Also it still perplexes me that Uber managed to convince so many people with their bullshit PR campaign about the small upstart facing the Taxi Mafia - when from the beginning it was a heavily-funded company, later turned multinational corporation, fighting small local providers with underhand tactics.
I remember having to use "car services" just because the taxis were so unpleasant.
"You bet ya!", he said, "I'm on vacation!" he said. He went on to talk about how the taxi cab industry was a dirty industry and uber/lyft reformed it.
Meanwhile one of my journalist friends declaims the "tyranny" of Uber/Lyft. It's not hyperbole its simply inaccurate.
No, they didn't. At least, not in most US cities - I don't know how the laws work abroad. All a taxi medallion does is allow you to accept rides from people that hail you from the street. That's it. Limo companies and vans that you scheduled beforehand did not need medallions. There's functionally not much different from the service Uber provides and existing charter services, except for the fact that Uber used technology to make scheduling rides much faster.
The "Taxi Mafia" very much existed, though calling it a cartel is probably more accurate. Governments deliberately constrained the supply of taxis through medallions. Naturally, this resulted in inflated prices and poor service due to lack of competition. There's a reason why many people have little sympathy for the taxi industry's struggles to compete with ride sharing: taxis sucked.
I abhor cabs.
I guess they did have insurance (again, at least in the states), but so do Uber drivers.
I don't use Uber or taxis often, but have used both several times over the years. There's never been a practical difference for me. If anything, Uber is less convenient because I need to sign up and install an app. Maybe one was a little cheaper, but not so much that I noticed.
> - stable for employees
> - stable for users
> - stable for society
No. Stability comes at the expense of dynamism. Innovation disrupts stability, and society is more often than not better off for it. You pay a needless tax whenever you buy a CD or flash drive which gets handed off to record companies in the presumption that you will pirate music. Politicians decided that the music industry needed more stability, and passed laws to make consumers fork over tax money to subsidize them.
There was a push to make ride-share companies wait at least 30 minutes before pairing riders up with a car. Not to guarantee any sort of safety or to fight congestion. It was literally just degrading service in order to make taxi companies more competitive with Uber, Lyft, etc.
Trying to achieve stability frequently hurts users and degrades quality of service.
Complaining about Uber's employment model instead of discussing this really important control question just annoys me. It deflects a potentially interesting conversation into grievance-airing about gig jobs.
The crux of your argument is we shouldn’t care about how we get there but what happens next or essentially, how do we react.
If you want to solve a problem, identify and fix the root cause instead of reactively applying some patch to cover the bleeding.
Getting “annoyed” at someone discussing the root cause is misguided.
On the contrary, we need to really understand how we got here first, in order to be able to recognize patterns of the problem and determine how to avoid it in the future.
As the saying goes, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
I would argue that your comment is the bad comment. Lots of unproven assertions, and it all began with a needless, toxic attack
You forgot the juiciest parts:
- private company plays on legal gray areas on purpose
- private company invest aggressively to expand faster than law can react in order to grab said monopoly
This is basically capital cancer, they had a real value but dismissed everything a company is to a society:
- stable for employees
- stable for users
- stable for society
Any company can play rough when let loose with massive funds, but when reality occurs, just like anybody else, they'll have to round their corners and .. surprise.. they stop being interested and competitive.