Uber is the worst kind of business preying on the lower class claiming independence and freedom when it's the opposite and you are basically a working slave. It did everything possible to go around government worker protections.
[1] https://www.20min.ch/story/uber-soll-fahrern-eine-halbe-mill...
Unless the union is able to explicitly explain their claim the Uber is somehow unfair to drivers, to me sounds like the union is just complaining they not getting their member dues.
Possible I missed something, so here are my sources:
How much Uber drivers make in Switzerland
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/ride-sharing-app-_uber-reaches-...
Taxi Driver Average Salary in Switzerland
http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=210&loct...
It's just the same as any other precarious job
It seems that this ~billion USD is an hypothetical amount Uber would have had to pay if its contractors had been employees? If so, I'm not quite sure "steal" is the appropriate word here. It also ignores the many things Uber might have done differently if its drivers had been employees: increase fare rates, decrease driver payouts, hire less drivers, possibly get out of Switzerland entirely, etc.
I'm sorry that the world doesn't offer magical fairyland jobs that are super easy, require zero skill, and pay super well, I really am - as a society we should be aiming for an abundance economy fueled by automation, where everyone shares in the spoils. But running a business that gives people work that they are generally happy to have the option to take is not infringement on anyone's independence or freedom. Just don't drive for them, and you'd be in the exact same position you were in without them existing (unless you were profiting from the heavily cartel-ized taxi system which abused all the customers, in which case I can't give a bigger shrug).
Sounds like Uber was the original web3 business
For drivers, things seem to have got worse. I’ve spoken to various taxi drivers, including current and former Uber drivers, and none of them liked working for Uber. They merely felt trapped.
But there is an argument to say that the local taxi cartels needed breaking up, and only a company prepared to engage in these kind of tactics could have done it. I don’t know what I think about all this.
I live in the U.S. I speak to almost all of my rideshare drivers about how they feel about their work. Literally none of them have expressed the feeling that they're trapped. (And not one has said that he would prefer driving a taxi.) They do make criticisms, more of Uber than of Lyft. But the main sentiments that they express are appreciation of scheduling flexibility and of not having a boss.
Laws and regulation are supposed to reign in bad industry.
Brigading and PR spin is rampant with Uber online for some strange reason, when in truth, they could provide a far better service by relaxing their tendency to spin bad PR by paying and insuring drivers better, and by operating more like a legit Taxi business.
It is NOT Uber that swept in and fixed the corrupt transport for hire system... It was passengers choosing a less expensive (subsidized by company investment) service, which is now dramatically increasing in cost to users now that they have stable market dominance.
The online PR spins only hold up for people who don't properly recall the past and for those who are unaware of the deception involved in use of "folksy" individual personal tropes used to over-simplify complex issues.
Do they? I'm trying to find some data on how much market share Uber has vs Lyft vs taxis.
Meanwhile, visiting my parents in a smaller part of Ireland, getting a taxi involves phoning, waiting to see if they decide to pick up (if it's busy they don't), then having them tell you it'll be 10 minutes only to arrive after an hour, not accepting card, etc.
A sociology professor I had assigned us a project to do something that would be "considered abnormal to the general public", and then document the results. He had mentioned over and over again to try and implement "as many safety measures as possible during planning". The professor went on to explain that the reason for harping on safety was such a big deal because a student of a previous class (decades before ridesharing) decided that their project would be to bring their personnel vehicle to where cabbies would line up. The student would instead offer rides to customers completely for free. I believe they even had a little sign they put on their window.
After this occurred two or three times, all of the cabbies completely boxed the students car in and called for the police to come. If I recall correctly, they were yelling, screaming, and honking at the student about how they were taking money out of their pockets. Some were accusing the student of taking customers to an undisclosed location and robbing them in order to get paid, while others were saying that doing this for free was essentially stealing from the cabbies, since the student didn't have a taxi permit.
I'm not sure if this was a matter of corruption as much as it was messing with/hurting people trying to make a living, but, I did think it was interesting that all of these different cabbies, from all of these rival taxi companies were all willing to work together spur of the moment, to stop someone who they couldn't possibly compete with. As I understand it, the depths of the rivalry between some of these companies ran pretty deep; it was shocking how willingly they all were to join up to crush this outside threat.
You are posting an anecdote and non-substantiated accusations against an industry based on your area. And you are doing this under a news where they have evidence that their competitors are as corrupt as it gets, a company which has been accused in the past of violating labor rights, disregarding local laws, bribing officials, exploiting workers, etc. And your point is that their competitors in Australia are worse “because you say so”.
Nah, I’m not buying it. The fact that the Australian taxi industry is bad, does not excuse Uber’s conduct. In fact I don’t care what the state is in this industry regarding this conduct and I wish Uber all the worst.
My post is a very relevant warning (in my view) about allowing politicians to use the above stories as an excuse to close down an industry. They are looking for such an excuse. Be warned and call it out.
Why do you think the current state is "/past/ this corruption." It sounds like Uber spent a bunch of money to just "own the corruption for itself." On the whole, I don't believe it's an actual improvement.
You may like the state of the cars more, but the continued overt monopolization and the worse outcomes for labor are massively negative outcomes, even if you aren't in a position to be personally impacted by them.
Uber didn't replace taxi. taxi was dying on it's own. Uber actually kept the bad designs of taxi going but they monopolized the Medallions.
"what it replaced" was the ongoing outcry to minimally decent public transit. Some of the international offshoots of the Occupy movement actually had this as their central theme.
Disruption can (and does) happen without resorting to breaking the law.
For some reason I would think the opposite was more common, i.e. if a company gets away with bad behavior, they will continue to do so until stopped by their government authorities.
Not really. It is not easy to paint existing systems with a wide brush. The situation in Germany is not the same as in Croatia which is not the same in India. I will always trust taxis in Mumbai and Berlin over Uber, whereas in a foreign location I will look for local options like Ola, Grab, FreeNow.
Uber did act as a catalyst for the incumbents to get off their butts, but it created another set of problems which are equally bad.
The minute it starts turning the screws to be profitable, the service quality will go back to what it replaced.
Here in India, its already less reliable and often more expensive than old school taxis.
Uber held drivers accountable. The taxi lobby did the exact opposite - they brutally abused an advantage gifted to them by the government because taxis are supposed to be a valuable public service.
In India it may be different, but in the US it continues to be extremely reliable.
Ok, Uber in particular may be very badly run and incapable of turning a profit. But on most places they have competitors that are profitable and usually, cheaper.
The taxi industry was (is?) insanely corrupt. There are literally state-sanctioned limits on taxis and artificial markets for medallions that made early purchasers absurdly rich.
All of this medallion nonsense can just as easily come back with Uber whenever they feel that competition has driven down prices too low. With a wink and a nudge, all the large players will play ball because they can.
As for what it is today, these companies still aren't profitable which means you're still living in a halo of speculative investment supporting you're current quality of service. The only viable remedy is to raise rates, which puts the service as a more expensive solution that could actually cost more than taxied ever did in the long run.
The picturesque London Taxi driver lives on even today.
Many of the 21st Century's worst attributes aren't due to society falling apart in the digital age.
Online life is exposing the seediness of society, which wasn't reported in old world media.
Lying on the internet is... difficult.
Not in my experience at all. I can't count how many taxis I've taken, with hardly any problems ever.
> corrupt
They lacked anywhere near the resources to be as corrupt as Uber!
https://twitter.com/shrutisonal26/status/1544540603932758016
Edit: Apart from the tweets, the actual article is behind a paywall.
My post is a very relevant warning (in my view) about allowing politicians to use the above stories as an excuse to close down an industry. They are looking for such an excuse. Be warned and call it out.
How does replacing one set of elite corruption with another set of elite corruption get to " i am thankful to Uber Lyft and all the other incumbents for managing to get their foot in"?? You are thankful to them? What are you on about?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Perfect may be the enemy of good but we shouldn’t excuse companies using endless VC money and law breaking to achieve something that’s marginally better for consumers.
Obviously there are some exceptions to this in the comments but generally, in modern countries where the taxi firms aren’t run by literal mafias and killing people, we should condemn Uber’s behaviour.
Taxi’s maybe have been shit but that does not in anyway justify Uber breaking the law to conquer the market (btw, now that they’ve done that, they’ve also turned to shit because it was unsustainable).
Literal or not, taxi companies really are as a rule something akin to local Mafiosos. They break the law all the time. The extent to which Uber screwed over it's drivers and to an extent risked the safety of it's riders bothers me. That Uber flouted local regulations intended to keep taxis services in the hands of local politicos' scumbag friends bothers me not in the least.
And as Uber rose, lots of drivers would drive both taxis and Uber, with each having advantageous and disadvantageous. And I also remember finally checking tire pressure on a cab I'd been paying to use for a bit - random amounts between 10 psi to 40 psi with half the tires bald. Taxi companies are filth and I laugh to hear any of them out of business. Sure Uber isn't much better but the point is Uber vs local Taxi company isn't a fight where people should be routing for a side. Tossing bottles at both sides, sure but not taking a side.
In the 1920s, Yellow Cab and Checker Cab engaged in shootouts on the streets of Chicago. A guy named John Hertz owned Yellow Cab. He also owned racehorses. In 1923, he bought a rental car company. In 1929, arsonists targeted his stables. He then sold Yellow Cab.
However the story told by this Uber leak is not about one company versus another. The sides in this battle are (a) Uber and (b) the people, as represented through the state or government.
Uber is NOT better. Read the article. They just take a bigger chunk from drivers and do not pay taxes.
I want Uber to disappear because their uncontrollable power, they use ride data to spy politicians, they avoid paying taxes, they mistreat their "employees", ...
Both sides are the same is false, and it is false in almost all situations. (Vote!)
Nice to know history isn’t all roses and sugar in reality.
>I should admit that I drove for only a month
so that readers can properly weigh your experiences when forming an opinion.
Hopefully a good reminder to not extrapolate personal experiences or propaganda of the circle one may be a part of to the whole world.
This happens to me all the time with Uber when I land at LAX and want to go to Anaheim or I’m in SF and want to go to San Jose.
And unlike a taxi, half the time Uber charges me $5 claiming that I ghosted the driver rather than them refusing to take me, something I don’t always catch.
The reason that was the only way cabs were available because those were the only communication technologies available.
Maybe what you should be demanding is that cab services provide apps so you don't have to hail/call, etc. There are several companies that can provide this for your cab jurisdiction area as a third party service and they won't price gouge the cab drivers and/or the customers, and they won't use illegal threats and bribes to change laws to suit their needs.
Sometimes I wish I could just “even though there is so surge, I would gladly pay a 2x surge to just get a car to arrive here within the next 30 minutes”.
Here in Australia this is becoming a real problem with Uber - drivers seem to apparently have unlimited "cancels" and just cancel rides continuously to drive up demand especially at the airport where they know passengers have no other choice. They'll also almost always refuse rides that are too far, or don't finish in or near a high-demand area (like a CBD or airport). Other ride share apps are worse (DiDi really sucks), but Uber is the most expensive by far and the experience is pretty bad.
Our taxis on the other hand mostly seem to have uber-like apps and you can reliably get picked up just about anywhere even if you live in the middle of nowhere (within reason, of course). They're about the same price as Uber, with no surge pricing as well.
If taxis could replicate this more ethically, I would switch in a heartbeat.
In my area, they aren’t very available and don’t like to pick up in many areas, and hate driving to the airport or train station. Previously, the airport and train station authority held cabs to high standards there and they were responsive and clean.
In places like Boston I’ve been straight up stranded in the airport when Ubers just won’t show - don’t know why.
It isn't lack of capital or brains that prevented the taxi indistry before and after uber to provide the same service but beneficial to their interests. After all these years they are not even trying to compete with Uber they just want things to go back to the way they were where consumers are taken advantage of or discriminated against. Like it or not, Uber is more accessible to all types of consumers not just the ones drivers think will tip the most, they have better background checks and uniform and scrutinized safety controls and providen a viable primary or secondary income to drivers.
The local laws and regulations should get out of the way and enable what uber is trying to do with or without Uber. The livelihood of taxi drivers is not the law's problem, the well being od consumers and the economy however is. An outdated business model should not be put on a respirator by politicians. I am of the opinion that traditional taxi system with medallions and all that should be done with. Anyome who provides consumer transportation can compete fairly with Uber and pals.
Their service is not revolutionary if you're non-white and a driver: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58831373
Their service is not revolutionary if you're handicapped. The TNCs charge wait time fees which end up discriminating against handicapped passengers who take longer to get from their home to the waiting vehicle, and to get into the vehicle. In fact, they were sued over this, more specifically for not making accommodations: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-uber-... and https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-10/uber-sued...
The TNCs are not required to operate a minimum number of paratransit vehicles like taxi fleets are. Uber has been sued for not providing paratransit vehicles https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/18/uber-accessibility-lawsuit...
The TNCs and local regulators have done nothing to address widespread problems of drivers refusing to provide service to the handicapped. I remember being shocked at the posts in TNC driver subreddits and web forums regarding handicapped passengers. Many drivers see someone in a wheelchair and just bolt - using various methods to cancel/reject the ride - because they see picking up such a passenger to be time consuming, a risk, or annoying.
The service is not revolutionary if you live in the "wrong" part of town. I lived in a "not quite wrong, not quite right" neighborhood where there was plenty of wealthy young people but it was also close to the "wrong" part of town...and when I tried using the service, it'd be 20 minutes to get a ride and usually at least one cancellation. In the "right" part of town? A quarter of the wait, and never a canceled pickup.
Who are you describing? Can you name anyone?
> where consumers are taken advantage of
I've never felt taken advantage of in a taxi. I know Uber pushes this all the time, but can you give examples? I know with Uber or Lyft they collect data on me such as where I am and where I go.
> or discriminated against
Is there any evidence that it's better with ridesharing apps? I mean evidence, not the same claims long made by Uber.
hehe love it. In the first world, ...
How about this, I want to arrive at an airport, walk out the front, check a number plate and put my suitcases in the boot knowing that if anything happens I'm not going to be risking 10k worth of stuff.
Oh officer, it was a yellow car that said taxi on the side, you think you'll find my stuff?
In Germany, Berlin of all cities, I had my bagage held to ransom by a taxi driver who "forgot" to start the meter and then decided the 250m we drove was worth an extra 10eur on top of the 15eur trip.
So sorry this is more Uber propaganda, but for the ~1000 Uber reciepts I have in my inbox, I've had few and only little problems. And a lot of these are from a city where people do go missing if they get in the wrong taxi.
Do I love Uber? No. They're sometimes shit. Surge pricing, allowing drivers to pick up a trip and then just cancel, 6 minute arrival timers that are actually 10 minutes away, wait fees from the first minute onwards, grumpy covid mask reminder emails even though I'm always wearing a mask, reissuing fees when they adjust the price and holding extra money on my card until it's all cleared.
But touch wood, I've never been in a crash in an Uber, I have in a taxi (single car, solely the drivers fault), even though it's a 20:1 ratio for journeys I've taken.
Edit: 1051 trips according to my inbox
E.g. here in this country drivers got criminal charges, got all their fares confiscated and some ended up in personal bankruptcy. Uber even kept the 20% commission and the leaked documents say they knew they were operating fucking illegally.
Just because SF needed a new taxis system doesn’t mean they had to inflict it on the rest of the world.
You want to get to the airport for 5AM tomorrow morning? Good luck getting an Uber, they won’t let you book ahead and if you want to hail at the time they will cancel on you 4 times.
I’ve never had this issue with a taxi company and have got a pre booked taxi to time critical things a lot of times in my life.
But yeh, they have an app (weren’t even the first though) so HN loves them.
If it was worse, why were people using it? Maybe people didn’t like, or more likely couldn’t afford, the taxi service you refer to.
> they won’t let you book ahead and if you want to hail at the time they will cancel on you 4 times.
This is exactly what getting a cab was like before Uber in nearly every city in the US. That’s why Uber had no problem disrupting taxis.
Is Lyft any better?
Whereas any incident with Uber is international news.
Makes it harder for me to elevate Uber’s issues as being as egregious as presented. I recognize their flaws, I also recognize the market need which still remains. So sure, make a better one thats more compliant. When I and others point this out we’re not giving Uber a pass. Just assigning a weight to the problems.
Can you give an example? I've never heard of that. They usually lack any power at all.
> nearly every municipality had a taxi service with negative press
Everyone seemed satisfied in my experience. I did see Uber's talking points everywhere on social media - how terrible taxis were. Unforunately, taxis lacked the money to run their own information campaign.
Why not?
MLK (and Im sure others before him) said you have a duty to disobey unjust laws. The law should conform with what is right, not just be followed blindly. If uber can improve outcomes and do no net harm then good luck to them and anyone else in a similar situation.
Propaganda is idealistic. It runs counter to its audience’s real-world experience. To the degree anyone is propagandising, it is those condemning Uber. Uber’s supporters, not of all of it, but certainly of its raison d’être, have practical, real-life experiences to sustain their arguments. The other side, condemning Uber, evokes moral outrage.
Not making a concluding argument for either side. But would hold back on the accusation that one side or the other is serving corporate or populist propaganda.
Where do you think these people work?
TLDR; Their parents are proud of them, let's not fuck that up for them.
Some people wonder, but why? Why protect such scummy company?
Well, it was literally to save lives, as much illegal Uber behaviour is, what they were trying to replace was worse, MUCH worse.
Where I live "Taxi Mafia" was a thing, not just in the usual sense people imagine, like blocking competitors using regulations, but people were murdering others, there were beatings, assassinations, theft, high level government corruption, the Taxi Mafia was evil and destructive as any other "<drugs/guns/slavery> Mafia" you can imagine.
A lot of people claim Uber is evil because they say their workers are contractors and not employees. Well, before Uber if you wanted to be a driver, you had to purchase your own car, open your own company, and then give 50k USD to the local mafia boss, and promise to join combat whenever called. Combat? Yes, combat, gathering up drivers to kill a competitor was a thing, one infamous case for example: out of town driver parked near airport to deliver someone, a client in a hurry got on his cab as the other client was leaving, the local mafia didn't like this happened, so they surrounded the car and invited the driver for a "walk", took him under a nearby bridge, and they all kicked him until he was a mangled mess, and then they kicked him some more to make sure he was dead.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/uber-portland-greyba...
Fuck the taxi unions and especially the PPB for so many reasons.
In Las Vegas, where the corruption is much, much deeper, police, at behest of the taxi union, were just driving around and towing any car with an Uber or Lyft sticker. When the ride sharing companies finally broke through, they were still forced to only pick up at the farthest point in the parking lot of their airport, and at the back end of any casino, which could mean 10-15 minutes of walking in the 100F weather to get to the rideshare pickup spot. Vegas is the only place in the US where I'll still take a taxi, which I hate, but ride share there is so horrible that there isn't really much of an option.
I also got robbed in various ways about 50% of the time when taking a taxi in Miami, with taxi drivers driving circles, or threatening to drive off with my luggage if I didn't leave a tip that was several times the actual fare of the ride, etc. People who complain about ride sharing companies are obviously people who have had the privilege of never needing to ride in a taxi. Maybe they're okay in some places, but they've been terrible pretty much everywhere I've been. The reciprocal rating systems that ride share apps use is a godsend.
What speeder is describing is not even close to true in any US city.
And yes, there were about 3 years of very public beatings and assassinations from the taxi mafia on my city before they finally went bankrupt and disappeared. And now, suddenly the taxi service has a similar quality to Uber.
What is stopping them murdering Uber drivers? Your story seems a caricature and makes little sense. "Uber saved my country from assassins"
Which country it was? Wich political party?
https://g1.globo.com/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2010/07/imagens-...
The police officer quote mentions a series of similar attacks. There used to be a video of the act, but probably link rotted.
With Uber you don't pay the driver directly. The price is set by a third party and so is the recommended route. Tricky to swindle the rate, route or tips. In areas where drivers have to be licensed, that is enforced so passenger and driver identity has some verification
And even this I highly doubt anything will come out of it.
Oil and gas companies have been blatantly breaking laws for decades.
Volkswagen, along with a majority of car manufacturers have been cheating emissions testing for ages.
Big banks literally rigged LIBOR through intentionally lying about numbers and laughing and not a single executive is in jail.
IIRC, Volkswagen were fined several billion, and a number of senior executives were charged.
This is not true and the devil is in the details. It's illegal to transfer "personal data" of EU residents. The definition of personal data under the GDPR is what US companies would consider PII or personally identifiable information and not all companies collect PII. In fact, I would argue most companies go out of there way to not store PII.
No expert but in New Relic you can select in which data center your data should be. In fact many websites of US newspapers are not accessible from the EU. Just recently I had to order a gadget through reship.com because I couldn't buy it directly...
But this isn't about Uber, this is about power and corporate personhood.
That is what people will reflexively say to any analysis that discusses the role of the profit motive and wall street earnings in leading to these outcomes.
The fact that systematic actions like this to amass advantages at expense of the public happen with regularity at Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, General Motors and many other for-profit enterprises, means there may be some room to improve the economic paradigm in which these things are built. And in fact, we have just such a paradigm, and the products of it (Wikipedia, Linux, etc.) are of a completely different character. They don’t have an investor class at all, that needs to recoup their investment by extracting rents forever.
The alternative to for-profit venture funded companies owned by Wall St doesn’t have to be communism or socialism. It can be a gift economy such Science, Creative Commons, or Open Source Software and decentralized permissionless networks based around protocols like HTTP.
For example, Uber can be replaced with an open source, decentralized marketplace that doesn’t take 50% of all drivers’ revenue, but has a free market and ratings / reviews operated by the community.
But if a project is funded by venture CAPITALISTS, subsidized by money-losing unit economics through multiple rounds, and then dumped on the public in a Wall St IPO, and subsequently owned by pension funds and other pools of capital, then yes that is a quintessential example of Capitalism. And the result is that there is an investor class that will always tell Uber’s board to maintain centralized control and extract rents from the public, squeeze drivers, as well as try to hack the society around them (as in this article: secretly trick, get around the police, lobby state officials) whereas an open source decentralized system wouldn’t do any of that.
The dream of cryptocurrency was that the developers would sell the tokens to the public and make money on the primary sale, but after that, the network would belong to the public. Even any royalties that could accrue (such as on every transfer of the token) would be above-board and disclosed once, so everyone knows the deal. Sadly, rather than focusing on a “peer to peer cash system” as Satoshi’s whitepaper said, the entire space switched around 2013 to “store of value”, HODL and speculative investment. It’s actually a cop-out that happened because blockchains can’t scale well.
Bitcoin was the granddaddy and it solved the double-spend problem, but in a very brute-force way, by gathering all transactions in the world in one place every 10 mins to search for a double-spend. It’s actually even worse than that, because every transaction has to be gossipped to every miner, and all mined transactions have to be stored forever in an ever-growing history. The tech is a straightjacket but the vision is good. We do need smart contracts to replace privately-owned middlemen, but we need the smart contracts to run on a better DLT than Blockchain. There have been tons of innovation since 2008 but Bitcoin maximalists and Web2 maximalists both deride all of it, so progress depends on open-minded people who look past the grift of utility-less coins long enough to build something useful
Sure! I volunteer you to build it for me.
Smart contracts are a horrible invention that don't do anything new. The equivalent in a normal SQL database (the original DLT) is just running a transaction; every SQL database under the sun has supported this for ages.
You’re jumbling up a lot of things here. Fixing the economic paradigm does not lead straight to crypto. Maybe it’s part of the solution in some areas, but it doesn't prevent capitalism or encourage open source bootstrapped enterprises.
The closest thing IMO to a swing at fixing the economic paradigm would be something like requiring all companies to be nonprofits once they go public or something…
Getting a taxi license costs an exorbitant amount of money and it's done through all kinds of dodgy deals.
There's 1-2 companies that have a monopoly on the whole industry.
There's weird rules about which types of taxis can "serve" the airport, akin to what mobsters are responsible for collecting trash in what areas.
You'll often get "sorry the payment terminal is out of order, cash only" BS.
A study a few years ago showed the main taxi company, according to their tax documents, earned a ridiculously low amount of money per day (= obvious dodging of taxes).
They clearly refused to innovate for years. When you called their number you'd get some unintelligible voice on the other end that would give you about 10 sec to state your details before they'd clearly run out of patience.
You could only request pickups at specific addresses that would then be connected to your phone number / profile. So "pick me up on this street corner" was impossible.
The last time we called one for a ride to the airport they didn't show up at the agreed time so we got an Uber. Taxi company called us many times screaming insults down the phone, followed by an offensive email with an invitation to pay and threats of small claims courts.
In light of all that, I have zero problems with someone else moving in fast to break things.
Most recent experience, we were in the docks, the docks are restricted access for terrorism prevention, on entry you need a specific purpose. Our purpose was to inspect a possible party venue (an actual steamship, it's awesome, for a few grand we could have them steam it out into the sea while we celebrated - but, on viewing it seemed like if weather was bad on the day it'd suck as a venue because there's only very limited indoor capacity). So after we've looked around we need to get back out of the docks. Friend summons an Uber. No problem initially, "This is why I use Uber" she says. Her ride gets to the edge of the docks and cancels, presumably because the driver sees scary warning saying "Restricted Area. State your business at checkpoint" and hit cancel because he has managed to live in a port city for years without knowing about this. She summons another one. It too gets to the edge of the docks and then cancels. "Uber says if this keeps happening they're forbidden from cancelling" she claims. Sure enough now her requests are just denied automatically.
So once she gives up I called a regular taxi. That driver couldn't find us, because apparently a massive sign with the name of the ship is too hard to notice ("I had no idea that was here"), but once we walked a few minutes to somewhere this driver could recognise we were driven out of the docks to go for cocktails with another friend.
The Uber drivers probably thought the pickup location was a mistake- they get there and say “I can’t pickup here, this is a wrong location” and cancel the job.
So three drivers can’t find you, including a taxi, and this is Ubers fault somehow, not yours for making unreasonable demands of drivers. I suppose it was Ubers fault that the cab couldn’t find you either? It amazes me how people rationalize blaming others in situations like this.
In Copenhagen Uber made a splash until they decided they didn't get all they wanted when the taxi legislation was liberalised and they left. My reading of it is that they didn't want to give other European countries ideas and they were losing money anyways, so it wasn't really worth it to subject themselves to the same kind of regulation that exists in London or New York.
And what did we get instead? 5-10 different taxi apps offering taxis at much the same speed it takes to get an Uber, but regulated locally and paying taxes. It's literally a question of installing a different (or multiple different) app and then the flow is the same.
The kicker: Uber came to Denmark late enough that the taxi companies already had apps (or at least some of them which was then the ones I used). Ultimately it was just a big fight over nothing and Uber left with red numbers and a bad image.
>> "Kalanick’s spokesperson said Uber’s expansion initiatives were “led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full approval of Uber’s robust legal, policy and compliance groups”."
... I don't think that messages what Kalanick’s spokesperson thinks it messages.
Talk about non-sequiturs.
The only billions Uber has is in losses:
2022:
Uber lost $6 billion to start the year, but reports a rebound in ride-hailing and no issues with driver supply https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-posts-nearly-6-billio...
2021:
Uber is still losing a lot of money https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-still-losing-a-lot-of-m...
12 Years After It Was Founded, Uber Says It Might Finally Make a Profit https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/09/21/12-years-after-it-...
2020:
Uber lost $8.5 billion in 2019, but it thinks it can get profitable by the end of 2020 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21126965/uber-q4-earnings-...
2019:
Uber lost over $5 billion in one quarter, but don’t worry, it gets worse https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20793793/uber-5-billion-qu...
> In the weeks leading up to [his] resignation, Kalanick sold off approximately 90% of his shares in Uber, for a profit of about $2.5 billion.
Uber's CEO is still laughing their way to the bank.
F...ing up our economy is profitable.
I was living in Valancia Spain, the first day I got there I remember walking down what turned out to be one of the main streets in the city to find it being blocked by hundreds of taxis in a peaceful protest. Ok fine, I didn’t know why and it was all cosure with the police.
Then a few months later my ability to use a good quality app with verifiable trust (extremely important in some parts of the world) and recourse to the operator was suddenly taken away.
I had to order taxis using one of the crap taxi middlemen apps which offer little to no support for when things go a wrong and I was back to riding in cars where the driver was actively trying to rip you off.
Oh you’ve lived here 10 years but you need to look on the map of where one of the main streets is? Ok great, make sure the meeter is started before you do that.
Oh it’s after 8pm so that short 4.50€ journey is automatically a minimum 6€ Ok great enjoy.
25€ to the airport? I’m sure this used to be 14…
Taxis suck, lack accountability and will do anything it takes to maintain their market share while providing a horrible scammy service.
Uber became popular because it leveraged VC and cheap credit to subsidized rides, it's becoming much less popular as we speak since ride fares are going up fast and it now needs to actually make money.
> Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from “extreme right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were “spoiling for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.”
However, this is how all "unicorn" startups operate. Break the law until they get caught and pay a small fine. Uber will get away with this and people will continue to use Uber.
No it absolutely isn't.
Uber is uniquely corrupt. Their toxic tech-bro culture has been baked in from the start.
Businesses want to pretend they are people with rights, then they need to be punished. Send the whole C-suite and Board to fucking prison.
Uber is super corrupt but hardly unique.
JNCO jeans and Cabbage Patch Kids were ubiquitous too at one point. Doesn’t mean that they represented anything more unsustainable fads.
Why would Biden, Macron bother with this company, and not others?
Where is the 'money flow' happening here? Is someone being bribed? Was Uber funnelling money to a related cause?
I can understand ministers wanting to please a big up and coming company, sure, that's their job in some way, but not like this.
How does Uber have the ability to get the VP to 'change their speech'.
What's going on? That's not in the article.
Yes I agree, Biden is also very tough on corruption[1], historically so in fact.
[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
The conduct described in the article is basically reckless win-at-any-cost nonsense that reflects Uber's very survival was forbidden by law. The politicians who prevented subordinates from enforcing the law should be called out one-by-one and made to explain themselves. The lesson from the parent comment is not the correct lesson.
The hate of Uber on this forum is ridiculous, some people are just so out of touch of the l reality of modern companies, society and business.
We're talking about laws from foreign countries too here, some of which were clearly aimed at preventing civil servants from becoming corrupt.
> Uber committed civil disobedience (in the American tradition)
Comitting "civil disobedience" against a foreign country to force them to open to business? Sure, it may be a tradition if you refer to Matthew Perry or William Walker.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...
I'd never rely on that for something important like an airport trip.
Mine include:
Cabbie suggesting we pick up girl from bus stop on the way to club. we did and yes we had to pay the extra for his amusement.
Cabbie runs out of fuel. Gets help, gets to petrol station, wants to charge us extra for the time!
Ordering 2 taxis just in case. Anger ensues.
Cabbie looking on the floor for his phone while driving. Seemed stoned.
Doing a few hundred miles in a random cab because the whole train system was screwed up.
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly90aGVkb2xsb3AubGl...
https://www.damninteresting.com/appendices/dollop-exhibits/n...
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/07/15/how-a-comedy-podc...
everyone was so busy being a fanboy it drove me a bit mad... especially operating without licenses and looking as if nobody had done the basic due diligence on what was needed to operate at all.
honestly the entire "genius" of the idea itself is "ignore the law and do whatever"
OT: What happened to the NY Times? They seem to have stopped doing ground-breaking investigations of the powerful, including government. Instead, we get investigations of trends and porn sites. What are they doing? It would be an incredile resource to lose. Seriously, please share the last investigation they did that fits that description?
Only US media listed is WP. I guess this is because the file is about international (non-US) behavior of Uber and ICIJ might have asked for help in media in each country.
Uber's behavior in the US is well covered by this very popular book [1] and it is authored by an NYT reporter, based on his own reporting on NYT.
I won't argue about NYT's general trends, but it's not very fair to complain NYT not to cover Uber.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Super-Pumped-Battle-Mike-Isaac/dp/039...
They can't be very smart, Joe Biden is the least corrupt president ever and has committed to total transparency: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-briefing-idUSKB...
Plus, the laws they broke are ones that almost no-one except taxi companies (and perhaps city tax officials) care about.
However, it's curious that there's no mention of Uber's largest backer, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which put an unprecedented $3.5 billion into Uber (initially, that may not be all). All the article mentions is this:
> "From Moscow to Johannesburg, bankrolled with unprecedented venture capital funding, Uber heavily subsidised journeys, seducing drivers and passengers on to the app with incentives and pricing models that would not be sustainable."
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/how-much-of-uber-does-sa...
Uber's relationship with Saudi Arabia certainly deserves some mention:
> "In the interview with the digital news platform, Khosrowshahi said the 2019 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi shows that "the (Saudi) government said they made a mistake. It's a serious mistake, but we've made serious mistakes, too right?""
I’m skeptical of a lot of technology and generally would prefer that status quo for a lot of things but this feels like a storm in a teacup for what is a pretty decent product disrupting an industry that deserved disruption, I’m almost hope Uber provides an example of how this can be done for other industries.
(Except that I agree neither with corporate personhood, nor the death penalty.)
- Enron. We all know what happened there.
- Facebook. Industrial-scale slimy.
- Exxon. Poor Alaska.
- BP. OMG poor Gulf Coast.
- McKinsey. Here’s how to sell more Fentanyl.
- Experian. Let’s lie about that giant data leak.
- AIG, Bond rating agencies, Lehman etc. We’re printing money from total crap paper, and we know it, but SHHH the OMG the $$$.
- J&J. Talc powder is very bad and we knew it for a long time. - Purdue Pharma. Evil opioid empire.
- Bayer. Roundup poison (someone explain why this is still legal to sell anywhere for any purpose).
And the list goes on forever! So sad and utterly morally bankrupt.
Corporate boards are part of the problem. In so many case are they not doing their oversight job because they are on the take or utterly incompetent or maybe both.
</rant> Sorry, this just makes me crazy.
It’s above the fold, on BBC.
I think UberPool was going to be Uber's killer feature. It made taking Uber's more regularly affordable for different groups of people, but COVID sadly ruined it.
I’d still rather ride share than use a taxi, and use door dash over Uber (lest we forget Uber’s previous lawsuits), but all of the choices in the market are kind of grim.
There's a long way from Steve Jobs' Apple, or Netscape, or many others (including FOSS!), who made exciting ground-breaking innovations, to Uber.
That doesn’t make every company the same. Goldman Sachs literally killed people for profit. Defense companies made up for their revenue loss from the end of the Afghanistan war by earning almost that same amount in military aid to Ukraine (seriously, our ~$50B in both cases).
Those aren’t tech companies FWIW. Even there there’sa error spectrum. AirBnB is cancer, for example.
But at last Uber killed the taxi industry, which was almost universally awful, corrupt and horrible to use. Seriously, good riddance.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Uber, Lyft, etc have to operate as commercial enterprises rather than VC money incinerators. This business isn’t going away.
[1]https://medium.com/@jsemrau/uber-and-lift-set-a-very-dangero...
...
People unconcerned with this stuff are probably the same folks who think Klaus Schwab is a benign leader of the WEF which is just some benign global humanitarian organization, and that when Schwaab talks about penetrating government cabinets, and people owning nothing by 2030 and liking it, it's just a conspiracy.
This is one of the major problems with the world - tech overlords and globalists have everyone brainwashed into thinking this dystopian shit is normal, and that we should accept it, or that it's necessary to build a "sustainable" future - whatever that means. Sounds to me like the rich and powerful will do whatever they can to become more rich and powerful, damn the costs. Their purported ends justify their means, no matter how violent, destructive, unethical or immoral.
Edit: I just thought more about this. This article literally painted a scene at one point where the effing POTUS, supposedly the most powerful person in the world, was being spoken to like a child by the CEO of a corporation, and then changed policy on the spot after being bullied around at a secretive conference that I won't even get into the sketchiness of. If this isn't concerning, I don't know what is.
Admittedly, Guardian is the only news site I check ever (last 5 or so years anyway), and even I am impressed that they went with a straight arrow. Good job.
// Weird seeing downvotes for my reply without any comments/input. Just goes to show - ignorance is bliss.
