Hacker News Reader

Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

My wife had the same issue with Lyft. She was taking a ride home last year when they got hit from behind by a car that tried to drive around them and ended up hitting them. She gave a statement to Lyft support to make clear that the Lyft driver was not at fault. However when describing the driver who hit the Lyft she called him "young" - so Lyft support blocked her account for making discriminatory statements in violation of their community guidelines. We had to escalate that to the CEO because there was no avenue of appeal without an active account. They played back the audio of her conversation and afterwards did agree to restore her account, but cautioned that if she violated community guidelines again in 90 days she would be banned permanently! You can't make stuff like that up.

View on HN

There's an argument that companies should be able to run themselves however they please, that Lyft should be able to have whatever community guidelines they choose, no matter how silly it's their right.

I agree with this as long as there is a healthy free market, and 2 or 3 companies to choose from isn't a healthy free market. Either we need to bust these companies up, or regulate them better. In D&D terms, a single company shouldn't be able to give you a permanent stat penalty just because you did something like use the word "young". Many of these companies are so big that if one of the big 2 or 3 ban you, your entire life will be affected. Another example is LinkedIn, if I get banned from LinkedIn I guess I'll just take the -50% to all future job opportunities. Once these companies get big enough they owe society better than automated support processes and surprise lifetime bans once an algorithm determines you might not be profitable enough to bother with.

> There's an argument that companies should be able to run themselves however they please

There is also an argument that lift should be paying the government 10 cents a mile to use the states roads.

No there isn’t. We have taxes for this

Lift is using a public good as the basis for a private business.

There's a gas tax.

Would you also want to charge commercial delivery vehicles $0.10/mile? They are also private businesses and they already pay gas tax.

Do you realized the cost will simply be passed on to the consumer in the end either way leading to higher inflation?

Why not? Large truck already don't pay for the damage they do to roads.

I’ve heard this before and if it is true I would be in favor of adjusting gas taxes on commercial vehicles to cover the cost of road maintenance. However, $0.10/mile sounds excessive and punitive and inflationary for all consumers.

I would love to see some data to support your claim.

Large trucks pay higher fees and require inspection

Common knowledge that the extra taxes and fees paid by trucks don't cover the cost of the damage they do.

Per this source [0] it appears you are correct. Trucks contribute 99% of wear and tear on the roads but pay only 35% of the cost.

My take is that cars/pickups/suvs are overpaying by a lot and commercial trucks are underpaying by a lot.

My biggest concern is that taxes, like inflation, only ever seem to go up, never down.

In this case I would be in favor of correcting this inequality if we reduce gas taxes for standard vehicles while increasing taxes on commercial trucks, but given their track record I suspect governments will never reduce taxes, only increase them.

[0] https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...

Personal vehicles are a luxury, why shouldn't they pay relatively more than commercial traffic?

In America personal vehicles are a necessity unless you live in the core of a city with adequate public transit of which there are only a handful.

They are a necessity if you live in a small town, the suburbs, a rural area, an area with extreme weather, have a family with young children, etc.

* In the US, 93% of households have access to a personal vehicle [0].

* 77.3% of respondents think owning a car is necessary [0]

If we increase taxes on personal vehicles it would disproportionately impact lower income workers who can barely afford to get by as it is. Forcing a single mom on a low income such that she could no longer afford to drive would tax her 10’s of hours every week resulting in untold hardship. It would be a disaster.

What you are advocating would only work if we invested trillions of dollars in transit infrastructure.

Taxation or more debt isn’t enough to pay for that transformation without absolutely destroying the economy and the quality of life of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Personal vehicles are only a luxury if you live in a fantasy.

[0] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/car-ownership-st...

Large trucks do things like delivery food to the grocer next to your apartment so that you can live. The road is a public good. Sometimes the tax we pay funds something we don't really use, and sometimes we use more than our tax adds up to. If you have a better system, make it happen.

Gas tax is only paid for by cars that use gasoline. With Uber pushing Teslas pretty heavily ($1,000 to the driver if they get drive a Tesla for Uber, which covers two months payment on a leased Model 3), I'd be okay charging a replacement fee. Batteries are heavy, which leads to increased wear and tear on roads, and the money for that comes out of the gas tax.

Should we also add a new tax to all electric vehicles who use the roads without paying gas tax?

I could see an argument both ways but taxing electric vehicles would tend to negate the incentive to switch from polluting cars.

Would you rather those Uber drivers pollute our air or would it make sense to encourage switching to zero emission vehicles?

Everyone needs to pay for their usage. Road taxes fix roads using gas as a tax was an easy way to charge for usage.

Air pollution is a different issue and electric cars have rebates to encourage purchases.

Yes. The price will be passed on only if the market will bear it. If my soda is going to cost me 10 cents more because of taxes and I’m still willing to buy it, the soda companies should raise their prices 10 cents even without the tax.

The price of every single good would go up, including all food - not just soda, diapers, toilet paper, toothpaste - everything.

Everything we consume is shipped and if the price of everything goes up the standard of living of everyone goes down. This would be a regressive tax that would disproportionately impact those who can least afford it.

This would be incredibly inflationary and hurt the poorest the most. Bad idea.

IFTA would like a word with you.

This is exactly how I look at it. The “censorship” and “arbitrary banning” isn’t the key problem. The key problem is that some of these entities are so powerful that being censored by them, or arbitrarily banned by them, can have serious long term consequences on almost anyone.

Frankly, the antitrust regulators and legislators have been asleep at the wheel for decades and have allowed an unimaginable level of consolidation in multiple sectors of the market. We should never have gotten to this point, but now that we’re here I feel like we need to follow the Big Bell example.

It would be handy if they had a requirement of transparency. Having your job threatened for saying that a driver that hit you looked "young" is too obscure.

Make it clear what you won't accept, have a whole web page with every single thing that you have decided on as corporate taboo.

You are free to chose from a number of local car service or taxi companies.

In my town that number is one. That’s assuming they are willing to travel to my town from the neighboring jurisdiction where they are based.

Are we free to revoke the limited liability of companies who act against the public interest?

> I agree with this as long as there is a healthy free market, and 2 or 3 companies to choose from isn't a healthy free market.

What about if some VC decides to use 200 million USD to undercut your prices? Would you consider that a healthy free market?

That very obviously isn't.

Companies that operate under limited liability should have an obligation to run their companies in a way that benefits society (otherwise we should withdraw the limitation on investor liability, as it is being used against us).

It's pretty funny how lots of people that are more or less rabidly anti-regulation never manage to consider limited liability to be regulation.

Regulations are merely rules I don’t like.

The problem is that there was a healthy free market, until the pearl-clutching wealthy decided they didn't like all the taxis that were cluttering up the streets and lobbied to introduce licensing. It took enormous companies breaking the law at an industrial scale to destroy this artificially expensive and terrible regulatory capture, and now those same companies are using the same regulatory mechanisms as a moat to stop competitors.

> she called him "young" - so Lyft support blocked her account for making discriminatory statements

Is anyone else confused how this is discriminatory? And what kind of guideline does it violate?

I am probably cynical, but perhaps these rules and regulations are only there to be used as a tool for removing undesirables.

Age discrimination is a legally recognized discrimination.

Where is the discrimination part, though?

Age classification isn't.

Depends on where this happened but in the US IIRC age discrimination only covers people older than 40. Discriminating against young people is legal, and it's not clear to me that describing someone as "young" is a form of discrimation.

I'm pretty sure, in the US, at least, that a customer is absolutely allowed to discriminate against the companies they make purchases from.

Except no one was discriminating against anyone. They simply described them.

> Except no one was discriminating against anyone. They simply described them.

In US every description is a discrimination. Fat, slim, black, white ( they say caucasian in movies without knowing what skin color the people living in that region have), master, slave, red, yellow.

And i bet Lyft will never hire a Dick (Chenney) or a Peacock .

My partner was sexually assaulted by a Lyft driver and lost her Lyft account in the process.

That's some great customer service right there.

Sounds like a big public lawsuit would help

> when describing the driver who hit the Lyft she called him "young"

> played back the audio of her conversation

Am I reading this right? She gave a verbal statement to a rep, ostensibly to support their internal processes. They turned around and hypercriticized her exact wording, looking for reasons to punish her? If you squint hard enough, you can almost understand why companies want to avoid any possibly-misconstruable language in public posts, regardless of how unreasonable the possible PR blowup would be. But this is the next level.

The gift of incorporation should come with significant responsibility and deference to actual corporeal beings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com