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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

Sorry how else are they supposed to do it at Uber scale?

Are you saying that we should allow a Uber to do whatever they want because of scale they are operating? It’s Uber choice to operate at scale. No one forced them to.

This is pure revenue extraction from American tech. The EU now makes more in fines from American companies than it does in taxes from its own tech industry. It is clearly impossible to fill these roles with humans without breaking the economic case for Uber, which is obviously the goal. Europe is so fucked man.

Then Uber is fucked. "This is how you do it cheaper" isn't an escape hatch, and we shouldn't accept terrible behavior just because it's cheaper.

Disclaimer: I briefly worked for Uber and quit in disgust

If it's clearly impossible, how come Uber managed to become compliant in 2022?

> The EU now makes more in fines from American companies than it does in taxes from its own tech industry.

That's because American tech doesn't pay its fair share of taxes to the EU compared to its revenue.

American tech companies just have a hard time operating in a legal system that isn’t bought and paid for.

> Sorry how else are they supposed to do it at Uber scale?

The people at Uber are ubersmart, so they can figure it out. If they can't, they don't know how to run their business in line with the law and should be fired.

Figure out how many humans are required to make the decisions, then hire that many humans and have them do it.

I swear this is like a restaurant chain complaining that they shouldn't be required to follow foodservice regulations because of how much money it costs them at scale.

Is following the law optional if you're able to break it at scale?

These laws are effectively retroactive wrt Uber, and are protectionist nonsense anyway. Good luck.

How are they retroactive? Did Uber not have reasonable time to comply? They are a young company, how can they be too calcified to react?

Dutch constitution explicitly prohibits ex post facto laws. This is in no way a retroactive law

What an unusual situation, a big company that has to manage infraction reports from their employees. I don't know... how does Starbucks, McDonalds, Volkswagen or Carrefour do? Do they have, maybe, managers or a human resources department? I'm just talking out loud.

Just how many cases are there? Surely not actually that great number that some employees can not manually go over the details. Maybe cut the developer and executive pay by say 20% and you can easily cover cost of those employees.

If they cant figure that out, then they shouldnt do it at all. Duh.

Anyway, if they're so large and special then they can hire a bunch of people. Large scale should make it easier.

Hire people?

According to Uber it wasn't a lot of drivers. They should be able to easily have a human review each case.

Well they can reduce driver pay and hire additional lawyers; the EU way.

Yeah, I find the notion that human judgement is superior to algorithmic judgement to be pretty suspect… look at Jens Ludwig’s work on judges, it’s not like involving a human improves outcomes somehow

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