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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

Amazon? Spotify? Square? Grubhub? Robinhood? And probably lots more. You can have respect for people and laws and still succeed.

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Spotify may not be the best example. They started out with pirated music without the approval of the record companies and then later cleaned up their act. But they are not douche bags like Uber.

Wikipedia suggests the Spotify application was launched at the same time as the announcement of deals with various major labels - is this incorrect?

Grooveshark started out with pirated music, attempted to make deals, and failed, but that was an entirely different company.

One could argue not all laws are moral and that following immoral laws is emphasising your own interests over those of humanity.

If abiding by the law was people's only priority, there would be no widespread usage of public key cryptography (it was extremely illegal in the early 1990s, and only gained legal acceptance after cypherpunks pushed back against the laws and proliferated its use), which would have prevented trillions of dollars worth of ecommerce from being realized.

There would also be no ride sharing apps, no home sharing, and no Bitcoin or Ethereum. Also worth noting that Amazon didn't charge a sales tax for a long time.

> One could argue not all laws are moral and that following immoral laws is emphasising your own interests over those of humanity.

This here is one of my all time favorite false-equivalences.

People performing sit-ins during the Civil Rights era, or women standing up for their right to vote are equivalent to a corporation that wants to run without paying for its drivers health-insurance.

It's another example of the common trope in the news media of "we must cover both sides of the issue". Yes a cashier skimping you on one penny in your change is technically a moral issue - but it's really not.

It's absurd how much our country is going to profit models that consist of nothing more than "make the same revenue, and externalize the costs onto society."

>It's absurd how much our country is going to profit models that consist of nothing more than "make the same revenue, and externalize the costs onto society."

Uber is not externalising costs to society. It is providing employment opportunities that otherwise would not exist, and rides at prices that would otherwise be higher.

Taking market share from competitors by offering consumers lower prices is not a case of "externalizing costs onto society".

> Also worth noting that Amazon didn't charge a sales tax for a long time.

Amazon actively and vigorously sought to make sure it stayed within the previously-established exceptions to the requirement to collect a sales tax for quite a long time, which is different thing than flouting the law.

In particular, many states (e.g., NY) would only demand that a company collect sales tax if it had a physical presence in that state. Since Amazon had no warehouses in NY, it didn't have to collect sales tax here.

In NY, it's actually the purchaser's obligation to report tax that was due on mail order purchases where the company didn't collect NY sales tax - there's a box for it on the state income tax form. (But it's something that most people don't bother to report since it's difficult to enforce.)

>Amazon actively and vigorously sought to make sure it stayed within the previously-established exceptions to the requirement to collect a sales tax for quite a long time,

Source?

Don't give me this happy horseshit masquerading as philosophy, this isn't about what "laws" or "ethics" are — Uber is constantly treating their drivers, who are people, like garbage.

I'm a part-time Uber driver and I've never been treated like garbage by them. They pay me exactly what they say they'll pay me and on time. If I don't like the rate I'm earning, I turn it off and go home.

Thanks for providing your perspective. Articles relating to powerful parties who reject established political mores (e.g. prohibitions on unlicensed business activity, redistributive taxation) illicit a lot of demagogic reactions and attempts to cast the party as some kind of terrible menace to society.

>I turn it off and go home.

A lot of people don't have that flexibility.

Irrelevant to this discussion about Uber, actually.

You could, and I often do. But the laws you should break in the interests of humanity are ones that permit things like slavery or other mistreatment of people.

If you're engaged in commerce, don't conflate your commercial interests with those of humanity at large. It's possible that you're serving both at once, but not probable, and when you are in it for the money your objective assessment of such things is severely compromised.

Commerce is economic production and coordination at scale. It enables humanity to have a far higher standard of living than would otherwise be possible. In my opinion, it is a moral imperative to remove all restrictions on voluntary economic actions and interactions, both for utilitarian reasons, and for the sake of the individual's right to control their own body and actions.

I largely agree, but I no longer consider myself a utilitarian because few situations are so straightforward that cognitive, systemic, and other biases don't come into play, not to mention the practical limits of foresight. I'm also very concerned with informational asymmetries and the economic costs thereof. You're not wrong, but I encourage you to consider that there is more to the picture.

I understand, but your initial attitude should be "let's try to work within society's boundaries to achieve our goal", not "what can I break". There are certainly cases where laws are outdated or wrong, and breaking them is the most efficient and harmless way to get them changed.

I'm just saying "move fast and break things" is not the only way to succeed, should not be a goal in and of itself, and Uber could have been just as successful without being so shitty to people.

but your initial attitude should be "let's try to work within society's boundaries to achieve our goal"

Why on earth is that the case? This viewpoint imbues "society's boundaries" with some kind of a-priori correctness, when really it has the same as any other concept: 0, until proven otherwise.

It's not a-priori correctness, but a-priori precedence, or respect. You live in a society, you benefit from society, you would not be capable of starting a business without society, so you shouldn't casually dismiss society. Basically all I'm saying is that you need a good reason to break the rules. "This makes it harder for me to make money" is not a good reason. "There's no other way to achieve my worthwhile goal" is a good reason.

Dismissing a restriction of society is not the same as dismissing society, in the same way that ignoring the speed limit or ripping your own music is not the same as ignoring the concept of law.

I agree, and you shouldn't ignore the speed limit or pirate music without good reason. I'm not saying follow the law at all costs, but give the law the benefit of the doubt. In a mostly democratic society, rules are often (obviously not always) there for good reason even if at a glance they seem pointless or wrong.

Public key cryptography wasn't illegal within the USA in the early 1990s. The legal issue was with exports.

Right. And the development of a global ecommerce market would have been severely hampered if the cypherpunks hadn't won the "crypto wars".

That's not really what happened. Lobbying by major tech companies such as IBM had a much greater impact on the regulatory changes than anything that the cypherpunks did.

In general yes, but can you really argue that taxi licenses are immoral?

I suppose you could argue that certain taxi laws were enacted to achieve immoral ends. That being the case, if Uber was really fighting for "truth justice and the American way" they could have imposed the socially beneficial aspects of taxi laws on themselves without all the shady stuff they keep getting called out for.

If you're telling Joe that he can't give Bill a ride, in exchange for money, that to me seems very oppressive.

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