But that's not true. Uber is still a platform for democratizing transportation. It has more or less completely fixed the issue of racism in taxi cabs (or auto rickshaws), which was previously a daily experience for me. In Maharashtra they've literally made an enemy of Shiv Sena, racist/nationalist political party, because they are undercutting the Marathi autowales.

It's also improving women's safety worldwide, which is a major issue outside the west. Literally days after an Uber driver raped a passenger in Delhi, my girlfriend at the time still insisted on taking a radio taxi home (wasn't Uber, which was shut down for a little bit) because she felt safer than in an auto rickshaw or taxi.

Uber is working - fairly successfully - to partially fix the issue of cronyism in governments around the world. They've taken private battles public and shown the world exactly how much people like Bill DeBlasio hurt the public.

This would all be a huge net gain for the world even if every >$150k/year engineer at Uber was horribly mistreated/marginalized/had their butt patted before shifting to another $150k/year engineering job.

The Kapors are not calling out Uber based on a utilitarian calculation. Uber is still exactly the force of good they promised to be, and their goals align just fine with the stated goals of the Kapors. It's just that their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist, and it looks like that matters more to the Kapors than the actual good they do.

When I first moved to New York, I had a roommate. He was Brown educated, on prominent City boards and sharply dressed. Regularly, I'd have to climb out of bed and walk to our corner of 30th Street and 5th Avenue, a decent neighbourhood, to hail him a cab.

The reason? He's black.

I got used to quibbling with cab drivers over "broken" credit-card machines (magically resurrected when I threatened to call the TLC, their regulator). And dealing with my out-of-borough destinations being inconvenient. Or having drivers on their phones the whole way.

Yellow Taxis have gotten measurably better since Uber entered the scene. Credit owed where it's due.

Passengers should never cancel accepted trips. That's what I explain to my passengers when they complain about other drivers doing this.

I never cancel my trips if the passenger is ready to go (some are too drunk or otherwise unable). Drivers who cherry pick can still be reported, but that's a manual process.

The leading cause for driver deactivation is excessive cancel rate. For that reason, the passenger should insist that driver cancel the trip.

I run into this when I call the passenger to confirm that they indeed wanted to order Plus service and that they are willing to wait 15-20 minutes for me to get there. They often think I am calling to cancel, but I never ask the destination since that's at least unethical and possibly illegal.

Maybe I don't understand what makes a good fare.

Also incentives are based on trip count, not trip length as far as I understand.

It's a problem that needs to be fixed in big cities with these apps.

But the reason why they reject in these cases has nothing really to do with the person, but the action/destination. Definitely an improvement.

The one time I took Uber Pool in Brooklyn the driver refused to let a black couple into the car, which we all protested and complained about, but nothing came of it.

In New York Uber isn't necessarily safer or less racist, although I'd concede it probably is in other countries.

For what it's worth, my girlfriend has taken an uber in NYC 100+ times, and has never complained about any kind of harassment from an Uber driver. She's complained to me about sidewalk/subway harassment, and workplace harassment, so I don't think there is a reason she would hide Uber harassment from me.

Also: Regular car services were horrible pre-Uber...which is why Uber took over NYC car transit.

It was basically: Call up a number, get answered by a guy with a heavy accent on a low quality landline, tell him what you want, and hope and pray that he understood what you said and the car shows up. If it doesn't, call another company and repeat.

Just curious to what extent you protested?

EDIT:

I mean, they can start out driving for both, but if you get fired by Lyft, you can't ever come back in most cases.

Lyft requires newer cars, which could bar totally broke drivers.

I have perfect background check, of course.

Lyft is definitely hands-on when reacting to passenger complaints. They likely have sentiment analysis software for comments by passengers.

Lyft passengers are ruthless in ratings. It took me a while to recover from initial ratings while I was learning. At least your ratings are a rolling average of last 100 rides so you can fix the problem of bad ratings with new rides. Last week should help: got 17 5-Star ratings and no negatives.

1) They have more direct control over, and responsibility for, Uber corporate behavior.

2) Uber corporate culture might bleed over to the customer experience.

3) The behaviors in practice at Uber are not good for anyone, even the "high-performing" assholes whose behavior is excused. Those behaviors keep talented prospective employees away and make current employees less effective.

I was only disputing the specific point I quoted. Even if everything Susan Fowler said is true, Uber is still a social good that is fixing racism in taxi cabs.

Harassment is harassment.

That part wasn't an excuse for harassment. And it also wasn't about programmers' salaries as justification. He was using rhetorical hyperbole to emphasize that the utilitarian benefit of Uber for brown and female riders is still true. That was a response to tyre's comment, "So now you have a company that isn't actually what it pitched itself to be.

Yes, harassment is harassment but it looks like yummyfajitas was responding to a specific business claim by tyre.

Part (but not all!) of the reason for this is that not every $150K/engineer is getting harassed, only some are, and some are doing the harassing, and in particular, those who are doing the harassing are, by all reports, not actually helping Uber's social mission effectively. If you're willing to sacrifice something about engineers to help Uber change the world for the better, sacrifice the people who take time out of their workday to proposition the people they manage, or who ignore their boss because they're trying to get themselves promoted, or who create and cancel projects to create the illusion of work, or who interpret people who sabotage their teammates as high performers. (And sacrifice them by firing them or better yet not hiring them, not by harassing them.)

I don't give a fuck how much that woman was getting paid, it is not conditional on her receiving sexual harassment from her supervisors. It is conditional on her doing her goddamn job, and making people feel unsafe by directly propositioning them obviously interferes with that.

As a society, we've made the decision that traffic regulation, gun regulation or preventing the sale of loose cigarettes does justify the police gunning people down or choking them to death. (Note that after Eric Garner and Philando Castille, no one advocated eliminating the rules that got them killed.)

So why is an unpleasant work environment somehow one of those things that are unjustified no matter what?

"So why is a hostile work environment somehow one of those things that are unjustified no matter what?"

Words matter.

Furthermore, the type of people that want to invest in companies that decrease systemic racism and harassment experienced by their riders should also be concerned about similar problems at places closer to home. Framing these abuses as though they are not all different manifestations of failing to recognize other people's humanity on some level really undermines any progress.

Specifically, if you think (1) "There are things in the world that are really bad, and no amount of greater good justifies them. Harassment is one of them." but you also favor cigarette regulation, then you must implicitly think the inevitable shooting/strangling people/other violence is NOT one of those things that are "really bad and no amount of greater good justifies them".

Or alternatively, the stated principle (1) is not your real justification and merely a post-hoc rationalization.

I suspected the latter. But I was wrong - as it turns out geofft is internally consistent and also opposes cigarette regulation, firearm regulation, and all the other rules who's enforcement involves doing things that are "really bad and no amount of greater good justifies them". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13725372

Regardless, this is whatabouttery. It's true that we have much more serious problems in the world than workplace harassment, like poverty and slavery and famine. That doesn't mean that the less serious problems aren't still problems.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/study-fin...

https://faculty.washington.edu/dwhm/wp-content/uploads/2016/...

There's also the minor matter of breaking federal law. You can call this "the zeitgeist" if you like, but if I was an Uber investor I would be concerned that the company is leaving itself wide open to multiple class action lawsuits. The amount of their funding used to fight the many suits against them is also more generally concerning. Lyft doesn't seem to get into the same battles they do, so clearly it's possible to achieve good without being raging assholes while doing it.

When is the last time Lyft prevented someone like DeBlasio from helping the taxi cartel rip off consumers?

Really? The only problem you see at Uber is that their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist? They are unpopular for superficial reasons and that's it?

Are you saying that it's okay to be harassed if the pay is high?

If so, please examine your own mind for its blind spots and learn a bit of humility, before sounding high strung and judgemental about others'.

150 years ago, which is only a handful of generations, it was widely accepted in America that people of certain races were only technically human and were better fit for slavery than for living a full human life. That position is an extreme minority these days. What changed? Nobody eloquently argued that idea away, we merely made the culture that relied on that idea economically unviable (at gunpoint). We didn't even do a very good job of making alternative ideas more economically viable, and that hurt us deeply for the majority of that time.

If we move racist employees from company X to failing company Y, we make a non-racist culture more economically viable. People who are only weakly racist generally choose to give up on spreading their ideas (even if they still hold them) to choosing an economically worse option. People who are undecided are more likely to hear about or be part of the non-racist culture than the racist one. That is, historically, how we have been fixing racism. It hasn't been working perfectly by any means, but it's been remarkably effective.

Capitalism is actually a great racism cure. Racism was always economically unviable.

It only existed because we passed laws protecting it. For example, greedy contractors hired negroes to build stuff until congress passed the Davis-Bacon law stopping that. Jim Crow wasn't a set of "you can discriminate if you want" laws, it was "you must discriminate". It was an extremely intrusive regulatory regime to the point of regulating dating choices.

Uber doesn't care about my race. All they care about are my dollars/rupees.

Well, sort of. What's good for the economy as a whole isn't always the same as what's good for you individually. I might prefer a world in which I know my kids have good jobs, but technology remains stagnant for a generation, to one in which technology improves and the economy as a whole grows, but my kids have much less reliable jobs. (This is essentially Pigou's argument about negative externalities; capitalism is, in theory, a great environmental cure, because you can't make money without a world to make money in, but that doesn't seem to be stopping any capitalists at the moment.) Or the effects of making the economically-rational decision might be so slow and so hard to detect that an actual human will fall back on their biases and never miss the profit they could have gained by not trusting their biases. (This is Greenspan's famous argument about hiring women economists.)

There's a timely and (at least for most people) non-racist example here: immigrants on work visas. Economically, it's good for my country to hire the best possible workers at the lowest possible salary, regardless of country of origin. So why do we have borders and ensure jobs go to equally-good workers at higher salaries (or worse workers at the same salary, or both)? Because we like a world in which the employment of our countries citizens' is protected, even at the cost of our economy.

Slavery was extremely economically viable. And the fact that you need laws to make slavery illegal, but you don't need so many laws as to make Jim Crow mandatory, leaves me skeptical of the use of unguided capitalism as an effective tool for ending racism (even if in theory it would work).

This may be true, but it's completely unrelated to the point I made.

Slavery is only economically viable if you don't treat the slaves as economic agents. At the time when slavery was being debated, virtually no one actually made this argument because it was patently ridiculous.

In fact, the phrase "the dismal science" was coined by a slavery supporter to criticize the economists who opposed slavery. Slavery proponents were actually anti-capitalists who argued that slavery was better for slave and master alike - they favored hierarchical relations rather than exchanges based on mutual agreement. I know Moldbug has been shunned from society for advocating it, but you should read Carlyle if you want to understand history.

It's true that if you don't treat foreigners as economic agents, then economics does in fact suggest treating them as an exploitable resource as well. In fact, if you take that premise, we should probably enslave them rather than just pass protectionist laws against them.

One of the things that's usually attractive about capitalism is that it is, in a sense, the default. Absent a government saying otherwise, two individuals or businesses or even countries will tend towards capitalism in their relations. But absent a government saying otherwise, slavery also arises, in many places and times in history.

What changed to make people say "Hey, we're failing to treat slaves as economic agents"? It may be the case that on paper, slavery was not economically viable ever - but it was absolutely profitable and desirable in practice. (That may be the disconnect; I'm using "economically viable" in a practical sense.)

The question of who is an economic agent is exogenous to capitalism.

What changed to make people say "Hey, we're failing to treat slaves as economic agents"?

In the US, a bunch of religious crazies decided to force their biblical interpretations on everyone else. For a while they used politics and small scale warfare (e.g. running around ad night and chopping people's heads off) to push their morals on everyone else, on slavery and other issues like drinking and polygamy. Eventually the limited wars erupted into a total war for dominance, which they won.

I'm less familiar with European history so I won't speak about that.

In the way capitalism arose from pillage & plunder.

Even way before the Industrial Revolution.

The navies protected the (taxable) commerce from further pillage & plunder.

But the only ones that could afford to build any ships at all were usually the monarchs whom had already largely pillaged and plundered the wealth of their subjects.

Capitalism at this complete a level of wealth concentration reveals its eventual destructive effect on free enterprise.

Due to the extreme wealth inequality ships could justify cargoes of volunteers who would virtually pay to live as somewhat of a slave somewhere else.

Eventually it was only a matter of greed whether a particular voyage would contribute to a more advantageous outcome when choosing either physical or financial bondage for their cargoes of slaves.

When the viewpoint of the capital owners is so far removed from that of the lowest-level subjects, the difficulty for them to respect the (finer?) differences between physical vs. financial bondage of their servants in the 18th & 19th centuries evolves into the blurring of the distinction between financial bondage vs. financial empowerment of their employees in the 20th & 21st centuries.

Simply depending on where the powerful draw the line when greed is involved.

When the money must make money even under adverse conditions, the result of unbridled capitalism tends toward slavery of some form or another.

Depending on your point of view, I guess.

That said, one can meet that standard, and provide a better/cheaper transportation service and everything else in Uber's mission without standing for a toxic workplace environment for women, no matter how much they are or aren't paid. There is exactly one profession where the amount of money you are being paid justifies tolerating unwanted sexual overtures and is not the profession software developers are signing up for.

Does the ends justify the means here? Not really. Lyft is arguably similar to Uber but without so many alleged and evidenced wrongs. We can quibble about how similar they are, if Lyft would be successful without Uber, how successful Lyft is, etc. but the fact remains that a sizable competitor in this space doesn't have as many faults and seems to be doing just fine for a startup.

Does the ends justify the means ever? Perhaps. But it is often an argument made in hindsight to diminish real wrongs for the sake of theoretical utility, when in reality there are many levels of gray that have fewer wrongs and similar theoretical utility.

Travis convinced Kapor that, amongst other things, Uber was a platform for democratizing transportation, citing things like racism amongst taxi cabs to spin Uber as social good. So now you have a company that isn't actually what it pitched itself to be.

I did not make any "ends justify the means" arguments, or claim that what happened (if Fowler is to be believed) is acceptable.

Vast majority of the cab drivers are from the Northern states. The natives of Mumbai dont want to drive cabs.

I'm very sure they don't get the destination when choosing whether to accept the ride, and often don't seem to get it until you get in the car?

I think you are the one with "broken logic circuits."