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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, a real tear-jerker. So, let's fix this. How do you propose to write a law that defines exactly when responsibility for suicide attaches?

In this case, Mr. Ochisor's customers were so desperate for an alternative to his three-decade-old business that they turned to a startup company that works by (literally) dodging taxi regulators. Is that really Uber's fault? The regulators'? The customers? Just how far do we want to take this whole idea of being reponsible for our competitors' mental health, or that of our vendors?

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Immigrants have a hard enough time as it is getting access to this country. They can spend a decade or more going to the trouble of raising funds (not just burning free VC money), getting sponsorship/visas, emigrating, assimilating, and dropping serious capital to secure just an abstract right to operate a business, only to see their efforts trampled by a competitor that outscales and outperforms them by (your own admission!) cheating the same system.

What recourse did he have? To this day government response to Uber's incursions has been mostly toothless.

I'm no friend of the taxi lobby but the guy was just trying to do right by his family up until he killed himself. While I don't see how Uber could realistically be held responsible for this guy's suicide, their undercutting his business certainly contributed to it, and you're being needlessly callous.

I don’t know how far, but possibly beyond glib dismissals of people’s suicides as a “real tear-jerker.”

(Shrug) It's an appropriate response, I think, to the use of peoples' suicides for purposes of overt emotional manipulation.

Your beef is with the taxi cartels and their click-hungry sympathizers in the media, not with me. They started it.

It speaks more to your disposition than anything else that being troubled by other’s suicides is “emotional manipulation.”

And I don’t have “beefs” with fictional boogie man cooked up by Uber, however bought in you are to that narrative. I certainly don’t remember “taxi cartels” stealing and passing around the medical records of rape victims, but that was probably a conspiracy by their “click-hungry sympathizers in the media.”

And here come the whataboutisms. You'll notice that in the post above, I explicitly called out Uber for actively circumventing the local taxi laws. I'm not apologizing for Uber, believe me, just pointing out that I'm not the one pulling the emotional-manipulation strings. The journalists (and the HN posters) who are citing someone's suicide to back up their position favoring one debatably-ethical actor over another are the ones who are doing that.

Uber is not responsible for pushing people to suicide at the end of a 30-year taxi-driving career. If you disagree, I respectfully suggest there are other sites where such opinions are more in line with the underlying ethos.

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