Uber broke laws, duped police and built lobbying operation, leak reveals | Hacker News Reader

Uber broke laws, duped police and built lobbying operation, leak reveals

theguardian.com

965 pointscolin_jack528 comments

Still a million times better than what it replaced. About 20 years ago I was working with the Australian taxi cab industry. The hq of the regulatory authority shared the address of the main payment system. The regulatory authority was made up of representatives of each taxi cab company that each had one vote. There was one taxi company (the one that controlled the payment system allowed) with 200+ subsidiaries that made up that organization. If anyone tried to get into the taxi industry they'd use their 200 votes to say they are not allowed by regulations. This was a company making 2billion a year in one state of Australia alone (NSW). It was so incredibly fucking corrupt and i am thankful to Uber Lyft and all the other incumbents for managing to get their foot in. It required dirty dealing to get past this corruption.

It’s hilarious how everyone acts like the pre-Uber taxi world was one of generous wages, honest hard working companies, and politicians working hand in hand with stakeholders.

The taxi industry was (is?) insanely corrupt. There are literally state-sanctioned limits on taxis and artificial markets for medallions that made early purchasers absurdly rich.

Sounds though like an orthogonal problem that could have been solved independent of destroying the entire industry?

Replacing a corrupt system with a different corrupt system isn't progress.

It is though. There's now 2 corrupt systems lobbying in different directions. We can now have them play against each other.

When corruption is enshrined by the law itself what other way do you have to fight it except to have the corrupt play off against each other.

The taxi industry existed for centuries (perhaps longer) in the cartel form. It's amazing progress to see that their power is no longer absolute.

At least one of which has the explicit aim of displacing the actual solution to the problem: effective public transport.

More lobbying isn’t good for the public, even if it’s done in “different directions “

Isn’t it strictly better if no groups from the old system got worse, but some groups that transferred got better.

Much of the general public genuinely believed that.

The picturesque London Taxi driver lives on even today.

Many of the 21st Century's worst attributes aren't due to society falling apart in the digital age.

Online life is exposing the seediness of society, which wasn't reported in old world media.

Lying on the internet is... difficult.

>Lying on the internet is... difficult.

And yet it is done many many times a day

Forget the reason for the change a minute, and focus on the outcomes. You've replaced a terrible set of local players with a handful of international mega players who I'd argue are just as crap as the ones you've displaced. There is still corruption in the sense that these platforms make the rules, and the drivers have basically no freedom to push back (baring some form of unionization).

All of this medallion nonsense can just as easily come back with Uber whenever they feel that competition has driven down prices too low. With a wink and a nudge, all the large players will play ball because they can.

As for what it is today, these companies still aren't profitable which means you're still living in a halo of speculative investment supporting you're current quality of service. The only viable remedy is to raise rates, which puts the service as a more expensive solution that could actually cost more than taxied ever did in the long run.

> still corruption in the sense that these platforms make the rules, and the drivers have basically no freedom to push back

I sort of agree with your broader points. But this statement mangles the definition of corruption beyond recognition.

> You’ve replaced a terrible set of local players with a handful of international mega players who I'd argue are just as crap as the ones you've displaced.

You’ve clearly not used both a taxi pre-Uber or an Uber. I’d wager my annual salary that a poll of users would rank the user experience of app based ride hailing as superior to that of the previous options. Uber didn’t even start out cheaper than taxis. They just slowly won out by being better. Cheaper just helped them grow faster later on.

> You’ve clearly not used both a taxi pre-Uber or an Uber.

You know this is extremely unlikely, so it's not good to base any argument on it.

Plenty of people outside of cities, especially in suburban America, never use taxis, and many who have cars don't use Ubers/Lyfts. Coming from your perspective it may seem implausible but consider another perspective.

A good user experience doesn’t pardon Uber’s excessive corruption.

> Uber didn’t even start out cheaper than taxis.

When Uber came to my city about a decade ago all rides were free to the passenger. So much cheaper than a taxi.

You don’t understand Uber’s business model. They want prices so low because that’s how they make money. Lower prices equals more rides. They know that the higher the prices the less overall rides they will get. You thinking that the goal is to raise prices is literally 100% wrong.

In Brazil during their worst recession in decades, they had something like 300k drivers. This dropped the prices to the point where so many more rides occurred that everyone made more money and the customers were happy because the prices were low. That’s what they are going for, not some sort of moat based on raising prices.

You can't lower prices to below costs and make money. If they're not profitable now, to become profitable they need to either cut costs or raise prices.

The only reason to have prices below costs is to gain market share so you can do one or both of those later.

What costs do you think Uber has left to cut that they haven't at this point? Maybe workforce.

This is all a common well known business tactic, which many businesses have used in the past to establish market position. It's what they'll do with that market position people are worried about.

I confess I know nothing of Uber's running costs but in my layman's understanding I think GP point is still valid. Driver buys the fuel and services the car. How does having more rides cost Uber more?

If they pay the driver more than they charge the rider which they have specifically done at points in the past, then every ride costs them, even if their other overhead is zero.

In the past they did this to achieve market dominance over taxis and lyft because they were drowning in billions of dollars of VC money, and the whole point of getting all that money is to become a market leader as soon as possible, even with loss-leading strategies.

> You don’t understand Uber’s business model. They want prices so low because that’s how they make money

this sounds like you don't understand the concept of a business model.

You can do the math and find an approximation of the price–demand relation ship ( assuming you adapt prices to keep your business profitable, and users react by adapting demand).

This system has two fix points, one at the normal taxi price and much much lower. Point is , the second fix point needs the majority of the population to stop using a privat car…

The technology definitely made life easier for passengers, especially in big cities. Prices were cheaper for some time, but only because they were subsidised by investors, so hardly a net gain. Arguably, they made the environment worse by pushing middle income off public transport and into taxis

For drivers, things seem to have got worse. I’ve spoken to various taxi drivers, including current and former Uber drivers, and none of them liked working for Uber. They merely felt trapped.

But there is an argument to say that the local taxi cartels needed breaking up, and only a company prepared to engage in these kind of tactics could have done it. I don’t know what I think about all this.

A key point here is that Uber didn't just disrupt taxi cartels, it also undermined public transport services. In places like Miami it even became a sanctioned alternative to bus routes that were cut. To me this is the true long term damage of their VC-funded predatory pricing model.

> In places like Miami it even became a sanctioned alternative to bus routes that were cut.

As in... government justified cutting bus services by saying Uber was a viable alternative?

Technically, yes. For a while they provided vouchers to reimburse riders for using Uber instead of the public bus system.[0] Now those particular night bus routes have returned to service, but others have been reduced or canceled. This has been happening for the past 10 years or so all over the US.[1] It's not clear if Uber is the primary culprit, but it certainly doesn't help.[2]

[0] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article24182271...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/upshot/myster...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096585642...

USA centric answer here: In flyover country, in most cities ride share has been life changing for people that would be stuck using overpriced local taxis (in smaller 80K-150K person cities taxi rates are confiscatory and service is often VERY limited) or terrible public transportation. Terrible meaning, a $2 bus ride that takes three and a half hours (of which 2 hours is sitting in the elemets) out of their day vs. ride share taking 10 minutes and $15.

Honestly, I'm not sure where the idea came from that outside some of the largest cities, public transport or taxis even were viable options. Now there's uber/lyft everywhere, because there's always someone with a car who would like to make some money.

That's great, but how does that justify Uber's poor behavior in places like Miami?

Not even trying to justify it.

The idea comes from many other countries where 80k-150k cities have public transport services that don't require people to spend 2 hours sitting in the elements waiting for a bus.

> USA centric answer here: In flyover country, in most cities ride share has been life changing for people that would be stuck using overpriced local taxis (in smaller 80K-150K person cities taxi rates are confiscatory and service is often VERY limited) or terrible public transportation.

And if Uber/Lyft had confined themselves to delivering reliable transport at a reasonable price in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, etc. people would be singing their praises.

But they didn't. Because those places weren't just unprofitable but were wildly unprofitable.

Which is stupid because I suspect being a reliable broker between driver and client could still be profitable. Having someone put in "I need to go from A to B at time X." and having a pool of drivers who can go "I'm going to B anyway, so why don't I adjust my time and make some money for doing so." would be a good thing in "flyover" country.

However, it won't be venture capital profitable. And that's really the crux of the problem here.

> But they didn't. Because those places weren't just unprofitable but were wildly unprofitable.

Uber as a company is "wildly unprofitable" across the board. I cracked open Uber's 2021 annual report, and I'm not sure they are profitable anywhere. Their revenue model really appears to support the notion they are simply displacing taxi operators, "23% of mobility bookings came from 5 cities..." and listed only NYC and Chicago in the US.It went on to say that 11% of mobility bookings came from airports (and that revenue stream was under attack from the taxi industry).

> However, it won't be venture capital profitable.

I've never had a VC ask for profits. Only growth where revenue and expenses would show we could trim the sails and break even in a pinch. Since Uber is publicly traded, I suspect they are going to have to do better than an annual report that basically projects profitability like I do winning the lottery.

> I’ve spoken to various taxi drivers, including current and former Uber drivers, and none of them liked working for Uber. They merely felt trapped.

I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally none of them have expressed the feeling that they're trapped. (And not one has said that he would prefer driving a taxi.) They do make criticisms, more of Uber than of Lyft. But the main sentiments that they express are appreciation of scheduling flexibility and of not having a boss.

If they can be de-platformed, they have a boss. They just have flexible work hours.

Being able to work for many platforms means you choose your boss.

Being able to take several drugs means you choose your drug

This is the second time I see you mentioning drugs in this thread [1], I genuinely don't understand the correlation or the argument you're trying to make?

Comment by ClumsyPilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048240

The people who are currently working for Uber think working for Uber is a good deal. You might get similarly positive reviews from the buyers of scratcher lottery tickets.

There are a lot of articles from random websites saying that it is a good deal, and given the ease of placing such content I think we should be skeptical. Every time I see an article from a driver, who is not a pro blogger in the space, and who’s done the math, it is usually pretty negative to neutral.

https://www.quora.com/Is-driving-for-Uber-worth-the-wear-and...

It’s actually really hard to know if you’re making money when you take things like capital depreciation and opportunity cost into account, and sophisticated businesspeople make this mistake all the time. The average driver could easily be fooled until it’s too late.

It would be nice if capitalism did correct price discovery here but we’re dealing with a market which has been highly distorted, both from questionable government regulation and taxi monopolies AND from insane startup valuations and investment. The only accountability moment has been the public markets and even then it’s pretty mixed.

Uber has overwhelming power over their drivers and if it was actually a good deal for them it would be the first time in the history of labor relations that a company left money on the table out of the goodness of their heart. Does Uber strike you as that company?

Yes I use ridesharing when I’m in the SFBA because there’s few other plausible ways to get around. I’m crossing my fingers the whole time that I’m not helping someone dig themselves deeper into a financial hole.

I love it. So you’re comparing the experiences of real drivers who don’t hate it to bloggers who are making mathematical calculations and you take the word of the bloggers. That’s just about par for the course.

“The poor dumb blue collar workers don’t know any better and need to be protected by the smarter elites who did the calculations!”

I don't see you presenting any contrary evidence of the opinions of "real drivers".

As far as I know, such evidence has never been released by Uber. I’m sure that Uber knows, or could, but I don’t think they’ve shared that info. They have an API called Movement which publishes anonymized data about trips, but I think cost isn’t available.

There was a study by MIT in 2018 that concluded it was a bad deal for drivers. https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/02/mit-study-shows-how-much-d...

I don’t know if the 2018 data is still relevant, as there are complex incentives that vary in each market.

But, Uber (and similar companies) could probably end the questions tomorrow by releasing data or allowing researchers to have access to their drivers. The fact that they don’t, and that they instead spend $200M lobbying the governments to make an exception for worker protections for rideshare drivers (and tried to make that irrevocable without a 7/8ths majority!!) seems telling to me.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/08/20/politics/california-propo...

They didn't state the bloggers were making the calculations. The bloggers noted are pro Uber.

If you're going to just dismiss someone's point through an appeal to sentiment, you might as well get it right. Or maybe getting what was said right doesn't matter, and just recasting it as elitist as a tactic is the point.

So youve compared experiences of real drug addicts who don't have it to scientists doing the calculations and you take word of the scientist?

I genuinely don't know any drug addict who thinks taking drugs is a good thing, beneficial to them or in anyway a positive aspect of their life.

Please don't make up phony exaggerations just to win an Internet argument.

I bet you know a lot of compulsive drinkers that view alcohol as a positive in their life.

I’m addicted to marijuana, but I still think it’s a good thing because it helps my PTSD. I don’t like being addicted to it, but I’m better off consuming it than not, although my addiction makes it difficult to regulate.

Would you be happy if your child was an Uber driver?

I would be happier for them to driver for Uber or Lyft than for a taxi company.

I don’t think it’s a career. Just a job. If my kid drove for a ride share while going to school or something that seems fine.

There are quite a few qualifications to that answer.

Because you asked a very loaded question.

If you were to ask me that question, I'd say: I'd be as happy that my child drives for Uber, as much as I'd be happy they're driving for a taxi, limousine, or a bus.

It's a question I ask myself often when I see the disrespect Americans have for people in jobs they also consider essential. I have other questions for myself like, "how would I truthfully explain this to my mother?". If the answers make you feel shame, then that probably tells you something.

1. I don't see anyone in the comments disrespecting Uber drivers

2. I never stated I'd feel shameful

3. I'm not sure I understand what argument you're trying to make

I wasn't aware I was making an argument. I asked a question (which was apparently loaded) and gave my thoughts. It's my experience that American society in general disrespects working class people - it's pretty clear from the stagnant wages and multi-generational political movement to suppress unions, so I understand why parents would not want their children to join that class.

> I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally none of them have expressed the feeling that they're trapped

Just think about the subjective bias here. They're working, you're the customer - do you talk shit about your employer on company time? Everyone knows that has serious risks.

I was thinking the same thing. You need to actually be close friends to actual drivers, when not interacting with them as passengers, to hear how they actually feel about uber

I always put more weight on negative comments about owns work condition because cognitive dissonance is a known human bias.

If you are working at a dead end job, where your pays and benefits are sub-optimal, and you are even putting more work hours then in other possible jobs, then why are you working there? Because of cognitive dissonance it is much easier to tell your self that you actually like the job over accepting the reality that you probably shouldn’t work there.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-08-09

> I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally none of them have expressed the feeling that they're trapped.

if you ask a smoking addinct if they could quit, 80% say yes and 80% will fail if they try.

Now if you show they've done the math on depreciation of their car, worked for 10 years, etc. then maybe yoi have an argument

Uber and others should really have been punished harshly for dumping. Banned from operating without extra taxes to bring them in line with other operators and fined for billions.

> Still a million times better than what it replaced.

Uber didn't replace taxi. taxi was dying on it's own. Uber actually kept the bad designs of taxi going but they monopolized the Medallions.

"what it replaced" was the ongoing outcry to minimally decent public transit. Some of the international offshoots of the Occupy movement actually had this as their central theme.

This is fantastical. Paying someone to drive you somewhere is not going anywhere anytime soon.

People even use Uber in Europe despite having world-class public transit. That should tell you something about the utility it provides people: they could have used top-tier public transit but they chose to use Uber instead.

I don't know if this really qualifies as the same sort of thing, but I do recall hearing a story about cabbies somewhere in Asia:

A sociology professor I had assigned us a project to do something that would be "considered abnormal to the general public", and then document the results. He had mentioned over and over again to try and implement "as many safety measures as possible during planning". The professor went on to explain that the reason for harping on safety was such a big deal because a student of a previous class (decades before ridesharing) decided that their project would be to bring their personnel vehicle to where cabbies would line up. The student would instead offer rides to customers completely for free. I believe they even had a little sign they put on their window.

After this occurred two or three times, all of the cabbies completely boxed the students car in and called for the police to come. If I recall correctly, they were yelling, screaming, and honking at the student about how they were taking money out of their pockets. Some were accusing the student of taking customers to an undisclosed location and robbing them in order to get paid, while others were saying that doing this for free was essentially stealing from the cabbies, since the student didn't have a taxi permit.

I'm not sure if this was a matter of corruption as much as it was messing with/hurting people trying to make a living, but, I did think it was interesting that all of these different cabbies, from all of these rival taxi companies were all willing to work together spur of the moment, to stop someone who they couldn't possibly compete with. As I understand it, the depths of the rivalry between some of these companies ran pretty deep; it was shocking how willingly they all were to join up to crush this outside threat.

No, in Switzerland. Instead it managed to steal almost a billion USD from drivers in Switzerland alone and give others the "idea" they can break the law too.

Uber is the worst kind of business preying on the lower class claiming independence and freedom when it's the opposite and you are basically a working slave. It did everything possible to go around government worker protections.

[1] https://www.20min.ch/story/uber-soll-fahrern-eine-halbe-mill...

I know a bunch of people who are happy Uber drivers as they couldn’t afford becoming regular taxi drivers. Do you often point out to your Uber divers that they’re lower class and being preyed on? How do they take it?

you can tell yourself that all day long if it makes you feel better.

In Europe, uber is exploiting the most vulnerable in our societies, and profiting of the harm they do to people and communities.

Not to mention, breaking laws, endangering passengers, using outright evil methods to keep their workers money.

Some of the most vulnerable are the homeless and mentally disabled. How is Uber exploiting them?

The phrase 'most vulnerable' is terribly overused, but your comment is still disingenuous.

These are not fair comments because everything you say the taxi industry it replaced is guilt of and closing the market. Uber puts new cars on the road and opens the industry to those who are locked out.

Suppose taxi industry is guilty of murder, does that mean I can now commit murder too?

If it gets replaced by a strictly less murderous alternative, this alternative is preferable.

No, but if a taxi industry is murdering people, and also helped create laws that prevent competitors from entering the market, I think it is OK to get around the laws that prevent competitors from competing with the taxi murder mafia.

In this metaphor, "murder" stands for "operating a taxi service without the approval of the existing taxi services."

My brother in law is a mechanic. He sees a lot of drivers who have a 3 year old car with 200k miles on them and basically a new car worth of repairs needed.

I also get a lot of happy drivers saying "this is my first day / week".

I see a lot of crazy driving too. All in all, it seems like there is a learning curve to being a profitable Uber driver. It is not necessarily easy to accomplish.

The ones who seem to anecdotally do best by it are the folks supplementing income by opportunistically taking fares here and there.

I love people who somehow think that taxi industry is filled with clean, perfectly maintained cars, fairly paid workers with great benefits and just the epitome of great citizens without any corruption.

Do you think I am one of those?

If so, why?

I see lots of people here from different countries describing very different experiences and wondering why they don't align.

It's insane. Thank God for tech companies for disrupting one of the worst industries on the planet. Uber and Lyft are, IMO, some of the best examples of the virtuous nature of "move fast & break things" as a business philosophy.

Uber are worse where I live. They cancel on you, they accept the fare and then just screw around for 20 minutes until you cancel, then if you try to rebook the price has magically gone up. At most times of day they are more expensive than the normal cab firms.

This all seems to come down to the rates of pay available to drivers getting worse, presumably as the VC money runs out. Thankfully the old cab firms have managed to cling on in the face of years of massive market distortion, and are still there to pick up the slack.

That's fine. They don't have to be better everywhere for me to be happy they exist. People attack Uber without dealing with the very obvious problem that in many, many markets, for both drivers and riders, they're an enormous improvement over the status quo.

And in many markets they were a market-distorting entity that drove already competitive firms to the wall by dumping VC money, meanwhile also circumventing rules which were in place for passenger and public safety.

I'm really not fine with that.

In what markets did Uber decrease passenger safety relative to existing cab companies? I have literally never been in a locality where the cabs were safer than Uber.

So early on in London there were problems with drivers not having proper insurance to carry passengers, for one, so if anything went wrong there would be no cover (and the driver was technically driving illegally as insurance is required). In some places (again like London) there were also requirements for background checks and registration before someone could be a driver, which uber worked around or just ignored when they entered the market.

These are just two examples from one market.

Okay. Not having taken London cabs, I cannot disagree with you. What I can tell you is that Ubers in NYC are much safer than cabs in NYC, and Ubers across Africa are much safer than their cab equivalents. To the degree that Uber's technology actually achieves something that cab companies cannot, it's punishing bad driver and rider behavior via the rating system.

> The ones who seem to anecdotally do best by it are the folks supplementing income by opportunistically taking fares here and there.

That's a large part of Uber's success: they are able to leverage the many people who have a car and occasionally have nothing better to do. There are even people who will drive for fun or as a way to kill boredom. Of course, those people will happily take a fraction of the pay that a professional taxi driver would. And those rides will be cheaper for consumers compared to taxi rides.

It's of course a problem when regulators disallow them to leverage this large class of drivers. When they are forced to operate like a taxi operator, a big part of their value proposition is gone. This is bad for consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.

> It's of course a problem when regulators disallow them to leverage this large class of drivers. When they are forced to operate like a taxi operator, a big part of their value proposition is gone. This is bad for consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.

It's only good for customers when they need to get a ride for certain times and only for some time. One of the reasons why taxis get regulated is because taxi companies need to guarantee service throughout the day. Drivers who only drive on the side will not provide that service, moreover if the regular taxi drivers are driven into bankruptcy because of uber drivers taking all the profitable times prices on average actually go up and especially for off peak times.

> This is bad for consumers and Uber, but good for taxi operators.

Uber's biggest lie is that these are the only stakeholders in the equation.

> [Mechanic brother] sees a lot of drivers who have a 3 year old car with 200k miles on them and basically a new car worth of repairs needed.

At the median rate for my city (Boston), those drivers were paid $1.07/mile* or $214K. They probably paid under $50K in gas, oil, tires, and repairs to that point, so they’re quite a bit ahead even if they have to throw the car away. Even at $0.66/mile for some of the worse cities, that’s still $132K in gross income.

* https://www.stilt.com/blog/2020/02/how-much-does-uber-pay/

Not that I doubt an article on a predatory loan website but…

You make the assumption that they are driving ~3800 miles a week and I can tell you, as a truck driver who is mostly out on the highways, there’s no way in hell they are doing those kinds of miles city driving. That’s like 550 miles a day seven days a week.

When I drove a cab the lowest rate was $1.45/mile (for medical vouchers) and some days it cost me money to haul people around and my expenses were only like $140/day (gas + lease). Though, once in a while I’d have a really good day with some big cash calls and take home a few hundred bucks but mostly I averaged ~$100/day take home (before taxes which I didn’t actually pay). Mostly, depending on the season and what was happening in town.

A lot of people eat peanuts, but a handful of people die from them. Should all people be made to eat peanut butter?

Uber is only a good company if it improves, yet somehow there is a never ending online narrative that "It's treating me well, so it's great for the world!".

That's not normal, it's deception.

They swapped masters from evil medallion rent seekers to software engineers. I’d pick the engineers any day and I’m glad they broke corrupt laws to make changes.

Taxi medallions ain't a thing in many countries. Many countries had proper regulated taxes with good drivers and clean cars (or vice versa). Now it's a shitshow with beaten Prius and a shithead behind the wheel.

I agree we should probably say "licenses" and not "medallions" when talking about policies all over the world, it's just that medallions are known as the worst example of corruption and regulatory capture, protecting incumbents while incredibly claiming this helped stranded people who need to get home when no taxis can be found.

At the peak these licenses were going for a million dollars each.

I think Uber, Lyft, and others are serving a great good in substituting for taxis in filling the need for road travelers. Taxi drivers may argue that the drivers are being abused, but we can't all have (nor do we all want) jobs with lots of protections.

Being a driver should be a job anyone could take while on the road to reaching their dreams in life, and not restricted to a lucky few who demanded the government give them a monopoly on the gig.

No, licenses-for-million-money did not exist outside of some markets.

Previously you'd get into taxi and then tell address. And refusing not-profitable-enough service was illegal. Now drivers see the route beforehand and can skip it.

A job should allow people to make a good wage and make a living out of it. It shouldn't be race-to-the-bottom for the profit of few by sacrificing quality of service.

Too bad those countries with proper regulated taxis and good drivers couldn't compete. Sounds like they weren't so good at least to the consumer.

Of course they could not compete: if your competitor flaunts the law, avoids the regulator, does not pay local taxes and externalizes a whole pile of things then there is no level playing field. It would be extremely surprising if they could compete.

The regulator is the taxi industry. More local taxes are paid because more drivers exist. The rules around the playing field are in favor of existing monopolies and they haven't changed.

The existing cartel wasn't fair. Having Uber open the door has allowed smaller players into a closed market. The taxi industry is still healthy and slightly more modern because of this.

>if your competitor flaunts the law

The law in question being simply that they cannot compete at all.

>does not pay local taxes

They pay all sorts of taxes in my jurisdiction from day one, and still kicked the taxi industry's ass.

Good for you. That's not the case here. Taxi companies employ people, pay wage taxes, sales tax, have their vehicles inspected once per year and in general are marginal business, except for the few in the biggest cities where it is a good business. Uber only went for the easy wins, siphoned off a large chunk of the profits in return for people working without a safety net and who do not pay into the social system, which works fine until it doesn't and then society has to pick up the tab.

Can't compete against a service that "sells" $2 worth of labor for $1. Now that the VC-funded subsidies are running out, we'll see how competitive Uber really is.

Ah, but we'll make it up on volume!

Selling a good at a loss in order to jack up the price later (the desired Uber play, though it seems like it's backfiring) used to be called "dumping", but...eh.

It doesn't have to be competitive on price. I'd use it at twice, or even three times the price of a cab, simply because the service delivers on what it promises, without unnecessary fluff.

I remember having to plan around the expected number of cabs that wouldn't bother to show up after quoting "10 mins" to get to SFO. Or having a London cabbie decide that my being sat in his cab was a license to spout pro-Brexit nonsense for 15 minutes and then claim that he didn't take credit cards. Or NYC cab drivers blatantly flouting the law by purposely ignoring you if you had a suitcase, because they didn't feel like taking a fixed fare in traffic to JFK.

No.

> It doesn't have to be competitive on price. I'd use it at twice, or even three times the price of a cab, simply because the service delivers on what it promises, without unnecessary fluff.

That is indeed how much Uber cost when it first came out. Particularly because they sent out nicer luxury cars and had to hire limo drivers. Uber used to be called UberCab, but the medallion cartel didn't let new entries in so easily and forced the change from UberCab -> Uber, and also made it so they had to use luxury limo drivers. Still, users chose and taxis died, rightly so.

The unit economics are there that whatever Taxis charged Uber should be able to charge the same or less. If anything Uber et al are removing overheads not adding to them. The only way taxis would be cheaper would be if they were dodging taxes with their "no credit cards" policies.

> if they were dodging taxes with their "no credit cards" policies.

Bingo.

> That is indeed how much Uber cost when it first came out.

I remember when Uber first came to my city and it was free for passengers.

I've had ride hailing drivers cancel fairs or mark the trip completed on me before showing up. I suppose I've had worse taxi experiences overall, though.

> I'd use it at twice, or even three times the price of a cab, simply because the service delivers on what it promises, without unnecessary fluff.

I think you're in the minority. And remember that the subsidies went both ways - one reason Uber was able to attract so many drivers initially (and thus provide great service) is that they paid them more than driving a cab would.

Wait... what? I think you need to follow the capital and who is exploiting the means of production here.

In formerly-medallion markets, surplus value collection shifted from medallion rent seekers to VC and private equity rent seekers. In non-medallion markets, existing normally run companies had VCs price-dump an unbeatable competitor into their market. Software engineers (and what inherent "good" is there to "software engineers," anyway??) are also in the middle, albeit with more of an ownership stake thanks to RSUs.

I don't see how it's slavery to work for uber. If uber wasn't there, the drivers would be either unemployed, working another minimum wage job, or taking 30 years loans to get Taxi licenses(which most of them wouldn't be able to get).

It's just the same as any other precarious job

This is a really simplistic view of labor dynamics and almost certainly too simplistic.

Jobs don’t exist in a vacuum. When a job is created sometimes it spurs other jobs, but sometimes it removes them. It is a really dynamic system full of feedbacks and feed forwards.

I think I read somewhere where someone actually modeled the dynamics behind uber eats, and found out that it resulted in net-negative jobs... That is every worker for uber-eats meant that more then one other worker didn’t get a job, not to mention the worse condition of that one worker that actually had the job.

I read the article you are referring to and it actually came to the opposite conclusion from what you’re saying: net-positive jobs, more spent and more earned.

(If you’re wondering how I am rebutting runarberg when neither he nor I cited a source, that’s a darn good question. But let the record show I offer just as much evidence as he.)

I can draw out a plausible model right now that results in net-negative jobs. Driving factors include:

* Food vendors that previously had delivery downsizing their own delivery staff and offloading it to uber eats.

* Restaurants not wanting to pay the service fees to uber eats gets fewer customers from the lowered exposures (as customers start ordering mostly through the delivery app), and eventually shut down.

* Restaurants that previously didn’t do delivery getting less money per customer as the delivery services take their share. And is forced to cut down on their opening hours and some of their staff to make up for the loss.

I never read that article you are referring to—if it even exits. The point was that labor dynamics are more complicated then: If a job is created, someone will work that job.

If we transfer over to the taxi market. There are examples of city government using Uber as an excuse to cut bus lines. Some bus drivers hence lost their jobs, and some companies probably lost their workers as the commute became to hard.

Now you’re just making things up? Why not either link to the source of your claim? I’m willing to believe what you’re saying is true but you’ve got to link to something, not just make up “models” (using the term very loosely here) out of whole cloth.

Also: how is “restaurant has no customers and has to close” Ubers fault? I guess restaurants never closed before Uber eats existed, or is Uber to blame for those business failures as well?

There’s plenty to criticize Uber for but blaming them for the closure of a restaurant that can’t attract customers is simply ridiculous and makes clear some people simply in this thread will blame anything on Uber regardless of whether the accusation even makes sense.

I am just making things up. My point was never to claim that uber eats has a net negative effects on available jobs, just to hint that it might be the case as an argument against GGGP claim that without uber the workers would either be unemployed or possess an equally sucky job.

> I think I read somewhere where someone actually modeled the dynamics

I know I’m being a little dishonest here. The fact is that I merely think I remember someone else talking about someone else doing such a thing. I never actually had the source, and I think I once saw a secondary source. But I didn’t think I actually needed—nor did I feel like wasting my time—to search for it. I figured it would be sufficient to demonstrate that such dynamics can theoretically exist.

I think the problem is exporting us labor practices to the civilized world

Taxi Drivers in Switzerland typically earn around 40,700 CHF per year and Uber drivers make roughly the same if working full-time, more if they are working more than 40-hours a week.

Unless the union is able to explicitly explain their claim the Uber is somehow unfair to drivers, to me sounds like the union is just complaining they not getting their member dues.

Possible I missed something, so here are my sources:

How much Uber drivers make in Switzerland

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/ride-sharing-app-_uber-reaches-...

Taxi Driver Average Salary in Switzerland

http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=210&loct...

Uber does not pay Social Security, Overtime, workers comp etc. When these people retire they have nothing, this money was effectively stolen from the workers.

Unia has successfully sued Uber at the highest courts and Uber recently lost. Geneva has banned Uber and others are expected to follow. There will now be an attempt to recover almost a Billion USD that is owed to drivers from Uber. [1]

[1] https://www.unia.ch/de/aktuell/aktuell/artikel/a/19138

> this money was effectively stolen from the workers

Yep. And also from the state/taxpayers, as the state will have to spend money to ensure those workers aren't left out in the street when older.

Uber didn't "steal" anything as competition is not a zero-sum game. Drivers chose contract work over a full-time job, and it's their choice to save their income. Besides, pensions and Social Security aren't shields against elder poverty befalling spendthrifts. They're merely buffers and one's that come at the opportunity cost of being able to take the money at that point in time and investing it.

> Drivers chose contract work over a full-time job

And children chose to work in the coal mines and die of blacklung

> pensions and Social Security aren't shields against elder poverty befalling spendthrifts. They're merely buffers

By that logic a literal shield is not a shield against swords and arrows, they are merely buffers of stronger material that protects you.

They come at the opportunity cost of being able to use the money to hire more soldiers or bribe your enemy.

> And children chose to work in the coal mines and die of blacklung

Are you saying the average Uber driver has no more ability to make decisions for themselves than the average child? Uber drivers cannot consent? I reckon they must also be prevented from buying cigarettes and having sex? This is absurd. An adult entering into a voluntary contract is profoundly different than a child being forced into work, in fact it's the main thing that it means to be an adult. What sort of weird infantilization does this line of logic even come from?

> An adult entering into a voluntary contract is profoundly different than a child being forced into work, in fact it's the main thing that it means to be an adult

Ah, okay, let's deal with adults: can you volunterilly sell your organs, sell yourself into indentured servitude, or into prostitution? Can you buy heroin or uranium? Can you at least open a coalmine without health and safety and let other people agree to work in it when they know they will get blacklung? No, you can't even buy some financial products without proving you are a sophisticated investor.

You are not allowed to do shit like that because when we allow business to profit out of misery and misfortune of others, business will purposefully trap unfortunate and vulnerable. It isn't an adult vs another adult -> it's one man vs multi billion dollars of lobbying, marketing and legal department.

You're seriously comparing driving for Uber to working in a coal mine, selling your organs, and selling yourself into slavery or prostitution?

When I was in college I drove pizzas and Chinese delivery for $2 an hour plus tips. It was fine, and I was happy for the work, which was the best I could find part-time. I'd have been much happier if I could have driven for Uber, and I'd have missed rent payments far less often. Miss me with the "this should be illegal" stuff, it's a completely different thing than any of the other stuff you mentioned.

I know people for whom prostitution worked out great, some of them made serious money. Why shouldn't I compare one form of expoitation to another form of exploitation?

In fact I would rather have prostitution than people working at $2/hour.

Why do you think successfull business happens in UK/US/{Insert first world country} and not in Somalia?

It's the fact that we have law & order, educated population and infrastructure. These things cost more than $2 an hour to maintain. Now if you started your own business and end up making $2 an hour, thats one thing.

But when an international corporation systematically exploits our people by underpaying them, it's destroying local businesses who can't compete and routing taxes through panama, it's stealing from all of us.

If you focus on a single aspect and ignore all the other issues, sure, there's no problems whatsoever. But when gig economy jobs are the only jobs available for a certain person, it's hard to argue that they're entering those fully voluntarily. The only alternative to them is starving or getting assistance. In the case of Uber, they can cause long-term issues for workers who gamble on buying a car for the job. Additionally, they cause the higher paying versions of the job to disappear, cause taxes to go away, and force employees into not being able to plan for the future. As much as I enjoy having a single mini-cucumber delivered to my door in 10 minutes for a few euros (thanks, Gorillas), there are some extremely negative things that come with those jobs having replaced other better paying jobs.

>> the "idea" they can break the law too.

There may be a disconnect here for those who are not Swiss. That very "idea" is arguably detrimental to the social health of a country like Switzerland (whose citizens appear to practice a sort of honor system when it comes to social norms and laws), while it may well be a non-issue in most other countries.

I think a global company like Uber will have a social impact, whether positive or negative, that very much reflects specific regions or nations, so white knighting Uber as a general proposition is not very sound.

This is the case for many other european countries aswell.

In the netherlands for instance, uber and many others got slapped down hard for circumventing the law according to the literal implementation of the law, instead of taking into account the spirit of the law aswell.

> Taxi Drivers in Switzerland typically earn around 40,700 CHF per year and Uber drivers make roughly the same if working full-time, more if they are working more than 40-hours a week.

You’re forgetting that one of these two person needs to pay for a car, car taxes, fuel and insurance by themself.

> No, in Switzerland. Instead it managed to steal almost a billion USD from drivers in Switzerland alone and give others the "idea" they can break the law too.

It seems that this ~billion USD is an hypothetical amount Uber would have had to pay if its contractors had been employees? If so, I'm not quite sure "steal" is the appropriate word here. It also ignores the many things Uber might have done differently if its drivers had been employees: increase fare rates, decrease driver payouts, hire less drivers, possibly get out of Switzerland entirely, etc.

Wage theft is still theft. In the US it is the largest form of theft there is.

Doesn't wage theft imply they aren't paying the amount that they agreed to pay?

they weren't paying the benefits required by law

wage theft comes in many forms. Most would use it to describe the deprivation of any pay or benefits as agreed upon or required by law. So not paying benefits required, reclassifying legal status of workers to avoid paying things, not paying overtime correctly, etc.

Well, and this is exactly the problem. They disrupted the market of ordinary taxis by undercuting the prices. Now that they are compelled to pay social contribitions their business is suddenly unprofitable.

As it was discussed in the other threads - Uber is not prohibited in Switzerland, they just need to adhere to the law same as everyone else. Somehow this seems to be a problem for them.

> Uber is the worst kind of business preying on the lower class claiming independence and freedom

Sounds like Uber was the original web3 business

Jesus f with the "slave" overdramatization, that is just ridiculous. Most of the people driving for Uber would not have been driving cabs and living wonderful lives otherwise, they'd be slinging burgers at McDonald's or just unemployed. They wouldn't be making the choice to drive if it didn't make sense for them, which makes it "work", not "slavery".

I'm sorry that the world doesn't offer magical fairyland jobs that are super easy, require zero skill, and pay super well, I really am - as a society we should be aiming for an abundance economy fueled by automation, where everyone shares in the spoils. But running a business that gives people work that they are generally happy to have the option to take is not infringement on anyone's independence or freedom. Just don't drive for them, and you'd be in the exact same position you were in without them existing (unless you were profiting from the heavily cartel-ized taxi system which abused all the customers, in which case I can't give a bigger shrug).

Uneasy co-incidence, that recently an Indian Uber competitor (named Ola) also had a report of lobbying efforts...

https://twitter.com/shrutisonal26/status/1544540603932758016

Edit: Apart from the tweets, the actual article is behind a paywall.

Btw I'm being a bit coy about naming names but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabcharge#Findings_of_the_Taxi... has all the details of what i spoke about above in case any doubts how corrupt the taxi industry is (although absolutely no one has doubted that to be fair).

Maybe some places have shitty taxis, in my European corner I haven't seen anything good about Uber other than bringing the US gig economy of employee exploitation.

Not sure where you're located but I'm from Ireland living in the UK. In Edinburgh, all Ubers are private hire cars (it's not just anyone in 4 wheels). Uber has forced all of the major taxi firms to accept card payments, have apps with tracking, etc. Uber itself funnily is actually less reliable than the other operators. My experience in Dublin is the same. It's also completely removed the "take someone the scenic route and charge them 3x" (which happened to me in a taxi in Dublin from the airport in 2014!)

Meanwhile, visiting my parents in a smaller part of Ireland, getting a taxi involves phoning, waiting to see if they decide to pick up (if it's busy they don't), then having them tell you it'll be 10 minutes only to arrive after an hour, not accepting card, etc.

In Germany nowadays, card payments and phone apps to call taxis were already a thing before Uber came here.

In Scandinavian countries it was even better.

Irish taxis are unusual compared to taxis in other countries. They’re virtually all self-employed owner-operators like Uber drivers. They are individually licensed and usually own their own vehicles. They can take app or radio dispatches or pick up street hails. If taxis in other markets had taken the same regulatory approach, something like Uber may never have had such widespread success.

Slightly better circumstances don't exonerate corruption.

Laws and regulation are supposed to reign in bad industry.

Brigading and PR spin is rampant with Uber online for some strange reason, when in truth, they could provide a far better service by relaxing their tendency to spin bad PR by paying and insuring drivers better, and by operating more like a legit Taxi business.

It is NOT Uber that swept in and fixed the corrupt transport for hire system... It was passengers choosing a less expensive (subsidized by company investment) service, which is now dramatically increasing in cost to users now that they have stable market dominance.

The online PR spins only hold up for people who don't properly recall the past and for those who are unaware of the deception involved in use of "folksy" individual personal tropes used to over-simplify complex issues.

> now that they have stable market dominance

Do they? I'm trying to find some data on how much market share Uber has vs Lyft vs taxis.

That's not a key issue to the discussion, the discussion is about corruption.

You were the one that brought it up.

Uber is only “better” because it is unprofitable.

The minute it starts turning the screws to be profitable, the service quality will go back to what it replaced.

Here in India, its already less reliable and often more expensive than old school taxis.

Not true. In SF when Uber started, it only had black cars and was meaningfully more expensive than a cab. The difference was that if you called a cab, depending on where you were in the city, there was a pretty decent chance you'd be told it'd take 15 minutes, but no one would ever show up. The Uber would be there 100% of the time.

Uber held drivers accountable. The taxi lobby did the exact opposite - they brutally abused an advantage gifted to them by the government because taxis are supposed to be a valuable public service.

In India it may be different, but in the US it continues to be extremely reliable.

> In India it may be different, but in the US it continues to be extremely reliable.

This is a hint at the main thing we need to remember: Uber replaced a terrible taxi situation in San Francisco. Every city is not like San Francisco. Every country is not like the US. Based on various comments here from people outside the US, some places already had functioning taxi systems, with reasonable prices, clean cars, and good drivers. Why is it ok that Uber got to flaunt regulations in those places as well?

I don't think it was ok anywhere. Even in SF I think it was beneficial but not "ok" in a general sense of fairness. The ends justify the means, I suppose. I'm not saying that Uber overall is a particular ethical company - I don't think they're great on that dimension.

uber is already profitable https://www.barrons.com/articles/uber-stock-first-profitable...

Operating profit, not net.

Look closer

That's just wrong.

Ok, Uber in particular may be very badly run and incapable of turning a profit. But on most places they have competitors that are profitable and usually, cheaper.

If they slash their operating developers from dropping out of the self driving cars race that would make them much more profitable. Whether doing so would be a good idea is another topic.

End does not justify means.

Disruption can (and does) happen without resorting to breaking the law.

I wonder if there are any examples of a company that disrupted a bad industry with malpractice and then magically stopped it ones they succeeded.

For some reason I would think the opposite was more common, i.e. if a company gets away with bad behavior, they will continue to do so until stopped by their government authorities.

It is a known and unfortunate phenomenon that regulation winds up creating moats even if in service of good ends and intentions. Pulling up the ladder effectively happens to the benefit any incumbent who can afford something far more than upstart competitors. If say, a scrubber stack on factories doubles the equipment costs it favors the existing factory owners even if retrofitting is a hefty expense, it would buy them a moat.

Stopping on their own has to do with cost benefit analysis and is thus circumstantial. For a sort of in progress Amazon openly admits that they need to reduce turn over because they are running out of hiring pool. Their work conditions are still infamous but they set standards. That could ironically potentially mean a more competitive environment could have had worse wages. Not an arguement against it being a problem but an amusing irony.

Similarly deeper pockets mean a need to be less reckless as big payout judgements become collectable. If a fly by night roofing company has a worker fall and break their back from lack of safety equipment it may only have a few hundred thousand in assets total. If it is a state wide one they could be on the hook for millions.

This is a good point. Which is why I’m a big fan of general workers’ solidarity, including via unionization.

Solidarity among workers offers us a tool to combat these companies, and force them to make changes that benefit us at the cost of their shareholders. The union should be able to lobby the government to enact and enforce sufficient safety laws such that a worker will never be changing the roof over night unless adequate safety standards are met. And if a company fails, a worker has the means to refuse the work, regardless of the size of the company.

With solidarity we simply don’t have to wait for these companies to stop on their own, because we can collectively force them to stop, bottom up.

How does that follow at all. Uber breaking the laws was not the only possible way to break up a cartel!

What is your point? Is it that we can’t have nice things and we should just settle with whichever company is able to make the most money from whatever corruption they can get away with?

You are posting an anecdote and non-substantiated accusations against an industry based on your area. And you are doing this under a news where they have evidence that their competitors are as corrupt as it gets, a company which has been accused in the past of violating labor rights, disregarding local laws, bribing officials, exploiting workers, etc. And your point is that their competitors in Australia are worse “because you say so”.

Nah, I’m not buying it. The fact that the Australian taxi industry is bad, does not excuse Uber’s conduct. In fact I don’t care what the state is in this industry regarding this conduct and I wish Uber all the worst.

I worry that stories like the above article will be used to justify outlawing ride share in favor of the cartels. This is actually the case in many jurisdictions where ride-share apps are still not allowed and the taxi industry still operates in a cartel fashion. I don't care about Uber or Lyft fwiw. No stake in either in any way shape or form.

My post is a very relevant warning (in my view) about allowing politicians to use the above stories as an excuse to close down an industry. They are looking for such an excuse. Be warned and call it out.

I think you might be focusing on the wrong thing here. There is no reason to outlaw ride shares, only ride shares that engage in illegal lobbying, labor violations, and disregarding of the law. In fact this is not specific for ride share companies, but companies in general (including traditional taxi cab companies).

People have been complaining about Uber not because it is a ride share company that undercuts the traditional taxi cab companies, but because they exploit their workers, bribe their elected officials, brake their local laws, and use VC funding to undercut their competitions. For this they should be outlawed.

whataboutism isn't useful for highlighting corruption - is why you are being downvoted.

> Still a million times better than what it replaced.

Not really. It is not easy to paint existing systems with a wide brush. The situation in Germany is not the same as in Croatia which is not the same in India. I will always trust taxis in Mumbai and Berlin over Uber, whereas in a foreign location I will look for local options like Ola, Grab, FreeNow.

Uber did act as a catalyst for the incumbents to get off their butts, but it created another set of problems which are equally bad.

This is such a stupid simplistic view - read the BBC article on this leak of Uber files. The corruption they (Uber) instituted was just as bad as this anecdote you are alleging.

How does replacing one set of elite corruption with another set of elite corruption get to " i am thankful to Uber Lyft and all the other incumbents for managing to get their foot in"?? You are thankful to them? What are you on about?

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

> It required dirty dealing to get past this corruption.

Why do you think the current state is "/past/ this corruption." It sounds like Uber spent a bunch of money to just "own the corruption for itself." On the whole, I don't believe it's an actual improvement.

You may like the state of the cars more, but the continued overt monopolization and the worse outcomes for labor are massively negative outcomes, even if you aren't in a position to be personally impacted by them.

So instead of virtual domination by one very large local incumbent with 200 subsidiaries, you have two foreign cab companies. That's an improvement?

> Still a million times better than what it replaced.

Not in my experience at all. I can't count how many taxis I've taken, with hardly any problems ever.

> corrupt

They lacked anywhere near the resources to be as corrupt as Uber!

Uber isn't the most ethical company for sure but here in Brussels the taxi industry is pretty shady as well.

Getting a taxi license costs an exorbitant amount of money and it's done through all kinds of dodgy deals.

There's 1-2 companies that have a monopoly on the whole industry.

There's weird rules about which types of taxis can "serve" the airport, akin to what mobsters are responsible for collecting trash in what areas.

You'll often get "sorry the payment terminal is out of order, cash only" BS.

A study a few years ago showed the main taxi company, according to their tax documents, earned a ridiculously low amount of money per day (= obvious dodging of taxes).

They clearly refused to innovate for years. When you called their number you'd get some unintelligible voice on the other end that would give you about 10 sec to state your details before they'd clearly run out of patience.

You could only request pickups at specific addresses that would then be connected to your phone number / profile. So "pick me up on this street corner" was impossible.

The last time we called one for a ride to the airport they didn't show up at the agreed time so we got an Uber. Taxi company called us many times screaming insults down the phone, followed by an offensive email with an invitation to pay and threats of small claims courts.

In light of all that, I have zero problems with someone else moving in fast to break things.

I don't use Uber. Several friends do, and, as a third party watching I'd suggest the experience is no better but now with a shiny phone app and exploitative would-be unicorn tech corporation at the helm.

Most recent experience, we were in the docks, the docks are restricted access for terrorism prevention, on entry you need a specific purpose. Our purpose was to inspect a possible party venue (an actual steamship, it's awesome, for a few grand we could have them steam it out into the sea while we celebrated - but, on viewing it seemed like if weather was bad on the day it'd suck as a venue because there's only very limited indoor capacity). So after we've looked around we need to get back out of the docks. Friend summons an Uber. No problem initially, "This is why I use Uber" she says. Her ride gets to the edge of the docks and cancels, presumably because the driver sees scary warning saying "Restricted Area. State your business at checkpoint" and hit cancel because he has managed to live in a port city for years without knowing about this. She summons another one. It too gets to the edge of the docks and then cancels. "Uber says if this keeps happening they're forbidden from cancelling" she claims. Sure enough now her requests are just denied automatically.

So once she gives up I called a regular taxi. That driver couldn't find us, because apparently a massive sign with the name of the ship is too hard to notice ("I had no idea that was here"), but once we walked a few minutes to somewhere this driver could recognise we were driven out of the docks to go for cocktails with another friend.

This is my experience too. The ride is only as good or as bad as the driver makes it and I have more trust in a system where a number of local taxi companies compete for my business than one massive far-away corporation that somehow can't geofence.

In Copenhagen Uber made a splash until they decided they didn't get all they wanted when the taxi legislation was liberalised and they left. My reading of it is that they didn't want to give other European countries ideas and they were losing money anyways, so it wasn't really worth it to subject themselves to the same kind of regulation that exists in London or New York.

And what did we get instead? 5-10 different taxi apps offering taxis at much the same speed it takes to get an Uber, but regulated locally and paying taxes. It's literally a question of installing a different (or multiple different) app and then the flow is the same.

The kicker: Uber came to Denmark late enough that the taxi companies already had apps (or at least some of them which was then the ones I used). Ultimately it was just a big fight over nothing and Uber left with red numbers and a bad image.

So Uber much like Tesla forced incumbent companies to innovate and you as a consumer have benefited, yes?

Uber came in late 2014. We had had app-hailing for a year or two at that point. They certainly shook things up but it's hard to see what Uber got out of it

You couldn’t be bothered to walk outside a “restricted access” area with what you call “scary warning signs” at the entrances, and you blame the Uber drivers for not wanting to take their chances driving past that sign to pick up you and your companion? Oh and the taxi driver also failed to pick you up there, and you finally move your butts to go meet the taxi.

The Uber drivers probably thought the pickup location was a mistake- they get there and say “I can’t pickup here, this is a wrong location” and cancel the job.

So three drivers can’t find you, including a taxi, and this is Ubers fault somehow, not yours for making unreasonable demands of drivers. I suppose it was Ubers fault that the cab couldn’t find you either? It amazes me how people rationalize blaming others in situations like this.

The entire docks, of a port city, ie that's the only reason people built a city there, is restricted.

The University has a department with its buildings inside the restricted zone (Oceanography, it would be stupid to not put it next to the docks).

Do I expect the average driver to be in and out every five minutes? No. Do I expect taxi drivers to have seen the docks before and know that, duh, "I have a fare to pick up" is a perfectly acceptable reason? Yes. That'll be what the guy who did pick us up thought too. How do you think we got in to visit a ship in the docks in the first place? Taxi.

The docks are big. They're docks! We didn't walk out of the docks to meet that taxi, that would take ages, we just went from the car park next to the ship to a road that the taxi driver could find on his map. Unlike Uber, when he couldn't find us I just talked to him on my phone.

Know what else is in the docks? Cruise liners. Need a taxi to the airport after your cruise? Those taxis are coming into the restricted access area. Know what else is restricted? The airport! I wonder if any taxi drivers ever visit the airport...

> Know what else is in the docks?

No, I can’t name a single thing in “the docks” because I don’t live in your city and you haven’t said where it is, so there’s no way for me to find out.

In fact airports do not have “scary signs” at the entrance, they have signs directing you to departures and arrivals by airline or terminal.

In the end, not a single drive could navigate to you successfully, taxi or Uber, I don’t see how your takeaway here is “Uber is bad”

I remember this being true in my home place (Kerala, India) till ~2016. Local autos/taxis were unreliable in some parts or would charge you exorbitant fees depending on your situation (Eg: if you were a woman traveling home at night). Uber really changed things in terms of reliability. Local taxi drivers would often resort to violence against Uber drivers for encroaching on their turf. Example video: (The driver eventually steps out of the car and gets beaten up).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okqxNEVYu7E

I actually joined a political party in my country, because they had the intention of protecting Uber.

Some people wonder, but why? Why protect such scummy company?

Well, it was literally to save lives, as much illegal Uber behaviour is, what they were trying to replace was worse, MUCH worse.

Where I live "Taxi Mafia" was a thing, not just in the usual sense people imagine, like blocking competitors using regulations, but people were murdering others, there were beatings, assassinations, theft, high level government corruption, the Taxi Mafia was evil and destructive as any other "<drugs/guns/slavery> Mafia" you can imagine.

A lot of people claim Uber is evil because they say their workers are contractors and not employees. Well, before Uber if you wanted to be a driver, you had to purchase your own car, open your own company, and then give 50k USD to the local mafia boss, and promise to join combat whenever called. Combat? Yes, combat, gathering up drivers to kill a competitor was a thing, one infamous case for example: out of town driver parked near airport to deliver someone, a client in a hurry got on his cab as the other client was leaving, the local mafia didn't like this happened, so they surrounded the car and invited the driver for a "walk", took him under a nearby bridge, and they all kicked him until he was a mangled mess, and then they kicked him some more to make sure he was dead.

I don't understand why breaking up the mafia wasn't a more pressing issue? What makes Uber drivers different that they won't be dragged from their cars and kicked to death?

the politicians from the parent commenter's city/state aren't in uber's bed

They don't have to be? They would only need to intimidate/recruit the Uber drivers (which they did) and use their gov connections to cover up the crime.

A local mafia problem is a local mafia problem, no matter the transportation system being hijacked.

This whole thread kinda turned into Taxi whataboutism to deflect from Uber.

They were definitely threatened and beat in Brazil several times at the beginning (I don’t recall anyone dying on the news, but I maybe it happened). The difference is that anyone could become a Uber driver, where not everyone could become a tax driver (due to governmental regulations and tight control by the mafia)

I'm wary of adding a me too comment, because we may be talking about the same mafia. But yes, it looks like most large cities in Brazil had an organized mafia that lived on extorting small amounts from the people unlucky enough to need a taxi ride. It helps that the government was the one organizing them, mandating meetings and price fixing, but the rampant extortion was not called for.

And yes, there were about 3 years of very public beatings and assassinations from the taxi mafia on my city before they finally went bankrupt and disappeared. And now, suddenly the taxi service has a similar quality to Uber.

This is true in lots of cities in the US too. In Portland, our police were working with the taxi union, and kept creating phony Uber accounts, requesting rides, and then fining the drivers. Obviously those riders were getting horrendously negative reviews, so they got added to the "greyball" list where the phony users would log onto the app, and it would look like there were no cars available. They had the gall to complain that they were being targeted unfairly.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/uber-portland-greyba...

Fuck the taxi unions and especially the PPB for so many reasons.

In Las Vegas, where the corruption is much, much deeper, police, at behest of the taxi union, were just driving around and towing any car with an Uber or Lyft sticker. When the ride sharing companies finally broke through, they were still forced to only pick up at the farthest point in the parking lot of their airport, and at the back end of any casino, which could mean 10-15 minutes of walking in the 100F weather to get to the rideshare pickup spot. Vegas is the only place in the US where I'll still take a taxi, which I hate, but ride share there is so horrible that there isn't really much of an option.

I also got robbed in various ways about 50% of the time when taking a taxi in Miami, with taxi drivers driving circles, or threatening to drive off with my luggage if I didn't leave a tip that was several times the actual fare of the ride, etc. People who complain about ride sharing companies are obviously people who have had the privilege of never needing to ride in a taxi. Maybe they're okay in some places, but they've been terrible pretty much everywhere I've been. The reciprocal rating systems that ride share apps use is a godsend.

> This is true in lots of cities in the US too.

What speeder is describing is not even close to true in any US city.

Maybe, but from stories I've heard from some locals, Vegas is pretty close. It's very much a mob run city, and I've heard stories (completely unsubstantiated) of assassinations related to taxi turf battles etc, and the tourism board directing police officers to not record any murders unless there were a lot of public witnesses so they can still be a top travel destination for tourists.

These are like, ramblings from random drunk dude on the street kind of stories, so maybe it's all BS, but it sounds like there is a lot of violent crime happening there in collaboration with the local police.

Sounds like there's a lot of violent crime happening there in collaboration with the local police, according to the ramblings of some random drunk dude on the street. Right...

Why do you think Uber would not have participated in the same corruption (or worse) once it was sufficiently entrenched? Remember, this is the company that in the US threatened journalists, and in India stole medical records of critics. It's not hard to believe they'd cross any line someone else was already crossing relative to local mores.

Not poster you asked but:

With Uber you don't pay the driver directly. The price is set by a third party and so is the recommended route. Tricky to swindle the rate, route or tips. In areas where drivers have to be licensed, that is enforced so passenger and driver identity has some verification

What made Uber special was that it ignored medallion/license laws. Those were central to taxi mafia. For example in São Paulo there was a period of time where some 30.000 or so drivers had passed all requisites, paid all fees, but whenever they applied for a license the government would only say they needed to wait. But if you paid 100k USD to certain guys, they would drop a cab, license and everything you needed at an agreed drop point, without any of the exams, testing, courses, etc...

> but people murdering others

What is stopping them murdering Uber drivers? Your story seems a caricature and makes little sense. "Uber saved my country from assassins"

Which country it was? Wich political party?

Brazil (I am assuming). Here, mainstream media (use Google translate to read it):

https://g1.globo.com/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2010/07/imagens-...

The police officer quote mentions a series of similar attacks. There used to be a video of the act, but probably link rotted.

> While taxi drivers must pass through a battery of paperwork, courses, exams and fees to offer what is known as public individual transportation in Brazil, private individual transportation services don’t have specific regulations on the books.

So, Uber steals the jobs of people that prepared to drive a taxi and paid their taxes. And Uber still says that taxis are evil like if Uber had not ignored rapes happening in their services around the world.

Uber propaganda is to vilify taxi drivers at any cost, to make them look sub-human. Uber is pure evil.

I'm enjoying how unhinged some of these comments are sounding. Should make for a good case study later on.

Taxi bad. Uber not as bad. Uber is ok? I don't see the mental gymnastics to give one a pass because another is bad.

Do not let perfect be the enemy of good.

We don't let robbers go because there are murderers out on the streets.

If letting the robbers go made the murderers vanish then we probably would, actually.

Ok I'll bite, where do we draw the line on acceptable crimes? What is the threshold for a crime we should punish versus not? Isn't that anti to the premise that we have varying degrees of punitive consequences for convicted crimes?

It happens today quite a lot actually. You only have so many police, courts, prisons and so on, so you have to focus your law enforcement resources on what matters more. If you dug into how the practice of policing actually works, especially in higher crime areas, you'd probably be fairly surprised. A lot of crimes do not have a consequence, because the police and prosecutors do triage.

Same thing happens with medical triage and prioritization.

The essential argument is: don't block a potential improvement because it doesn't perfectly fix the problem, and instead just stay in a worse situation. Because often, the practical reality is you only have imperfect solutions, and hypothetical perfect ones often do not happen. And you can still execute your perfect solution later after the imperfect one is complete.

Regardless of what you think about the company or their products, letting them get away with this sets a dangerous precedent in my opinion. Whether you agree with the specific laws they’ve broken, the precedent would allow companies to break other laws you might agree with more (and do more damage as a result).

Companies break laws every minute. Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now: it's illegal to transfer data of EU residents to US data centers.

Oil and gas companies have been blatantly breaking laws for decades.

Volkswagen, along with a majority of car manufacturers have been cheating emissions testing for ages.

Big banks literally rigged LIBOR through intentionally lying about numbers and laughing and not a single executive is in jail.

And they all set dangerous precedents, and now uber is setting yet another. And we all got dumber by taking the discussion to this direction. Enough defeatism.

To add to that, it could also be inferred that the Ubers of the world are able to get to where they are from the numbing affect of all the previous evilCorps that came before creating the death from a thousand paper cuts scenario.

They're just standing on the shoulders of evilCorpGiants?!

Agreed! And they should be held accountable too!

I'm not sure what your point is.

IIRC, Volkswagen were fined several billion, and a number of senior executives were charged.

My point is that the precedent has already been set, and a company that essentially allowed people to transact freely (away from the taxi cartel and regulatory capture) isn't the straw that's going to break the camels back.

IMO there's a big difference between breaking the law to optimize some otherwise-legitimate activity and starting an entire business on something that (at least at the time) was illegal in most countries.

I find what Volkswagen did worse. They polluted our air beyond the acceptable limit. On the other hand, Uber broke taxi laws that were anti-consumer anyway.

Volkswagen was the only one that was caught, you mean.

They weren't the only one that was caught.

Just like SMU wasn't doing anything the other schools were not doing. They just got caught. It is an example of how using the extreme punishment had a much larger collateral damage blast radius than intended.

Ohhh, they did a lot more then just braking taxi laws. According to this leak they engaged in illegal lobbying (which I would simply call bribery), and evidence tampering.

> Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now: it's illegal to transfer data of EU residents to US data centers.

This is not true and the devil is in the details. It's illegal to transfer "personal data" of EU residents. The definition of personal data under the GDPR is what US companies would consider PII or personally identifiable information and not all companies collect PII. In fact, I would argue most companies go out of there way to not store PII.

> In fact, I would argue most companies go out of there way to not store PII.

email address and ip is pii. So basically everything uses pii even if it is only for bot and ddos protection

Not all companies store IP addresses. Or email addresses for that matter. And whether or not an email is PII depends on a lot of factors for your company but alone an email address is not legally PII.

>So basically everything uses pii even if it is only for bot and ddos protection

If I use Cloudflare for example, as DDoS mitigation, I am not storing PII, Cloudflare is and thus Cloudflare has to deal with the legalities of that.

Even just transferring is not allowed without consent. And if you are the "controller" (ie. you are using Cloudflare to serve your customers) you would take the fine, not Cloudflare. And IP and email are PII.

Maybe it's time for mandatory penalty minimum set somewhere in the 3-100x profits made due to breaking the law. I'm tired of reading about how e.g. an investment fund settled for 100M with no admission of guilt after making a billion breaking the law.

The people who write the laws and control who's in government are corrupt as hell.

Think about the collateral damage caused by killing companies that break the law: lots of people lose their jobs, and most of them had nothing to do with the illegal act. That's not justice.

So what’s the alternative?Corporations can’t keep getting away with this.

As bad as China’s politics is, their businesses bend the knee to the government.

Sounds like “too big to fail” and a 2-tier justice system. Employ enough people, get immunity.

They may agreed on settlement because case and outcome was not that obvious.

Or that the plaintiffs couldn't afford not to settle, more likely than not.

Plaintiff lives on budget money, and even he loses the case, he doesn't get any damage back. It is strong incentive to go to court.

What is the point of this? That new companies should be even smarter than the stablished ones and therefore try to game the system even more? Or that we should learn from them and try to improve the situation and make all of them follow the rules?

His point was going after newer and smaller companies is a joke when larger companies are basically getting away with murder, or more accurately doing nearly the same thing you're punishing smaller companies for doing (at a larger scale)

I still don’t understand the reasoning.

The way to follow the rules is looking who is doing worst and take that as an upper bound?

More like it's pointless to say you can't do X behavior but someone else can

You mostly need to outlaw all of it or someone will keep doing it. Going after smaller companies won't change anything

> don’t understand the reasoning

Prioritising limited enforcement resources based on harm minimisation.

As a citizen of a democratic country I still prefer the laws dictating what is harmful rather than a CEO and a member of the government unilaterally.

And if something goes wrong use the tools from a democratic regime to change it. Even with its drawbacks democracies are the best system known to rule countries.

> Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now

No expert but in New Relic you can select in which data center your data should be. In fact many websites of US newspapers are not accessible from the EU. Just recently I had to order a gadget through reship.com because I couldn't buy it directly...

Yes, but why are you saying this? Because you think we should allow more of it? Or because you think we have fundamental problems we need to fix? Or some other reason?

This will codify that breaking the law is a cost of doing business. Uber already killed a person by disabling the brakes on their self driving car.

But this isn't about Uber, this is about power and corporate personhood.

Their "legal" business model should already be illegal. They are just testing the system to see how far they can get away with stuff.

And even this I highly doubt anything will come out of it.

I despise how they operated from start through 2017. But do I wish Uber had never happened? Nope. Also, when you say "letting them get away with .." are you including Macron, Biden etc in "them'?

When you have a massive leak of pervasive illegal behavior throughout the company, from the CEO down, and your response is...

>> "Kalanick’s spokesperson said Uber’s expansion initiatives were “led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full approval of Uber’s robust legal, policy and compliance groups”."

... I don't think that messages what Kalanick’s spokesperson thinks it messages.

"It's all okay because our legal and compliance teams said it was."

Talk about non-sequiturs.

Disclaimer: at Uber 2014-2018

Travis has not been CEO for 5 years. Based on this article, what do you want the people who actually presently work at Uber to do?

Quit? And find a job in a legitimate company?

I literally left Uber and moved to Japan. Mostly because I could not stand inequality I saw in SF and US. Did feel like Uber wasn’t great for full time drivers as well and it bothered me a lot and always on my mind.

So I did that.

You ever actually do something like that or are you just giving theoretical advice based on stuff you’ve never done?

Easy to say stuff like this. Tell me when you’ve actually done something similar yourself.

In 2004, I left the US on humanitarian missions, never came back. Glad it worked out for you too.

Shit. Well done on both of you.

Seriously glad for some light in the dark.

There's nothing special or enlightened about choosing the life you want to live. Plenty of people do it, for better or worse outcomes. Give it a try, start with a low consequence decision, take it, and see what momentum you build.

You missed the point. There is something special and enlightening about living an ethical life.

Let's let the person who actually did this for the past 18 years decide how they want to feel about it.

I’m glad you had the determination to do something like what you did. You sound like a better person than me. Keep doing what you’re doing - need more folks like you who actually walk the walk.

Uber’s behavior was well-known from 2014-2018. I never even considered them for employment.

Do you want a gold star for taking a job at an immoral company, exiting that SF tech cesspool because of “inequality”, doing a runner to a comfortable, wealthy country that only someone privileged could afford — and then pretending that move made you a saint?

Beatification in progress.

I’m really disappointed that you would take such an antagonistic stance towards what I said and twist my words.

I am not a saint. I never said I was. You, my friend, are also not a saint. I suggest you make arguments based on things you have actually done yourself. Be better. I’m trying to better as well.

Appear as witnesses in a FCPA lawsuit.

Granted, for that to happen, it would take a prosecutor to start a case.

I don't think "they broke the law" has the same weight it used to. The American justice system has been so entirely captured by capital that such an accusation merely tells me that one of Uber's enemies spent real money on a PR firm.

Plus, the laws they broke are ones that almost no-one except taxi companies (and perhaps city tax officials) care about.

There are some particularly bad things here like

> Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from “extreme right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were “spoiling for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.”

However, this is how all "unicorn" startups operate. Break the law until they get caught and pay a small fine. Uber will get away with this and people will continue to use Uber.

> However, this is how all "unicorn" startups operate.

No it absolutely isn't.

Uber is uniquely corrupt. Their toxic tech-bro culture has been baked in from the start.

It absolutely is when paying fines for breaking the law is called 'cost of doing business'.

Businesses want to pretend they are people with rights, then they need to be punished. Send the whole C-suite and Board to fucking prison.

Uber is super corrupt but hardly unique.

Why would any rational company follow the law when the cost of not doing so is miniscule and the upsides are huge.

If the law encourages people not to follow it the law isn't very effective.

Interesting reporting about behavior that goes somewhat beyond business-as-usual for corporate lobbying efforts (not a justification, just a note that these kinds of tactics are relatively common and this report is not an extreme outlier, compared to pharmaceutical lobbying for example).

However, it's curious that there's no mention of Uber's largest backer, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which put an unprecedented $3.5 billion into Uber (initially, that may not be all). All the article mentions is this:

> "From Moscow to Johannesburg, bankrolled with unprecedented venture capital funding, Uber heavily subsidised journeys, seducing drivers and passengers on to the app with incentives and pricing models that would not be sustainable."

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/how-much-of-uber-does-sa...

Uber's relationship with Saudi Arabia certainly deserves some mention:

> "In the interview with the digital news platform, Khosrowshahi said the 2019 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi shows that "the (Saudi) government said they made a mistake. It's a serious mistake, but we've made serious mistakes, too right?""

FWIW this is about the company's founding DNA: "The leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick".

I see this is hitting the front page of the guardian with that heavy hitting colour scheme but reading through the articles I feel a big… so what? Maybe I’m just apathetic but it feels like a company that’s fought to exist in a world of crappy, shady incumbents and made life meaningfully better for a lot of people.

I’m skeptical of a lot of technology and generally would prefer that status quo for a lot of things but this feels like a storm in a teacup for what is a pretty decent product disrupting an industry that deserved disruption, I’m almost hope Uber provides an example of how this can be done for other industries.

The laws being broken were clearly unjust and Uber committed civil disobedience (in the American tradition) by breaking them. That doesn't mean every underhanded thing Uber has ever done has been justified, but in this particular instance it seems like it was. No one wants to be sympathetic to a large corporation of course, but that's a conversation most people aren't willing to have...

> The laws being broken were clearly unjust

We're talking about laws from foreign countries too here, some of which were clearly aimed at preventing civil servants from becoming corrupt.

> Uber committed civil disobedience (in the American tradition)

Comitting "civil disobedience" against a foreign country to force them to open to business? Sure, it may be a tradition if you refer to Matthew Perry or William Walker.

How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide (2017)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...

HN discussion of that Greyball article (not just linking because my comment is the top one and explains it, or anything...).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785564

and scheduled me a 5:15am ride at 10pm the night before so i could get to their airport at the click of a button. where else is the driver going to make $25 (guessing their actual profit from $40 ride) in 20min at 5am? it's in the best interest of the people and progress. that's what the law should be enabling, not defending taxi licenses and unions

Uber don't schedule anything in most markets, they just look for a driver a couple of minutes before.

I'd never rely on that for something important like an airport trip.

Corporations are people, and people can be terminated by the state. Corporate death penalty. Easy.

(Except that I agree neither with corporate personhood, nor the death penalty.)

Uber is the best thing that happened to the taxi industry, from client's perspective

Except all the weird/interesting cab stories are no longer going to happen.

Mine include:

Cabbie suggesting we pick up girl from bus stop on the way to club. we did and yes we had to pay the extra for his amusement.

Cabbie runs out of fuel. Gets help, gets to petrol station, wants to charge us extra for the time!

Ordering 2 taxis just in case. Anger ensues.

Cabbie looking on the floor for his phone while driving. Seemed stoned.

Doing a few hundred miles in a random cab because the whole train system was screwed up.

And now they enter the "ask for forgiveness" stage, get a slap on the wrist and get to bank their billions.

> and get to bank their billions.

The only billions Uber has is in losses:

2022:

Uber lost $6 billion to start the year, but reports a rebound in ride-hailing and no issues with driver supply https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-posts-nearly-6-billio...

2021:

Uber is still losing a lot of money https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-still-losing-a-lot-of-m...

12 Years After It Was Founded, Uber Says It Might Finally Make a Profit https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/09/21/12-years-after-it-...

2020:

Uber lost $8.5 billion in 2019, but it thinks it can get profitable by the end of 2020 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21126965/uber-q4-earnings-...

2019:

Uber lost over $5 billion in one quarter, but don’t worry, it gets worse https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20793793/uber-5-billion-qu...

Uber may be losing billions, but Travis Kalanick still has his.

> In the weeks leading up to [his] resignation, Kalanick sold off approximately 90% of his shares in Uber, for a profit of about $2.5 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_Kalanick

Sadly, this is normal for growing companies. Amazon lost year after year at some point.

Uber's CEO is still laughing their way to the bank.

F...ing up our economy is profitable.

Cory Doctorow makes a pretty compelling case it's just a bezzle: https://doctorow.medium.com/the-big-lie-that-keeps-the-uber-...

Meh, any corp of this caliber lobbies as much as they can. It wouldn’t have succeeded if cabs weren’t so shitty.

They "succeeded" because every ride so far was subsidised by investors. It's not a level playing field for the cabs, which have to make a profit.

Or their competitors who played by the rules.

I'm not sure that the uber competitors (taxis) followed the rules as much as some people seem to think. For instance, why is their card reader is always broken?

I’m sure the cab cartel was on life support and only tried to scam every tourist and sometimes even locals because they couldn’t make a profit otherwise.

I just wonder when companies just stopped caring at all about doing the right thing? Are there any objectively honest big companies out there?

- Enron. We all know what happened there.

- Facebook. Industrial-scale slimy.

- Exxon. Poor Alaska.

- BP. OMG poor Gulf Coast.

- McKinsey. Here’s how to sell more Fentanyl.

- Experian. Let’s lie about that giant data leak.

- AIG, Bond rating agencies, Lehman etc. We’re printing money from total crap paper, and we know it, but SHHH the OMG the $$$.

- J&J. Talc powder is very bad and we knew it for a long time. - Purdue Pharma. Evil opioid empire.

- Bayer. Roundup poison (someone explain why this is still legal to sell anywhere for any purpose).

And the list goes on forever! So sad and utterly morally bankrupt.

Corporate boards are part of the problem. In so many case are they not doing their oversight job because they are on the take or utterly incompetent or maybe both.

</rant> Sorry, this just makes me crazy.

Really feels like there’s a massive amount of corruption in European politics these days. Especially in the EU.

Outside of maybe freshman politicians I would think that corruption exists with many, if not most, politicians in the US as well. I can't speak to other countries but power tends to corrupt.

More regulation => more opportunities for bribery => more corruption

Uber was better than taxi because it had an app and taxis did not. However, taxis in many cities now have some taxi-hailing app. Once the app became available, I began to prefer taxis over "ride sharing" services like Uber and Lyft.

Ugh ICIJ. Cherry picked stories without ability to look through raw files/data.

Damn. That’s gonna leave a mark.

It’s above the fold, on BBC.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62057321

All this effort and legal chicanery just to build a mediocre, unprofitable business.

Yes, let's focus on the business and forget all about the product, which just so happens to be ubiquitous today, used in most developed countries and 10,000 cities, and people use "Uber" as a verb the same way "Google" is used for searching the web. /s

Well in my country, it has gone from being ubiquitous to being rarely available, to the point that Uber is considering exiting the market.

JNCO jeans and Cabbage Patch Kids were ubiquitous too at one point. Doesn’t mean that they represented anything more unsustainable fads.

Honestly, I'm happy they resisted the pressure. Visiting Istanbul, and the taxis suck here (apparently the taxi drivers got Uber banned here)

“Sometimes we have problems because, well, we’re just fucking illegal.”

The Uber propaganda here in this thread is insane. Taxi’s maybe have been shit but that does not in anyway justify Uber breaking the law to conquer the market (btw, now that they’ve done that, they’ve also turned to shit because it was unsustainable).

Perfect may be the enemy of good but we shouldn’t excuse companies using endless VC money and law breaking to achieve something that’s marginally better for consumers.

Obviously there are some exceptions to this in the comments but generally, in modern countries where the taxi firms aren’t run by literal mafias and killing people, we should condemn Uber’s behaviour.

Uber is well known for paying to manipulate on-line discourse. The amount of propaganda just adds to my grievances towards the company.

My observation is that nearly every municipality had a taxi service with negative press, isolated in local news under different taxi brands, and in municipal court filings. This being about local taxi that bent the law to become entrenched themselves.

Whereas any incident with Uber is international news.

Makes it harder for me to elevate Uber’s issues as being as egregious as presented. I recognize their flaws, I also recognize the market need which still remains. So sure, make a better one thats more compliant. When I and others point this out we’re not giving Uber a pass. Just assigning a weight to the problems.

> This being about local taxi that bent the law to become entrenched themselves.

Can you give an example? I've never heard of that. They usually lack any power at all.

> nearly every municipality had a taxi service with negative press

Everyone seemed satisfied in my experience. I did see Uber's talking points everywhere on social media - how terrible taxis were. Unforunately, taxis lacked the money to run their own information campaign.

Ask actual individuals, take taxis yourself, ask people that try to be their own driver.

Not everything is about an information campaign but factors in common pain points from consumers.

I have taken more taxis in more cities than you imagine. Thousands, I would guess. I've talked to many cab drivers and rideshare drivers about this exact issue: IME most think Uber/Lyft screw them, that cabs were better as their fate was in their hands (and they didn't have to provide a car!), but as Uber/Lyft control access to rides (the only real value they provide), the drivers have no choice.

Uber/Lyft also use corruption to get free use of our public commons - the streets that they clog - while with cabs it was fairly distributed in free market bidding for the public resource (i.e., medallions).

> I have taken more taxis in more cities than you imagine. Thousands, I would guess.

Thousands? That’s daily commute level which puts you in one of the extremely rare locations that had a semi functional cab system.

You don’t understand how miserable the cab system was (and generally still is) in most of the US because you lived in an aberration.

> Uber/Lyft also use corruption to get free use of our public commons - the streets that they clog

Not even on the top 10 of concerns surrounding Uber for the 95% of the population who don’t live in a super dense city. Also, it’s not free use because the drivers pay the same road taxes we do. They just aren’t double taxed without the medallion system.

> Not even on the top 10 of concerns surrounding Uber for the 95% of the population who don’t live in a super dense city.

How does it make economic sense for Ubers to circle around non-dense areas that couldn't support a taxi system? If there's an answer beyond a combination of VC subsidies and convincing drivers to assume additional economic risk, I'd love to know! (So would Uber, for that matter. Or at least their investors.)

> You don’t understand how miserable the cab system was (and generally still is) in most of the US because you lived in an aberration.

That's circular - you repeat your conclusion (cabs are poor) as evidence for it. I've taken cabs in many, many cities. Some cities do lack sufficient cab service; I'll agree with that.

> Not even on the top 10 of concerns surrounding Uber for the 95% of the population who don’t live in a super dense city

The standard isn't 'super-dense', and more people live in cities than you think. Plus, why are the concerns of people in cities any less important than yours?

> it’s not free use because the drivers pay the same road taxes we do. They just aren’t double taxed without the medallion system.

It's not the drivers using it, it's Lyft and Uber. Corporations are separate entities using the road space for profit.

> The standard isn't 'super-dense', and more people live in cities than you think. Plus, why are the concerns of people in cities any less important than yours?

The standard absolutely is super dense. I live in a spread out city and your concerns are completely hollow. Nobody in Houston is concerned about the number of Ubers on the road.

> It's not the drivers using it, it's Lyft and Uber.

It’s the driver’s car. The driver is driving it. It’s the driver.

> Ask actual individuals, take taxis yourself, ask people that try to be their own driver.

You know, I was a taxi driver in Phoenix when Uber/Lyft came to town and watched the fallout of their actions — absolutely nobody cares about that and every time I post about my firsthand experience in some Uber article I get downvoted to nothing.

The disconnect (and astroturfing) is phenomenal. I don’t think people would cheer on the Robber Barons 2.0 if they didn’t personally benefit through direct subsidies. The funny thing is rates are basically what they were before they destroyed the taxi industry with the exception that drivers get paid a lot less than before, once the daily (or weekly) lease was paid up on the cab the rest of the money went to the driver. On a good day you could have the car paid for in the first few hours and then it’s easy money. When I lived downtown I’d get up early and do 2, 3, 4 back-to-back airport trips ($15 airport special which usually paid $25ish) in an hour or so and have half the car paid off before the medical appointments started to come out. I also used to make two or three hundred on Friday and Saturday nights just working out a cab stand at one bar.

Then Uber/Lyft came along and started charging less than cost and all that went away. You basically had to figure out who had what medical appointment when and be sitting on that call to even think about paying for the cab let alone gas and maybe, if you had a good day, could get all fancy with some Carl’s Jr.

I don't know what it was like in Phoenix, but in the city I live in -- and frankly most cities I've visited in north america(1) -- price has never been a motivating factor in uber vs. taxis.

It's always been that taxis don't come when I need them. Sometimes they're fine if you're at a bar and a cab will come by for hailing because they know business will be there, but if you're carless and need to get somewhere at a particular time cabs have always been a nightmare.

I've called to get a cab to come pick me up and then waited 2 hours while dispatch couldn't find a cab to come because they were all too busy picking up opportunistic rides. I've never had an experience anything like that with uber or lyft.

I would -- and now that the money train has dried up for uber a bit, do -- pay as much for an uber as I did before for a cab, except now the uber actually comes. In my particular city most cab drivers also aren't union, and they pay to rent their cars for their shifts from the people who own the plates. Most of the protest of uber coming to town was from cab owners (some operators, but many not) who were using their license as a retirement plan.

I recognize that the drivers were put in a tough spot, and most of this isn't their fault, but things were deeply broken before, and they still are. But I think there's a lot of rose tinted glasses going on here, and people who needed cabs were often literally left out in the cold by the way things were.

(1) Pretty much the only city I've ever had good experiences with cabs is NYC.

> I've called to get a cab to come pick me up and then waited 2 hours while dispatch couldn't find a cab to come…

Yeah, that happened a lot when it was busy because you don’t make any money chasing around stale calls where the people probably aren’t there. And there were big chunks of the Phoenix Valley that were off limits after the sun went down, doesn’t matter if you’re running an app and aren’t carrying around a few hundred in cash so there’s not as much incentive to avoid certain areas. I’d talk to new drivers who would make “all the money” working those areas at night and then they would just stop showing up to get a cab after not too long.

So, without surge pricing (which was illegal under Arizona law unless it was posted on the side of the cab in letters of a certain height) cab drivers go 100% mercenary when it gets busy and people get left out in the cold where they couldn’t get a cab for any (legal) price. It was a problem and on nights like New Year’s Eve we would get our revenge on the people we would profile as “non-tippers” because, well, that’s what they get.

I honestly don’t think anyone would have had much of a problem with Uber/Lyft if they didn’t undercut the existing cabbies by violating the law on things like commercial insurance (which was expensive), mandatory background/drug testing (which, ironically, the law didn’t say you had to pass) and certified meters (so the passengers didn’t get ripped off). That’s all it took to be a legal livery vehicle in Arizona and they would give the window stickers out to all sorts of shady characters who would (legally) rip off the tourists and drunks because they had their extremely high rates posted as was the law.

I remember having online debates in the early ‘00s with people claiming the evil capitalists would move into a market, put the competition out of business by charging less than the actual cost of whatever product they were selling and then once they had a de facto monopoly jack the prices up. I’d always say “show me one real example of this happening” (which they never could) and now that’s the business plan of all these Silicon Valley companies people applaud their actions. People who would boycott Walmart because they believe they engage in these tactics happily use the services of companies who unapologetically do. I just don’t understand…

I've taken many, many taxis with barely a problem. They weren't (and aren't) shit at all to me.

I won’t use Uber. It’s terrible and far worse than my experience with taxis. I’ve also said here before that many UK cities had better taxis systems before Uber but was shouted down. The only way Uber could compete was unprofitably undercutting the local market with a worse service.

Just because SF needed a new taxis system doesn’t mean they had to inflict it on the rest of the world.

You want to get to the airport for 5AM tomorrow morning? Good luck getting an Uber, they won’t let you book ahead and if you want to hail at the time they will cancel on you 4 times.

I’ve never had this issue with a taxi company and have got a pre booked taxi to time critical things a lot of times in my life.

But yeh, they have an app (weren’t even the first though) so HN loves them.

At least in the US you can pre-book. I’m no Uber fan but I haven’t experienced this cancelation you mention.

You can “prebook” an Uber but they explicitly state that they will only try and find you a car automatically at that time, not guarantee one/arrange a driver in advance. So it’s basically just automating the “find me an Uber” button press. At least this is how it works in the UK.

Yup, I’ve had exactly this issue, so I always end up going with a local minicab service for early morning airport flights.

Sadly, especially for a prebooked car for a 4am pickup in the suburbs (to the airport), their prebooking doesn’t mean much.

I mean “inflict it on the rest of the world” come on. They wouldn’t be selling if you weren’t buying. Uber categorically provides a better service than taxis in almost all places and provides a far safer experience in others. But once again it’s likely some self righteous first world person’s opinion who has no context for how other countries function. Par for the course on HN.

People are buying because they used VC money to undercut the competition. Until They owned the market and raised their prices.

Where do they own the market? I use Lyft everywhere I go in the US just fine.

Lyft still hasn’t even broke out of the US and Canada.

In Canada they've barely even broken out of Toronto.

People weren't necessarily buying in a fair market, hence the secret lobbying operation.

Taxi companies operate with the advantage of state monopolies. They have lobbyists too, and they were so well-connected that they allowed exactly zero innovation for decades before they got blown out of the water by Uber.

Maybe in some countries, but where I live the taxi monopoly was removed long before Uber existed and Uber managed to outcompete with VC backed price dumping plus breaking the law.

> The only way Uber could compete was unprofitably undercutting the local market with a worse service

If it was worse, why were people using it? Maybe people didn’t like, or more likely couldn’t afford, the taxi service you refer to.

> they won’t let you book ahead and if you want to hail at the time they will cancel on you 4 times.

This is exactly what getting a cab was like before Uber in nearly every city in the US. That’s why Uber had no problem disrupting taxis.

> If it was worse, why were people using it?

Because it was impossibly cheap.

In the UK and Australia, the taxi experience was generally better than that. Uber came along and undercut them, and at first they had a great experience.

Now uber is usually more expensive, and usually less reliable. It's very fortunate that they didn't quite manage to completely kill off the competition with their subsidies.

I think Uber coming along was absolutely a net win for consumers. They managed to

1. Upend the existing monopolies with cab drivers and create competitions in many different markets

2. Funnel VC money directly into the hands of consumers in the form of subsidized rides, especially in the years from ~2012 to 2018.

And they did this in a commodity market, so it's super easy for entrants to just copy the idea. Bad for Uber, great for everyone else. The fact that a good hunk of the money that got lit on fire during this process was Saudi oil blood money is just icing on the cake, IMO.

I think that your point 2 is a positive when taken in isolation, but with negative consequences for wider society - it did drive other firms out of business.

I also don't know how many markets uber entered were actually monopolies. London certainly wasn't, though the minicab firms there were dodgy as hell. It will have increased standards of service in that market longer term, even as it unfairly competed.

Are cab monopolies a US thing?

"I won’t use Uber. It’s terrible and far worse than my experience with taxis."

Is Lyft any better?

Don’t know, don’t think they’re in the UK. I’d imagine they are just as terrible as Uber though

I agree with you except with the marginally better part. Their service is profundly revolutionary.

It isn't lack of capital or brains that prevented the taxi indistry before and after uber to provide the same service but beneficial to their interests. After all these years they are not even trying to compete with Uber they just want things to go back to the way they were where consumers are taken advantage of or discriminated against. Like it or not, Uber is more accessible to all types of consumers not just the ones drivers think will tip the most, they have better background checks and uniform and scrutinized safety controls and providen a viable primary or secondary income to drivers.

The local laws and regulations should get out of the way and enable what uber is trying to do with or without Uber. The livelihood of taxi drivers is not the law's problem, the well being od consumers and the economy however is. An outdated business model should not be put on a respirator by politicians. I am of the opinion that traditional taxi system with medallions and all that should be done with. Anyome who provides consumer transportation can compete fairly with Uber and pals.

> After all these years they are not even trying to compete with Uber they just want things to go back to the way they were

Who are you describing? Can you name anyone?

> where consumers are taken advantage of

I've never felt taken advantage of in a taxi. I know Uber pushes this all the time, but can you give examples? I know with Uber or Lyft they collect data on me such as where I am and where I go.

> or discriminated against

Is there any evidence that it's better with ridesharing apps? I mean evidence, not the same claims long made by Uber.

As a POC and for many of my POC friends in NYC Uber was a god send. The discrimination is real.

Also a POC and never had an issue with NYC taxis.

That's great! I'm glad you never had to experience it.

Pre-uber it was common at McCarren Airport (Las Vegas) that taxis would intentially take you the wrong way to spike their fare. Those who knew would have to demand the driver to not take the tunnel, and even then they would argue with you. There is no reason not to think that this was common everywhere.

Why do you think TNC drivers don't do this, especially when the company is incentivized to ignore it? Pro tip: if the driver's phone isn't visible from the rear passenger seat, pull up the route on your phone and watch them like a hawk.

The uber/lyft driver subreddits and web forums used to be full of stories of drivers bragging about intentionally taking the 'long way'. Drivers bragged about how the often strange and dynamic routing used by Waze and Google Maps made it very easy to take a random turn that adds miles to the trip (or lots of traffic, preferable if the driver has a hybrid) and how they could just dismiss the customer's questions with "oh, I don't know, I'm just following the app" (except for the purposeful wrong/missed turn.)

I used to take Uber/Lyft occasionally and I'd always pull up the route on my own phone because I'd frequently catch my driver starting to make an unexplainable turn, or intentionally choose a very high-congestion route instead of a faster arterial road.

If you don't know the city well, it's easy to miss the driver purposefully making one accidental wrong turn that ends up adding significantly to the fare.

The difference in my city is that if your taxi driver did this, you could complain to the police unit overseeing taxis.

Now? You complain to Uber and they give you a discount or correction if you're lucky and haven't been too much of a squeaky wheel.

In some places (I don't think it's everywhere) Uber charges/pays the estimated fare from before the trip regardless of the route actually taken, I believe. In theory that makes it harder to do the thing being described, but it also obviously means a driver who gets stuck in traffic on the route uber says they should take is gonna get screwed.

There is plenty of reason - while I heard rumors of it, I never experienced it. Also, in most locales taxis make a significant bonus from the 'flag drop', the start of a ride. Prolonging rides isn't as profitable as finding new ones.

I’ve been taken on much longer rides than necessary in multiple cities. Las Vegas and Chicago are the first that come to mind. It’s also nearly impossible to know how much a taxi ride will cost in advance. The app and “quote” are the game changer with Uber and Lyft. If the Taxi companies (especially in Vegas) would build a similar app and pre-quote my trips, I’d probably still use them, even if they are a little more expensive, because Uber stops are typically much farther away. But Taxi companies don’t seem to want to.

Their service is not revolutionary if you're trans: https://xtramagazine.com/power/uber-trans-drivers-discrimina...

Their service is not revolutionary if you're non-white and a driver: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58831373

Their service is not revolutionary if you're handicapped. The TNCs charge wait time fees which end up discriminating against handicapped passengers who take longer to get from their home to the waiting vehicle, and to get into the vehicle. In fact, they were sued over this, more specifically for not making accommodations: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-uber-... and https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-10/uber-sued...

The TNCs are not required to operate a minimum number of paratransit vehicles like taxi fleets are. Uber has been sued for not providing paratransit vehicles https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/18/uber-accessibility-lawsuit...

The TNCs and local regulators have done nothing to address widespread problems of drivers refusing to provide service to the handicapped. I remember being shocked at the posts in TNC driver subreddits and web forums regarding handicapped passengers. Many drivers see someone in a wheelchair and just bolt - using various methods to cancel/reject the ride - because they see picking up such a passenger to be time consuming, a risk, or annoying.

The service is not revolutionary if you live in the "wrong" part of town. I lived in a "not quite wrong, not quite right" neighborhood where there was plenty of wealthy young people but it was also close to the "wrong" part of town...and when I tried using the service, it'd be 20 minutes to get a ride and usually at least one cancellation. In the "right" part of town? A quarter of the wait, and never a canceled pickup.

I'm curious to your baseline here: my experience with cabs in San Francisco is/was that they would just drive off if you had a wheelchair, whereas Uber/Lyft drivers were already committed, so would follow through. Same for coming out to certain locations. I'm guessing this has far more to do with the norm about drivers being penalised for excessive cancellations/refusing trips, and riders ability to provide direct feedback.

> I lived in a "not quite wrong, not quite right" neighborhood where there was plenty of wealthy young people but it was also close to the "wrong" part of town...and when I tried using the service, it'd be 20 minutes to get a ride and usually at least one cancellation. In the "right" part of town? A quarter of the wait, and never a canceled pickup.

Is it possible fewer people were calling Ubers from that part of town, so there were fewer drivers there? Whereas the wealthier part of town was busier? Drivers go where they are called more frequently, hence the shorter wait time in the other part of town. What do you propose Uber do differently here, force drivers to idle in less busy parts of town?

“I had to wait twenty minutes for a ride” what’s your complaint here, that Uber is evil and transphobic, or that you’re upset a livery servant doesn’t show up the moment you snap your fingers? This “I had to wait 20 minutes for a ride” complaint shows a really entitled and self centered attitude.

I’m really curious what you think Uber should do differently in that case, and why you were calling Ubers at all if they’re so evil and taxis are just as good. The last point really makes me scratch my head.

Pretty easy, they control the ability to cancel and the ability to get work. If they cared about these problems, they’d reward the drivers who don’t fuck around.

The cancellation one is the easiest, you just purge the top cancellers.

Everything you said is an attempt to find a rare case to make your point. I do live in a bad part of town where insurance companies cancel on me because of risky neighborhood and I use uber many times a week. Majority of my drivers are african americans or a minority who would not be able to drive a Taxi without fronting a lot of money or have a connection with a someone who will rent a medallion and then of course do it full time to break even. I even had family members who drove Taxi and it was so miserable for them because on off seasons they barely made enough to cover gas and medallion rental. Minorities that have a hard time getting work or living in areas with economic drought (chain stores moved out due to white flight or crime so jobs are far away) can just drive uber at least as supplement which is what they tell me they do when I ask them.

As for trans folks, their face should match what is on their ID. This is a safety issue. Even if your stare or country won't let you set preferred gender they won't stop you from updating your picture. Bad guys can game the system otherwise.

Their business was defacto to ignore local laws. And you'll find libertarians as a advocate of that business model.

A lot of folks here seem to be confusing breaking the law in the name of justice and social progress (e.g. Rosa Parks) vs the blatant corruption of companies like Uber. At least the Uber VPs knew they were corrupt.

In my country we used to have Uber but they pulled out maybe 4-5 years ago. I wish they have stayed, because now we only have one and it is driving the price way up high due to lack of competition.

The Uber propanaganda is always insane on HN.

Where do you think these people work?

TLDR; Their parents are proud of them, let's not fuck that up for them.

Indeed. And many may have joined not knowing the real workings of the company; heck, the same situation could also be true for many of us now. But to continue defending the company even after knowing the facts is certainly a thing to marvel at.

Maybe it is "marginally better" where you come from. Uber and their ill have always been always parity priced or more expensive in the markets I have lived in. The killer value proposition is the car actually turns up in a timely manner and actually takes passengers to where they want to go. Taxis often simply were eother not available to call, rarely showed up even if called and would often refuse to go where passengers want. Uber and its competitors literally makes it possible to live in the cities i live in without owning a car because even if you regularly commute by public transport, for those occasions where you need a car, you know you will get one reliably. In the past that was not an option and you would have to own a car.

Hopefully a good reminder to not extrapolate personal experiences or propaganda of the circle one may be a part of to the whole world.

The best part about Uber/Lyft imo is that I know exactly how much I'll be charged before I even request it. Taxis you get to do a bunch of math that depends on factors like traffic but in the rideshare apps you can decide if the ride is worth it.

If taxis could replicate this more ethically, I would switch in a heartbeat.

They don't always stick to it. From LAX airport, it was showing an initial price of say $30, and then "looking for drivers" spinner goes on for 2-3 min. Then they "found" one that is more expensive, say $45, which you can accept to get "faster" service. Hint: you will have to wait ages to get that initial price, if at all.

Uber has become much more shitty AND much more expensive in the last years. Same with Lyft. I have a tingly feeling Lyft and Uber has struck a deal behind the curtain to not tread on each other, or fix prices.

I once took an Uber who didn't follow the directions of the app properly, missing some turns, resulting in unnecessary cycles. This resulted in the fare being higher than initially stated.

When I reported this to Uber, showing the trace in the map, they said the final price was still within the range stated (it was not), and nothing happened.

In my market I can now get an taxi in more consistent time than an Uber. It seems drivers don’t get matched in a timely manner. Unfortunately I was using Uber primarily because of how fast it arrived previously, but the driver numbers fell off a lot during Covid, between some drivers churning out, not wanting to wear masks, and or switching to Uber eats.

Sometimes I wish I could just “even though there is so surge, I would gladly pay a 2x surge to just get a car to arrive here within the next 30 minutes”.

I've always thought much of the problems with Uber would be resolved by allowing the customer to bid higher for the trip.

Wouldn't that just encourage Uber drivers to be slow in picking up and wait for people to bid?

Yep, but it'd make Uber much more of a platform for negotiations between buyer and seller, which is what it kind of holds itself out to be.

But it would also encourage the Uber drivers to snipe each other as prices climbed.

> and would often refuse to go where passengers want

This happens to me all the time with Uber when I land at LAX and want to go to Anaheim or I’m in SF and want to go to San Jose.

And unlike a taxi, half the time Uber charges me $5 claiming that I ghosted the driver rather than them refusing to take me, something I don’t always catch.

I thought that Uber drivers could not see your destination until they picked you up. Are drivers taking off and refusing at the moment of pickup in SF? Seems like that would be pretty easy to catch behavior.

In NYC, I had several drivers refuse to let me into the car until I told them where I was going. I never took those cars and made them cancel it (and then reported it). However, it is common practice.

>Are drivers taking off and refusing at the moment of pickup in SF?

Yes. Although usually what they do is call first and ask where you are going to.

I've absolutely had times where I've had them refuse either after I got in the car, or they don't unlock the doors until I tell them.

Does anyone still pick up? After a few calls and cancelled rides, you quickly learn not to answer anymore if you want the car to arrive.

i reckon uber could make this a more difficult thing to occur by matching the GPS signals and location data.

If a driver attempts this, they can make it so that the driver cops the fee if the user could either prove that they are near the pickup location, or was able to take a picture of the car (with license plate).

I can see this personally happening more and more in Romania when I go visit relatives, and locals confirmed me the trend. At some point soon there won't be any reason anymore picking Uber over taxis.

Well, iphones have also only existed since little before Uber came around.

The reason that was the only way cabs were available because those were the only communication technologies available.

Maybe what you should be demanding is that cab services provide apps so you don't have to hail/call, etc. There are several companies that can provide this for your cab jurisdiction area as a third party service and they won't price gouge the cab drivers and/or the customers, and they won't use illegal threats and bribes to change laws to suit their needs.

I’ve used non-Uber taxi apps in cities like Austin and they failed to show up multiple times and about 50% of the time the “finding driver” part takes about 15-20 minutes before I gave up and just used Uber (one time my phone died during this process and I was left with no taxi). It’s obviously treated like a 3rd tier part of their companies.

People want tech companies providing taxi services, they don’t just want the old local taxi service with a half-assed app bolted on + the usual dirty city taxi cars w/ no review process.

Non-Uber taxi apps in Germany are horrible.

The apps are buggy and the service is unreliable.

Uber is far better in my experience.

In Sweden, I have had the opposite experience. The Uber app is never used, due to how low paid the drivers are. The taxi apps are actually decently good and pretty reliable. They are not as feature rich as the Uber app, and more expensive, but when you need a ride at three in the morning, don't expect the Uber app to get you one.

I don't know why the app would need anything more than "I want to be picked up here". Dispatching worked fine when you had to call a phone number. The app could literally be an interface to texting.

Because no one wants to sit and wait around wondering if a car will show up?

> Dispatching worked fine when you had to call a phone number.

Dispatching absolutely did not work fine when you had to call a number. You were often left twiddling your thumbs wondering if a car will actually show up.

> The app could literally be an interface to texting.

Why not start your own competitor then? I'm sure it will be easy to create such a simple app. Better include some load-balancing, because I'm sure everyone will rush to use your featureless app instead of these other apps with nice interfaces, that show you exactly where the car is, with accurate ETAs, integrated payment, safety features, etc.

Have you ever even used the Uber app?

> You were often left twiddling your thumbs wondering if a car will actually show up.

They always showed up for me. And I have no idea what city/country you think it didn't. I feel like this is just Uber PR.

> Why not start your own competitor then?

Because the network effects of drivers and network effects of riders. It would cost a lot of money to compete with that. Also, to deal with a lot of other backend issues that have nothing to do with the app itself - like making sure the driver's cars are in good repair, commercial insurance, etc.

The actual app itself is much easier compared to the business side of things. If someone wants to do the business side, I'll spearhead the app development.

> Have you ever even used the Uber app?

Yes. Also, I never said it was trivial to create a clone of the Uber app. I said things worked fine before there was a complex app and would work okay with a simpler app. Because the complaint I was responding to wasn't feature parity, it was bugginess. But lets go through your points.

>that show you exactly where the car is

Uber actually has admitted that the majority of the cars you see on your screen are simulated to give you a feeling for how many cars are in the area.

Or do you mean once a driver is assigned, in which case I don't know the point of it. I can just look at the ETA.

> with accurate ETAs

Now who never used the Uber app. Their ETAs are wildly inaccurate.

> integrated payment

That you have to check and dispute in case the bill you for drivers cancelling on you, and a variety of other things hooked directly to your card. I'd much rather pay people what I owe them in a one-off transaction.

> safety features

I've never seen them in action, but I'm glad they're building them.

Can we collectively agree that the reason why people are reporting very different experiences with cabs before uber, is because cab-rides in different locations were very different experiences?

In London, the chance that calling a cab (or even the less regulated minicab services) would result in a no-show seemed remote. In San Francisco, it was a regular occurrence. In the rural UK, calling a cab would have been a rare, expensive event, and would require finding an unoccupied local driver among a very small subset.

I'm sure there is even a wider variety of taxi implementations worldwide.

> cab-rides in different locations were very different experiences?

Sure. I'll agree with that.

and i’ve used uber in austin and had some of the worst experiences i’ve ever had. personal anecdotes dont really matter— uber is a shitty company and so are taxis, two wrongs dont make a right.

Uber fails to show up for me about half the time. It just goes through driver after driver, moving to another when the previous one doesn’t come well past the estimated time. Has happened in three different cities in the past three months.

The reason that was the only way cabs were available because those were the only communication technologies available.

Nah, it was would because taxi company owners are lazy morons. Well, to put a better face on it, a given one-city taxi company would have at a most a few hundred drivers and maybe ten actually back-office/real-employees. That level of small business isn't going to create a web interface to their operations in the early 2000s. Sure, third parties were offering some high priced web-based hailing service but of course that kind of thing would have to be higher priced than the already high-priced (and crappy) "interface" that calling the dispatcher for a ride involved. Why didn't taxis create their own phone/internet hailing service? The same reason Al Gore's "information superhighway" was dead in the water. That is, the average abusive monopolist - like a local taxi company - could only look at the Internet and say "sounds all-right but I'm not lowering my price for that, I'm raising them web-design costs money".

Local taxi companies also weren't in a position to arrange to burn through millions and millions in cash from VCs.

Exactly. No Saudi prince would give $250k to some dude name Al with and his 10 car fleet.

In 2007 I had to drop my car off to get some work done. The plan was to take a taxi ~3 miles down a major road to my office, then taxi back up there at the end of the day.

Well it took three calls and about 90 minutes, but eventually someone showed up to drive me six minutes down the street in blistering 98F. It was more like 2 hours of standing outside baking in the sun to get someone to drive me to the shop at the end of the day. Turns out in my city (Dallas) taxis really only exist to drive to and from the airport. Worst case with ride-share companies, you're looking at ~30 min wait for an uber to arrive, with real-time updates if the driver feels like canceling, and auto-orders you another one.

Taxis work nothing like uber. If you are not traveling to/from a major sporting event, convention center or airport, the taxi does not want your business and will actively avoid/ignore you. For small, one-off trips like a coffee date, going to a concert, dropping your car off for service etc uber is great. Taxis absolutely do not want to be in that business. What this fight is about, is who is allowed to pick up/drop off at places like the airport, metallica concerts, apple wwdc etc.

Did you read the article? You like Uber a lot, congrats, what does that have to do with this?

Exactly. Not see the forest for the trees.

I'm pretty convinced that these boilerplate responses are a result of PR brigading, which happens a lot in threads of this kind online. They always seem way too positively scripted, and they bury real comments.

The Internet is so overrun by engineered smoke and mirrors now, it's hard to trust even online comments concerning corporations unless they're negative comments concerning those corporations.

Even negative comments are just the competition's campaign

> the car actually turns up in a timely manner

Here in Australia this is becoming a real problem with Uber - drivers seem to apparently have unlimited "cancels" and just cancel rides continuously to drive up demand especially at the airport where they know passengers have no other choice. They'll also almost always refuse rides that are too far, or don't finish in or near a high-demand area (like a CBD or airport). Other ride share apps are worse (DiDi really sucks), but Uber is the most expensive by far and the experience is pretty bad.

Our taxis on the other hand mostly seem to have uber-like apps and you can reliably get picked up just about anywhere even if you live in the middle of nowhere (within reason, of course). They're about the same price as Uber, with no surge pricing as well.

Uber varies dramatically in different locales.

In my area, they aren’t very available and don’t like to pick up in many areas, and hate driving to the airport or train station. Previously, the airport and train station authority held cabs to high standards there and they were responsive and clean.

In places like Boston I’ve been straight up stranded in the airport when Ubers just won’t show - don’t know why.

Another important benefit of taking an Uber is that the price is clear.

In the modern country of America taxi firms are run by literal mafias... Like actually.

They’re not.

>Obviously there are some exceptions to this in the comments but generally, in modern countries where the taxi firms aren’t run by literal mafias and killing people, we should condemn Uber’s behaviour.

hehe love it. In the first world, ...

How about this, I want to arrive at an airport, walk out the front, check a number plate and put my suitcases in the boot knowing that if anything happens I'm not going to be risking 10k worth of stuff.

Oh officer, it was a yellow car that said taxi on the side, you think you'll find my stuff?

In Germany, Berlin of all cities, I had my bagage held to ransom by a taxi driver who "forgot" to start the meter and then decided the 250m we drove was worth an extra 10eur on top of the 15eur trip.

So sorry this is more Uber propaganda, but for the ~1000 Uber reciepts I have in my inbox, I've had few and only little problems. And a lot of these are from a city where people do go missing if they get in the wrong taxi.

Do I love Uber? No. They're sometimes shit. Surge pricing, allowing drivers to pick up a trip and then just cancel, 6 minute arrival timers that are actually 10 minutes away, wait fees from the first minute onwards, grumpy covid mask reminder emails even though I'm always wearing a mask, reissuing fees when they adjust the price and holding extra money on my card until it's all cleared.

But touch wood, I've never been in a crash in an Uber, I have in a taxi (single car, solely the drivers fault), even though it's a 20:1 ratio for journeys I've taken.

Edit: 1051 trips according to my inbox

If you’re in germany, use the mytaxi (freenow) app and pay in the app.

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/free-now/id357852748?l=en

Dear Daniel,

Thank you very much for your message.

The driver is registered at the responsible office and will be blocked in this case. Unfortunately we can't do anything about the price, because we are only a mediator and have no influence on price.

Best regards from Hamburg

von FREE NOW

Support Agent Passenger & Driver Care Intelligent Apps GmbH Grosse Elbstrasse 273, 22767 Hamburg

1051 trips supporting a clearly criminal business. They admit that basically themselves, until they claim to have changed their direction a couple of years ago.

E.g. here in this country drivers got criminal charges, got all their fares confiscated and some ended up in personal bankruptcy. Uber even kept the 20% commission and the leaked documents say they knew they were operating fucking illegally.

Yea I really couldn't care less about that. It's illegal in the country where most of those trips took place, drivers can have their cars confiscated.

But here's the thing, it comes down to "you can't use ride sharing at the airport". Why you may ask? "BECAUSE, you can't use ride sharing at the airport".

If that's the law, fuck the law.

You should familiarize yourself with the leaked material. Breaking the law fully intentionally happened in many countries and in many aspects, not only against some stupid regulations which car can pick up passengers where. Why did they have kill-switches in their offices? And all the time they systematically made sure that if something happens the drivers will be punished, but their own money is in tax heavens. The whole business model is about exploiting people: I bet > 90% of their drivers don't understand the concept of deprecation. Somewhere else in this thread it was said in Switzerland a full-time Uber driver earns about as much as a traditionally employed taxi-driver. Except that in a traditional employment the employee doesn't pay for the expenses of running the business (including deprecation). It's the same as if a naive business owner does not understand that revenue is not the same thing as profit.

Besides that the whole model is about exploiting people they implemented it in so many shady and criminal ways. They claim no longer doing the latter after the management changes.

Some people think buying clothes from sweatshops in Bangladesh is fine. Others think exploiting local drivers is fine. Or they just deny to learn the facts. I am not one of them.

> The whole business model is about exploiting people

Which is why people stopped voluntarily working for uber and the company has gone out of business.

> Or they just deny to learn the facts. I am not one of them.

So if ignorance isn't an excuse, tell me about the slave / child workers that mined and assembled the materials for the device you're using to come off as a giant hypocrite right now.

In the city I took most of those rides, people get cut up and dumped in drains for the price of an iphone because they took the wrong taxi late on a Friday night. I'll take kill switches in an office over that, but thanks for your selective concern.

I am aware of blood mineral problem. I am typing this in Europe on a low end smartphone produced for the Indian market around 2015. While my footprint is not zero, it should be a much lower than regularly updating to the next high end device.

Ex-taxi driver,

Taxi’s maybe have been shit but that does not in anyway justify Uber breaking the law to conquer the market (btw, now that they’ve done that, they’ve also turned to shit because it was unsustainable).

Literal or not, taxi companies really are as a rule something akin to local Mafiosos. They break the law all the time. The extent to which Uber screwed over it's drivers and to an extent risked the safety of it's riders bothers me. That Uber flouted local regulations intended to keep taxis services in the hands of local politicos' scumbag friends bothers me not in the least.

And as Uber rose, lots of drivers would drive both taxis and Uber, with each having advantageous and disadvantageous. And I also remember finally checking tire pressure on a cab I'd been paying to use for a bit - random amounts between 10 psi to 40 psi with half the tires bald. Taxi companies are filth and I laugh to hear any of them out of business. Sure Uber isn't much better but the point is Uber vs local Taxi company isn't a fight where people should be routing for a side. Tossing bottles at both sides, sure but not taking a side.

Appreciate the driver insight here! We often play off “the good old days” before tech took over industry X.

Nice to know history isn’t all roses and sugar in reality.

I should admit that I drove for only a month but I also have known quite a few longer-time drivers. And in my defense, the industry was setup so most people stayed for that short time and only a few people, who actually bought their cabs, stayed for longer, literally ate and slept in their cars and made a chunk of money over, who knows, five years but also quit but in better shape financially (and worse shape physically, I'm sure).

Was in an uber once, driver told me he did 14 hour days and was very happy with the money he was making. From memory, 4k £ (UK) though maybe I misremember.

14 hour days, eh? I didn't ask if he thought that was safe. Uber should never let that happen but clearly they were ok with it, or with carefully not looking.

4k monthly?

Sorry, you're right, monthly

> Literal or not, taxi companies really are as a rule something akin to local Mafiosos.

Uber is NOT better. Read the article. They just take a bigger chunk from drivers and do not pay taxes.

I want Uber to disappear because their uncontrollable power, they use ride data to spy politicians, they avoid paying taxes, they mistreat their "employees", ...

Both sides are the same is false, and it is false in almost all situations. (Vote!)

And you dont think some traditional taxi firms do this already?

They are one of many eyes and ears on the ground, tracking people's movements.

Wtf are you smoking, you want Uber disappear because you think it has too much controllable power?

You can say that to literally every fortune 500 companies.

"Tossing bottles at both sides, sure but not taking a side."

In the 1920s, Yellow Cab and Checker Cab engaged in shootouts on the streets of Chicago. A guy named John Hertz owned Yellow Cab. He also owned racehorses. In 1923, he bought a rental car company. In 1929, arsonists targeted his stables. He then sold Yellow Cab.

However the story told by this Uber leak is not about one company versus another. The sides in this battle are (a) Uber and (b) the people, as represented through the state or government.

Given what we know about Chicago gangs historically - is that really indicative of the national business model of taxicab companies or is that just what the Chicago gangs invested in and where they chose to flex their might?

This really depends on where you are, taxi laws and companies are not the same everywhere, Uber mostly is.

You should include this disclaimer as you commented below

>I should admit that I drove for only a month

so that readers can properly weigh your experiences when forming an opinion.

I would take Uber lobbyists over taxi lobbyists in Hong Kong any day. Manipulating the number of taxi licenses so the current license are worth millions of HKD, holders get rich just by letting hundreds of licenses to drivers who don’t earn much after rent, while also being pawns of CCP? I don’t think people would really like them.

I’d support anyone who broke the sf taxi cartel. For all the high minded rhetoric folks spew about how the regulations protected the consumer - it was a clear cartel - racist, poor service, insultingly bad in fact. The fact that govt agencies and departments bent over backwards to support this garbage is all you need to know about the peoples representatives

There is a world outside SF. Some places had great taxis, others had awful and most somewhere inbetween. Uber used the same underhanded tactics in all places.

> Uber propaganda

Propaganda is idealistic. It runs counter to its audience’s real-world experience. To the degree anyone is propagandising, it is those condemning Uber. Uber’s supporters, not of all of it, but certainly of its raison d’être, have practical, real-life experiences to sustain their arguments. The other side, condemning Uber, evokes moral outrage.

Not making a concluding argument for either side. But would hold back on the accusation that one side or the other is serving corporate or populist propaganda.

>Taxi’s maybe have been shit but that does not in anyway justify Uber breaking the law to conquer the market

Why not?

MLK (and Im sure others before him) said you have a duty to disobey unjust laws. The law should conform with what is right, not just be followed blindly. If uber can improve outcomes and do no net harm then good luck to them and anyone else in a similar situation.

I don't feel great about taking Uber, but until NYC gets the TV screen out of my face, it's a no brainer from a user experience pov.

I highly recommend the episode 271- Uber from the podcast The Dollop which goes about the history of Uber.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly90aGVkb2xsb3AubGl...

The Dollop just plagiarizes content from other sources. They have a (not always complete) list of sources on their website, but on the podcast itself, they read other sources word-for-word without giving attribution:

https://www.damninteresting.com/appendices/dollop-exhibits/n...

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/07/15/how-a-comedy-podc...

I can’t imagine a world without Uber. Every city I go to, this or similar apps simply makes my commute easier and better.

Why is this news? It's from 2014... We already knew all this. They even made a TV series about all this.

I went to Vegas earlier this year. The taxis were far better and cheaper than the Uber. Uber's are also a lot more expensive now.

I think UberPool was going to be Uber's killer feature. It made taking Uber's more regularly affordable for different groups of people, but COVID sadly ruined it.

… and in retrospect, was it worth it? Or was it a pyrrhic short term victory at a huge expense for something that would have happened eventually anyway but at a slower pace? Was this all just a quest to accelerate the inevitable outside of what overlapping Overton windows allowed for?

God, I love this comment section. Let's justify Uber's behavior since taxis were/are bad.

But don't worry they're a changed company in the valley now and they're so sorry for past behaviour (nothing to do with being caught)... https://youtu.be/15HTd4Um1m4

Uber works like a terrorist organization. Their city teams work like terrorist sleeper cells...no office, no call center only email contact. They bribe, they buy, they infiltrate and they have a huge fanatical base who won't listen anything against them.

Taxis suck. But Uber sucks now, too.

I’d still rather ride share than use a taxi, and use door dash over Uber (lest we forget Uber’s previous lawsuits), but all of the choices in the market are kind of grim.

The new norm: to become a unicorn you have to lie, cheat, and steal.

I don’t know what’s worse. This, or VW writing software to identify an emissions test was being done and entering a low emissions mode that car never used when under normal operation

Uber has massively improved taxi services around the world. The labor laws and taxi medallion rackets they circumvented were massive barriers to improving transportation services.

Laws that enshrine and entrench the taxi monopoly are bad laws.

"Behind every great fortune is a great crime." - Balzac. Was there ever an industry that this quote described more accurately than tech?

this was always obvious to me from day one. i didn't need a leak to notice this. it was flagrant and blatant at the time.

everyone was so busy being a fanboy it drove me a bit mad... especially operating without licenses and looking as if nobody had done the basic due diligence on what was needed to operate at all.

honestly the entire "genius" of the idea itself is "ignore the law and do whatever"

Indeed, the app, while nicely implemented, contained nothing groundbreaking.

> More than 180 journalists at 40 media outlets including Le Monde, Washington Post and the BBC [and the Guardian] will in the coming days publish a series of investigative reports about the tech giant.

OT: What happened to the NY Times? They seem to have stopped doing ground-breaking investigations of the powerful, including government. Instead, we get investigations of trends and porn sites. What are they doing? It would be an incredile resource to lose. Seriously, please share the last investigation they did that fits that description?

https://www.icij.org/investigations/uber-files/about-uber-fi...

Only US media listed is WP. I guess this is because the file is about international (non-US) behavior of Uber and ICIJ might have asked for help in media in each country.

Uber's behavior in the US is well covered by this very popular book [1] and it is authored by an NYT reporter, based on his own reporting on NYT.

I won't argue about NYT's general trends, but it's not very fair to complain NYT not to cover Uber.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Super-Pumped-Battle-Mike-Isaac/dp/039...

I'm concerned more than complaining, and not about Uber coverage but about investigative reporting in general. The reporting in that book was years ago.

ITT: How Softbank and A16z broke up regional taxi mafias, while absorbing disproportionate press from many jurisdictions at once

Inexcusable. Yet no considerable action will be taken against this corporation nor the corrupted, lobbied politicians that enabled this will ever be held accountable, let alone be cornered to resign from whatever seat they occupy. It's not a good indication for the future how the EU seems to be one giant toybox for fraudulent activities such as these, with all the recent scandals.. there seems to be very little interest in even just keeping a façade of legitimacy.

They’ve made multiple movies/series about WeWork. Where is the movie in Uber??? Take my money! Show me the Kalanick!

I think it's important to realize that Uber is what SV has become: Corruption and abuse of power as the primary tools of business, not innovation. Embrace of the powerful, not the little guy in their garage. Destroying other people and embracing sociopathology..

There's a long way from Steve Jobs' Apple, or Netscape, or many others (including FOSS!), who made exciting ground-breaking innovations, to Uber.

There’s nothing particularly surprising here. This is capitalism. Pretty much every company operates like this.

That doesn’t make every company the same. Goldman Sachs literally killed people for profit. Defense companies made up for their revenue loss from the end of the Afghanistan war by earning almost that same amount in military aid to Ukraine (seriously, our ~$50B in both cases).

Those aren’t tech companies FWIW. Even there there’sa error spectrum. AirBnB is cancer, for example.

But at last Uber killed the taxi industry, which was almost universally awful, corrupt and horrible to use. Seriously, good riddance.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Uber, Lyft, etc have to operate as commercial enterprises rather than VC money incinerators. This business isn’t going away.

How is this news? This has been known for a long while. I, myself of all people, have written an article about how dangerous lobbying from these tech companies is [1] Corporations need to get their funding out of politics because it perverts the democratic process. The same applies to foreign influence. It bothers me greatly how much right-wing parties all-over the world are taking a pro-Russian stance.

[1]https://medium.com/@jsemrau/uber-and-lift-set-a-very-dangero...

Lots of early stock holders in the comments.

But the question is, how many politicians and lobbyists were on the other side, trying to keep the status quo as it was, in favour of taxi drivers?

I don't know of a more corrupt industry than the taxi industry. The tight control of supply via taxi licenses, the low pay of drivers and the inability for any incumbents to enter. It was horrendous and hugely profitable for those in power and exploitative for anyone needing such services.

All you have to do is look at cities where they don’t have Uber and you’ll find a strong taxi mafia. Sometimes a literal taxi mafia like in Budapest.

I was living in Valancia Spain, the first day I got there I remember walking down what turned out to be one of the main streets in the city to find it being blocked by hundreds of taxis in a peaceful protest. Ok fine, I didn’t know why and it was all cosure with the police.

Then a few months later my ability to use a good quality app with verifiable trust (extremely important in some parts of the world) and recourse to the operator was suddenly taken away.

I had to order taxis using one of the crap taxi middlemen apps which offer little to no support for when things go a wrong and I was back to riding in cars where the driver was actively trying to rip you off.

Oh you’ve lived here 10 years but you need to look on the map of where one of the main streets is? Ok great, make sure the meeter is started before you do that.

Oh it’s after 8pm so that short 4.50€ journey is automatically a minimum 6€ Ok great enjoy.

25€ to the airport? I’m sure this used to be 14…

Taxis suck, lack accountability and will do anything it takes to maintain their market share while providing a horrible scammy service.

Which app was that?

2 wrongs don't make a right. Uber operates like the mafia. I'm not going to take their defense just because they are a "just an app" or that the competition is as bad...

Uber became popular because it leveraged VC and cheap credit to subsidized rides, it's becoming much less popular as we speak since ride fares are going up fast and it now needs to actually make money.

Isn’t this leak about 5 years old?

ofc, microsoft, its owner, has _nothing_ to do with all that.

...

Duh?

People on here pretending like unelected rich elite influencing politics via NGOs by meeting with elected government officials in Davos every year isn't a big deal or anything to worry about, and that Uber's behavior as well as the behavior of corrupt world leaders who enabled Uber, is justified because Taxi companies and labor unions are also corrupt.

People unconcerned with this stuff are probably the same folks who think Klaus Schwab is a benign leader of the WEF which is just some benign global humanitarian organization, and that when Schwaab talks about penetrating government cabinets, and people owning nothing by 2030 and liking it, it's just a conspiracy.

This is one of the major problems with the world - tech overlords and globalists have everyone brainwashed into thinking this dystopian shit is normal, and that we should accept it, or that it's necessary to build a "sustainable" future - whatever that means. Sounds to me like the rich and powerful will do whatever they can to become more rich and powerful, damn the costs. Their purported ends justify their means, no matter how violent, destructive, unethical or immoral.

Edit: I just thought more about this. This article literally painted a scene at one point where the effing POTUS, supposedly the most powerful person in the world, was being spoken to like a child by the CEO of a corporation, and then changed policy on the spot after being bullied around at a secretive conference that I won't even get into the sketchiness of. If this isn't concerning, I don't know what is.

“There’s nothing wrong with capitalism. This is a problem of crony-capitalism / corporatism. <EOF>”

That is what people will reflexively say to any analysis that discusses the role of the profit motive and wall street earnings in leading to these outcomes.

The fact that systematic actions like this to amass advantages at expense of the public happen with regularity at Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, General Motors and many other for-profit enterprises, means there may be some room to improve the economic paradigm in which these things are built. And in fact, we have just such a paradigm, and the products of it (Wikipedia, Linux, etc.) are of a completely different character. They don’t have an investor class at all, that needs to recoup their investment by extracting rents forever.

The alternative to for-profit venture funded companies owned by Wall St doesn’t have to be communism or socialism. It can be a gift economy such Science, Creative Commons, or Open Source Software and decentralized permissionless networks based around protocols like HTTP.

For example, Uber can be replaced with an open source, decentralized marketplace that doesn’t take 50% of all drivers’ revenue, but has a free market and ratings / reviews operated by the community.

But if a project is funded by venture CAPITALISTS, subsidized by money-losing unit economics through multiple rounds, and then dumped on the public in a Wall St IPO, and subsequently owned by pension funds and other pools of capital, then yes that is a quintessential example of Capitalism. And the result is that there is an investor class that will always tell Uber’s board to maintain centralized control and extract rents from the public, squeeze drivers, as well as try to hack the society around them (as in this article: secretly trick, get around the police, lobby state officials) whereas an open source decentralized system wouldn’t do any of that.

The dream of cryptocurrency was that the developers would sell the tokens to the public and make money on the primary sale, but after that, the network would belong to the public. Even any royalties that could accrue (such as on every transfer of the token) would be above-board and disclosed once, so everyone knows the deal. Sadly, rather than focusing on a “peer to peer cash system” as Satoshi’s whitepaper said, the entire space switched around 2013 to “store of value”, HODL and speculative investment. It’s actually a cop-out that happened because blockchains can’t scale well.

Bitcoin was the granddaddy and it solved the double-spend problem, but in a very brute-force way, by gathering all transactions in the world in one place every 10 mins to search for a double-spend. It’s actually even worse than that, because every transaction has to be gossipped to every miner, and all mined transactions have to be stored forever in an ever-growing history. The tech is a straightjacket but the vision is good. We do need smart contracts to replace privately-owned middlemen, but we need the smart contracts to run on a better DLT than Blockchain. There have been tons of innovation since 2008 but Bitcoin maximalists and Web2 maximalists both deride all of it, so progress depends on open-minded people who look past the grift of utility-less coins long enough to build something useful

This kind of collusion between the state and a company is antithetical to capitalism.

Yes but without a strong state to prevent this, the incentives do push the companies to collude

With a strong state, it’ll just be easier to collude without even having to maintain an appearance.

It might be on paper, but that's a "No True Scotsman" argument, just like all the socialists saying "oh the Soviet Union wasn't real socialism!".

In reality, this seems to be what happens every time, empirically. So maybe this is just what real life capitalism is like?

Most economic systems go through the same 3 step process:

1. Start out with a good idea.

2. Go through a golden period of good results, in which there is much innovation, and established dominant players are upended.

3. Revert to form, in which the newly dominant players prevent further change.

The key is not looking for the perfect system at step 2, but the one which causes step 3 to break down in the quickest time possible.

You talking about Uber or the cab cartels they were competing with?

A better argument: People will always try to dupe, deceive, get rich and get their way. Capitalism is - so far - the best way to channel at least some of that energy into building something productive for society as a whole.

Regulatory Capture ruins this.

The taxi drivers had the regulatory capture in this case

Second best. I think UBI + Open Source beats it over time. And I have examples to prove my point … you are welcome to provide some the other way:

  Wikipedia vs Britannica, Encarta

  NGiNx and Apache vs IIS

  OSS browser engines vs IE

  Science va Alchemy

  etc.

For example, Uber can be replaced with an open source, decentralized marketplace that doesn’t take 50% of all drivers’ revenue, but has a free market and ratings / reviews operated by the community.

Sure! I volunteer you to build it for me.

I take you up on that challenge good sir

It already exists: https://drivers.coop/

Oh cool! How many times have you ridden in a co-op car?

The current plague of cryptocurrency proves that, by itself, the mere fact of the market being open source and decentralized doesn't do anything useful; it even makes it worse in a lot of ways. The scammers will do exactly the same thing, except they take a 100% cut of your money when they dump the tokens onto retail investors and then do a rug pull.

Smart contracts are a horrible invention that don't do anything new. The equivalent in a normal SQL database (the original DLT) is just running a transaction; every SQL database under the sun has supported this for ages.

No, smart contracts are the realization of something just as revolutionary as Web1 and Web2 and just as likely to change the world, once people use them to help communities organize and coordinate their activities:

Smart contracts represent the first time in history when you can trust code to do what it says. The next best thing that even come close is Intel’s SGX extensions, where we trust Intel, or AWS key management service, where we trust Amazon.

The idea that everyone can custody their own private keys as they want AND no one can be “above the law” and circumvent the business logic, is really powerful. That assurance and level of trust in the code is what enables a whole slew of new applications that currently require human gatekeeper institutions, same as Web1 replaced radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, and centralized platforms like America Online, Compuserve and Minitel.

You just are myopically focused on the silly Web3 phase, same as people derided Web1 personal home pages with <blink> and <marquee> tags until the Web grew up.

For example https://intercoin.org/applications

>Smart contracts represent the first time in history when you can trust code to do what it says.

This is extremely, extremely wrong. The operators of the network can change the smart contract VM whenever they want. There's nothing magic about it, the VM is just implemented in some code that all of the executor nodes happen to agree on at any given moment in time. In practice they don't change it, but neither would you if you were running a financial database on top of SQL.

And besides, the worst issue in software development is unintended bugs made by programmers. No programmer I know would ever trust any non-trivial code to simply "do what it says" because there could be complex bugs lurking in there somewhere. Smart contracts can't do anything about that, practically speaking they make it much worse by making it difficult/expensive to change the smart contract. There is nothing revolutionary or powerful about them, the point of them is actually to make them weak and expensive on purpose so the executors can charge increasing gas fees.

Edit: I looked at that list of applications, almost all of them could be done better without smart contracts or even without computers. Those things are all thousands of years old. The only exception on that list is NFTs, but NFTs are an entirely bogus concept that are yet another version of a ponzi scheme.

You seem intellectually curious and honest from what you write. So I think you’re one step away from the epiphany, if you can resist doubling down on this statement

this is extremely, extremely wrong

Sure, they can “hardfork” the protocol in a backwards-incompatible way, but they’d have to get the fork adopted by everyone who is currently running (and “securing”) the other version of the database and its “stored procedures”. Often, the node operators don’t all know each other and it’s hard for them to all collude to run the hardfork. Often, the old network has large enough incentives for each individual to not switch, similar to how everyone always threatens to leave Facebook but it still has the same MAU because its network effect is so huge. Good luck leaving when all your friends are on it, etc. And Facebook doesn’t give you a steady stream of income, even. If it did, if you made more profit than it cost you to run a node, why wouldn’t you ALSO keep supporting the old network? I can think of one reason only — if the new network hardfork would pay you MORE and it would be a zero-sum game. It would have to break old contracts AND gain enough traction to pay all the node operators MORE than the old one. That’s quite a hurdle and becomes harder the bigger the original network was.

Bitcoin was forked multiple times, but even a sensible hardfork change like increasing the block size proved too hard to do. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV are around but most Bitcoin ”miner” nodes still run the tried and true old blue.

Ethereum team had to put a “difficulty bomb” in there to try to get the miners to upgrade. See Ethereum Classic, for instance, it is still being run, despite having no widely adopted applications or stablecoins on it. So even without utility, you can have shitcoins running for years, and you’re talking to me about how ALL nodes can just abandon it?

Now about the bugs and correctness. Look… first of all, no one is claiming that smart contracts will solve every single problem, neither did Web1 but it solved enough that everyone left AOL and CompuServe and MSN and joined it. That’s a FACT. They also left Encarta and Britannica which were quite popular capitalist enterprises, paying all editors top-down from their profits, and instead Wikipedia eclipsed them all. They are now a rounding error.

But you bring a fair point — since smart contracts must be immutable to be trusted (like UniSwap Factory, or many other protocols) they have to be audited and battle tested before the public can trust them with large amounts of value (elections, money, etc.)

The ultimate in this is Provable Correctness, and there are now tools to actually prove a smart contract or a program is correct.

The second place is what Cardano is doing — running fuzzing with massive amounts of input through what is essentially a functional programming language (Haskell). What is not enough about that? You get the best of all worlds… trillions of tests, and then immutable code you can trust.

Disclaimer: I am not building on Cardano and have no connection to their ecosystem. Just that they are focused on moving the space to a more provably correct set of smart contracts, and it addresses your concern.

>So I think you’re one step away from the epiphany, if you can resist doubling down on this statement

I will double and triple down on it. I've been following this for at least a decade now. Smart contracts are completely useless and they need to go. The "epiphany" here is that it was obvious since The DAO transaction was reverted that there is nothing actually immutable about blockchains or smart contracts. If enough whales are threatened by some activity then they'll hard fork, because the miners/stakers all depend on the activity of the whales to realize their profits. The network doesn't exist without them, and it's not actually hard for them to collude.

This is another reason why it's futile for you to expect anything out of blockchains; they're not actually run by volunteers, by design they're run by the greediest possible participants who are supposed to do whatever they possibly can to maximize their profit from mining, because if they don't do this then the network collapses. This is entirely how the system is designed to work. You're not actually "trusting the code", you're trusting that a hardfork won't be successful for entirely non-technical reasons, i.e. that they would lose money. People who run ordinary databases also don't mess with the database for the same reason. Blockchains don't add anything new to this, they're not a good or even interesting invention.

>Bitcoin was forked multiple times, but even a sensible hardfork change like increasing the block size proved too hard to do

This is ahistorical, it wasn't hard to increase the block size, it was just undesired by the majority of the miners. BCH happened because some miners were upset about SegWit, a change that did actually succeed.

>The ultimate in this is Provable Correctness, and there are now tools to actually prove a smart contract or a program is correct.

These tools do not solve the problem, because "correct" is entirely subjective. With those, you can prove that the program doesn't violate its own invariants or contain certain logic errors, but you can't validate that the output for the human is correct. No amount of fuzzing can solve this.

I mean, I could say that you sound like the old fogies in each generation like Steve Ballmer who famously yelled "search is not a business!" People just don't get how the next generation of users could POSSIBLY find something useful, which they don't see useful. It's like people drew the future with flying cars, when in reality the innovation was in something else.

In a regular database, I can't have an election because someone can go in there and change all the votes or stored procedures. I can't trust the code. I can't trust the database. One person with one key can change everything.

You know what's better than that? People being able to only act as themselves, and the rules being enforced by multiple machines. As I said, it doesn't have be "a blockchain", but what I described is the defining features of "smart contracts". It's simply more resilient than any middleman, and it makes it much, much harder to corrupt the system to extract rents. The system ends up being neutral, and all the "profits" are either taken out of circulation or accrue to the participants. There is no parasitic investor class in the end. People sell the tokens once and then they circulate among network participants. There are multiple gateways to get or cash out of the token instead of one (like cashing in/out of PayPal using PayPal Inc only). It's very hard to shut the system down or exclude certain groups from it. In all these ways (except the last one perhaps, depending on who you ask), it's strictly BETTER than centralized, closed, privately-owned systems. Why do Web2 maxis hate all these improvements?

Who pays the volunteers?

You’re jumbling up a lot of things here. Fixing the economic paradigm does not lead straight to crypto. Maybe it’s part of the solution in some areas, but it doesn't prevent capitalism or encourage open source bootstrapped enterprises.

The closest thing IMO to a swing at fixing the economic paradigm would be something like requiring all companies to be nonprofits once they go public or something…

Who pays volunteers on Wikipedia, Linux, BSD, Webkit, Chromium, PHP, Python and all those other technologies and languages who have taken over the world? Is TimBL rich through extracting rents from all users of HTTP?

Vitalik is mega-rich from selling his tokens once, and now he doesn’t control the network. That is the alternative I am talking about. The developers of a successful project make buck but then the project becomes bigger than them. There were was an article posted the other day from an open source author complaining that they are now being required to use two-factor authentication before they can continue releasing their product. They said “well, I guess I don’t pay for the distribution platform, so I will take what I can get.” But they are missing the point entirely — the distribution platform isn’t supposed to serve the one author/maintainer. It’s supposed to serve the public! Those are the actual customers, and even if the author pays $1,000,000 a month to such a service, the value to the public of NOT having a security backdoor on the next update can become far, far greater. At some point, what you built just becomes bigger than you.

That’s why science has peer review, wikipedia has talk pages and open source commits have reviewers before merging the code. No one wants something to be rolled out at 5am on the whim of one guy, EVEN IF he has two factor authentication.

There is a fundamental, fundamental difference in mindset between on the one hand the celebrity culture we have on Twitter, and various entertainment, and the peer review culture of science, wikipedia and open source. The latter is far more useful to society.

In fact, most of our divisions and strife in demicracies is a result of for-profit news media trying to write one-sided outrage articles with clickbait titles because the market selects for that, while our social network algorithms surface this and put us in angry echo chambers because that leads to the most “engagement” (and therefore, profit). Once you see it, the profit motive IS WHAT CORRUPTS these networks. Wikipedia and Linux may have their faults, but not these.

Who pays the volunteers? No one. They have enough financial stability to spend an hour here and there making a commit. There doesn’t need to be a billion dollar investment by any party to advance the thing forward. They’re like ants… and it beats closed profit-driven silos in the end.

>Who pays volunteers on Wikipedia, Linux, BSD, Webkit, Chromium, PHP, Python

In order: Wikimedia Foundation, various companies, various companies, Apple, Google, various companies, various companies. Most of those developers are paid. The wikipedia editors are unpaid volunteers, but the IT staff isn't.

You asked about the volunteers, not the paid staff. The vast, vast majority of contributions on eg wikipedia comes from unpaid contributors.

I would not assume the latter

It is easy to check in a variety of ways, including calling their API of contributors. Where would Wikipedia get the money to oay this vast army of people? And even if they did, divide the amount they raised by the number of contributors and tell me if it is a meaningful amount compared to what employees are paid in the capitalist company model.

It isn't Wikipedia that is hiring or paying the contributors I refer to

No, I asked my question assuming we lived in the world you’re suggesting where all software is built by volunteers in a utopian gift economy. I am asking who pays your volunteers. The question is semi-rhetorical.

The answer as GP points out is that in the majority of these cases open source software is still funded by capitalists. Wikipedia content presumably being largely a volunteer effort doesn't change this. Something still has to fund Wikipedia's existence. Wikipedia and signal for example are funded by nonprofits. I quite like this model which is why I suggested it in my previous comment.

The main point is that you can’t just tell everyone to work for free and still call it capitalism or even expect it to work at all. That’s what it sounds like you’re suggesting… I like your challenge to the capitalism/socialism dichotomy. I think your solution is lacking some sophistication in understanding how the open source landscape works, what motivates people and how to yield production, and is kinda out of touch with reality.

I think it’s quite the reverse: rather than being out of touch with reality, it is based on behavioral economic studies of reality ignored by capitalists. Watch for example this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rbR2V1UeB_A

The way they would be able to contribute is that the UBI would allow them to negotiate shorter workweeks. They’d use the time for other things, like taking care of their own children and parents, rather than sticking them in a nursing home and public schools.

My solution also helps women close the pay gap: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286

Honestly I’m not even sure what we’re talking about anymore. I definitely agree we need a way as a society to have families raise their own kids and break the power couple plus daycare dynamic. But I doubt a volunteer economy would achieve those results. We need to make homemaker a socially prestigious occupation and provide people doing that role more of a support system and structure so they can participate in the economic machine and feel/be valued the same way “breadwinners” are. Then they’ll be seen and see themselves as equals.

Also the Atlassian example in the video is meh. The people aren't working for free. They’re working for a paycheck. The company just lets them have autonomy for one day a quarter. So 4 days a year they get to work on what they want instead of what their managers want and this is your example of how a volunteer economy supported by UBI will work? Have you paid any attention the last 2 years? People don't work if they don't have to feed their family and pay the mortgage… I think you’re conflating innovation with grunt work. Until we have robots to do all the grunt work, UBI is a pipe dream. And I say that wanting it for myself just as much as the next person… so I’m with you there.

Metapoint. You seem to keep significantly editing your comment, so I don’t know what’s been voted or commented on. Either responding, or editing with the —-EDIT—- line would help there.

Cryptocurrency is a huge non-sequitur here.

> Files expose attempts to lobby Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz and George Osborne

They can't be very smart, Joe Biden is the least corrupt president ever and has committed to total transparency: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-briefing-idUSKB...

>pledges

A pledge has the same value as good intentions.

It is not just a pledge as so far he has not broken it https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/biden-prom...

Biden being shown as a puppet in this context is certainly something.

Admittedly, Guardian is the only news site I check ever (last 5 or so years anyway), and even I am impressed that they went with a straight arrow. Good job.

// Weird seeing downvotes for my reply without any comments/input. Just goes to show - ignorance is bliss.

Someone describe to me why politicians even bother to meet with Uber.

Why would Biden, Macron bother with this company, and not others?

Where is the 'money flow' happening here? Is someone being bribed? Was Uber funnelling money to a related cause?

I can understand ministers wanting to please a big up and coming company, sure, that's their job in some way, but not like this.

How does Uber have the ability to get the VP to 'change their speech'.

What's going on? That's not in the article.

> Why would Biden, Macron bother with this company, and not others?

Yes I agree, Biden is also very tough on corruption[1], historically so in fact.

[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

Obviously we are to trust whitehouse.gov on how tough on corruption the administration is.

There is an ideological attachment to the gig company. See Macron trying to change the labor laws in France. In Macron's mind, France is "uncompetitive" and so Uber is like a straight-to-the-veins routing around the political system to change that.

Having lived in France, I would definitely agree on some level with that, I see an entire nation of people fighting over surpluses and a lot less productivity - but I wonder if even that would be enough.

Agree with Macron or not - that's at least him doing is job to 'make things happen' - but the degree of complicity is just to much.

There's money going somewhere somehow, that's the missing piece.

I don't suggest there is outright bribery because that's 'illegal' and would 'really get them in trouble' but something softer like campaign contributions or related causes, or favours here and there.

I really don't think it takes much money when the ideological alignment is there.

... the leak is from 2013-2017 when Travis Kalanick was still CEO, I mean it was bad but we already know it.

Everything Uber has done is pretty standard for a lot of big companies, people just love to bash Uber for some reason, probably people with ties to the utterly corrupt Taxi industry.

No. The behavior described in the article is not "standard." When you identify a law in a big company that forbids you from doing a business practice, you stop and obey the law. There is no alternative approach, particularly in a big company.

The conduct described in the article is basically reckless win-at-any-cost nonsense that reflects Uber's very survival was forbidden by law. The politicians who prevented subordinates from enforcing the law should be called out one-by-one and made to explain themselves. The lesson from the parent comment is not the correct lesson.

I see no reason to be a staunch defender of bullshit unjust laws meant to stifle innovation and uphold monopolistic behaviors. The executives can hold their heads high at their acts of corporate level civil disobedience.

No, serious executives cannot do that. If an executive acknowledges a business practice violates law, the action item is not 'do it anyway'. There is no corporate level civil disobedience. This is not correct and not reflective of the way this actually goes in real life corporate America.

There is. You can treat fines as just another cost of doing business if your returns will be far greater.

No. It is not standard to build an illegal enterprise and then treat the fines as a cost of doing business.

It is. If every business followed every law perfectly as a standard practice it would be very difficult for many businesses to survive. Law has to be fudged when appropriate.

Look, the most aggressive folks have reasoned positions they feel comfortable taking to judges and counterparties. If your position is "I'm illegal and I don't care, see if you can fashion a remedy that makes me regret it", judges and counterparties will oblige.

If you aren’t caught doing illegal things you will never see a judge.

This! I don't use Uber often but when I use it, it's pretty good and I like the experience very much.

The hate of Uber on this forum is ridiculous, some people are just so out of touch of the l reality of modern companies, society and business.

Rules are meant to be broken. That's how progress occurs. The courts will decide what, if any, sanctions to apply. This is as it should be in a liberal democracy.

Looks like you're quoting a book on social progress. This isn't it.

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