Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

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I hate to say it but intentions mean fuck all when the results are bad. People working at Facebook in the early 10s thought they were bringing people together and fostering openness in communication and helping the world, and instead we got a toxic hotbed of misinformation, conflict, and enabling genocide and the greatest increase in adolescent mental health problems and depression in recorded history.

The people working for the company might have the best intentions, but when the ultimate goal is to extract as much value from the users of the platform as possible and monetize it, by way of technology which upends long establish social and economic mechanisms, you are playing with fire and anyone with a little but of judgement can see that the end result is going to be disaster for everyone but the investors.

Seriously, I don't care if you think you are a good person -- you helped destroy an established industry by subsidizing with loss-leading fares and payouts and created a culture of contract work which has workers grinding all the time with absolutely no network of support to rely on. On top of this the business model of 'not our fault, you are dealing with a 3rd party' platformization which washes its hands of any fault or support is currently wreaking havoc right now.

Nah the taxi industry was a lot worse than Uber. Most of the arguments over whether Uber drivers are employers to me are baffling; most taxi drivers took set, long hourly shifts from the medallion owners -- a much greater hallmark of an employee/employer relationship -- and were mafia backed and run quite crookedly. Many taxi drivers to this day have much worse working conditions and pay rates.

On the rider side, many people of color, especially Black, were not able to get taxi rides because they drove right by them. Look this up if you don't believe me -- there are innumerable examples of documentations of this, and this basically was altogether eliminated with Uber rides.

Uber was a game changer and a great equalizer for a great many people in society who didn't own their own cars (i.e. visitors, but also people who lived in major cities.)

In fact many taxi drivers became Uber drivers and have made a much better living this way.

Of course, there are also many more Uber drivers than at the start... and so it is kind of a race to the bottom with respect to an equilibrium achieved where it's now just an OK job instead of the $30+/hr like in the early days for uberX drivers...

> you helped destroy an established industry

The latest news on this is literally the opposite (Uber integrating w/ various taxi companies as their lead generation and dispatch provider)

FWIW, I've talked with a number of drivers over the years, and there's people using Uber as a flex source of income while some other pursuit hasn't gotten off the ground yet, people using it to supplement FTE income from elsewhere, people that made bank post pandemic, people doing it to be active in retirement, people who complain about platform issues, people that give it praise, and everything in between. I think if one is going to be outraged on behalf of drivers, it behooves them to try to understand how diverse the driver population is in the first place.

On a similar note, I think people often get hung up on some pet notion but fail to realize there's a lot of stuff going on that makes it hard to keep tally in an ethical bean counter. For example, there's efforts to support Ukraine[0], there's one about increasing women's workforce participation via government-subsided commutes in the middle east, there's the electric vehicle incentives, etc.

Do these offset some ideological notion of how the transportation industry ought to work? I don't know, but I think only looking at the ideology side isn't going to tell the whole story of what's happening on the ground.

[0] https://www.uber.com/newsroom/support-for-ukraine-2022/

To be clear, I am not fond of the taxi industry. My point was that destroying things and replacing them with a subsidized temporary solution with no plan for what to do when the money runs out is irresponsible and the people who run these companies clearly don't care.

I mean, the latest earnings guidance was saying Uber was expecting to be GAAP profitable on an operating basis by the end of year (it already was profitable on an EBITDA basis for a while, and it was technically GAAP profitable on an overall basis in Q1 due to some equity appreciation). It's currently rolling out ads, which is known in the tech industry to be a high margin source of revenue, and if you google Uber in the news these days you'll see a plethora of other things coming to fruition that would simply never have happened under the taxi oligarchy.

I think latching on to the talking points from 8 years ago is not doing enough justice to how much Uber changed since then.

> I think latching on to the talking points from 8 years ago is not doing enough justice to how much Uber changed since then.

I am specifically talking a person about their experience working there at that time. This conversation is not about if Uber has changed or how bad the taxi industry was, this conversation is about 'can you be a good person while working for a corporation which is recklessly disregarding important social structures in order to maximize profit without concern for consequences'.

EDIT: I realize now I should have more clear with my tenses.

> not about if Uber has changed

Shouldn't it be though? Even without getting into the weeds of Machiavellian ethics, I think if one can argue "you helped a high momentum company do X bad thing", then it's fair game to argue "you helped a high momentum company reach Y good outcome" as well. I don't mean to shit on the taxi industry when I bring them up, I mean that there are positive things Uber does today that are only feasible due to the sheer scale it achieved through the means it took to get there, and because even through its darkest periods, there were many insiders that sincerely wanted to do the right thing (and who eventually prevailed).

Is it "bad" if bad things happen from shaking things up and then good things materialize after that? As I said, I don't know to what extent the goods outweigh the bads or don't, but I'm trying to form strong opinions held weakly.

Let's try a thought experiment:

I get a bit drunk at a friend's house and my friend realizes I shouldn't drive home so he offers to let me sleep on in the guest room until I sober up. I refuse and get behind the wheel and make my way home. On the way I see a flipped car in a body of water near the road. I stop and jump in and save the trapped person.

Did the morally good act of saving a person negate the morally reprehensible act of driving drunk?

The end results don't make your actions in the original instance OK, even if the bad case (wrecking and killing someone) didn't happen but instead a good one did. I shouldn't have been driving since it objectively at the time was immoral and I had no way of knowing what would happen.

I think your thought experiment differs from the original topic in few different ways.

For one, the person you were replying to isn't the CEO. A more accurate analogy might be drawing ethical conclusions about the accountant in the company that built the road that led to the accident (or one at the beer company or a weapons company if we want to be spicier)

And the other thing is your drunk driver analogy has a big serendipity aspect to it. The change of tune at Uber was very deliberate in response to the reputational damage its earlier iteration inflicted on itself. A more useful thought experiment might be one about an ex-con gangster turned community service volunteer.

I agree reprehensible occasions remain reprehensible no matter what, what I don't agree with is the notion of immutable morality (X person is always as moral as they were previously), ascribing morality of amorphous groups to individuals, and various other cognitive biases I see people committing in threads like this.

I was trying to convey to the person I responded to that he or she should carefully evaluate the cause and effect of things before shrugging off culpability, even though they felt that they were doing good because they wanted to do good. My point was ultimately supposed to be that good intentions are not helpful if you don't bother evaluating the effect of your actions.

Being able to walk around guilt free is nice, but I won't respect you for saying 'but I was intending to do good' if you willfully ignored the reality around you.

Then after getting knocked around regarding the peripheries of my message and whether or not taxis are good or Uber actually was bad, I ended up operating defensively and lost the tether on the thread with which I had started.

I accept that I approached this poorly but I maintain that my message shouldn't be discard solely due to my incompetence at delivering it.

Thanks for following through with this and I do hope we converse again.

> I hate to say it but intentions mean fuck all when the results are bad

First off, your opinions are completely meaningless to me.

> you helped destroy an established industry

LOL my other comment rings so true about how HN loves to bend over backwards to defend the taxi monopoly.

1) Taxi drivers were not employees they were independent contractors. 2) Taxi drivers had to pay for gas, rent the taxi, and clean the taxi at the end of their shift 3) Every shift they had to pay for the use of the car/medallion and they started the shift OWNING money. Once they earned enough to pay for the fees, they earned everything after that. If they had to end their shift early due to illness or family emergency, they LOST money for the day.

This is the "established industry" that you are protecting? I'm happy to be a part of dismantling this immoral monopoly that abused their workers. Uber drivers can turn on and off their apps whenever they want, they can work at Uber and Lyft at the same time, they can withdraw their earnings at the end of the shift, etc. They can stop working whenever they want and they can start working whenever they want. My time at Uber something I'm deeply proud of.

You obviously care about my opinions or you wouldn't be upset and defensive and accusatory.

I would ask you to point out in my response where I am protecting anything. I am decrying the destruction of things by underhanded means (subsidizing to make costs artificially low and payments to workers high) which is irresponsible and completely indicative of a business model that has no concern for externalities or contingencies for failure. 'Oh the business didn't work' is a terrible line when in the process of failing you destroyed an entire working system, even if that system did suck in a lot of ways.

It is great that you are proud of your work, but I hope that in your current and future endeavors you may be able to use your talents for something a bit better.

> You obviously care about my opinions or you wouldn't be upset and defensive and accusatory.

Nah, I really don't. I enjoy having discussions where I educate people.

It wasn't underhanded, not in the least bit. Defending the status quo monopoly that exploits its workers is really strange. Destroying entrenched rent-seeking monopolies is doing the world a great service. Uber has been a public company since 2019. The fact that it's a viable business is beyond question at this point.

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