Uber’s Board to Discuss Leave of Absence for CEO Travis Kalanick
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I think this was my comment on the last Uber article. They fired a couple of people, hired Holder and seem to be doing damage control.
This seems like more. We're going on anonymous sources here, so it will be interesting to see what really happens as a result. But it feels like Uber needs a massive culture shift as a company; like turning around an oil tanker on the edge of a hurricane type of shift.
> Uber is fighting significant employee attrition, the tens of thousands of drivers it depends on are angry about their pay, and investors are concerned that one of the most well-funded start-ups in history has come unglued.
I've met a lot of Lyft drivers who stopped driving for Uber. I've also encountered a lot of bad Lyft drivers, as Uber has a pretty strict rating policy and dismisses people with low ratings (leaving Lyft to pick up the scraps; like a driver who didn't stop for an ambulance).
Still, only people who are in tech or on sites like HN care. The majority of my friends still use Uber. Many think Uber and Lyft are just as bad to their employees. Advertising is a powerful thing. So it apathy. The vast majority of people either realize and chose to ignore, or don't care, that everything we have comes on the backs of an increasingly underpaid working class.
http://khanism.org/perspective/trapped-in-the-cubical/
Will Uber fall apart in the next year? Unlikely. They have so much capital and infrastructure, they're making money and despite all the laws they sidestep and outright break, they still manage to stay on top while hiring drivers who can barely afford to drive, thwarting unions and providing people a cheaper way to get home after they're drunk.
Uber is the pinnacle of capitalism, and despite all the recent media backlash, they will PR the fuck out of it, run their damage control, symbolically change some things, maybe legitimately change some others, but in the end, they'll be around for a long time to come. Their success if built on an extreme amount of _disruption_ and considerable risk that has paid off.
It's not in a vacuum. It is one of many industries that have climbed to the top of the world in this fashion over the past century. The rise of questionable tech companies, adding to the existing questionable oil, manufacturing and retail companies of the last century, should raise serious philosophical questions about what humanity is evolving to become.
It's evolving to become a place where goods and services previously only available to billionaires became available to millionaires and then became available to the middle class and then became available to the poor all over the World.
In 1900, the US had 4,192 cars. 1681 ran on steam. 1575 were electric and 936 had an internal combustion engineer. Only the super rich and hobbyists had them. The Model T was released in 1908. On May 26th, 1927, 15 million Model T's had been produced. Today, 88 percent of Americans are drivers and there are 1.9 cars per household in a country of 321 million people. Furthermore, most of those without a car have access to buses and trains. One day we'll evolve to become a society where everyone will have access to on demand transportation as reliable as running water, available everywhere.
Transportation isn't the only industry impacted by this evolution. Even the uninsured in America have access to more and better medical care than John D. Rockefeller did in his day.
We can symbolically condemn capitalism until we go blue in the face, but the fact still remains that it is the only reason this planet is able to sustain 7.5 billion people at the current quality of life. 100, 200, 300 years ago plagues and famines were common and many suffered and died due to causes that fewer and fewer people in the present will ever have to worry about.
Are all of the institutions produced by capitalism perfect? Far from it, but even those institutions have flaws that we can correct if, as a society, we're willing to put a price on them to incentivate some entrepreneur to solve it in the pursuit of profit.