Creating the kind of world we want to live in should be the sole purpose of rules and regulations. How people want to live shouldn't play second fiddle to what rules and regulations say. Rules and regulations can be changed.
There’s real truth in the terrible service flaws of the previous taxi system, but the employment flaws of Uber are being smothered with the service improvements they’ve introduced. That’s not the only issue worth caring about.
Having workers tie themselves to a company for 40 hours a week being the only valid way to make money is conservative thinking, be a bit progressive and see how much freedom this potentially opens up for workers.
The issue ttjjtt and others are pointing out about Uber are not around binding employees to one employer for a fixed 40 hour workweek. In fact, I'd bet ttjjtt would support labor laws which limit a businesses ability to punish employees for moonlighting.
The issue is, like amazon's mechanical turk, that Uber is cutting corners, costs, and wages for their "employees" in ways that are both legal and illegal while secretly lobbying to make it easier for them to reduce benefits.
This is a market leader using their position to harm their workers. "Conservative thinking" is that "why do we need all these labor rules and protections for employees? They signed up for it!" Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?"
Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job". Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening?
Uber works great for users, we know that. Uber would also work great for drivers if the drivers got a larger cut. So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine? And no, this is not over regulating at all, at least not more than for example limiting how many Taxi's are allowed to operate in the city etc which is already happening.
Did you read the article?
The issue is 2 fold.
1. Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that.
2. We have an entire political party in the US (Republicans) that are "anti-regulation" and fight tooth and nail against new regulations.
If we want "regulators" to make things better, we need to put in regulators that want to regulate.
This doesn't matter on a state level, for example democrats could easily create such regulations in New York or California if they wanted to.
> Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that.
Yes, every corporation lobbies for laws that favors them, this is nothing new. Lobbying isn't corrupt, politicians making under the table deals with corporations is the bad part, lobbying is just corporations telling politicians what kind of laws the corporation would want.
And then paying money to politicians who offer to do what the corporations want. Lobbying (at least as practiced in the US, where it is considered "free speech" for corporations to "donate" money to politicians they like) is very clearly legalized corruption - there really is no other valid way to look at it.
Yes, it is slightly more expensive than Uber, but the drivers have been vetted by the municipal government, proved their ability to speak the local language and know their way around the city and are insured to be able to pay you off if they crash.
Unlike Uber, they are - in fact - independent contractors. They are actually proud about their freedom.
Uber, OTOH, works here mostly by way of these shady folk who rent cars to disadvantaged immigrants who barely speak the language, collecting most of their earnings, forcing them to drive north of 12 hours per day before they return to Poland or Ukraine in 6 months.
> Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job".
Trying to pass such regulations runs against massive lobbying efforts by companies. Amazon, Uber don't care about giving employees flexibility. They are free to give workers the flexibility, nothing is preventing them from doing it. They use this model to reduce benefits to give their workers. It is incredibly hard to pass regulations against these lobbying efforts. However regulations that companies need to give their workers benefits do already exist, that's why Ubers operations were deemed illegal in places.
> Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening?
The argument is that the future is that people don't have the choice of " just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour," but instead are locked into highly unfavourable situations, with no choice (because of their economic situation) and at the same time skirting around tax obligations, just to enrich the investor class behind Uber.
That did already happen, just look at what Über did with the Uber Black loans where drivers got enticed into car loans with promises of guaranteed income, just for Uber to reduce the fares. This is essentially the same as how servdom in Russia worked.
> So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine?
That's the whole point about the Uber leaks. Uber was not willing to work under the existing worker protection frameworks, they even exited markets where they were forced to (e.g. Switzerland).
HN is obviously not a hive mind, but in in general, for facets of the HN crowd, the investor class, those with conservative/libertarian views on labor, business owners, etc. the default view is simply to not empathize with the service worker.
For whatever it's worth, I tend to err a bit toward the "more regulation" end of the spectrum, but I don't feel the need to believe that the world is simple and everyone who doesn't subscribe to my simplistic view is morally deficient.
Except this counterpoint is not based on real evidence but largely based on purely theoretical arguments which have been shown numerous times to be way too simplistic.
I’d like to hear more evidence. until then it seems like a comforting thought for a libertarian rather than a sober description of reality.
You’re on the internet arguing with imaginary strawmen for your amusement. It’s not time well spent.
I agree. But we also need to consider when well-intentioned measures are corrupted or fail entirely. That was the case with taxis before Uber. It remains the case with many of Uber's competitors. Uber is no paragon. But the neither is the status quo. This is far from a bimodal argument.
The fact is that Uber/Lyft created a new market even when the product existed a long time. In NYC, you could always get a car service to come and pick you up, but you had to know them, have a pre-existing relationship, etc. If you do, even today, it's cheaper than Uber, but it's a hassle.
Also in NYC, taxis are terrible in comparison to Uber. They're usually dirty/unkept, the drivers are sometimes "off". Taxi owners weren't focused on the service- they were focused on the medallion, the right to have a taxi. That's where the real value was.
The taxis were/are essentially anonymous, so there's no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum in terms of cleanliness, repair or customer service.
Uber, for all its extreme faults, flipped that on its head, with driver and rider visibility, and that changed everything.
Uber has many problems- handicap inaccessibility, driver treatment, a ton of evidence against them regarding deliberate manipulation and probable lying to regulators, but "bring back the old ways" clearly weren't working either.
The market needs to break up and become more free.
Similarly, until a few years ago it was forbidden to operate busses between cities.
Uber has some negative aspects but opening up the market and allowing healthy competition is certainly a huge positive.
And was there any other requirements? Like required training or mandating mandatory supply at all times?
There’s a lot of competition on the German market for taxi-alternatives, many of which started long before Uber (and are often cheaper as well).
In the process, Uber clearly behaved illegally and unethically towards its workers and government regulators. That's been known for a while. Could it have been different? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes governments don't listen until they're forced to.
Now about the working conditions of cab drivers, honestly in many places they were already being screwed over by local oligopolies (for a prime example of this, see for example the NYC medallion auction scams which defrauded individual drivers of hundreds of thousands of dollars). In the Uber story, drivers got shuttled from one shitty situation to another probably just about as shitty.
Hopefully the new set of players in that space now abide by the local rules, and also the regulators learn from their failures and get on top of the industry without forgetting about their users too much.
And the first requirement for this is that rules and regulations are followed.
Establish a culture in which there is no consequence for disobeying the rules and regulations and I guarantee that the most regular offenders are not those who's practices you agree with.
The best case scenario here is that there are heavy consequences for those who broke the rules, but the rules are revisited and altered to make things more in line with consumer needs.
As an autistic person I found this very hard to grasp when I was young. Now I understand that rules must be discovered as an emergent property, they cannot be read from a manual or law book. What matters is the culture that enforces whatever rules you want. Otherwise you get tons of laws on the books people don't enforce.
Seems like you're addressing the difference between the concept of Social Contract and the concept of Law.
The Social Contract is exactly what you described: the implicit permissions and offenses that a body of people will tolerate. It is, by definition, equal to the current will of the people, and as you said requires discovery. But it requires constant discovery, as the list of permissions and offenses may change over time, and is not necessarily consistent.
Law is an explicit agreement on what permissions and offenses that body of people will tolerate. Ideally it would match the social contract's list of permissions and offenses, but in reality it will always be lagging behind, and it's a social responsibility to try and keep it up to date. Unlike the Social Contract, the law is codified and constant, requiring no discovery.
In small groups of people, coexisting with just the social contract can be all you need. But as the group grows, it becomes less and less possible to predict what the current body of permissions is, leading to people committing offenses without malicious intent; there was no way for them to know beforehand that an action was an offense. And because the body of permissions changes constantly, it's also not something that can be relied on practically after the discovery. We must always suffer the anxiety of taking an action that will condemn us.
Law provides an easier means to get along by providing a constant and predictable list of permissions and offenses. It changes too, but only by announcement, allowing the populace to stay abreast of the updates. This offers a relief to the anxiety presented in a strictly Social Contract setting, and encourages people to act and be involved in daily life rather than avoidant of it.
The offenses you're describing seem to fall under the concept of De minimis[1], which establishes that there are offenses to a rule that just aren't worth acting on. We all know they're against the law, but not necessarily against the spirit of the law, and the cost of acting on those offenses are greater than the benefits. So we allow them to happen, by virtue of the Social Contract overriding the Law in minor circumstances.
But that doesn't mean that the rules and regulations aren't important and larger offenses should never be acted on. The Law is still the Law and for good reason. Ignore it, and that anxiety returns to plague anyone without the power to force their will.
Unfortunately when you have regulatory capture by special interests groups, this ensures that no progress ever happens because the organization with the most lobbying money is always guaranteed to win.
I don't think anyone would disagree with that. I think the point is that Uber can do shitty things that should be punished and provide a good service that should be encouraged.
To put it another way, the world I want to live in gives you a fair chance of running a competitive business without having to be mega rich and chummy with the leaders of the countries you operate in.
The idea that Uber is creating slaves that have no agency is the typical elitist arrogance, sitting in their ivory towers, picturing all these poor Uber drivers suffering when it’s simply not the case.
> Uber identified police officers through data mined from the app and then, using an internal tool called “greyball”, served them a fake view of the UberPop app, populated with ghost cars that wouldn’t stop for them. They could also block anyone from booking in certain zones, like around police stations, using a tool called “geofencing”. [1]
Fair enough if you disagree with the court ruling, but they should abide by the law like everyone else.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-f2971465-73d2-4932-...
if you disagree with a court ruling, and then set up intentionally a system to avoid the police detecting you continue your behaviour, you should be punished to the maximum extent of the law. The people who orchestrated that behaviour should have money confiscated from their illegal enrichment, and jail time for purposely working to circumvent a legal order for a court. And if not back then, today.
They broke through all of those unfair laws and now we live in a system that benefits from them breaking the rules for the better. Seriously, you think the taxi monopoly was so much better than now? That’s laughable!
Should the Dutch farmers who are being regulated out of business sit idly by while all their hard work goes to nothing?
Uber chose to break the rules against an illegal taxi monopoly and I’m thrilled they did because otherwise no one would have been able to break it. Because they put their necks out on the line we have a driving service around the world that would never have existed if we didn’t have them pushing the boundaries.
I would, for a large number of reasons, at the basic level no one really agrees what the "world should be" thus your regulations for a utopia would not match mine.
Further government has proven through out history to be very poor at creating the kind of word "we want the live in"
Instead government, the law, "rules and regulations" should be about impartial conflict resolution and protection of natural rights not attempting to create some kind of Utopia that it can never achieve and will make everyone life worse in the attempt
The Uber driver circling at 5 am may not be turning a profit with $15 airport rides. This business may only be sustainable for as long as VC money flows, and drivers are willing to go bust.
Uber makes something like a 36% variable margin [1]. Even adding back sales & marketing we find a positive, if small, margin. They lose about 11% per ride. But that varies wildly region to region. (New York, for example, is profitable.)
Drivers' economics are more precarious. But the "as long as VC money flows" argument hasn't made sense since Uber's 2019 IPO.
So on net, they may be out something like 11-30% per ride dependent on location. Those are awful economics. More concerning would be busy season/dry season dynamics for Uber drivers. If there are months where rides decline in frequency or become more concentrated - then driver economics may be substantially worse than the average would have you believe.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-posts-nearly-6-billio....
Many rich people wouldn't suffer if Uber could just forcefully employ people at will, keeping them hostage, if Uber could arrange something like that. But that hurts the people who are being kept hostage. When we create/remove/modify regulations, both sides of the coin needs to be considered.
In this case, it's less about how good/bad Uber is for passengers and more about how Uber is exploiting their employees. Even if everyone loved Uber as a passenger, we can't allow them to exploit other human beings.
Anything else?
But since you apparently sit on a trove of data (as you're so sure of this) that I don't have access to, could you share a bit the results and your methodology?
And I presume you obviously don't use those pesky child-labor-by-Foxconn phones/other devices like Apple; heck it would be hard to find any electronic device using ie rare metals that were sourced by standards you seemingly want others to adhere to. So I presume you typed this on some wooden computer sending pigeon packets.
We can go much deeper. You will inevitably fail eventually the same standards you are expecting from others here, probably pretty quickly. Its just about which battle one decides to pick up and push hard enough. You picked Uber for some reason, others for around gazillion reasons stated in this thread do not consider them the most important topic given the overall benefits to whole society.
"Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent."
Rules and Regulations are extremely hard to change, thats why we have companies like Uber popping up in the first place.