Slashdot Mirror
California Sues Uber Over Practices
mpicpp writes with news that California is the latest government to file a lawsuit against Uber. "California prosecutors on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against Uber over the ridesharing company's background checks and other allegations, adding to the popular startup's worldwide legal woes. San Francisco County District Attorney George Gascon, meanwhile, said Uber competitor Lyft agreed to pay $500,000 and change some of its business practices to settle its own lawsuit. Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey partnered with Gascon in a probe of the nascent ridesharing industry. A third company — Sidecar — is still under investigation and could face a lawsuit of its own if it can't reach an agreement with prosecutors. Uber faces similar legal issues elsewhere as it tries to expand in cities, states and countries around the world. The companies have popular smartphone apps that allow passengers to order rides in privately driven cars instead of taxis."
Consumers are terrible at protecting themselves. "Quality Products / Services" takes third place in terms of things that get a business to the top, after "Excellent PR Control / Advertising" and "Ruthless Business Practices". If you want to see what happens when you reduce consumer protections and monitoring, look to the third world where companies put melamine in their food to artificially inflate the protein count and fake baby formula with little to no nutritional value gets passed off as legit.
"We consider that six courts and an asylum claim are a rather odd way of returning to Sweden within a month."
Passengers don't want to get robbed and raped by their drivers. They don't want drivers who are drunk. They don't want to be injured by uninsured drivers. The Uber free market isn't very good at eliminating those risks.
Neither is your oh-so-precious government regulations. There are plenty of stories of people getting assaulted or raped by a 'legit' taxi driver.
The free market doesn't exist. It doesn't solve problems. It doesn't achieve optimal outcomes.
It's a fucking abstraction describing long-term outcomes under a perfect hypothetical model based on crap assumptions, not some divine entity.
Blasphemy! Apostacy!
One wonders at the free marketeer's assumptions that government is always corrupt, and that private industry is always honest, and above reproach.
I liken the situation to vaccines, where some people wonder why a vaccine is needed, because it seems no one gets that disease any more.
It really wasn't teh eevlul cguvmint'z desire to hamstring the people's rights that got these regs started, it was things like plaster of paris in bread, bogus scale systems that give you 11 ounces of meat when you were paying for a pound, the Cuyahoga river catching on fire, and much more.
This is not to say that the selfsame impeccably honest free marketeers won't try to take advantage of those evul regulaytoons when it suits their purposes, wihness the conservative lynchpin states like Texas trying to keep Tesla sales out of their domains. Regulations are bad except when they aren't?
But that's a side issue, more to my point of the guvmint not being the sole home of corruption.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
What planet are you on? Or are you too young to remember how consumers got screwed before consumer protection laws. Yeah feel free to stop using the service after you get killed because your Uber driver was drunk. And it just isn't the passenger there are also other drivers who may be killed or maimed by an unqualified Uber driver. It's not just all about you. And try suing if you get hosed. You will find punishing Uber nigh impossible.
People, and free-market Libertarians in particular, have this idea that if there is a problem between two parties, one can just sue the other and it'll get worked out. They don't seem to realize that a lawsuit is a huge pain in the ass for everyone involved (except the lawyers), and is also very expensive. Lawsuits are out of reach for most people simply because of the cost. It's just not realistic.
For more insight, I would point you to Fletcher Reede in "Liar Liar", when his car is damaged by a tow company:
"You know what I'm going to do about this? Nothing! Because if I take it to small claims court, it will just drain 8 hours out of my life and you probably won't show up and even if I got the judgment you'd just stiff me anyway; so what I am going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!"
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I hope we eventually agree on something like a private-commercial drivers license and car registration. That would make all this Uber stuff much easier to swallow.
Basically, just as there are federal rules for private liability car insurance, the government should define a new class of insurance coverage for drivers who do commercial ride sharing. Then let actual insurers figure out what to charge, and compete for customers. Maybe billing for some plans could be done by how active you are, instead of "all you can eat", since activity is so easy to track. In order to qualify for the insurance, your car also needs to pass a more stringent (and frequent) inspection than the regular thing we all have to do. Again government guidelines for what this should entail are necessary.
The basic idea is this: government defines sensible standards, the private sector competes to satisfy standards. In most insurance settings, this is how it works. I think it's a no-brainer that the system should be extended to paid ridesharing, which clearly requires a different licensing and insurance from the kind that I have now.