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Trump-Style Tactics Finally Stopped Working For Uber (buzzfeed.com)
BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith describes a three-year-old meeting that Uber held -- which saw several influencers including actor Ed Norton among attendees -- as the beginning of the ride-hailing company's long slow meltdown. Later today, the company is expected to announce that its CEO Travis Kalanick would be temporarily stepping away, and his closest lieutenant is all set to hand his resignation. On Sunday, the company held a board meeting, which according to several journalists, lasted for nearly seven hours. The meeting capped a difficult stretch for the ride-hailing company, which is trying to weather an investigation into its workplace culture, a lawsuit by Google parent Alphabet over the alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets, a federal probe into its business practices, and the recent departures of top executives. Back to Ben: At the dinner (which took place three years ago), Emil Michael, the right hand of CEO Travis Kalanick, heatedly complained to me about the press. The company, he told me, could hire a team of opposition researchers to fight fire with fire and attack the media -- specifically to smear a female journalist who has criticized the company. I suggested to him that this plan wouldn't really work because the story would immediately become a story about Uber behaving like maniacs. "Nobody would know it was us," Michael responded. "But you just told me!," I replied. [...] Instead of making any meaningful changes, Uber simply pressed on for years. It found both continued growth and accumulating scandals. Many of its crises, like those remarks to me, were tinged with misogyny, whether sexual harassment of its engineers or pulling a rape victim's medical files. After one of those engineers, Susan Fowler, stepped forward with a blog post detailing systemic sexual harassment and discrimination -- a post that was followed up by a series of devastating stories by The New York Times, Recode, and others -- the company invited former Attorney General Eric Holder to lead an internal investigation. Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Michael is set to resign, and Reuters reported Kalanick will take a leave of absence ahead of what's expected to be a deeply damning Holder report. (Kalanick is also coping with a family tragedy.) They will leave having built the most valuable private company in the world. But it is a company whose cultural darkness is inseparable from its place as the icon of the tech boom. Uber -- and the boom -- have been defined both by massive new conveniences and by a corporate culture that is aggressive, paranoid, and dismissive of, in particular, complaints from women; a culture of enemies lists and cavalier approaches to the law. Emil Michael told Uber employees Monday that he has left the company.
Anti-Uber article number 101 and seasoned with anti-Trump salt We get it, you're being paid to manipulate the news.
I have mod points. But looks like there is no way to mark the story as flame bait/troll. The UI only lets me mark comments as troll/flame bait. But not the story. May be someone who is more familiar can clue me in how to do this.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I have never used that site, but this video seems quite descriptive of what they are up to.
Disclaimer: anyone interested in disclaimers and/or with understanding limitations should be able to easily adapt one of these samples to this post.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Ok, then I'll trash your HQ to the point where you can't use it for months to come, then have to renovate it again.
You can of course sue me and you will of course win, but you will not be able to recover the loss.
Don't play against someone who doesn't mind losing as long as you lose more.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I didn't even vote for him and I'm sick of the left's raving obsession with him!
I'm just curious why the Democrats are so upset that a lifelong Democrat got elected instead of someone whose career highlight is "kicked off of Watergate prosecution team for extreme dishonesty."
Don't forget, she also slept with Monica's boyfriend. Or claims to have, anyway.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Similar pattern to most IT fads: the fanboys harp on a few key issues and convince suckers and PHB's that those few factors are the bee's knees. Over time they find out the hard way that every factor is important, not just the ones the fanboys highlight and exaggerate.
Just because factors like insurance, lawsuits, cleaning up puke, and mechanical maintenance don't show up in the first Uber paycheck doesn't mean they don't matter in the longer run.
It makes me sound like a fuddy-duddy at work, but I'm usually right because I've seen the same pattern for decades. People are suckers. The inexperienced just don't know how to look at a wide array of factors when evaluating something, and their egos and/or shiny UI objects prevent them from listening to those who can. (On the plus side, reinventing the wheel is great job security, although you start to feel like Sisyphus.)
Uber might survive, but their halcyon days are probably behind them as reality winds its way into their market.
Table-ized A.I.
My uber usage dropped 80% in the last year.
I pay with a few extra minutes of wait time (5-10 instead of 3-8), and a 20% tip.
At weird hours, the wait for a lyft goes up dramatically, and I still use Uber, but I can't be the only person that has reduced their usage of Uber, and I suspect at the very least, that's apparent in Lyft's usage (smaller number to start with, so easier to spot the signal through the noise).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg