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Comment by sevenf0ur | Hacker News Reader

I hope Lyft fires the driver. There's no excuse for dumping someone's pet on the side of the road like trash. The barrier to entry for these apps must be real low.

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Indeed this whole story sounds like the driver is just a useless human. They dropped off the passenger at a pet hospital. I can't imagine how the driver realized there was still a cat in the car and did anything other than return to the pet hospital. I wonder what lyft's GPS data says, do they see the driver stop a few minutes after leaving the pet hospital, near where they found the cat?

I looked for a couple other writeups on this story, but no one seems to know how the cat got from inside the car to anywhere else. Without any details, I'm left to assume the driver is a terrible human being and simply discarded the cat on the side of the road.

>I hope Lyft fires the driver.

They aren't employees, are they? Your verbiage seems off. I know not continuing to work with an independent contractor is very similar to firing an employee, but isn't it a little different?

In the context of the comment and any reasonable conversation that's not about worker's rights, no.

They're exactly the same thing.

I'm not so sure. Why do we call them different things if it's exactly the same?

Because other contexts exist.

Technically aren’t the passengers the employer?

It would be a terms of platform violation.

I have no idea if there's a legal distinction, but I've heard of people firing contractors, and customers for that matter, so in the vernacular it seems fine.

> There's no excuse for dumping someone's pet on the side of the road like trash.

Do we know that's what happened? It's what I assumed, but I hadn't followed this story until the article popped up on Ars, so I'm curious if there are more details.

Short of it: cat in carrier in car; driver drove off, only responded hours later; cat found days later not in carrier covered in fleas. The cat did not let itself out of the car or carrier so the driver must have, as they have no other excuse.

I hope people revert back to taxis where it's an option.

Lyft and Uber are the same price as taxis - and the quality is dramatically worse now.

Are taxi's any better now? I haven't taken one in more than a decade, but in talking to taxi drivers back then it was clear that calling the cab company and asking for a pickup didn't result in any guarantees. They would call it out on the radio and if someone felt like picking you up they would. Otherwise you just wait outside the bar and wonder why there is no car.

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