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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

So this isn't snark: explain to me what Uber's done that's "great"? They burn VC money in a trash bin in pursuit of a business model that looks totally nonviable unless one achieves a monopolistic position or pays below-minimum-wage rates (as that seems to be what the race to the bottom is for drivers).

I'd bet that the overwhelming majority of those board members were rich before Uber and will be rich after Uber dissipates.

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their drivers are the training set for their self driving cars.

thats how they want to become profitable.

Ahh yes, that self-driving tech that they totally 100% developed on their own and didn't steal from anyone else, right?

what difference does it make to me whether they stole from waymo or not? im not going to white-knight for google.

innocent until proven guilty, btw. some journalist writing something in a newspaper is not proof.

The difference being that if they were as unethical with other companies' tech as they were when expanding into markets and failing to protect their employees from harassment, then it could be an existential problem for the company. If their future relies on self-driving tech, which they never get a chance to implement because the only tech they have is stolen and they thus can't use it, they're fucked.

And the relevant legal standard here would be "preponderance of evidence", not "innocent until proven guilty" (which is a right for individual citizens in criminal trials). Corporations aren't fully people yet.

drivers could be helping make better maps, but I doubt that uber is able to use a cell phone to really create a usable training set for self driving. If every drivers car had cameras and lidar, that would be different.

im not saying that the plan is particularly well executed.

You can say it's a great waste if you'd like. But it is huge. Ubiquitous. World-changing. Uber will be in history books, whether or not it pans out as a valuable company: we'll see. But it has already earned its greatness, even if said greatness was just burning billions of dollars to transform our world.

Uber is going to burn billions of dollars and what change have they affected with it? That taxi companies now have phone apps?

You mean that we can now relaibly summon them to our location? That we can share rides via similar routes? We can cut out the medallion scam, where capital owners can rent seek off of driver's labor? Optimize routes to more efficienly move people and save energy?

... in markets where they can and do operate. Uber might be widely used in large cities but elsewhere it has little impact. Uber exists because American public transportation infrastructure is awful, nonexistent, or otherwise inefficiently designed. If they get to the point of running self-driving car networks then there will be much more to talk about. Until then they've only created a solution for a very small portion of the population.

I'm no fan of uber's ethical track record, but I've had the opportunity to use uber in both Indonesia and Poland, which was extremely convenient. In Poland in particular, I took a taxi from the airport before learning that uber could take me back. I learned while I was there that the taxi driver exploited me because I was a tourist who didn't know the local prices and he could charge 5x normal rates.

You're describing corrupt US markets with somewhat passive operators, but in the rest or the world the story is different. In Scandinavian countries each taxi company has an app, is fairly efficient, and it's just the matter of downloading a bunch of apps. In some Asian and Eastern European markets unlicensed cheaper gypsy taxis are an everyday thing, with a host of problems of their own, so arrival of yet another competitor is not really a game changer.

Yea I think this is really really really stretching things.

I can't tell if this is sincere or satire. :/

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