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Comment by Illniyar | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't seem at all out of control. Seems like an awesome idea and the process needs to be refined to dissuade bad behavior. Considering the company was founded about a year ago is probably a lot of room for improvements and innovation (and angering your contractors in the process).

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There headline may be a slang reference, "out of control" = "awesome" or "dope".

The title of the article used to be "Who Charges Those Electric Bird Scooters?"

Is it legal in US to use electricity at home for business purposes? In some countries that's against contract with electricity provider, as they have different tariffs for business.

In general business tariffs are lower, so I don't see the problem.

nope, not in Europe. Businesses have to pay a lot more than private residences.

same in US..

I would guess so. However, the original comment I replied claimed that businesses pay even less than private citizens.

It is the case in France and Switzerland, at least.

Even in the regulation-stricken UK, it's fully legal to work from your private home (so called "clerical" work).

And fyi, something being against the contract is not automatically illegal.

Leaseholds often excludes business activities as does home insurance.

Yes, you can't register a company at your home address, but no one will ever deny you coverage if you do clerical work at home. At least every single insurance and rental I had in UK had a special provision for this - if you need to stay at home and work remotely, that's 100% covered. It just can't be your principal place of work.

> It just can't be your principal place of work.

Does that mean it doesn't allow 100% remote work (where you always work from home but are an employee)?

That's where it becomes fuzzy and no contract in the world will define this precisely.

What kind of insurance are you talking about here? Wouldn't increased presence in the home make any mishaps less likely?

Contents & Home insurance - and I guess yes and no. Probably lowers the chance of theft claims, but increases slightly the chance of fire damage and accidental damage to contents. Don't have the actual data to back this up though.

You can easily get cover for working at home. But usually work is excluded from domestic policies; particularly third party liability.

Obviously the liabilities vary, if you're doing prototyping of fireworks in your garage then it's a little more risky than coding!

Insurance isn't always priced solely by risk; work-from-home insurance probably reduces claims for many people but that doesn't mean you can't charge more for it.

It would be interesting to know how occupier presence varies with claims made.

Plenty of people register businesses at their home address. It entirely depends on the nature of the work as to whether it requires a change of use from the planners or invalidate insurance etc

the lack of strict regulations is one of the reasons start-up businesses flourish in the US. Although I am pro-regulation in some issues, I think that European style pain-in-the-ass regulations only hinder technological advancement. Would UBER ever be successful in Europe? Nope.

...uber is successful in Europe. There are cities that banned it, but there are as many that didn't.

Conversely, Uber is not very successful in South-East Asia, but not for the abundance of regulation but for the lack of it - Grab, a local copy-paste of Uber, has become so dominant that Uber had to leave most of the markets there

yeap, the ones who didn't ban are the ones who didn't apply all these useless strict regulations.

In Germany, it is still not possible to take an Uber ride, for example. Besides, if it started in Europe as a small start-up it would be killed right away with tons of regulations anyways. So the only reason that you have Uber in Europe is that it has become a giant company in the US, due fertile environment, and thus could afford all these legal battles to enter the market.

South-East Asia is a different story. It has nothing to do with regulations at all. It is just a completely different mindset there. The fact is though, businesses in those countries can easily flourish as well.

And they make a lot of direct lobbying toward local government to make sure they don't enforce existing taxi laws.

which they should, don't you think? sometimes being disruptive is the only way to go.

No, because they're just trying to get an exemption for themselves. If they were advocating for a change for all, that'd be better.

you cannot advocate for a change for all if you are the only company in that field. Uber was literally a revolution of transportation. However, as a side effect, the changes you advocate sets a precedence, thus also affects everyone, which was the case in the US. There were a few other companies who also benefited from the changes, such as Lift.

"you cannot advocate for a change for all if you are the only company in that field."

But they're not. They're a taxi company. There are tons of those around.

And indeed Uber has been a catalyst in several EU countries for taxi deregulation. They had to leave Finland because it was illegal to be an Uber driver without having a ”traditional” taxi license; a legislation change will come into effect this summer that greatly deregulates the taxi industry. So I guess they succeeded in being disruptive, but I agree with the other commenter that Uber is probably not the best example from corporate ethics point of view.

> uber is successful in Europe.

But Europe was an expansion market for them, after they spent a while working out early kinks in the US. I think the post you are commenting on meant success as a startup, which is very different from successfully expanding there.

I don't think that Uber was a good example of a good company hindered by regulations...

The pain-in-the-ass regulations also save a lot of people's time and money (Theranos-style startups are much less likely to pop-up over this side of the Atlantic also).

It's a trade-off, like most things in life.

For every Theranos, there are 25 Stripes, Dropboxes, and Mixpanels.

It’s not a good trade off at all.

Unless you're one of the little people whose health was harmed in the Theranos fiasco. Or are those people acceptable sacrifices?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-patients-hurt-by-theranos-1...

I highly doubt that.

Here is a nice vlog on how Europe lost its tech companies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSU5MFPn6Zk

I'm not really convinced by his arguments, a lot of European countries have a higher free market index than the US and US taxes are more complex than a good half of European countries.

I think he overestimates the impact of regulation & "culture" (what does that even mean in a place as diverse as Europe?) and underestimates the effect of having a large market in the US where everyone speaks the same language and have more or less the same culture.

Gray area I'm sure, in this case, the electrical company wouldn't know.

Is it legal in the US to use regular cars for taxi purposes? Operating a taxi without a taxi license? Operating a hotel without a hotel license? It's companies like these, and uber, and airb&b, etc that skirt around the laws.

Even if so, I doubt electric company would ever call anyone on that -- that would just be inviting black PR: "you burn coal, and prohibit charging our eco-friendly scooters", "go fix ingesting my solar power into your system first", etc. -- possibly not completely correct, but painful still.

Plus, an electric company might love this: more customers, with demand at off-peak hours that might even slightly reduce the need for energy storage.

I think some better vetting of hunters and maybe capping the amount of people for area's to hunt for them would be a start? Seems now it's a wild west when it comes to who gets at them first.

> Seems now it's a wild west when it comes to who gets at them first.

Why’s that a problem for the companies though?

If your company decides on a PR stunt on 5th avenue by spraying the streets full of dollar bills, creating a riot, I'm pretty sure you're liable.

They end up paying more to recovery people than they're earning from people renting the things and after a few recoveries, more than the scooters are worth.

Why does it cost you more if people are competing? I think you only pay the successful one.

Gamification. Pure and simple. Even the kids liken it to "getting paid to find rare Pokemon Go". One could even go so far as to find linear optimizations for max network paths ;)

What sweetens the incentive is the "instant" cash transfer within 5 hours or so of drop-off. Mobile micro-work at scale is not only tenable. But may be the preferred operandus of labor market participants.

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