> cab drivers are committing suicide because of their debts

This isn't the motivation for this regulation. If it was, the same City Councilman who proposed this cap wouldn't have shot down a minimum-wage proposal for cab drivers. Remember: most medallions aren't owned by cab drivers. And cab drivers don't donate.

Reflief shouldn't be protecting their broken business model and the corrupt medallion system. This isn't a problem technology is causing, its loan sharks locking taxi drivers into debt with the insane prices of a medallion. I'd rather see the medallion system removed, debt relief provided to the drivers and a more fair congestion tax or similar to control the number of cars.

That issue is present with everyone else also, not just cab drivers. I don't see why they should be singled out for relief. If we want to provide a safety net for people obviated by technology, that has nothing to do with Uber or Lyft.

One difference between taxis and "everyone else" is that with everyone else, the business that does in their business is usually legal.

Uber and Lyft were largely operating illegally when they started in most cities. They ignored expensive licensing requirements. They ignored safety regulations. They ignored insurance requirements. They ignored price controls on fares. They ignored requirements to accommodate disabled people.

Taxi companies who were obeying all these rules (which all imposed costs on the taxi companies that Uber and Lyft did not have) had a reasonable expectation, perhaps even a right, to expect the city would force Uber and Lyft to follow those rules too, or would shut them down. But the cities didn't, so I think a good case can be made that the cities owe the taxi drivers a bailout.

Uber and Lyft operated 100% legally in NYC from their inception. The NYC ride-sharing market is not like other US cities, which allow peer-to-peer ridesharing. All rideshare drivers in NYC are licensed by the TLC, and Uber and Lyft are licensed TLC operators.

Uber and Lyft beat NYC taxis fair and square - they used the existing TLC regulations (with the overhead required) and won out because of being a better product.

I think this concept is address well in Neil Postman's "Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change" [1]

[1] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/pos...

Perfect is the enemy of the good. Why not help some people on the way to helping a wider group? I do agree that we need wider-ranging policies for people displaced by technological change. It would help people find work and society make use of their talents.

The idea that Uber, or any other company, is responsible for someone else committing suicide is both bizarre and offensive.

From https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/nyregion/a-taxi-driver-to...:

Immigrants from Romania, the couple had bought their New York City taxi medallion nearly three decades ago. Lately, it had been difficult to find fares. Her husband worked 12-hour shifts, but brought home less money. He was worried about the plunging value of their once-lucrative medallion and frustrated about Uber’s takeover of the industry.

On a cold day in March, Mr. Ochisor hanged himself in his garage in Queens. His family blames the growing hopelessness he felt over his fortunes as a taxi driver.

The problem is not ride sharing, its the fact that being a taxi driver in NYC is viewed as an investment rather than a job. That you have to purchase a medallion for insane sums of usually borrowed money.

It's a broken system. Could you imagine if you had to put up $1.3 million to be a factory worker? Money that you're still on the hook for if the factory ends up closing due to lack of demand? Charging people for the privilege of working, and somehow its Uber's fault for not protecting this corrupt and manipulative system.

If the medallion was bought 30 years ago as said, it was surely acquired for closer to $3 than to $1 million. He could sell it for a large profit, despite the downtrend in the recent years.

Thirty years ago they were about $250,000 in today's dollars. He would be lucky to recoup that in the current market.

Yeah, a real tear-jerker. So, let's fix this. How do you propose to write a law that defines exactly when responsibility for suicide attaches?

In this case, Mr. Ochisor's customers were so desperate for an alternative to his three-decade-old business that they turned to a startup company that works by (literally) dodging taxi regulators. Is that really Uber's fault? The regulators'? The customers? Just how far do we want to take this whole idea of being reponsible for our competitors' mental health, or that of our vendors?

Immigrants have a hard enough time as it is getting access to this country. They can spend a decade or more going to the trouble of raising funds (not just burning free VC money), getting sponsorship/visas, emigrating, assimilating, and dropping serious capital to secure just an abstract right to operate a business, only to see their efforts trampled by a competitor that outscales and outperforms them by (your own admission!) cheating the same system.

What recourse did he have? To this day government response to Uber's incursions has been mostly toothless.

I'm no friend of the taxi lobby but the guy was just trying to do right by his family up until he killed himself. While I don't see how Uber could realistically be held responsible for this guy's suicide, their undercutting his business certainly contributed to it, and you're being needlessly callous.

I don’t know how far, but possibly beyond glib dismissals of people’s suicides as a “real tear-jerker.”

(Shrug) It's an appropriate response, I think, to the use of peoples' suicides for purposes of overt emotional manipulation.

Your beef is with the taxi cartels and their click-hungry sympathizers in the media, not with me. They started it.

It speaks more to your disposition than anything else that being troubled by other’s suicides is “emotional manipulation.”

And I don’t have “beefs” with fictional boogie man cooked up by Uber, however bought in you are to that narrative. I certainly don’t remember “taxi cartels” stealing and passing around the medical records of rape victims, but that was probably a conspiracy by their “click-hungry sympathizers in the media.”

And here come the whataboutisms. You'll notice that in the post above, I explicitly called out Uber for actively circumventing the local taxi laws. I'm not apologizing for Uber, believe me, just pointing out that I'm not the one pulling the emotional-manipulation strings. The journalists (and the HN posters) who are citing someone's suicide to back up their position favoring one debatably-ethical actor over another are the ones who are doing that.

Uber is not responsible for pushing people to suicide at the end of a 30-year taxi-driving career. If you disagree, I respectfully suggest there are other sites where such opinions are more in line with the underlying ethos.

Companies are huge economic actors. They can have very large effects on people's livelihoods. If people feel hopeless, they may commit suicide. Here, we have a very direct link between app-hailing and the reduction in taxi driver incomes. There's no denying that a major factor in these people's suicides were these apps.

Same question as I posed in the other post. At what point in the course of business competition do I become responsible for your suicide?

If you mod me down and send me into an emotional crisis, are you responsible for what I do as a result? No? Why not?