If you’re driving for Uber or doing any of these semi-legit “gigs” that your city/state don’t like you should know that you’re the one who will pay the price when your state goes after them.
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Regulation - like discipline - is something which is enacted by the individual person or group, rather than imposed from outside.
The entire human concept of “incentive” needs an overhaul. Simply forcing people to do the right thing is not a long-term solution.
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It’s worked fine until now - it’s called laws. Abolishing laws and regulations is stupid ancap nonsense. You really want to give corporate entities more power?
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[quote=“waetherman, post:7, topic:96370, full:true”]
Is there a dead pool yet on Uber, or at least Kalanick? This is the fourth scandal in 2017. I have to think he’s going to be replaced as CEO if for no other reason than the optics
[/quote]Eighth, in fact. Most of them just in the past few weeks.
1)Susan Fowler’s post exposing the abysmal, harassment enabling(if not outright encouraging) culture inside Uber, plus the anonymous account from another woman inside uber, plus the NYT report that included 30 current and previous Uber employees who not only confirmed the allegations, but added more, and provided a great deal of leaked documentary evidence ranging from emails, to chat logs, to surreptitiously recorded meetings.
2)Senior VP of engineering resigns due to it being uncovered that he didn’t disclose that he left google due to credible Sexual harassment allegations that Recode discovered, despite Uber claiming they did a thorough and extensive background check which found nothing. (Hey, at least we know they’re consistent about using shitty background checks)
3)The reveal that the entire blow-up in California about their self driving cars where they were playing the persecuted victims was actually because they refused to pay for a $150 permit.
4)That they were testing their self-driving cars illegally, doing so knowingly, and that they lied to both the public and regulators about incidents involving their self-driving cars(including one of their cars running reds and failing to recognize six traffic lights in a single trip, which they blamed on human error, but later leaks revealed was entirely under autonomous control)
5)Getting sued for Data theft, Design theft and corporate espionage by Google over parts, designs and code from their own self-driving projects that mysteriously somehow ended up in Uber’s suddenly surprisingly fully formed autonomous vehicles.
6)Uber CEO Travis Kalanick caught on video openly lying and generally being a raging fuckface to his Uber driver when questioned about dropping fares.
7)Their VP of Product and Growth resigns over credible sexual misconduct allegations, the second Exec to leave in as many weeks.
And this current Greyball program scandal makes eight. All of this in about three weeks.
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What do you mean “do I really?” - I never even suggested anything of the kind. I go out of my way to not implicate myself in the economies of corporate capitalism, and I attack and sabotage business corporations. Those entities get their power principally from two places - their state charters and entrenched capital, which is incentivised by the state.
Laws are fine, but they are emergent and voluntary. The only other option is to have them imposed as part of an authoritarian structure, and thus creating strata of class privilege. It is the contemporary nation-state which has allowed corporate capitalism to thrive, and for an egalitarian society both need to be dismantled.
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I was combining several of those as parts of the same scandals, but you’re right; it’s a shitshow over there. I only wish that the people who were responsible would actually end up suffering. Instead, I have no doubt this will be whitewashed and Uber will emerge clean as a whistle and ready for their IPO.
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It’s an interesting thing that I think deserves separation from Uber’s awful internal culture.
I have a hard time condemning anyone trying to avoid a police sting. They are fundamentally dishonest, and our own government lying to us should never be acceptable. If a journalist or private citizen wants to lie for an undercover exposé, fine, but not the gov’t. Like any other law enforcement, you can’t just assume that they will only target the guilty. I’ve been innocently caught up in a sting before and it shook me up so much I couldn’t sleep and flubbed a job interview the next morning.
If anything this illustrates the folly of interfering in private transactions. If two parties get together and make a private transaction that the gov’t isn’t even aware of, does it make a sound? The argument might be that the sting is necessary because law enforcement can’t just simply pull them over because they can’t tell who is an uber and who isn’t. Which is very telling- if you can’t tell, from behavior, that someone is breaking a law, and no one calls in that a violation is taking place, then you have the textbook definition of a victimless crime. Which in my book aren’t crimes.
If you have to “infiltrate” the system as a dishonest customer, how are they somehow the bad guy for calling you out on it and avoiding you? A business makes money by serving customers, not serving non-customers.
The rules all sounds so reasonable until you take things to their logical conclusions. In my city, police thought it would be a good use of resources to send someone to a grocery store parking lot and beg people for a ride with a sob story and then insist that the driver allow them to give a small amount of money for their troubles. Then bust them for being an illegal taxi. Fucking disgusting.
I don’t blame anyone, rich or poor big or small for avoiding stings in any way possible.
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In my environment, I disagree. Our taxi industry is heavily regulated, partly because of the amount of crime which happens, both directed at drivers from their customers, and by drivers at customers. Its been a long ongoing disaster and uber just resets the process back to the start because they are outside the system.
For me, its perfectly fine if the authorities in my state investigate them. Can’t happen soon enough.
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The company also sent undercover agents to electronics discount stores to record the phone numbers assigned to the cheapest burner phones
Hmmm… I thought the phone numbers for burner phones weren’t known or assigned at the store, and are instead assigned once the purchaser takes them home and signs up over the internet. (I could be wrong, and I don’t doubt that most of the described stuff has happened.)
I don’t like what I hear about Uber these days and I think they have a come-uppance due. That said, I’m technologically fascinated by the maneuvers involved here; if Uber was replaced in this story by, say, the EFF (or some other populist org that I like, and the context rendered the behaviors’ legality moot enough relative to the ethics involved) I’d probably smile a bit. I like that technologically speaking, the police-state hasn’t gained ALL the upside from the last 20 years of tech evolution; but I’m not so keen for the beneficiaries to be commercial entities either.
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From the NY source, it’s “device numbers”, not “phone numbers”.
Enforcement officials involved in large-scale sting operations meant to catch Uber drivers would sometimes buy dozens of cellphones to create different accounts. To circumvent that tactic, Uber employees would go to local electronics stores to look up device numbers of the cheapest mobile phones for sale, which were often the ones bought by city officials working with budgets that were not large.
I guessed it meant that they were seeing what the cheapest models for sale in the nearby stores were.
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Gracias, that makes sense.
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Maybe the IMEI numbers are allocated in blocks.
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Echoed by me in a post elsewhere in this thread prior to reading yours.
Compared to other things Uber has done, this seems downright mundane.
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And, as we all know, emergent laws never result in mob justice, moral panics, or abhorrent moral codes of behavior, just as people will never attempt to find loopholes in laws to make sure that the laws in question are inapplicable to themselves as individuals.
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The cognitive defect is that of perceived “self interest”, that it somehow matters who fortune or misfortune happen to, despite the lack of any evidence.
Organisms are not individual, they are networks. Personae and self-image are illusory. Reflecting this in how society is organized is probably not insoluble.
I dunno, I’d like to think that it matters to the individual person that they are being inflicted with pain or injustice.
Um hum. You don’t say. So then why do you get so upset when people challenge your self-image? After all, if it doesn’t matter to whom fortune or misfortune happen to, then why does it matter?
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Organisms are not individual. One can easily encounter an organism with, for instance, organs transplanted from another organism. Can either body truly be said to be individual? Never mind that all organisms are - in the biological, non-imperial sense - colonies.
Injustice also misses the point, because exploitation and violence themselves tend to be predicated upon the notion that what happens to one organism matters more/less than what happens to another.
That sounds like another kafkatrap. There is no basis for assuming the self, the image, or the upset in the first place.
Bringing it back on-topic, confronting the delusion of personal identity directly addresses the problem of exploitation by state and corporation alike, whereas creating privileged classes of person to manage the behaviors of others does not, the latter exacerbates the problem.
But if organisms are not individual, but are conglomerate entities–colonies, to use your own term–then how can you say that exploitation is occurring without de facto recognition of the existence of and the damage to individual entities within that larger collective?
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