Well, I think they're doing both. They are lobbying at the state and local levels, and they are apparently breaking laws (sensible and ridiculous alike).
The latter is starting to look like a good way of achieving the former, though. When you finally give people a decent transport service, all of a sudden they start giving a shit about the regulations that could make it illegal.
Whereas, come at it from the ground up and say "Hey, we're a no-name startup, please change your laws protecting a powerful entrenched industry so we can operate, ok?"... I can see that not working too well.
However, knowingly breaking the law has its risks, and no crying if you get caught. It's a different thing to rail against the law than to say you shouldn't be punished for breaking it.
Uber wants to be above the law, or at the very least, encourage their drivers to break the law. This is not an ethical way to do business.
I agree that if you break the local laws wherever you are, you will be subject to the prescribed penalties. I also agree that not all laws are good things. For different reasons I agree that there are instances of Uber acting unethically (fake hailing Lyft rides, for instance, or misusing customer information).
I disagree that disobeying one or more regulations is, by definition, an unethical way to do business. There are cities where Uber is not allowed to pick up at the airport. And yet, when Uber drivers nonetheless pick up at those airports, the only thing harmed is the taxi oligopoly (and perhaps public respect for the regulatory system, which people can see is not being used for the public good but to prop up entrenched interests).
Like jaywalking laws and signage size ordinances, port authority pickup regulations do not invoke deep questions of right and wrong behavior (i.e. ethics), beyond the metaethical questions of the origin of morality and whether following The Law is a moral good in and of itself.
If 'politically correct' means not wanting to award a prize to a game encouraging vigilante, or state sponsored, murder of low level minor criminals then I suppose that's what you should call it, personally I prefer 'not being a dick'.
That's rather minimizing the butchery of many species (including intelligent primates like gorillas) to near extinction. You even call it a major issue in the next sentence. These are not smash and grab kids or poor Jean Valjeans hunting the only food they can find to feed their starving families. These are well-financed, cold-blooded killing operations with expensive gear.
Advocating their execution may be in poor taste, but I wouldn't call it "being a dick." And I'm not convinced that using potentially lethal means (e.g. gunfire) to stop a poaching operation in progress would be wholly unwarranted.
Uber also adds the "Showing up, but then refusing you a ride if you have a service animal" and other serious issues that keep cropping up.
Well that shit clearly needs to stop. A company practice of refusing access to the disabled or their service animals is unacceptable, as is deliberately underserving those with disabilities. If that is occurring at a high level, nail em to the wall.
However, while I support universal service animal access, I'm more sympathetic to the individual driver with cloth seats who knows that dog hair can be hell to clean out (and will get all over your next fare).
All that adds up to requiring (at penalty of large fines) the RS company to ensure sufficient handicapped access in a portion of their driver pool, without demanding that every last driver accept shed fur in what may be their only vehicle.
I don't understand how Uber is a taxi service. They don't take street fares. At best Uber is a car service.
This. The ability to be hailed from the street (and in some places, use special lanes/stands at public transportation hubs) is what makes a taxi, what requires a medallion, etc. Uber, Lyft, and friends cannot be hailed from the street, so they are not taxis in the strict sense--they are a car service that utilizes personal-use vehicles.
Although for the purposes of some/.er outrage, there is no practical difference. For instance, the need for adequate insurance applies to both taxis and car services. I'm all about consumer protection, so I have no problem with requiring the corporation to insure at commercial liability levels (which they do, but the different coverage permutations could definitely use more clarity). This also makes me a big fan of the driver pictures and ride tracking Uber employs.
Licensing I'm on the fence about. I'd like to see some data on accidents per mile driven by ridesharing drivers vs taxi and car service drivers. My personal, anecdotal experience is that taxi drivers have been more reckless and less knowledgable; YMMV. If the data were to consistently show that Uber had fewer accidents and other incidents, what's the point in making all those people get CDLs? It would just be a barrier to entry without demonstrable safety benefit. If it went the other way, or even if it was lower but not low enough, I'd be in favor of some sort of class or cert (akin to a defensive driving course).
I'm even less inclined to buy in to non-safety related regulations, which are largely relics of a bygone era or straight buttering the biscuits for the taxi lobby. IIRC the major traffic engineering burdens in this arena are from street hailable taxis (even when they aren't intentionally shuttingdown a city), but if there are studies showing RS is a major independent contributor, I'm all ears.
As for other regs, metering is even less reliable than the fare estimates given before RS rides. RS may already be better serving underserved areas. I am in favor of requiring more handicapped-accessible vehicles, and Uber has the resources to make sure there is an appropriate ratio if there aren't enough.
Returning copyright terms to a reasonable length is about fairness to society. It has nothing to do with fairness to content creators or preventing infringement.
We the people grant a limited monopoly on creative expression in order to promote more creative expression (paraphrasing Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).
Among the arguments in favor of this monopoly right, "fairness" (i.e. I should control how this gets used because I worked hard to make it) is perhaps the least compelling.
Today, we acknowledge this long history of mistakes. We are grateful for all you do for reddit, and the buck stops with me.
"... Which is why today I am implementing a system of regular public apologies, to be made by me on a quarterly basis and as needed when we really fuck things up.
I want you to know that accountability and leadership aren't just buzz words here at Reddit, they are very real goals that I have delegated to a very real junior staffer, Ted.
So in the future, when Reddit screws the pooch, you can rest assured that I will take full responsibility by publicly apologizing and then firing Ted."
In the pre-iPad days, I rigged up a stand for an old twist-screen convertible "tablet" laptops using a mic stand, some plexiglass, a few bolts, and one of those plastic troughs you tack on the bottom of a door.
True and true. I meant judged in the judiciary sense, but there are always consequences to speech, even (especially?) protected speech. And you are correct that you can still be sued (for just about anything), and you still have to present your defense to the court.
If the truth of your statement isn't materially in dispute, or its clearly a statement of opinion not fact, then you can potentially get the case thrown out early on in summary judgment. It doesn't obviate court entirely, but it's much cheaper than going through discovery and (heaven forbid) trial.
That rejoinder gets tossed around quite a bit. While it is technically true, it's misleading--the First Amendment (along with the rest of the Constitution) does inform the standards by which private conduct is judged.
The Supreme Court in Hepps decided that not only is truth an absolute defense to defamation*, but also that the burden is on the plaintiff to prove the defendant's statements are false (ie presumption of truth). This is contrary to old English common law (presumption of falsity) and a direct result of First Amendment protection.
For the same reason you have to prove actual malice in the case of a public figure (Sullivan), and are protected from foreign judgments that would be contrary to the 1st Amendment (2010 SPEECH Act).
Other amendments also have things to say about private conduct. In Shelley, SCOTUS applied the for-government-only 14th Amendment to racially restrictive property covenants. It may be a contract between two private parties, but enforcement of a contract or judgment is a government thing.
*Public interest/public figure, if we're being exact.
Agreed, I would love to see some citations for this backcanceling practice.
I did some quick googling, and insurance carriers are certainly threatening to cancel (future tense) coverage for RS drivers, and refusing to pay for claims occuring within the passenger pickup gap.
But basic contract law fundamentally condradicts the notion of backcanceling. If the contract was void the moment you turned on the Uber app the first time, your insurer would have to refund all your premiums so as to avoid being unjustly enriched.
Of course, they can also argue for a course of action that's not legally correct just to hassle you and hope you give up.
Wait a few years when licensed taxis are out of business and there are no taxis on the road when you need them.
This isn't an inexorable death spiral brought on by price warfare. It's eminently fixable by just joining the 21st century. Cab companies, who already have the advantages of incumbemcy, capital, licensed labor force, tailored infrastructure, and favorable regulations, could pretty much close the gap just by creating a decent app and guaranteeing credit card acceptance. It's not about skirting regs to sustain cut rate pricing, it's about convenience.
Wait till there are few if any handicap accessible vehicles and few will pick up certain minorities.
It's worth arguing that even by the lowest standards, the APIs do not possess even a modicum of creativity. It's also worth arguing that they are so purely functional on a basic and elementary level that they should not be afforded copyright protection at all. But since the higher court rulings force us to concede copyrightability arguments, what's left to argue is that Google's use of these validly copyrighted APIs was fair and thus permissible.
Of course it smells clean, Uber hasn't been around for that long. They will have forced taxi's out by the time they start smelling 'off'. Do they even have a requirement to make the seats washable? Eww.
Seeing as Uber comprises an army of private people's vehicles that they have to drive around in all the time, and not a commercial fleet of 24/7 3-shift cabs, I don't think that's accurate. Plus bad-smelling ride == bad review, so in theory even if it did happen its self-correcting.
As for "forcing out," even though I personally prefer Uber to traditional taxis, I don't think the latter is going extinct any time soon.
Fluff, I see from your many posts on this issue that you have a very negative view of RS services, even to the point of making posts like the above that are just silly. I'm asking honestly, what's fueling the vitriol? Did something bad happen to you or a loved one while using one of these services? Are you from somewhere in Europe where you have an awesome, heavily vetted taxi regime that you don't want to see undercut? Just curious.
My wife and I use Uber on a regular basis. We, and most of our friends and acquaintances, have switched to ridesharing platforms and have not looked back. The main reasons are:
1) Convenience - car to your doorstep in minutes, rather than 20 minutes after the 15 minutes you waited on hold. Immediate availability and prompt, easy service is probaby 90% of the reason we use Uber. Certain use cases are possible now that were highly impractical before, like requesting an Uber from the office at lunchtime and having it be there by the time you get out of the building. I don't live in NYC so street hailing is a long shot and phone dispatch is a long wait.
2) Ease of Payment - just arriving at your destination completes the transaction on your chosen credit card; no more lies about only accepting cash and dirty looks when the cabbie has to dust off the old credit card imprint machine.
3) Quality of Service and Ratings - I have had mostly great experiences with Uber drivers, who get 5 stars. I had one that was awful, he got 1 star and a report that he (literally) didn't know how to drive. The ratings seem pretty accurate. In cab world, it's a crap shoot, and the quality of drivers has been 50/50 at best. To be fair, none of the bad cabbies have been as bad as the one awful Uber driver I had. But I've had plenty of great Uber drivers that were better (personality, road knowledge, driving skills) than all but the best few cab drivers I've ever had.
4) Cost - at least in my region, Uber is not really competing on cost; that is to say they're often as or more expensive than a comparable cab ride. Sometimes, certain rides are a few bucks cheaper, but it's almost never a pricing slam dunk that would drive choice over the above reasons. The cost is always reasonable unless it's big surge, in which case I can choose another RS, a traditional taxi, public transport, etc. They don't pull any funny business with the cost, unlike many cabs I've been in--no games with meter vs zone pricing and haggling over a short ride that somehow costs double what's on the sticker.
For us, the Uber platform has just been a hands-down better experience. It's not a bunch of hoopdies offering cut rate prices, it's a fast, no-hassle experience for which we frequently pay extra.
Slashdot Mirror
They want to help others. They have power, but don't want it, and don't abuse it.
So, basically Ned Stark.
So having a nice interface is novel? You must work for the US Patent and Trademark Office.
::patent attorney chortle::
Well, I think they're doing both. They are lobbying at the state and local levels, and they are apparently breaking laws (sensible and ridiculous alike).
... I can see that not working too well.
The latter is starting to look like a good way of achieving the former, though. When you finally give people a decent transport service, all of a sudden they start giving a shit about the regulations that could make it illegal.
Whereas, come at it from the ground up and say "Hey, we're a no-name startup, please change your laws protecting a powerful entrenched industry so we can operate, ok?"
However, knowingly breaking the law has its risks, and no crying if you get caught. It's a different thing to rail against the law than to say you shouldn't be punished for breaking it.
Uber wants to be above the law, or at the very least, encourage their drivers to break the law. This is not an ethical way to do business.
I agree that if you break the local laws wherever you are, you will be subject to the prescribed penalties. I also agree that not all laws are good things. For different reasons I agree that there are instances of Uber acting unethically (fake hailing Lyft rides, for instance, or misusing customer information).
I disagree that disobeying one or more regulations is, by definition, an unethical way to do business. There are cities where Uber is not allowed to pick up at the airport. And yet, when Uber drivers nonetheless pick up at those airports, the only thing harmed is the taxi oligopoly (and perhaps public respect for the regulatory system, which people can see is not being used for the public good but to prop up entrenched interests).
Like jaywalking laws and signage size ordinances, port authority pickup regulations do not invoke deep questions of right and wrong behavior (i.e. ethics), beyond the metaethical questions of the origin of morality and whether following The Law is a moral good in and of itself.
If 'politically correct' means not wanting to award a prize to a game encouraging vigilante, or state sponsored, murder of low level minor criminals then I suppose that's what you should call it, personally I prefer 'not being a dick'.
That's rather minimizing the butchery of many species (including intelligent primates like gorillas) to near extinction. You even call it a major issue in the next sentence. These are not smash and grab kids or poor Jean Valjeans hunting the only food they can find to feed their starving families. These are well-financed, cold-blooded killing operations with expensive gear.
Advocating their execution may be in poor taste, but I wouldn't call it "being a dick." And I'm not convinced that using potentially lethal means (e.g. gunfire) to stop a poaching operation in progress would be wholly unwarranted.
Uber also adds the "Showing up, but then refusing you a ride if you have a service animal" and other serious issues that keep cropping up.
Well that shit clearly needs to stop. A company practice of refusing access to the disabled or their service animals is unacceptable, as is deliberately underserving those with disabilities. If that is occurring at a high level, nail em to the wall.
However, while I support universal service animal access, I'm more sympathetic to the individual driver with cloth seats who knows that dog hair can be hell to clean out (and will get all over your next fare).
All that adds up to requiring (at penalty of large fines) the RS company to ensure sufficient handicapped access in a portion of their driver pool, without demanding that every last driver accept shed fur in what may be their only vehicle.
I don't understand how Uber is a taxi service. They don't take street fares. At best Uber is a car service.
This. The ability to be hailed from the street (and in some places, use special lanes/stands at public transportation hubs) is what makes a taxi, what requires a medallion, etc. Uber, Lyft, and friends cannot be hailed from the street, so they are not taxis in the strict sense--they are a car service that utilizes personal-use vehicles.
/.er outrage, there is no practical difference. For instance, the need for adequate insurance applies to both taxis and car services. I'm all about consumer protection, so I have no problem with requiring the corporation to insure at commercial liability levels (which they do, but the different coverage permutations could definitely use more clarity). This also makes me a big fan of the driver pictures and ride tracking Uber employs.
Although for the purposes of some
Licensing I'm on the fence about. I'd like to see some data on accidents per mile driven by ridesharing drivers vs taxi and car service drivers. My personal, anecdotal experience is that taxi drivers have been more reckless and less knowledgable; YMMV. If the data were to consistently show that Uber had fewer accidents and other incidents, what's the point in making all those people get CDLs? It would just be a barrier to entry without demonstrable safety benefit. If it went the other way, or even if it was lower but not low enough, I'd be in favor of some sort of class or cert (akin to a defensive driving course).
I'm even less inclined to buy in to non-safety related regulations, which are largely relics of a bygone era or straight buttering the biscuits for the taxi lobby. IIRC the major traffic engineering burdens in this arena are from street hailable taxis (even when they aren't intentionally shutting down a city), but if there are studies showing RS is a major independent contributor, I'm all ears.
As for other regs, metering is even less reliable than the fare estimates given before RS rides. RS may already be better serving underserved areas. I am in favor of requiring more handicapped-accessible vehicles, and Uber has the resources to make sure there is an appropriate ratio if there aren't enough.
My thigh muscles might be slightly warmed. How terrible.
In most places you have to pay extra for that.
A belt clip is closer to your genitals than the inside of a front pocket?
I use the iCodpiece, you insensitive clod!
Returning copyright terms to a reasonable length is about fairness to society. It has nothing to do with fairness to content creators or preventing infringement.
We the people grant a limited monopoly on creative expression in order to promote more creative expression (paraphrasing Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).
Among the arguments in favor of this monopoly right, "fairness" (i.e. I should control how this gets used because I worked hard to make it) is perhaps the least compelling.
I'm confused as to how the very first post in a thread can be redundant? That's just lazy moderation.
Went through and read some of those strips--classic! I wish I could claim the foresight on this one... I just picked an name and went with it.
Today, we acknowledge this long history of mistakes. We are grateful for all you do for reddit, and the buck stops with me.
"... Which is why today I am implementing a system of regular public apologies, to be made by me on a quarterly basis and as needed when we really fuck things up.
I want you to know that accountability and leadership aren't just buzz words here at Reddit, they are very real goals that I have delegated to a very real junior staffer, Ted.
So in the future, when Reddit screws the pooch, you can rest assured that I will take full responsibility by publicly apologizing and then firing Ted."
In the pre-iPad days, I rigged up a stand for an old twist-screen convertible "tablet" laptops using a mic stand, some plexiglass, a few bolts, and one of those plastic troughs you tack on the bottom of a door.
Alogorithms aren't racist, and teaching a computer to visually recognize objects is hard. Move along.
Oblig Better Off Ted
True and true. I meant judged in the judiciary sense, but there are always consequences to speech, even (especially?) protected speech. And you are correct that you can still be sued (for just about anything), and you still have to present your defense to the court.
If the truth of your statement isn't materially in dispute, or its clearly a statement of opinion not fact, then you can potentially get the case thrown out early on in summary judgment. It doesn't obviate court entirely, but it's much cheaper than going through discovery and (heaven forbid) trial.
1. Freedom of speech is a government thing.
That rejoinder gets tossed around quite a bit. While it is technically true, it's misleading--the First Amendment (along with the rest of the Constitution) does inform the standards by which private conduct is judged.
The Supreme Court in Hepps decided that not only is truth an absolute defense to defamation*, but also that the burden is on the plaintiff to prove the defendant's statements are false (ie presumption of truth). This is contrary to old English common law (presumption of falsity) and a direct result of First Amendment protection.
For the same reason you have to prove actual malice in the case of a public figure (Sullivan), and are protected from foreign judgments that would be contrary to the 1st Amendment (2010 SPEECH Act).
Other amendments also have things to say about private conduct. In Shelley, SCOTUS applied the for-government-only 14th Amendment to racially restrictive property covenants. It may be a contract between two private parties, but enforcement of a contract or judgment is a government thing.
*Public interest/public figure, if we're being exact.
Agreed, I would love to see some citations for this backcanceling practice.
I did some quick googling, and insurance carriers are certainly threatening to cancel (future tense) coverage for RS drivers, and refusing to pay for claims occuring within the passenger pickup gap.
But basic contract law fundamentally condradicts the notion of backcanceling. If the contract was void the moment you turned on the Uber app the first time, your insurer would have to refund all your premiums so as to avoid being unjustly enriched.
Of course, they can also argue for a course of action that's not legally correct just to hassle you and hope you give up.
Wait a few years when licensed taxis are out of business and there are no taxis on the road when you need them.
This isn't an inexorable death spiral brought on by price warfare. It's eminently fixable by just joining the 21st century. Cab companies, who already have the advantages of incumbemcy, capital, licensed labor force, tailored infrastructure, and favorable regulations, could pretty much close the gap just by creating a decent app and guaranteeing credit card acceptance. It's not about skirting regs to sustain cut rate pricing, it's about convenience.
Wait till there are few if any handicap accessible vehicles and few will pick up certain minorities.
Lol wut?
When your post popped up on my windshield HUD just now, I thought it was the most insigh%$&+'#{+&'NO CARRIER
Mod AC up.
The trial court ruling is how things ought to be, but how things actually are is a much different story, as reflected by the CAFC and SCOTUS.
You need a vanishingly small amount of originality to meet the copyrightability threshold. Like choosing categories for yellow pages rather than listing everything alphabetically. Like selecting and arranging public domain stories. Like adding a few lines to someone else's pictures.
It's worth arguing that even by the lowest standards, the APIs do not possess even a modicum of creativity. It's also worth arguing that they are so purely functional on a basic and elementary level that they should not be afforded copyright protection at all. But since the higher court rulings force us to concede copyrightability arguments, what's left to argue is that Google's use of these validly copyrighted APIs was fair and thus permissible.
Of course it smells clean, Uber hasn't been around for that long. They will have forced taxi's out by the time they start smelling 'off'. Do they even have a requirement to make the seats washable? Eww.
Seeing as Uber comprises an army of private people's vehicles that they have to drive around in all the time, and not a commercial fleet of 24/7 3-shift cabs, I don't think that's accurate. Plus bad-smelling ride == bad review, so in theory even if it did happen its self-correcting.
As for "forcing out," even though I personally prefer Uber to traditional taxis, I don't think the latter is going extinct any time soon.
Fluff, I see from your many posts on this issue that you have a very negative view of RS services, even to the point of making posts like the above that are just silly. I'm asking honestly, what's fueling the vitriol? Did something bad happen to you or a loved one while using one of these services? Are you from somewhere in Europe where you have an awesome, heavily vetted taxi regime that you don't want to see undercut? Just curious.
Oh and I forgot 5) Cleanliness and Smell. Speaks for itself.
My wife and I use Uber on a regular basis. We, and most of our friends and acquaintances, have switched to ridesharing platforms and have not looked back. The main reasons are:
1) Convenience - car to your doorstep in minutes, rather than 20 minutes after the 15 minutes you waited on hold. Immediate availability and prompt, easy service is probaby 90% of the reason we use Uber. Certain use cases are possible now that were highly impractical before, like requesting an Uber from the office at lunchtime and having it be there by the time you get out of the building. I don't live in NYC so street hailing is a long shot and phone dispatch is a long wait.
2) Ease of Payment - just arriving at your destination completes the transaction on your chosen credit card; no more lies about only accepting cash and dirty looks when the cabbie has to dust off the old credit card imprint machine.
3) Quality of Service and Ratings - I have had mostly great experiences with Uber drivers, who get 5 stars. I had one that was awful, he got 1 star and a report that he (literally) didn't know how to drive. The ratings seem pretty accurate. In cab world, it's a crap shoot, and the quality of drivers has been 50/50 at best. To be fair, none of the bad cabbies have been as bad as the one awful Uber driver I had. But I've had plenty of great Uber drivers that were better (personality, road knowledge, driving skills) than all but the best few cab drivers I've ever had.
4) Cost - at least in my region, Uber is not really competing on cost; that is to say they're often as or more expensive than a comparable cab ride. Sometimes, certain rides are a few bucks cheaper, but it's almost never a pricing slam dunk that would drive choice over the above reasons. The cost is always reasonable unless it's big surge, in which case I can choose another RS, a traditional taxi, public transport, etc. They don't pull any funny business with the cost, unlike many cabs I've been in--no games with meter vs zone pricing and haggling over a short ride that somehow costs double what's on the sticker.
For us, the Uber platform has just been a hands-down better experience. It's not a bunch of hoopdies offering cut rate prices, it's a fast, no-hassle experience for which we frequently pay extra.
The whoosh was so powerful it made my ears pop.