Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

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Oh, you will find one comment of mine about the taxi mafia on yesterday thread.

Of course, it does not justify exploiting workers. Protecting people from those practices is one of the reasons we have governments composed of independent powers, and entire structures with the only purpose of keeping those honest. People aren't complaining about Uber because it looks like that on their case, those safeguards are working. (As an example, this article could only be written because the safeguards are working.)

And yeah, they were some courageous people that insisted on breaking some really immoral laws and destroying a really bad local actor. If it wasn't for them, city transportation would probably be the same it was at the 2000's. Of course, they did it for their own immoral motives, using bad practices that should be punished. It just looks like they will be punished, so why bother hating them? Just use a lower priced competitors that probably treats their drivers better, and forget them.

>>so why bother hating them?

Perhaps because "the ends justify the means" is not a sound code of morality. Lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting, lawbreaking, hiding rapes & assaults, and more are rarely justified for any ends, perhaps only fighting literal authoritarianism.

These immoral behaviors are certainly not justified to merely open a stagnant market because you want to exploit the workers even more than the entrenched entities (e.g., at least in the old system there was a path to earn a medallion worth 6-7 $figures and get a retirement, w/uber, it's only 'what are your stats last week') and steal some of the gains for yourself.

And now, after over a decade of lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting, lawbreaking, hiding rapes & assaults, and squandering $billions of investor funds, they still aren't profitable, and are shedding drivers & customers as they attempt to raise prices to anything sustainable.

We were promised flying cars and all we get is a new form of exploitation, except now driven by a smartphone app? If they put all that funds and effort into an actual honest non-exploitative effort for a flying car...

Oh, for sure. The investor should sue, any driver that feels exploited should think about it (but most will be better by simply changing to a competitor), and the government sure as hell should do its work.

But the investors don't seem to care, they are losing the drivers, and the government seems to be acting quite well against them (at least here it is). So, again, why should I bother?

Anyway, AFAIK:

> If they put all that funds and effort into an actual honest non-exploitative effort for a flying car...

They would be squashed (literally) by the taxi mafia. That's why nobody did it before them.

(About the "hiding rapes & assaults" thing, do they still do that? They tried it here and it backfired quite strongly (as it should), so now they have a policy to help the police on those cases. If they are indeed doing that somewhere, well, maybe people should look at the other end of the problem, it's way more effective to fix it there.)

>>Oh, for sure. The investor should sue, any driver that feels exploited should think about it (but most will be better by simply changing to a competitor), and the government sure as hell should do its work.

So, are you saying that just because someone has recourse that acting immorally is OK, and because that recourse exists, we shouldn't hate on them?

I have an attny friend who took a case against Uber. In a liberal US state with strong worker and consumer protections, it still had to go through multiple layers of appeal to the state's supreme court until they finally got a settlement from Uber. It would have been literally impossible unless the plaintiff was very rich, or the attny hadn't taken the case on contingency/pro bono basis (IDK which he did).

Hordes of unethical people like the Uber executives will fight everything tooth & nail, legally or not.

They do not deserve respect in a civilized society merely because they manage to make money. Any clan of asshats can make money by exploitative and illegal means.

>>They would be squashed (literally) by the taxi mafia. Just because the "taxi mafia" is bad also does not mean that it is OK to impose bad consequences on everyone else to fight them. If the taxi mafia were the only ones harmed, maybe OK, but that group has harmed a lot of people.

> So, are you saying that just because someone has recourse that acting immorally is OK

It's certainly not ok. But I'm certainly not losing sleep over it, because the worst case is really not that bad.

Anyway, I do encourage people to look at alternatives to work for, and I will start to lose my sleep if I see my government's attitude changing.

> Hordes of unethical people like the Uber executives will fight everything tooth & nail, legally or not.

Yeah, and if you look carefully, the root of the problem here is not inside Uber. I keep hopping some high-profile criminal acts on exactly the correct way to disrupt the Justice system and for it to change into something more democratic, but well, that's pretty unlikely. Odds are getting higher that my country will get a plain old revolution to change that, what is a much worse option.

>>I keep hopping some high-profile criminal acts on exactly the correct way to disrupt the Justice system and for it to change into something more democratic, but well, that's pretty unlikely.

I'd agree that this is extremely unlikely in any country, and even conceiving & detailing such a plan, nevermind executing it perfectly to obtain a desired effect seems impossible in that the possible actions do not overlap with any solutions.

>> Odds are getting higher that my country will get a plain old revolution to change that

What country is that? It may be necessary. That said, just because most of an elite is unethical doesn't give some sub-group license to be so, at least in my book.

>courageous

Yes I'm certain the folks at Uber were feeling the pressure every day at their Bay Area office with its foosball tables.

Good grief.

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