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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.
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.
from the /. summary:
from Wikipedia:
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
. . . especially if you were talking Finnish to them . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Couldn't the police just use the app?
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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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.
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?
You mean, how do we fix it? There's no point in even trying until more of the population becomes aware that this is what is actually happening, and that they have a better chance to win the lottery than to break into the handjob circle of generationally rich bastards through hard work. And there's no point in explaining that as long as they think they're likely to win the lottery.
Seriously, though, convincing people that the two-party system is effectively a one-party system would be a big step in the right direction. You can't get change by doing the same shit you've been doing. Problem is, we can't even agree on that here. Even with people looking right at the campaign contribution records they still yelp about false equivalence. Sure, in general, Reps and Dems are different, that just doesn't matter. The money is applied in the way that causes the expected results — expansion of corporate power, and of media influence.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"