When Peter Thiel says "single digit millionaires have no effective access to the legal system" [1] on the surface that sounds laughable and out-of-touch but I think there's a lot more truth to this than most people would like to admit.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.de/peter-thiel-hulk-hogan-gawker-...
You claim this is the truth. On what do you base any of this, other than TV?
[1] http://www.livemint.com/Specials/13TE2UEtexMf1GDeEt5rCP/Mahe...
Since when has the truth been popular, or well received when it wasn't also what people wanted to hear?
You are forgetting that some past and present employees that could be directly implicated by Susan's evidence may also choose the smear campaign route to save their hide.
This could range from the women in HR* who might get thrown under the bus by Uber for aiding and abetting, to the men that perpetrated the actual harassment.
*Of course this scenario playing out is highly unlikely given Uber's history.
[0] https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/835193441814392833
They've always ended up looking
What a fantastic opportunity to send those assholes on a wild goose chase. Even better if they can somehow feed Uber bullshit that they later end up hanging themselves with.
Doesn't matter. Court of law !== Court of public opinion. In fact, courts sometimes suspiciously follow the public mood.
Seems there is some recent evidence, in sexual harassment matters:
--Single accuser, no-one believes you --20 accusers, no one believes the accused
The floodgates don't open until #1 goes public, and more follow.
Maybe the victims won't get as much recompense as they deserve (because so much of the judgement will go to attorneys), but I would not be so sure that Uber will have them outgunned in court. At the very least, it could teach Uber a lesson by putting an expensive crater in their VC runway.
0) http://www.maglaw.com/publications/articles/00392/_res/id=At...
Every time I thought I learned something from a movie or tv show it was because they were portraying something I didn't know a lot about. I would be very slow to say any kind of entertainment like this is educational.
On the other hand they both seem to get along really well with the current US president.
Normally I don't care, but because I'm from Chicago and am officially very touchy about all the abuse the city catches, I'd like to correct the record as Eric Holder is from New York.
Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? You know, I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us ? Well, I don’t even trust you to do that." -Milton Friedman
He does have a credible image, but the announcement sort of co-opted that to make it seem like he might be somehow independent in his thinking. In reality, he's a lawyer being paid by Uber. As such, he isn't really inclined to find all the dirt...Depends on where said dirt is.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/01685274cc944196af9016ad0a875...
It's like there's a massive list of investors and shareholders who are all riding this "sure thing" to big riches. Which makes me wonder two things: 1.) is uber too big too fail? are there so many rich and powerful people invested that they will make uber succeed no matter or 2.) this thing could be the biggest investor flop in recent memory.
To reiterate, I wish Uber to change. I don't wish them to fail.
Employees yes, drivers not so much. There's plenty of competitors that would love to fill that hole.
> and it would burn a lot investors, thus negatively affecting the funding landscape for years to come.
Maybe letting investors know that company culture of how people are treated has real negative consequences would signal to them that they should pressure these companies to behave in an appropriate manner. Burning investors for ignoring the writing on the wall about Uber's behavior (there's been indications of problematic behavior of executives for years) is exactly what needs to happen.
maybe voters will learn this too?
i was about to say that these events could make for a great teaching moment, but these are lessons we've been given many many many chances to learn. i'll settle for us once again avoiding eating ourselves alive as a species, and hopefully we avoid eating some scapegoat subset of us alive while we're at it.
Silicon valley alums of a top tech company are not going to be hurting for jobs in the near future.
It sets the example that bullshit like this is not workable and will bring you down. There are no net downsides to uber falling.
Maybe in the US. Elsewhere (e.g. Toronto), it's Uber or taxi.
In fact there are many smaller startups that keep coming and going. Bikes, autos, cabs. In fact there was a bus startup too that failed just because it didn't have money to play against the system.
There are rumours of a huge business house (with pretty much endless supply of money and extremely easy access to the central Govt - in fact the PM on a personal level) entering the market.
They brought a very Wall Street-esque aggressively cheat your way into becoming too big to fail, at any cost attitude into software. They were chummy with top-dollar lobbyists to get around pesky small-town regulations and unions. Some of those entrenched interests were bad, but even in defeating them, they weren't precisely taking from the rich and giving to the poor either.
The grass is always greener, but they do not resemble software heroes like Carmack or Stallman or (idiosyncratic pick) Newmark at all. When it comes to anti-authoritarianism and civil disobedience, I think Snowden not Kalanick. Even if you want a Randian libertarian, Jimmy Wales over Travis Kalanick.
Uber's endgame is self-driving cars, which will put a lot more good people (Uber drivers and non-Uber drivers) out of a job. That's only feasible because of Uber's aggressive attitude to growth and crushing competition in long-term-unsustainable ways in the hope that the technology will materialize soon. If they change enough that this isn't their endgame or they don't pull it off in time, I don't know if they're financially viable.
I think that that goal and that pressure is part of why Uber is as rotten as it is (see how HR repeatedly doesn't want to fire abusive people who are allegedly high performers; even if the rest of their team would do better without them, Uber can't afford to figure that out).
Meanwhile, if they fail outright, it seems like basically all Uber drivers also drive for Lyft, and the engineering staff can get good jobs at lots of other places. It'll also be a good precedent for future companies not to try the strategy Uber has, and hopefully prevent more problems along these lines.
right. regardless of where you stand on his performance as attorney general, hiring eric holder is a political move. if uber actually cared about investigating this, they wouldn't have hired a politician.
AG is a Presidential appointment with Congressional confirmation. While those appointed are not necessarily politicians, it is most certainly a political position.
Direct Presidential appointees are absolutely political; cabinet members more than most.
> That term has a real meaning in the circles which matter (i.e., politics), and AG is not considered a political position.
It actually has a fairly vague and shifting meaning even within politics, but by virtually any of them the Attorney-General is very much a political position.
That must be why Trump fired Sally Yates then...
/s
Really, it's about as political as it gets. Or did you think Jeff Sessions would so much as be looked at under a Democratic president?
Yes, exactly. The appointee is appointed to implement the administration's policies, which are political. During George W. Bush's administration, state Attorneys General were directed to pursue investigations of voter fraud. The eight who did not were fired in 2004 and replaced, which was very unusual.
Anything involving the law is political.
Any time two people interact, politics comes up.
To give another side of the Uber story, I've seen nothing but respect on my team of ~25 engineers. Only a few of us are women, but also only a few of us are the "white male" stereotype that you see in the press. Everyone I've talked to on my team is aware of and upset about the lack of female engineers in tech.
I saw Uber's CTO (Thuan Pham, a Vietnamese refugee) downstairs at Uber the day Susan Fowler posted her article. A woman who works at Uber came up to him, and asked him how he's doing. He said, "It's a tough time, but we'll get through it." She told him, "I'm sorry, I know how much you care", and gave him a hug.
Arianna Huffington is on Uber's board of directors. She's in charge of helping Uber employees "lead healthier lives". In response to Susan Fowler's article, Arianna has been holding personal discussions with employees about what we're going to do to stop this type of thing from ever happening again.
It's easy to stereotype a company, but at the end of the day you're talking about ~12,000 individuals. Many if not most of whom came from Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I'm hopeful that these decisions didn't come from the top. It really may have been just a couple of individuals who did messed up things, and should/will be fired.
http://gawker.com/top-huffington-post-editor-was-investigate...
It's a tricky problem, but ultimately you rely on the investigators caring more about their reputation than any one contract. If it gets out that firm X doesn't do objective reviews, then future companies in hot water won't hire them.
The real challenge here is that these investigators are not independent. Eric Holder has done prior work on behalf of Uber, which means he could reasonably be biased towards the company.
1. The public at large, who want to see standards of civic probity upheld? Or, 2. Future clients, who will want value for their money?
Delivering #2 requires writing up a designed narrative, in magisterial rhetoric. A narrative that hides all the dirt that isn't likely to come out anyway, and redirects culpability toward low-ranking dispensables, whether guilt or not.
For a big name like Holder, "folding up shop" would mean something like a beachfront retirement, in Malibu.
The independent directors on a company's board should hire the investigators, who then should report back to those directors.
Of course, in most startups, just like in many public companies, "independent" directors often aren't.
This is why I'm skeptical of Uber's promise to investigate these allegations. When I heard that they had retained Eric Holder to investigate, my knee-jerk reaction was petty and cynical: "Great, retain a Chicago politician so you know you'll get the answer you're paying for."
I was a little disappointed in myself at the time, but damn. With this company, I'm starting to think that impression might have been on the money.