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Finnish Police: If You See Uber Car, Call 911
emakinen writes: The police in Helsinki, Finland has announced in a tweet that if you see someone driving Uber car, you should call 911 (or actually, 112 in Finland). In an article in the local newspaper they have explained that there is an ongoing investigation to find out whether or not Uber is legal in Finland and they want to interrogate Uber drivers. Normally you should have a permit to drive a taxi in Finland.
I'm glad Finland has no other problems for the police to worry about.
Maybe, licensing taxies was a good idea at some point. There is very little competition among them, because their usage is sporadic — you need it, you raise a hand to hail one and take the first available without any way of figuring out the driver's and his company's reputation.
But Uber and Lyft and others have changed that. You can choose between these companies and you know the driver's reputation — and bad ones don't survive there long. A piece of government bureaucracy found itself irrelevant.
That is a very hard thing to accept and acknowledge even for honest men and women. For the corrupt ones — and, face it, government jobs tend to attract a higher share of such — it is something to fight tooth-and-nail. With laws, regulations, and PR-campaigns... Private victims of the old system may also be used as foot-soldiers against the new. It will not be pretty, but technology is destiny. We'll win, but not easily.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
'call 911' cause our amrican readers are too retarded to understand anything else
Here they come...
I'm glad they do that because Uber is an illegally operating taxi company.
And yes, I am 100% pro EU.
How about booking one, then questioning the driver?
I'm a little confused too, aren't Uber drivers using their own cars? Is there something that is supposed to distinguish the car from any other car?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I spotted one, dialed 911, and a very confusing conversation occurred between myself and the Dallas Police Department.
Don't think you should be interrogating people... before you decide if it's illegal or not (presumably under existing laws).
from the /. summary:
from Wikipedia:
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Couldn't the police just use the app?
No, he's from America, where it's "shoot first, questions later"
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
It seems that the taxis and police form a quite close knit relationship. Most importantly the "official" taxis serve as extra eyes and ears for the police. Unsurprisingly the police have the taxi union's back in this kind of a situation and resort to these kinds of intimidation tactics.
Obviously they should also call when seeing taxis, since any reasonable study will need baseline data.
That's like saying "the US did this" when it was actually just Wyoming.
>Normally you should have a permit to drive a taxi in Finland.
So does this mean carpooling is a crime?
The real headline here is that Finland has police.
You are welcome on my lawn.
nice narrative you've got there. It'd be a real shame if some reality got dropped on it...
This isn't about competition. It's about removing the protections employees have been afforded and treating folks who are very plainly not contractors as contractors. In most countries the gov't imposed costs on employment to make sure employees (who were largely powerless) weren't abused. It's sorta like how you can never sell yourself into slavery in fairly because if you're making that kind of deal you're already as such a huge disadvantage that the deal could never be 'fair'.
I don't know about Finland but in America we've based our entire quality of life on this system. There's no safety net here, not even a token one. These phoney "contractor" jobs eliminate the last real protections workers here had. It's also not sustainable. The $15/hr you'll max out at with Uber (after accounting for gas & routine maintenance) won't buy you a new car at 200k when the old one falls apart and you can't get parts (and before you say: I can get parts for a 20 year old car! Try actually _using_ those parts. they're junk, and you'll break down constantly. How long will you last as a driver with 2-3 breakdowns a year?).
Uber isn't the sharing economy, it's the desperation economy.
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Wait, do I actually have to be in Finland?
Never mind.
to runaway power that mega corps and the 1% have? Gov't is a tool, like fire or a gun. It's a dangerous tool, but there are lots of dangerous tools. If you don't use them someone else will (to your detriment).
The 1% have shown they have no fear of large, central governments. They'll use their wealth and power to make one that suits their needs at your expense. So I ask you, what are you going to do about it? I really am asking. I've never once heard a convincing response, or even something that didn't sound like it came out of that old movie "Red Dawn".
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Biscuits and mum I get, but what is your alternative "polite" term for tits?
If they want to talk to Uber drivers, create an account and request a ride. Takes a few minutes at most...
Breasts?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And they still are.
You might want to go and actually live in a place where licenses on taxis isn't enforced. I can suggest a few (Phuket, Thailand is a good one). Taxi gangs are so powerful there, they've stopped any attempt at getting public transport in many towns and villages, in many cases by beating up the drivers whenever a Baht Bus service is started. They've divvied up turf and will happily fight with each other over it, every Tuk Tuk driver is armed for just this very reason and they ensure profitability by refusing to turn on the engine for less than 300 Baht (which is the minimum wage in Phuket).
This is in stark contrast to well regulated Bangkok. Taxi's are cheap and plentiful, less than 400 Baht from the city centre to the airport and if that's too rich for your blood, the train now goes to the airport as well.
Unregulated taxi environments always lead to violence and a poorer experience for the passenger. Most western nations learned this generations ago when jitneys and illegal cab operations were literally run by organised criminals, in many developing nations where governments are too inept, corrupt or both to control the taxi drivers, this situation continues. Honestly, if you think the taxi laws around your area are too restrictive then work to change them rather than eliminate them because unregulated taxi environments are worse than the strictest regulations.
Also, calling your opponents "statists" only demonstrate that your point is extremely weak and that you've haven't even got the originality to use a semi-original insult... or even one that has a proper meaning.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I don't think the transportation industry should be completely unregulated, with no requirements on safety, insurance, identity, training and qualifications, etc. And those regulations need to apply equally for all.
Isn't Finland one of those countries where you have to have years of training before they let you have a license anyway? And where vehicles get regular inspections? And where they have national health care, so there's no worry about whether the driver has enough insurance to cover your hospital bills? I'd like to see all of those things everywhere, but it seems like any place which has all of them can probably sustain random people acting as taxis.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes.
Also taxis are considered a part of public infrastructure, and are often given tasks like ferrying small children to schools. You occasionally get a huge scandal when someone gets through the safety nets and gets reported/caught for being not fully sober when driving kids to school.
Uber's model is not going to work. First people to get on barricades are going to be mothers afraid for their children.At which point "uber is freedom" folks are going to either shut up or get mass destroyed on all public forums. If there's one group you never want to mess with, it's mothers worried about their children's safety.
- An app-and-server cab flagging service
- A batallion of unlicensed (and licensed) taxicab drivers that fall somewhere in between employees and and independent drivers.
The flagging service is nothing special; any company can set one up in any city. There's also nothing specifically "Ueber" about that, and I expect it to get stiff competition.
Then there is a horde of drivers, some unlicensed some licensed taxicab drivers, whom Ueber contracts to conduct rides. The worrisome part is that it's unclear whether they're qualified, insured, fit, etc. and whether they're employees or not. Fact of the matter is that Ueber both dodges the responsibilities that come with having employees and gouges drivers more for their flagging service than they'd be if they were truly independent.
It's that part of Ueber that's predatory, legally questionable and which is therefore under attack.
Then there's quality control, insurance, and liability. Which is where Ueber falls short and practices unfair competition with respect to other taxicab drivers.
We have government agencies that regulate taxicabs, make sure they uniformly adhere to certain minimum standards and won't simply abduct and rob their passengers. Without first having to look up a driver's "reviews".
There's nothing at all "irrelevant" about a government agency that does that, and it's worth having.
If Ueber wants to be a taxicab company, fine, but it will have to play by the same rules as everybody else: licensed drivers only. The fact that it's burning a load of venture capital to bend the rules is no reason to support them.
The solution to one company flaunting the law is not to let another company do so. It's to enforce the bloody law. Your right, Taxi cab drivers are being illegally abused. The companies doing so should have their medals revoked and auctioned off to companies who follow the law. They should also be heavily fined with a cost equal to at least twice the profit from the illegal activity.
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If you jump in an uber, can you hump in an uber