Uber was a disruptive (read: sketcky) concept to begin with. Several cases of assault by drivers and even a rape in india are documented occurances in the Uber ecosystem that seem to be shrugged off by the company as "isolated incidents."
If you're talking about personal safety, reviews can only be a good thing.
Uber drivers deserve to be protected from their customers, too. You're talking about assault and rape by uber drivers. What about protecting drivers from assault and rape by uber passengers? What's to stop a passenger from taking advantage of a driver? The mere fact that most (but certainly not all) drivers I've taken in uber as well as traditional taxies are male suggests to me that safety and sexual assault might be a concern for drivers also.
As they might say on twitter, #driverslivesmatter?
Then they'll be forced to retreat to dealing with larger issues like why America has so many environments that seem to lead young men to fight unprovoked physical attacks against police officers in the first place.
And that'll be progress, at least in the national conversation if not in actual deeds.
And if they start demanding removal of the cameras, fuck'em, I say, because by then, the moderates among us will see the good they do and people who want to obscure and hide behind anonymity and hearsay will be marginalized.
Because the most common use/biggest market for free, anonymous file exchange is always going to be illegally sharing data. There are lots of services allowing free file exchange (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) which aren't anonymous and it seems, by and large, there's not a great need for anonymity outside illegal data sharing. There are some other potential applications for anonymously sharing data, e.g., whistleblowing, but they're covered by sites like wikileaks (albeit the powers that be do their very best to suppress anything with that application,too).
If every single person took public transportation, lived in public housing, and took food stamps, you can bet those services would improve as financially and politically well-connected service users complained about the quality. Public support for those programs would go through the roof as people came to see them as essential for their own well-being, not just essential for the poor and supposedly lazy 'dregs' of society. Just look at regions with levels of income similar to the US where the majority do use public transportation and housing, e.g., Hong Kong and Singapore, and in the case of transportation, we can probably include Europe, and all those places have much better public transportation and housing than their equivalents in the US. You can argue the causation goes the other way, e.g., more people use those services because they're better, but it seems fair to me to assume a two-way feedback loop.
Now what you might be thinking is that transportation, housing, and food options *in general* wouldn't be better if they were publicly provided. That seems fair. But in the case of education, the vast majority of people already use the public education system, so an improvement in the public system per se would bring an improvement to the majority of service users the way an improvement in, say, the food stamp system would not.
Romney used that argument when people complained about him avoiding taxes during his election campaign. The problem was he was campaigning on a platform for political office that included preserving the same loopholes and low tax rates which he benefited from. Romney not only benefited from tax loopholes which enabled him to pay a lower tax rate than the middle class but also actively participated in preserving them. A great number of corporations and other super-rich individuals - thanks to SuperPACs we will never know who - put themselves in the same position by using their vast riches to exert vastly disproportionate influence on the political system, in order to elect politicians like Romney who would preserve the tax breaks they benefit from.
Thus, the problem isn't just "big corporations", and it isn't just "the rich" and it isn't just Congress, the House, and the President. It's all of them working together - not unanimously or monolithically, but when all's said and done, as a system. The system is self-sustaining in that tax loopholes and low tax rates make it easier for the rich to exert a disproportionately large influence on the political system in order to preserve the same privilege that gives them influence.
Ganbei!
Personally I think the bigger racism here is the extra status whites in China get even over Chinese Han people - yes, unfortunately, one can be racist against one's own group. There was the apartment complex that opened a little while ago "foreign-looking applicants only please". In my stay in Nanjing I was never treated negatively on account of being white, occasionally on account of not fluently speaking the local language, but usually any differential treatment I got on the basis of my whiteness was neutral or positive (like the dinner invite you got here).
Getting hired as a token whiteface might be a bit of a hollow privilege but it's still a privilege over not being offered a job at all.
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Uber was a disruptive (read: sketcky) concept to begin with. Several cases of assault by drivers and even a rape in india are documented occurances in the Uber ecosystem that seem to be shrugged off by the company as "isolated incidents."
If you're talking about personal safety, reviews can only be a good thing.
Uber drivers deserve to be protected from their customers, too. You're talking about assault and rape by uber drivers. What about protecting drivers from assault and rape by uber passengers? What's to stop a passenger from taking advantage of a driver? The mere fact that most (but certainly not all) drivers I've taken in uber as well as traditional taxies are male suggests to me that safety and sexual assault might be a concern for drivers also.
As they might say on twitter, #driverslivesmatter?
Then they'll be forced to retreat to dealing with larger issues like why America has so many environments that seem to lead young men to fight unprovoked physical attacks against police officers in the first place. And that'll be progress, at least in the national conversation if not in actual deeds. And if they start demanding removal of the cameras, fuck'em, I say, because by then, the moderates among us will see the good they do and people who want to obscure and hide behind anonymity and hearsay will be marginalized.
Because the most common use/biggest market for free, anonymous file exchange is always going to be illegally sharing data. There are lots of services allowing free file exchange (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) which aren't anonymous and it seems, by and large, there's not a great need for anonymity outside illegal data sharing. There are some other potential applications for anonymously sharing data, e.g., whistleblowing, but they're covered by sites like wikileaks (albeit the powers that be do their very best to suppress anything with that application,too).
Yes, yes, and you bet!
If every single person took public transportation, lived in public housing, and took food stamps, you can bet those services would improve as financially and politically well-connected service users complained about the quality. Public support for those programs would go through the roof as people came to see them as essential for their own well-being, not just essential for the poor and supposedly lazy 'dregs' of society. Just look at regions with levels of income similar to the US where the majority do use public transportation and housing, e.g., Hong Kong and Singapore, and in the case of transportation, we can probably include Europe, and all those places have much better public transportation and housing than their equivalents in the US. You can argue the causation goes the other way, e.g., more people use those services because they're better, but it seems fair to me to assume a two-way feedback loop.
Now what you might be thinking is that transportation, housing, and food options *in general* wouldn't be better if they were publicly provided. That seems fair. But in the case of education, the vast majority of people already use the public education system, so an improvement in the public system per se would bring an improvement to the majority of service users the way an improvement in, say, the food stamp system would not.
Romney used that argument when people complained about him avoiding taxes during his election campaign. The problem was he was campaigning on a platform for political office that included preserving the same loopholes and low tax rates which he benefited from. Romney not only benefited from tax loopholes which enabled him to pay a lower tax rate than the middle class but also actively participated in preserving them. A great number of corporations and other super-rich individuals - thanks to SuperPACs we will never know who - put themselves in the same position by using their vast riches to exert vastly disproportionate influence on the political system, in order to elect politicians like Romney who would preserve the tax breaks they benefit from.
Thus, the problem isn't just "big corporations", and it isn't just "the rich" and it isn't just Congress, the House, and the President. It's all of them working together - not unanimously or monolithically, but when all's said and done, as a system. The system is self-sustaining in that tax loopholes and low tax rates make it easier for the rich to exert a disproportionately large influence on the political system in order to preserve the same privilege that gives them influence.
Ganbei! Personally I think the bigger racism here is the extra status whites in China get even over Chinese Han people - yes, unfortunately, one can be racist against one's own group. There was the apartment complex that opened a little while ago "foreign-looking applicants only please". In my stay in Nanjing I was never treated negatively on account of being white, occasionally on account of not fluently speaking the local language, but usually any differential treatment I got on the basis of my whiteness was neutral or positive (like the dinner invite you got here). Getting hired as a token whiteface might be a bit of a hollow privilege but it's still a privilege over not being offered a job at all.