was basically: Call up a number, get answered by a guy with a heavy accent on a low quality landline, tell him what you want, and hope and pray that he understood what you said and the car shows up. If it doesn't, call another company and repeat.

There may be some miscommunication here. There are the 555-DRYV car services that are precisely what you described, and then there are the private car services that you routinely see lining up on Park Ave. to collect the glut of lawyers that had to stay past 8pm. The latter are fantastic.

There are hundreds of car services in New York City. Most New Yorkers have one or two they have learned work well for their neighborhood and provide good service and stick with those. Car services are no different than any other consumer service, there are a good ones and bad ones. Also why does it matter if they have a "thick accent"? You are suggesting that the communication is so poor that people regularly need to hang up and call another car service? This is simply hot true. There are times when you might need to call another service because they might be backed up but certainly not due to of a total communication failure.

Can't rate a driver who didn't start a trip. That's how they fly under the radar. Forcing the driver to be the one who cancels will get them on the radar and out of the system. Excessive cancel rates get drivers deactivated more than anything.

Drivers harass a woman by not accepting a trip?

I have to call you out on this. Most drivers have both apps installed in their phone and their behavior does not change because they got hailed through Uber.

It seems I run into far less assholes driving for Lyft, though. Maybe their QC is better?

EDIT:

I mean, they can start out driving for both, but if you get fired by Lyft, you can't ever come back in most cases.

I had a terrible experience with a Lyft driver. I took a Lyft home after a long flight where I wasn't feeling well. I mentioned something about not feeling well. The driver decided I was going to die and mess up his car. Then, he tried to dump me at McDonalds. Only after arguing with him for 10 minutes in the McDonalds parking lot and refusing to get out of the car, he reluctantly sorta agreed to take me to the hospital except he took me to the children's hospital.

I took a Lyft in Las Vegas where the driver was clearly mentally unstable (sounded and acted it), let us out at the wrong place in an unfamiliar neighborhood in a windstorm, and got out to piss in full view of both his headlights and the front of the wrong house. He then had to drive us to the right place grumbling the whole way. I've not ever had any ride/customer experience that even compares in confusion and intensity of uneasiness in an Uber, despite their shitty engineering work culture.

Lyft doesn't seem to do any form of real background checks. I had a driver that very clearly shouldn't have had a license and didn't speak a single word of English. The dude straight up blew through two reds.

>which we all protested and complained about, but nothing came of it.

Just curious to what extent you protested?

how can her experience with lyft be any better? most times the drives are using both services...

As I understand it, the Lyft vetting is more intense than Uber's. So many Lyft drivers can be Uber drivers, but the reverse may not be true. I could be wrong though, my only data points are talking with drivers and therefore anecdotal or hearsay.

I doubt it. My Lyft onboarding experience consisted of watching a couple of safety videos at an auto parts store instead of a 1:1 "mentor" session. Last I heard, mentors are gone in San Francisco.

Lyft requires newer cars, which could bar totally broke drivers.

I have perfect background check, of course.

Lyft is definitely hands-on when reacting to passenger complaints. They likely have sentiment analysis software for comments by passengers.

Lyft passengers are ruthless in ratings. It took me a while to recover from initial ratings while I was learning. At least your ratings are a rolling average of last 100 rides so you can fix the problem of bad ratings with new rides. Last week should help: got 17 5-Star ratings and no negatives.

I agree that Uber has a net positive social impact, but the Kapors are nevertheless right to try to force change here.

1) They have more direct control over, and responsibility for, Uber corporate behavior.

2) Uber corporate culture might bleed over to the customer experience.

3) The behaviors in practice at Uber are not good for anyone, even the "high-performing" assholes whose behavior is excused. Those behaviors keep talented prospective employees away and make current employees less effective.

Uber may, in fact, have an HR problem that needs fixing. I'll wait for the investigation to find out - Fowler seems fairly credible, but far too many incidents like this seem fabricated/unsupported/implausible, and get traction mainly because the media loves them.

I was only disputing the specific point I quoted. Even if everything Susan Fowler said is true, Uber is still a social good that is fixing racism in taxi cabs.

You kind of had me until you used someone's salary and work opportunities as an excuse for their harassment mattering less, or being overlooked.

Harassment is harassment.

Yup. There are things in the world that are kinda bad, but worth imposing on people for the greater good of society (e.g., taxes, jury duty, bans on raw milk). There are things in the world that are really bad, and no amount of greater good justifies them. Harassment is one of them.

Part (but not all!) of the reason for this is that not every $150K/engineer is getting harassed, only some are, and some are doing the harassing, and in particular, those who are doing the harassing are, by all reports, not actually helping Uber's social mission effectively. If you're willing to sacrifice something about engineers to help Uber change the world for the better, sacrifice the people who take time out of their workday to proposition the people they manage, or who ignore their boss because they're trying to get themselves promoted, or who create and cancel projects to create the illusion of work, or who interpret people who sabotage their teammates as high performers. (And sacrifice them by firing them or better yet not hiring them, not by harassing them.)

This harassment calls to mind the most negative possible stereotypes of silicon valley tech bros. Misogynistic, rude, deeply unpleasant people to be around. The question is how did those people get into Uber in the first place, and why are they allowed to stay while all of their victims leave?

I don't give a fuck how much that woman was getting paid, it is not conditional on her receiving sexual harassment from her supervisors. It is conditional on her doing her goddamn job, and making people feel unsafe by directly propositioning them obviously interferes with that.

How do you decide which things are really bad, and no amount of greater good justifies them?

As a society, we've made the decision that traffic regulation, gun regulation or preventing the sale of loose cigarettes does justify the police gunning people down or choking them to death. (Note that after Eric Garner and Philando Castille, no one advocated eliminating the rules that got them killed.)

So why is an unpleasant work environment somehow one of those things that are unjustified no matter what?

Allow me to rephrase:

"So why is a hostile work environment somehow one of those things that are unjustified no matter what?"

Words matter.

Ok. Why is a hostile work environment unjustified no matter what, but strangling people to death in the pursuit of causes like cigarette regulation isn't?

This seems like a really strange argument to double down on. There is an overlap of people who discount harrassment based on salary, and people who discount fatal brutality by citing an unimportant crime. Instead it's the same outlook on how society should work that opposes both abuses. While people can choose to work harder on one problem, ranking them and deciding one should be ignored is a good tactic for insuring there isn't a critical mass of people fighting any injustice.

Furthermore, the type of people that want to invest in companies that decrease systemic racism and harassment experienced by their riders should also be concerned about similar problems at places closer to home. Framing these abuses as though they are not all different manifestations of failing to recognize other people's humanity on some level really undermines any progress.

I'm not making an argument, I'm merely questioning a philosophical claim I think is probably wrong.

Specifically, if you think (1) "There are things in the world that are really bad, and no amount of greater good justifies them. Harassment is one of them." but you also favor cigarette regulation, then you must implicitly think the inevitable shooting/strangling people/other violence is NOT one of those things that are "really bad and no amount of greater good justifies them".

Or alternatively, the stated principle (1) is not your real justification and merely a post-hoc rationalization.

I suspected the latter. But I was wrong - as it turns out geofft is internally consistent and also opposes cigarette regulation, firearm regulation, and all the other rules who's enforcement involves doing things that are "really bad and no amount of greater good justifies them". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13725372

As you might imagine, I also disagree with society's implicit position in the cases you mention.

I don't. Nothing's changed, and nothing's been done to those officers. Society has implicitly accepted these actions as justified.

It's possible my statement was unclear: my disagreement was "Society, you are wrong," not "Your claim about society is wrong".

Regardless, this is whatabouttery. It's true that we have much more serious problems in the world than workplace harassment, like poverty and slavery and famine. That doesn't mean that the less serious problems aren't still problems.

>as an excuse

That part wasn't an excuse for harassment. And it also wasn't about programmers' salaries as justification. He was using rhetorical hyperbole to emphasize that the utilitarian benefit of Uber for brown and female riders is still true. That was a response to tyre's comment, "So now you have a company that isn't actually what it pitched itself to be.

Yes, harassment is harassment but it looks like yummyfajitas was responding to a specific business claim by tyre.

It was an excuse. "It's just that their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist." Harassment is not a personality.

I think what is at issue here isn't Uber's external accomplishments, but it's internal culture. It's great that Uber has been able to reduce racism in your area. But it doesn't change the allegations that there are deep dysfunctions internally.

In the US at least Uber hasn't done a very good job at eliminating racial discrimination. A study has found that drivers continue to discriminate, this time based on the race they assume based on the person's name.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/study-fin...

I don't know whatever Lyft is doing, but I have a super low rating on Lyft than on Uber and I behave the same in both the cases.

Wait, as a driver?

No as a customer.

The actual study says they are doing a very good job - traditional taxis discriminate vastly more than Uber/Lyft/Flywheel. Look at the tables at the end, it's easy to see a HUGE delta for traditional taxis, compared to relatively small (albeit statistically significant ones) for Uber.

https://faculty.washington.edu/dwhm/wp-content/uploads/2016/...

> their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist

There's also the minor matter of breaking federal law. You can call this "the zeitgeist" if you like, but if I was an Uber investor I would be concerned that the company is leaving itself wide open to multiple class action lawsuits. The amount of their funding used to fight the many suits against them is also more generally concerning. Lyft doesn't seem to get into the same battles they do, so clearly it's possible to achieve good without being raging assholes while doing it.

From what I can tell, lyft doesn't do the same good as Uber. Uber does battle with corrupt politicians, exposes them to the public and opens cities up to competition. Then Lyft free-rides on this, follows them in and makes money.

When is the last time Lyft prevented someone like DeBlasio from helping the taxi cartel rip off consumers?

At the end of the day, Travis is a war-time CEO who is always going to be fighting things that keep his company from being as successful as it can be. This may sound good, but people like this are why we have laws. They need regulation. Look back 150 years if you doubt that.

"their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist"

Really? The only problem you see at Uber is that their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist? They are unpopular for superficial reasons and that's it?

> This would all be a huge net gain for the world even if every $150k/year engineer at Uber was horribly mistreated/marginalized/had their butt patted before shifting to another $150k/year engineering job.

Are you saying that it's okay to be harassed if the pay is high?

If so, please examine your own mind for its blind spots and learn a bit of humility, before sounding high strung and judgemental about others'.

Moving cab drivers from company X to company Y won't change human nature and 'more or less fix... racism'.

Getting kicked off the service for rejecting too many rides/being a jerk to passengers and getting low ratings/etc won't change human nature. It'll just change the nature of people who drive for Uber.

I'm fine with racist people having trouble finding jobs. Or only being able to take jobs where they don't have to interact with other people. If you can't make a person less racist, marginalizing them so they do less harm is the next best thing.

No, but accepting the ride before seeing the passenger's face does reduce discrimination. Just like blind resume reading does (although, see sibling comment by cstejerean). "More or less fix racism" is a wild exaggeration, but being safer, less-discriminatory and less-corrupt than taxi services in parts of the developing world is quite a feasible bar to meet for Uber and they in fact do often meet that bar.

That said, one can meet that standard, and provide a better/cheaper transportation service and everything else in Uber's mission without standing for a toxic workplace environment for women, no matter how much they are or aren't paid. There is exactly one profession where the amount of money you are being paid justifies tolerating unwanted sexual overtures and is not the profession software developers are signing up for.

Why do you think that's true?

150 years ago, which is only a handful of generations, it was widely accepted in America that people of certain races were only technically human and were better fit for slavery than for living a full human life. That position is an extreme minority these days. What changed? Nobody eloquently argued that idea away, we merely made the culture that relied on that idea economically unviable (at gunpoint). We didn't even do a very good job of making alternative ideas more economically viable, and that hurt us deeply for the majority of that time.

If we move racist employees from company X to failing company Y, we make a non-racist culture more economically viable. People who are only weakly racist generally choose to give up on spreading their ideas (even if they still hold them) to choosing an economically worse option. People who are undecided are more likely to hear about or be part of the non-racist culture than the racist one. That is, historically, how we have been fixing racism. It hasn't been working perfectly by any means, but it's been remarkably effective.

Nobody eloquently argued that idea away, we merely made the culture that relied on that idea economically unviable (at gunpoint).

Capitalism is actually a great racism cure. Racism was always economically unviable.

It only existed because we passed laws protecting it. For example, greedy contractors hired negroes to build stuff until congress passed the Davis-Bacon law stopping that. Jim Crow wasn't a set of "you can discriminate if you want" laws, it was "you must discriminate". It was an extremely intrusive regulatory regime to the point of regulating dating choices.

Uber doesn't care about my race. All they care about are my dollars/rupees.

> Capitalism is actually a great racism cure. Racism was always economically unviable.

Well, sort of. What's good for the economy as a whole isn't always the same as what's good for you individually. I might prefer a world in which I know my kids have good jobs, but technology remains stagnant for a generation, to one in which technology improves and the economy as a whole grows, but my kids have much less reliable jobs. (This is essentially Pigou's argument about negative externalities; capitalism is, in theory, a great environmental cure, because you can't make money without a world to make money in, but that doesn't seem to be stopping any capitalists at the moment.) Or the effects of making the economically-rational decision might be so slow and so hard to detect that an actual human will fall back on their biases and never miss the profit they could have gained by not trusting their biases. (This is Greenspan's famous argument about hiring women economists.)

There's a timely and (at least for most people) non-racist example here: immigrants on work visas. Economically, it's good for my country to hire the best possible workers at the lowest possible salary, regardless of country of origin. So why do we have borders and ensure jobs go to equally-good workers at higher salaries (or worse workers at the same salary, or both)? Because we like a world in which the employment of our countries citizens' is protected, even at the cost of our economy.

Slavery was extremely economically viable. And the fact that you need laws to make slavery illegal, but you don't need so many laws as to make Jim Crow mandatory, leaves me skeptical of the use of unguided capitalism as an effective tool for ending racism (even if in theory it would work).

Well, sort of. What's good for the economy as a whole isn't always the same as what's good for you individually. I might prefer a world in which I know my kids have good jobs, but technology remains stagnant for a generation, to one in which technology improves and the economy as a whole grows, but my kids have much less reliable jobs.

This may be true, but it's completely unrelated to the point I made.

Slavery is only economically viable if you don't treat the slaves as economic agents. At the time when slavery was being debated, virtually no one actually made this argument because it was patently ridiculous.

In fact, the phrase "the dismal science" was coined by a slavery supporter to criticize the economists who opposed slavery. Slavery proponents were actually anti-capitalists who argued that slavery was better for slave and master alike - they favored hierarchical relations rather than exchanges based on mutual agreement. I know Moldbug has been shunned from society for advocating it, but you should read Carlyle if you want to understand history.

It's true that if you don't treat foreigners as economic agents, then economics does in fact suggest treating them as an exploitable resource as well. In fact, if you take that premise, we should probably enslave them rather than just pass protectionist laws against them.

So how do we enforce the right sort of capitalism, where all people are seen as economic agents?

One of the things that's usually attractive about capitalism is that it is, in a sense, the default. Absent a government saying otherwise, two individuals or businesses or even countries will tend towards capitalism in their relations. But absent a government saying otherwise, slavery also arises, in many places and times in history.

What changed to make people say "Hey, we're failing to treat slaves as economic agents"? It may be the case that on paper, slavery was not economically viable ever - but it was absolutely profitable and desirable in practice. (That may be the disconnect; I'm using "economically viable" in a practical sense.)

The default is pillage and plunder, not capitalism. Capitalism is what arises when you have a government that prevents people from pillaging and plundering, but does little else.

The question of who is an economic agent is exogenous to capitalism.

What changed to make people say "Hey, we're failing to treat slaves as economic agents"?

In the US, a bunch of religious crazies decided to force their biblical interpretations on everyone else. For a while they used politics and small scale warfare (e.g. running around ad night and chopping people's heads off) to push their morals on everyone else, on slavery and other issues like drinking and polygamy. Eventually the limited wars erupted into a total war for dominance, which they won.

I'm less familiar with European history so I won't speak about that.

What happened in Europe was that Britain had the industrial revolution, then twigged that they could make even more money if their competitors couldn't use slaves to compete with the machines, so banned slavery, and then enforced that ban on other nations using their navy, which was stronger than most other country's navies because Britain is so rubbish people who live there would rather die of scurvy than live there.

The ships play such an important part.

In the way capitalism arose from pillage & plunder.

Even way before the Industrial Revolution.

The navies protected the (taxable) commerce from further pillage & plunder.

But the only ones that could afford to build any ships at all were usually the monarchs whom had already largely pillaged and plundered the wealth of their subjects.

Capitalism at this complete a level of wealth concentration reveals its eventual destructive effect on free enterprise.

Due to the extreme wealth inequality ships could justify cargoes of volunteers who would virtually pay to live as somewhat of a slave somewhere else.

Eventually it was only a matter of greed whether a particular voyage would contribute to a more advantageous outcome when choosing either physical or financial bondage for their cargoes of slaves.

When the viewpoint of the capital owners is so far removed from that of the lowest-level subjects, the difficulty for them to respect the (finer?) differences between physical vs. financial bondage of their servants in the 18th & 19th centuries evolves into the blurring of the distinction between financial bondage vs. financial empowerment of their employees in the 20th & 21st centuries.

Simply depending on where the powerful draw the line when greed is involved.

When the money must make money even under adverse conditions, the result of unbridled capitalism tends toward slavery of some form or another.

Depending on your point of view, I guess.

Based on this and subsequent posts, it seems like you're making an "ends justifies the means" argument.

Does the ends justify the means here? Not really. Lyft is arguably similar to Uber but without so many alleged and evidenced wrongs. We can quibble about how similar they are, if Lyft would be successful without Uber, how successful Lyft is, etc. but the fact remains that a sizable competitor in this space doesn't have as many faults and seems to be doing just fine for a startup.

Does the ends justify the means ever? Perhaps. But it is often an argument made in hindsight to diminish real wrongs for the sake of theoretical utility, when in reality there are many levels of gray that have fewer wrongs and similar theoretical utility.

I was only disputing this claim:

Travis convinced Kapor that, amongst other things, Uber was a platform for democratizing transportation, citing things like racism amongst taxi cabs to spin Uber as social good. So now you have a company that isn't actually what it pitched itself to be.

I did not make any "ends justify the means" arguments, or claim that what happened (if Fowler is to be believed) is acceptable.

> because they are undercutting the Marathi autowales.

Vast majority of the cab drivers are from the Northern states. The natives of Mumbai dont want to drive cabs.

there is a pretty frequent drumbeat of stories about drivers being racist/sexist. not to mention that this is a company one of whose VPs threatened to go after a journalist that wrote critically of it. not exactly a social "good", that. I'd love to see stats on how and where Uber is actually "fighting cronyism" as well, instead of just rote ideology.