Yeap, Uber is awful. Oh, wait, this is actually a report from 2007 describing the Taxi industry: http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/Unregulated_Work...

There's a lot of propaganda about how Uber is reducing the welfare of drivers, but it all seems based on some ideal of the taxi industry that isn't actually true.

> They don't give a flying fuck about the law, and they're too big for any single city to pressure them into anything.

I think that's a little overblown. Uber has been forced to leave many cities (Paris, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Madrid, etc) and parts of cities (e.g. Calgary Airport).

Uber may be willing to bend the law, but the cities can literally call their cars and ticket them (or even impound them), it's not like it's an underground operation, and not even Uber can sustain that, as we've seen.

But it's not bending it, it's disregarding and breaking it. Bending was what Uber-like services have been doing in Europe for past 10+ years, and in time they managed to integrate themselves with the infrastructure nicely.

In my city the IRS tries to randomly call and then fine the living crap out of Uber drivers, but it doesn't seem to be effective. Frankly, if Uber teaches people anything it's how slow and inefficient local governments have become. Which is both good and bad to know. On the other hand, local startup community figured out that they're obliged to help Uber win, so they promote them and jobhunt for them and if our startup community is good at anything, it's good at promoting and finding people.