The Uber Conflation
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I agree with this. Taxi regulations might have started with noble intentions, but quickly evolved into protecting a monopoly at the expense of consumers.
I think Uber's about to be a very expensive lesson about Karma and will hopefully show some of these VC babies that "move fast and break stuff" is a great strategy for software, and a terrible strategy for people.
It's one thing to suggest that maybe a nicer, kinder, friendlier approach could have been used. It's another to have an environment where such an approach can succeed in isolation.
Night School believed as you do. They figured they would be most successful by playing ball, cooperating with regulators, and not pissing people off. For their pains, they were shut down by the very people they bent over backwards to play nice with. They caught no flies with honey. Uber, on the other hand...
This is a long-winded way of saying that it's possible that one might consider adapting to the scenario.
I mean if we're really committed to the Night School idea that would probably be best done as a Government program, since it's so intertwined with assets that are used heavily by the Government. But I'm also willing to bet if we gave them a couple Billion to burn, they could also make it happen. The question of whether that's worth it or not is quite different, though.
Uber got to the position of being the most bloated of fat VC babies by not playing nice. Night School never got that far because they insisted on playing nice. They also ran afoul of the taxi industry, who felt threatened by their business model.
We might want to give serious consideration to the possibility that one behavior pattern is not privileged above all others in all possible scenarios.
I think regulators' attitude is just as controversial: 'you must do this because we say so,' not 'you must do this because it's a good idea.'
I'd wager that most corporations are violating one law or another, without any complaints from the people.
I'm not saying ALL the regulations were put in place for good reasons, and I'm not going to argue that cab companies don't have a monopoly in most places because they do indeed have that. But then to turn that around and say therefore, the Government shouldn't regulate Taxis in any capacity is equally stupid and not supported by the evidence.
And before you say "Well I didn't say they shouldn't regulate at all" please bear in mind that you just said a corporation should be able to violate laws deemed useless by that corporation and/or the general public, meaning the regulations have no teeth and therefore might as well not exist.
I also have very little to say about Uber in particular, I was just responding directly to your comment about how we should follow laws to the letter.
Sorry if that came across a little aggressive, not my intent at all. :)
> I don't see why it's suddenly up for debate whether companies need to abide the letter of the law.
Wasn't exactly true. I also have disagreements with other parts of the post, including "Origin of law is irrelevant" (what if the law arose from lobbying by a powerful industry vs for the common good) and "If you disagree you can campaign to have it changed" (and I assume obey it in the meantime) vs something like civil disobedience or jury nullification.
There may still be arguments to make that it's detrimental, or at least not beneficial for other reasons, or there may be data that contradicts my anecdote (if so, please link it), but I'm glad Uber exists and probably opposed to any regulation that makes it difficult or impossible for it to operate in a given place.
I know of no one in any of the dozen or so cities I've lived who doesn't prefer a typical uber driver to a typical cab driver.
The trouble is, they don't agree which way it goes.
I think the resolution to this conondrum is, it varies based on city/region. Some areas had traditional taxis that are worse than ridesharing, and some better.
And taxis are allowed to be Ubers too, we have Teslas S, Mercedes-Benz E and S classes and normal VW Passat taxis, all of them probably working also for Uber.
Especially in Taipei, they hit a price and convenience point where taking an Uber is essentially doing a task on my phone in exchange for having to wait longer to get a ride. To be clear, it usually takes about 15 to 90 seconds of waiting to get a cab.
Outside of Taipei, any convenience store (which are basically all over the place) will call a cab for you and again, it's still a pretty short wait unless you're in a remote area in the mountains or something.
Xapata, you must really be a heck of a globetrotter to be able to so confidently ask a question like that!
Confidently? More curious than confident. It's best not to assume tone in text.
Clean, cheap usually friendly drivers with lots of local insight and you're guaranteed not to be cheated.
I bike commute in San Francisco and on a typical day I dodge literally dozens of illegally double-parked ride share cars occupying marked bike lanes. I have been nearly doored multiple times, nearly run into parked cars multiple times, been forced into traffic innumerable times, etc.
This is not the 'fault' (sic) of individual drivers. It's the business model, and I hold Uber and Lyft accountable.
EDIT: taxi drivers do this 2% as often; I've bike commuted in the city 20 years and it is apples and oranges
And when I'm on the other side and need to take a cab, I much prefer to take a yellow cab, because they get there faster. Even with GPS, a dense urban environment is filled with little foibles and tricks that only experience can handle
I think that pricing congestion directly would be better, but in the absence of that, this is an example of Uber hurting some citizens who are not taxi companies.
To cite road congestion as being part of the "spirit" of why taxi medallions were created leaves me with the impression of someone being disingenuous.
What on earth makes you assert this? The intense and (to modern eyes) borderline insane levels of traffic congestion in NYC at the dawn of the automobile age are very well documented. There are pictures and videos you can easily find, that make today's horrible congestion look bearable and civilized. A lot of traffic rules and devices have their dawn in the same era.
And "caring" is something almost no companies do. Even in pure capitalism, companies don't WANT competition. They don't CARE about their consumers - they just want to make as much money as they can.
Your argument is basically valid, but fails to account for Uber's consistent violations of law at several levels of government and geographic areas.
The article suggests, and I'd agree, that the problem wasn't Uber avoiding or ignoring taxi regulations; the problem was them applying that same gleefully transgressive attitude towards other areas that had nothing to do with their goal.
There's an interesting argument in the article, but the amount of squid-ink being squirted overwhelms it. A big chunk of the article is pretty much "They didn't do it, and if they did, look at everyone else." Which is pretty much bullshit.
Where it lands for me: If the CEO wants to disclaim responsibility for the culture, he needs to step down as incompetent.
If the CEO wants to take responsibility for the culture, he needs to step down for running an institution that routinely breaks the law. (There's a legal term for that...)
Yes this left a bad taste in my mouth. Quote from article:
"The fact of the matter is that we as an industry are responsible for Uber too. We’ve created a world that simultaneously celebrates rule-breaking and undervalues women (and minorities), full of investors and companies that are utterly ruthless when money is on the line, while cloaking said ambition in fluff about changing the world."
Soo.. its our fault for enabling this behavior, but we shouldn't punish Uber for it? Nooo. The majority of us don't create the rules/hierachy of what is valued, we can only vote with our feet and wallets and we should.
At any rate this part of Ben Thompson's post annoyed me for a different reason - he conflates and equates patent infringement with theft of trade secrets, while those are in fact quite different things, and have correspondingly quite different forms of relief/punishment.
I don't have a strong position on whether or not that should be the case, but the fact remains that theft of trade secrets is actually a federal crime.
The following quote from Bloomberg's piece revealing the acquisition shows the panic Uber felt:
“The minute it was clear to us that our friends in Mountain View were going to be getting in the ride-sharing space, we needed to make sure there is an alternative [self-driving car],” says Kalanick. “Because if there is not, we’re not going to have any business.” Developing an autonomous vehicle, he adds, “is basically existential for us.”
This observation understandably led them down the path to acquire Otto, which by all accord would provide much needed technology and legitimacy in this arena. However, their diligence failed to uncover that Otto's progress was completely unrealistic for having been incorporated for just 6 months. One may argue that Otto was meant for the sole purpose of trucking/logistics, but again from the same Bloomberg piece:
"The Otto deal will help; the company makes its own laser detection, or lidar, system, used in many self-driving cars. Kalanick believes that Uber can use the data collected from its app, where human drivers and riders are logging roughly 100 million miles per day, to quickly improve its self-driving mapping and navigation systems. “Nobody has set up software that can reliably drive a car safely without a human,” Kalanick says. “We are focusing on that.”
Is it fair to question the expertise and go-to-market viability of a company that cannot even understand what they are purchasing could not have possibly been stood up from a cold start in 6 months? I think so.
This leads me to revisit Uber's viability as a business that can one day go public, make a profit, and return the unprecedented amount of capital it has raised. While this has been dissected from almost every angle, most opinions have baked in the assumption that eventually Uber will execute seamlessly on the transition to self-driving cars and further entrench the advantage they have created by controlling demand. Well, this lawsuit throws a major wrench into that assumption. From Wired:
"First, it allows plaintiffs to ask the court for an immediate, temporary injunction, giving Waymo the power to shut down Uber’s self-driving truck and car experiments until this is sorted. Second, it lets the accuser seek permanent injunctive relief—complicated legalese for forcing Uber to halt any part of autonomous program dealing with the allegedly swiped lidar. Third, the plaintiff can seize the products of its trade secrets, even before the case is decided. In other words, Google could use this legislation to not only temporarily halt Uber’s progress, but take away its toys."
Safe to say that if these implications play out, Uber will be extremely handicapped in the race to autonomy. Public progress reveals Tesla and Waymo are both further along than most people realize. Were one of them to launch a fleet of self-driving cars offering a ride sharing service (as Waymo plans to by the end of 2017), it would seem they could quickly chip away at Uber's demand advantage by competing on the lower prices afforded by not having drivers.
Timelines and technology costs are always major variables in such nascent areas, but the technology gap for Uber to close becomes that much bigger if this suit goes against them - probably too big a gap for their network of riders, routing expertise, or a group of engineers from Carnegie Mellon to defend against.
It's not so much that Uber is behind on self-driving but the idea that Uber is in any way dependent on self-driving as a business. If they're covering their bets just in case that's one thing. If they think their business model depends on it, I wouldn't go anywhere near them as an investor.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...
If the CEO wants to take responsibility for the culture, he needs to step down for running an institution that routinely breaks the law. (There's a legal term for that...)
Watch him aim for the middle ground... weaseling and PR with the fervent prayers that attention will shift and he can keep eating the sweet cake he gets to keep. When most people can't formulate or even understand the logical proposition you're offering, heartless people are left with amazing leeway.
This seems like an excellent description of the problem: if you're going to run a company that intentionally pushes the boundaries of specific regulatory restrictions (in order to demonstrate a better result that can only happen without them, to get popular backing for removing them), then you need to draw a clear internal dividing line between the risky actions taken in support of that goal and all the other areas in which the company should act as a model for upstanding behavior.
I was under the impression that Uber outright broke the law in many places. The author describes how things went for them in San Francisco: the laws never considered smartphone apps, so Uber was able to legally operate as a "limo service." In that particular case, I agree with the author. But I thought that in many other cities, Uber came in and started operating in clear violation of the letter of the law, not just the spirit.
Is that true, or am I just misinformed?
In fairness, I'm not sure I would go so far as saying the article's pretenses are false - rather, the article is assuming good faith when it probably shouldn't. I also think that it's talking mostly about Uber's core business idea being a gray area (which it is), rather than all the myriad bad things Uber does that aren't directly related to its actual business.
[1] - http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20130526/ECONOMY/305269...
In most other sports, doing that would be "breaking the rules."
Not sure how such a division arises. (Maybe if the authorities make no attempt to "close" said loophole?)
The basketball example is an interesting one. One assumes that if the league wanted to eliminate that type of play they'd change the rules to increase the penalty in some way by docking points or whatever.
After several Uber drivers had to pay back all their earnings, lose their car and get a fine on top, there has been significantly less drivers willing to take the risk.
Outside of some peak hours (new years, etc) where the risk of getting caught is minimal, the only ones left are the really shady drivers with their crappy cars.
If the fines incurred are less than margins, then you have a profitable strategy.
For a similar example, UPS and FedEx both rack up an unbelievable amount of parking tickets in major cities for stopping their delivery vehicles in places where they're not allowed. These companies do this deliberately, because it's cheaper to pay the tickets than to have drivers take the extra time and effort of locating a legal place to stop. Some big cities have gone so far as to set up special accommodations for these companies to pay their tickets in bulk rather than dealing with each one individually. In effect, these parking tickets work as a tax on delivery companies. Doesn't seem particularly evil.
Interesting side note: USPS, as a federal agency, apparently has immunity from local laws like this, so they don't get ticketed. This gives them a substantial advantage over their non-governmental competitors in big cities.
What you're saying is tantamount to saying a thief who likes prison food is also above the law, because he actually enjoys the penalty for the laws he breaks.
And if you had done that, I'd have never responded. What you said was:
>You're advocating for wealth being over the law.
Which no one has yet done, not even close. Justice, according to the law, is being served. You can argue that the penalty is unjust, which you have failed to do so far.
You can also argue that it's wrong to break the law, which is a new argument in the thread starting with your "over the law" comment.
Saying an entity isn't subject to the law because of wealth and saying that an entity shouldn't break the law are two completely different things. The first argument doesn't work because the companies in question are proving they are subject to the law by paying the fines. The second argument is new, nebulous, not particularly substantive, and otherwise better left ignored.
There are fines that impact big companies and rich people less because of deep pocketbooks. But parking tickets on delivery trucks are not such a fine. They scale linearly with bad-parking activity. As mikeash said, this case is effectively a tax.
This statement reeks of ignorance. That's like saying a poor person could easily afford chemo, while ignoring the fact that they won't be able to afford food or shelter at the same time.
Is that morally wrong, in your eyes?
Is that morally wrong, in your eyes?
Uber has been consistently breaking the law (or parking into society's collective parking space, if the metaphor is lost). And your response is that they are wealthy enough right now to do it, so no big deal.
I doubt many people would think feeding a parking meter (which is not allowed in a lot of places) is "wrong" in any material way even though you can get fined for it. Taking a handicapped space, blocking a bus stop, or parking in front of a fire hydrant, on the other hand, would be widely considered as icky behaviors totally irrespective of any difference in fines.
Pay a fee to the victim?
There's a distressing trend on HN recently of people citing "the law" as if it were the end of any kind of practical or moral discussion.
There are 2 types of fines: fines that are meant to stop things from happening and fines that are there to basically make the city money. Most traffic fines seem to be structured for the latter.
An improvement to this would be to structure fine based on networth rather than a fixed amount. Yet even then, a millionaire paying $900,000 in fines is still not as devastating as a poor person paying $900. So I would say that the issue is still the structure of the punishment.
I can't say I really favor this but it has been done.
If so, kindly do not speak from the glass house about picking and choosing which laws to follow. You do it, I do it, everybody does it. Society still functions somehow.
They stated that different laws exist for different reasons. That's not picking and choosing laws. And they didn't say that laws to make money are inherently bad either.
On the one hand, cities recognize that it's more or less impossible to make deliveries in a city without violating the law a decent portion of the time. But people want to get packages delivered.
On the other hand, they want to provide incentives to at least try to obey the law. (And they're almost certainly not averse to having the revenue stream either.)
>The company is said to have lost at least $2 billion last year and is on track to pile up a loss of at least $3 billion this year. Those are rough figures that may underestimate how much money Uber is losing and don't include interest, taxes or stock-based compensation.
There's great art in knowing how to rejigger a car that must look like a Toyota Camry, but obviously is not the same Camry that you or I could buy from the local dealer for $30,000.
There's a blog post for someone to write about Silicon Valley's efforts to put the Petty Principle in action. Lots of gray in the middle on this one. I'd love to see someone's comprehensive take on what's forgivable these days vs. unforgivable.
He basically scaled down a car's dimensions to make it lighter while still looking similarly to the full size version. This made NASCAR introduce jigs to measure the cars. A rule that is still very much in use.
Given how popular Uber is, and how much people dislike the Taxi industry, it is enlightening to think about why taxi reform was never on anyone's agenda.
Lyft had no issues with complying, but Uber did.
http://www.recode.net/2015/7/15/11614750/uber-fined-7-3-mill...
There are many attitudes to have about taxi regulation. Some would argue that the market will eventually provide better solutions; even for issues like traffic congestion. Others might contend that the regulation is necessary because the market will either not find solutions or the cost of finding those solutions via the market is prohibitive. Some might take a less principled approach and consider whether the current regulations are better at solving problems or creating them. Regardless, we have to honestly consider the whole story. It's easiest to argue for Uber's approaches when you consider only the small part of the argument where Uber and its ilk clearly best the entrenched taxi system.
Sometimes the best way to reform a thing is to tear it down, and I think that's where Thompson's cautiously optimistic post about Brexit landed. (Perhaps this one? https://stratechery.com/2016/the-brexit-possibility/)
I would say there's an equal danger of conflating their disrupting regulations with innovation or progress. There's some relation, but it's not equivalent. Treating them the same is only good for Uber.
Or maybe it's that "innovation" and "progress" are mistaken to be only good things.
Note that I'm not judging - I have come to realize (sadly) that a certain ruthlessness may be necessary for large-scale success in business, especially in the tech industry.
The fake "I'm an Uber survivor" anonymous blog post and the leaked cab video seem like they're possibly the work of anti-Uber conspirators. And then you have other bloggers cashing in on the situation by writing these kinds of posts to get page views.
If there is, it's from Uber itself. Everything that has come out are things that Uber has done by itself. No one else's fault but Uber and it's leadership.
"The whole "Kalanick must step down" talking point is ridiculous. There was an HR problem he wasn't personally connected to, so now he must be removed despite being an incredibly effective CEO? "
The buck stops there. He is completely, 100% responsible for the culture of his company.
"Because SJWs now rule Silicon Valley and investors bow to them? Um, no, they don't."
No one who uses the phrase "SJWs" should be taken seriously.
"The fake "I'm an Uber survivor" anonymous blog post and the leaked cab video seem like they're possibly the work of anti-Uber conspirators."
Because there's no way they actually happened. They hired an actor to defame Kalanick. And no one had ever experienced sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments at Uber before.
The term "culture" is not compatible with the idea of assigning 100% responsibility to one person. In fact it's practically the antithesis.
> No one who uses the phrase "SJWs" should be taken seriously.
Why?
> Because there's no way they actually happened. They hired an actor to defame Kalanick. And no one had ever experienced sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments at Uber before.
Not an actor, but possibly someone was trawling for embarrassing footage that otherwise would probably never see the light of day. The blog post was clearly fake and I'm just wondering if it was part of a viral marketing campaign for New Balance sneakers, or a party with a grudge, or possibly just a regular troll.
"The term "culture" is not compatible with the idea of assigning 100% responsibility to one person. In fact it's practically the antithesis."
Again, the buck stops there. EVERYTHING at Uber is Kalanick's responsibility. EVERYTHING. Otherwise he does not deserve the title of founder, and all the money that's come with it.
True I don't have evidence that the #UberSurvivor blog was fake but there's also been zero proof that it is real and I would be willing to bet money that none will ever appear.
Yes, they do. Again, they are entirely responsible for their company.
"It would be more than adequate for Kalinack to simply order a review of HR policy."
Like the several other times he's done that, and it failed to change anything?
Downvotes not going to fix Uber.
It's like if Edward Murrow went after McCarthy without bothering to double-check his own staff for anything that could be used against him.
And I could easily see this "fuck the world, we do what we do" attitude creating a hyper-alpha atmosphere where sexual harassment is scoffed at.
So, one could argue that without this attitude, Uber would have run out of steam or lacked the hustle to take on the Taxi companies and government regulations.
Still, regardless of the success that this culture has achieved, you can't treat your workers like shit and ignore sexual harassment.
I could easily see Uber being replaced by another company after Uber does all the hard legwork of taking on the Taxi companies and governments.
Especially if Uber lacks the ability to fix its' image.
It's not clear when Uber learned about these allegations of sexual harassment. I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they acted immediately after all the other cultural problems with harassment they seem to have.
We don't have any evidence that the allegations were substantiated. We have some internal, anonymous leaks that claim that Google found the allegations were "credible".
Well, except the bit where they didn't do that either.
Defending a lack of ethics with ideology is a nothing more than a cheap trick. And I'm not falling for it anymore.