fstuff

I just had a thought, wasn't this accident after the Levandowski thing? I wonder if Uber pulled a bunch of code for fear of infringing on waymo and put in this crappy hacky code. They probably didn't want the Levandowski case to appear to slow down their progress.

Lol, people keep taking about Uber building internal products because 3rd party stuff can't "Uber" scale, I think the real drive to build internal apps is to save on licensing costs.

Take chat, hipcat is like 5-10 bucks per month per user. Uber has about 20k FTEs, 40k contractors all use chat. That's 3 to 600k per month just on chat.

Don't forget scale is expensive.

I can't imagine how much that many slack licenses would cost.

Before the Susan fowler thing they had a rule that you had 30 days to exercise your options after you leave or separate as they called it. Since the company's value went up so much most people couldn't afford to pay the tax and because it was private you couldn't sell it (employee lock out is in November). Lots of people were handcuffed because of this, and I know a few that walked away. After the Susan Fowler thing they changed the option thing to like 7 years.

I think they moved to RSU's in mid 2015 or 16.

It's weird walking away from 120 million but I think I might get what he was thinking. He was probably over confident with the tech, and thought it was close to roll out. He was also probably thinking the tech was worth billions. I bet Anthony felt he built the tech himself and he owned it. He probably wanted and felt like he deserved a bigger piece of the multi billon dollar self driving pie than just 120 million.

Hmm... If Anthony ends up taking a plea deal I wonder if there might be some details about Uber that might come up. I could totally see Anthony selling out Travis at least

Oh I didn't hear about a snap lawsuit, I knew their stock tanked but I don't know about the lawsuit. I'll Google it. I figured after they put out the ipo perspective it was "buyer be ware".

What the heck could this be about? They just IPO'd and the investors are mad the stock is down? Why would that be a reason to sue... Or I assume sue... Why would this require an investigation? Might be a dumb question

But as a bicyclist it's deadly. I'm in SF, it happens all the time on second St and on market. I thought they weren't even allowed to drop off on market but it happens all the time. It happens to me like once every 3 months but I see it every week happening to others. I keep an eye out for those Uber badges and expect to get cut off.

Waze and a company called scoop do this

Agreed, if I go on the sidewalk I never go faster than walking speed but only if the sidewalk is clear. I'll walk it if there's people on the sidewalk.

>As for the self righteousness of "only peds belong on sidewalks", I get tired of that.

I strongly disagree with this. I've owned an electric scooter for over a year now and I learned real fast that it's super dangerous to ride on the sidewalk.

The problem with pedestrians is that they are not looking out for scooters. People will wander into your path and depending on how fast you're going you may collide.

Also you can't see people walking out onto the sidewalk from doorways and recessed building entrances and around corners. I see people on those scooters going full speed on sidewalks and if someone happens to suddenly walk out doorway they're getting hit.

When people walk out onthe street they should look both ways for cars before stepping on the road. In my opinion it's ridiculous to expect people to peer out of doorway stoops and look for people on scooters barreling down the sidewalk.

Yea I've never seen anyone riding with a helmet on these scooters. U see them all over south park bear the ball park.

I've rode a personal electric scooter for over a year now and I can say a helmet is a must. The biggest dangers I've seen is clueless uber/ lyft drivers cutting you off (happens a lot) and pot holes / cracks in the pavement. They travel at 10+ mph so if you hit a big enough pot hole your going to eat it.

Actually their motto is "Safety third"

https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ube...

there's a company testing a remote driver system to take control of self driving cars when they can't handle a problem ahead.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...

I can understand that, my anecdotal experience with AT&T fiber when they rolled out was that they dug up half the curb in front on my driveway and left a trench covered with a unsecured piece of 2 inch plywood for almost 3 months. They blocked half my driveway and gave me no notice or contact info. I'm not even one of their customers, it's just their box happened to be in front of my house.

Yea I was not happy, and insulted when service rolled out and their rep only offered me 5% discount to make up for construction.

It's the 100k paid out to this guy included with that number? Just curious

Yea I had uber driver tell me he cleared 100k maybe 3 or 4 years ago. Back then uber only took a 15% i think. They also paid crazy incentives to lure drives. Like earn 1-2k for x amount of rides in a certain period. Now that they have a sufficient amount of drivers they drastically cut the incentives. Google the protests in India by their drivers after incentive pay was cut. I think most drivers were making more from incentives than fares.

I'm no uber fan but I don't see them ever going away. It may downsize or it may merge with a competitor but I don't see the uber app ever going away. Plus they have a lot of paper assets. 20% of Didi is 10B alone. And they have a piece of that Russian company. Also who knows how much all that user data is worth. It seems they have more assets than just cash on hand. I think they'll end up merging with a competitor and operating in the US under the uber brand. Or they'll sell of those assets, and scale way back and hope to partner someone with a working self driving.

Most operational staff are hourly workers who don't get paid anywhere near what a engineer gets and hourly works usually don't get RSUs. You have to consider the 1000s people working on city ops, support, their insurance ops teams are huge, in the US alone they probably have 1 to 2k of people in support roles. Only salaried employees garner the big pay which is guess is less than half the company.

Ps... you'd crap your pants if you knew how many contractors they have doing operations work. Their mostly in low cost counties like the Philippines, and Brazil. Nothing about support scales with growth.

If they lose they could be forced shut down they're AV research. I don't think the judge would let them continue using waymo's tech while uber appeals

I think it'll be exodus 2.0. I contracted there until Nov 2016, a few months before the delete uber campaign and Susan Fowler. I kept in contact with some service desk friends and they said after Susan's blog at least 200 people quit right after. Again this is just anecdotal hearsay but I was told another 500 people left a few months later after they collected their yearly bonuses. After bonuses he said maybe 10 to 15 people per week were stopping by the support bar to turn in their laptops on their last day in his building alone. His guess was that at least 800 to 1000 people quit in the first six months of the year. I haven't spoken to him since the end of summer so I don't know how their policy changes, pay bumps, and CEO/ leadership have changed things and if the attrition number slowed. But with this recent news I think this could kick off exodus 2.0.

You missed a couple steps

- hire a PR firm to flood new cities with stories of how g great uber is

- build up a huge rider and driver base by offering riders deep discounts and drivers big bonuses

- when threaten with regulations email the user base asking them to contact city officials because regulators are stifling innovation and limiting consumer choice... asnd throw in a line about taxis being old and crappy. They did this exactly when it wad announced London banned them.

Quote>"Uber now says it had a legal obligation to report the hack to regulators and to drivers whose license numbers were taken. Instead, the company paid hackers $100,000 to delete the data and keep the breach quiet. Uber said it believes the information was never used but declined to disclose the identities of the attackers."

So they paid a hundred grand to hackers to delete the info and they know the data was never used because the hacker's said the wouldn't...ok sounds legit.

Lol those conditions almost sound like a silk road darknet market transaction. In that you're making a transaction with stranger and pay the stranger

I think that's already the play book. Remember when their self driving car ran 6 red lights in sf asnd they said:

>Uber spokesperson Chelsea Kohler said the car was being operated by its human driver at the time and had no passengers aboard

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2016/12/ubers-sel...

Then it came this came out later

>Friday reported that traffic violations by the company’s self-driving cars were caused by problems with the cars’ mapping programs, and not, as the company had previously claimed, by human error.

After video of one of the violations surfaced in December, the company not only blamed and suspended the human monitoring the system, but doubled down. The supposedly human-caused red-light violation, they said, “is why we believe so much in making the roads safer by building self-driving Ubers.”

And while running red lights was the most egregious problem with the cars, they were also unable to safely navigate bike lanes.

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/02/2...

If this is a dup where's the main thread?

Hm....This part doesn't look to good for Anthony.

During the hearing, Waymo’s attorneys alleged that Levandowski had taken “thousands of photographs” of company documents displayed on a personal computer to avoid detection while duplicating the materials. At one point, a Waymo lawyer suggested that Uber’s attorneys had 64,000 Levandowski photos in their possession, though Uber said some of those are personal.

More than that, it seems a lot of SF Uber/Lyft come from far away to work in San Francisco and don't know their way around and have their eye's glued to their phone's GPS. I ride a bike in SF and I've nearly been hit by a Uber/Lyft driver at least 10 times this year(once the same driver cut me off 3 times on 2nd street). I keep a eye peeled for those Uber/Lyft logos when I see them pulled over, when pull out into traffic they almost never look for bikers and usually screwing with their phones.

That's true and Travis said that when he first got calls to quit but he listened to his customers and employees and quit. I'm no fan of Travis or uber but I feel like Travis deserves some points for making the right call months ago and I wish others followed his lead back then.

Just take a look at Didi. They won the market in China and now prices are up, driven incentive pay is cut, wait times are up because drivers are leaving the platform because pay is down.

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2016/09/1...