Uber Facing Ban In Turkey After Erdogan Backs Taxis (sbs.com.au)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SBS: Uber faces being banned in Turkey after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the ride-hailing app was "finished" on Saturday following an intense lobbying campaign from Istanbul taxi drivers. Erdogan's comments, in a late-night speech Friday in Istanbul, came after the government agreed new rules that are expected to severely complicate Uber's operations in Turkey. Drivers of Istanbul's yellow taxis have over the last months waged an intense campaign to have Uber banned, saying the company is eating into their business without having a proper legal basis for work. "This thing emerged called Uber or Muber or whatever," said Erdogan. "But this issue is now finished. It's over now. Our Prime Minister (Minali Yildirim) made the announcement. We have our system of taxis," he said.

"Yildirim's government last month issue a directive sharply hiking fines and threatened to blacklist companies whose vehicles illegally work as taxis," reports SBS.

Comments

Very interesting

[no-body]

How single individuals get the power to determine the lives of well, millions or billions of people, defining how their individual lives turn.

This ongoing game has not changed for ? 1000's of years.

It needs two parts - the allowing and the demanding side and as always, the allowing number of individuals is by far the much larger number.

Maybe there are some niches where this system has somewhat changed to benefit a larger part of a population. Overall, it is the same and the mechanisms to uphold this imbalance getting more and more refined.

Has it to do something with upbringing, where behavioral patterns are formed and kept or is it genetically imprinted?

If you look from a more distant point, it is just weird. There is some different opinion about a point and then starts this prancing and breast pounding and vassals are sent out to measure up their skills under the risk of getting injured or killed, now from very remote and safe places..

Who benefits? It seems to just create more and more trauma in people where the opposite event, less trauma could lead to more happiness.

Re:Very interesting

[Bongo]

Has it to do something with upbringing, where behavioral patterns are formed and kept or is it genetically imprinted?

I gather it has to do with the size of the group. Fifty thousand years ago, we were organised as tribes, of about a few hundred people. Later, around the time of agriculture, and settling down, the size of the group expanded, and now you needed some way to impose order on disparate tribes. It became the time of Kings, and eventually, empires, like the Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, and so on. That was also the time of the large monotheistic religions, where there was One True Way, One God, one ruler, one empire, and so on. All that coincides with what various philosophers have termed the "mythic-membership" stage of our cultural evolution. That is, you are part of the large group which has a common identity as defined by a set of myths, beliefs, and rules. The whole thing is very hierarchical. In one way or another, the "authority" of the hierarchy is divine, and the myths and laws all serve to make it work, to allow you to become an empire. It also kinda echoes in the way a child grows up and is taught the rules by the parents, and learns to think of themselves as a member of one family, rather than as being an individual who just does whatever their own impulses dictate. So all this became the normal state of the world around 2000 BC or so. And this empire + religion + sacred laws + empire is how the world was organised.

What you are talking about now, as in, why do free thinking intelligent individuals all decide to support dictators today... is simply because the stage of empires has lasted a very long time, as it was the main game in town for thousands of years, and only since things like, the Maga Carta, and the French Revolution, and basically, the Western Enlightenment, did the system swing back from the empire-group to the individual, to a free thinking individual, and ideas like, all people are created equal, all should be well educated, etc., only recently, ie. a few hundred years, has that new structure or way of organising things, been developing.

And the trouble is, the world is one place, but it isn't all at the same time -- the hierarchy-empire structure is still the main player in most of the world.

The key is, the empire brings stability and safety. After that, things like democracy can start to develop. But safety comes first. Which is why "strong men" are valued, if they can appear strong enough to bring safety and stability. It is a stage which cannot be skipped.

(Notice also, all the stuff about Western Imperialists and NeoColonialists is just a footnote, because EVERYONE was building empires every chance they could get, and it is not just some Western thing.)

But a fatal flaw with empires is they get too big and centralised control cannot work anymore. You need the individuals to exercise their intelligence, ie. you have to give them freedom.

On the one hand...

[Ecuador]

On the one hand, Uber did its usual thing of going around local laws to offer their service, so they naturally got stopped at some point. I won't even attempt to make a case on whether taxi protection laws are good or bad, my hunch is that the answer is "it depends", but in any case rarely have we seen companies with as little regard of local laws as Uber.
On the other hand, the neo-Sultan is obviously not worried about poor taxi drivers, he built the narrative he wanted: one or two sentences after the "Uber / moober" populist joke he asked where they got Uber from, and he answered "Europe of course". Which is completely wrong, it is an American company that started in San Fransisco, but he wanted to dish on Europe because the EU leaders don't seem to appreciate how he is cleansing his nation from "dangerous anti-democratic elements"...
In general, Erdogan seems to know how to win the people, I was aghast when I saw him get the audience to applause while he was bad-mouthing Kemal Ataturk, who for Turkey is more than what Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt are combined for the US, but represents the opposite of the current course (Kemal established a democratic & secular nation). I can think of other leaders who had the same charisma in the past, fortunately Erdogan controls Turkey and not Germany ;)

Istanbul taxi drivers are theives

[ghoul]

Other cities Taxi drivers may overcharge you but in Istanbul they will literally steal money out of your wallet. Its a common trick. They will halt by the side of a main road ,instead of your destination saying their is construction ahead. While you try to quickly get down and pay the fare you will be hit by the second part of the plan - a highly overcharged fare which just jumped in the last 30 seconds. At this point you already have your money out of your wallet and stuck trying to figure out how the fare jumped so high. At this point they will reach into your wallet , take out a 100 and swap it (using sleight of hand) for a 20 and then say to you Ok you gave me 20, give me the rest. You as a tourist are in shock at this point and cant even argue.
Erdogan is a populist who gets his votes from thugs and hoodlums so I am not surprised he supports Istanbul Taxi drivers.
In comparison Uber works fantastically well in Istanbul.