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Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi Will Be Offered the Job as Uber's New CEO (recode.net)
Kara Swisher, reporting for Recode: The board of Uber has voted and wants Expedia Dara Khosrowshahi to be its next CEO. But here is a shocking twist for those who have had to endure this awful, messy and convoluted process: He has not been officially offered the job as of 15 minutes ago, said sources. Still, most expect him to take it and he appears to be the one person dueling factions of the board can agree on. Unknown until now, Khosrowshahi was the third candidate -- after Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman and former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt. Khosrowshahi is considered the "truce" choice for the board, which has been riven by ugly infighting between ousted CEO Travis Kalanick and one of its major investors, Benchmark. Benchmark had backed Whitman, while Kalanick had backed Immelt. Sources said that going into this morning, after Immelt withdrew his name from contention when it was clear he would not win the job, Whitman had the upper hand in the race for the job. But she also wanted a number of things -- including less involvement by ousted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and more board control -- that became too problematic for the directors, said sources.
Oh, please, let it go to Meg Whitman! Let Meg Whitman demonstrate how female power can transform an evil, hated corporate empire into a loving, kind, progressive transportation company! Please! Let her do for Uber what she has done to, I mean for, HP!
Profitability is passe.
The problem with profitability is what to do with the profits? The choices are stockpiling like many Fortune 500 companies are doing or investing in ever riskier assets to find the highest ROI.
Whether they have such issues or not is none of our business. Do they deliver good service at a good price is what should concern us.
You're certainly welcome to make that your only basis for evaluation. In terms of my day to day transactions, I agree with you. But there are larger issues, and many people do choose to care about them.
I understand the argument that a company that does not discriminate will be more economically effective than one that does, and that over time the former will win and the latter will lose. I even believe it's correct. But we have ample evidence that "over time" doesn't mean a few years, but rather means at least a few generations.
so long as nobody is forced to work there. And no one is — not in this country, not since early 1860-ies
You should read Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name. Black slavery was clearly not effectively abolished until the 1940s, not the 1860s. It was reduced, clearly, and the situation has continued to improve, but any evenhanded analysis of the history of blacks in the US serves to support my point that market forces alone are insufficient to fix the inequalities we'd like them to address on any time scale faster than centuries. And market forces were not enough in that case, either, else we'd never have needed the Civil Rights Act and related legislation.
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And market forces were not enough in that case, either, else we'd never have needed the Civil Rights Act and related legislation.
The Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with market forces and everything to do with striking down Jim Crow era state government laws that made it impossible for market forces to exist. When you had state-mandated segregation, how the hell can a market function? If the law says it was illegal to allow white and black people to ride in the same train car (this is the famous Plessy v. Ferguson case) then how can the market offer an integrated solution?
You can't blame the free market for failing to do something when the government has made it illegal for the market to even try. Nor do I think its entirely fair to assume everything will be fixed as quickly as you would like it and which I don't think government policy can do any better than the market. Former slaves and their children would have started with next to nothing, especially considering that in many states it was illegal to teach them to read. It may well just take generations to build up the human capital necessary to see blacks on the same footing as whites. That's just the reality of the situation, and it's quite clear that state governments spent a good deal of time making it far more difficult for black people to succeed. You can't fault the market for that.
So it's ok for them to discriminate as an employer, but not for me to discriminate as a consumer?
Hypocrisy is just, super trendy lately.
The Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with market forces and everything to do with striking down Jim Crow era state government laws that made it impossible for market forces to exist.
True, but an analysis assuming a purely rational and efficient market would indicate that separate and equal options would have arisen. Sure, trains would have to have separate cars for different races, but it was societal attitudes, not economics, that caused those cars to be so different. Note that the argument that the difference arose from differences in ability to pay doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
The reality in the Jim Crow south was that business owners were expected not only to segregate (as required by law), but also to offer lesser services to blacks. Offering the same level of service would have been legal, but provoked criticism, ostracism and a loss of white business. The market in that case actually selected against equality, because a significant (and relatively wealthy) segment of the customer base actively boycotted businesses that attempted to provide it. Other extra-legal elements of the Jim Crow system, such as restricted access to banks, and the constant sub-rosa threat of judicial or non-judicial violence against uppity blacks ensured that black business ownership was suppressed.
Nor do I think its entirely fair to assume everything will be fixed as quickly as you would like it and which I don't think government policy can do any better than the market.
Businesses are run by people, and the range of options that those people consider when deciding how to participate in the market are determined by the societal context. I agree that market forces are a powerful mechanism for changing society, and that government really isn't, but what government can do is exactly what it did in the case of the Civil Rights Act... make it illegal to offer differentiated services based on old distinctions that we wish to eliminate. That prevented social pressure from being able to make businesses offer lesser services to blacks.
It may well just take generations to build up the human capital necessary to see blacks on the same footing as whites.
That argument would hold more water if it weren't for the fact that other immigrants, arriving with similar low levels of education and other forms of human capital, climb much faster. I don't completely dismiss the notion that there are elements of black culture in America that are anti-progress, indeed I think it's easy to point out that the bone-deep skepticism of the establishment which prevails in much of black culture (and which is entirely understandable given the history of incredibly-pervasive hypocrisy in that system that was so blatant in the era between reconstruction and the end of Jim Crow, and is still not wholly eliminated) is extremely negative. But I don't think that fully explains the situation today, either, mainly because new black immigrants who arrive without the same cultural baggage, also see retarded progress up the social ladder.
That's just the reality of the situation, and it's quite clear that state governments spent a good deal of time making it far more difficult for black people to succeed.
And there's a good argument that many federal programs intended to help them succeed are so wrongheaded that they do exactly the reverse as well.
You can't fault the market for that.
I don't fault the market for any of it. The free market is a powerful optimizer that seeks the outcome that customers -- especially the customers with the most money -- want. But when what the monied customers want is social inequality, the market can't fix that. Not by itself.
Note that that isn't the Uber situation. In the Uber situation, most of the money -- investors and customers -- see the sexism and bro culture as a negative. Were the board to take a -- wh
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