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A comment on Uber charges more if you have credits in your account. Parent comment

Re:Uber charges more if you have credits in your account by saghm on Sunday September 22, 2024 @08:03PM (#41621154)
Yep, I agree with that. I think there's probably a spectrum of "transparency" rather than just a binary thing, and we all have different ideas of where to draw the line of what's acceptable. They key question to me is whether it's transparent enough for there to be accountability. Right now, it's impossible to tell the difference between the pricing algorithm that Uber currently uses and one where they pull tricks like the one described in the article, and I think that's the problem; they might do it, they might not, and from the outside, it looks identical because there's no way to hold them accountable if they do.
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Re:Uber charges more if you have credits in your account by bdangubic on Monday September 23, 2024 @10:15AM (#41626382)
> no way to hold them accountable if they do

Hold them accountable for what exactly?! Uber provides a service - how much it costs depends on many factors like where you live, time of the day and many other factors. You open the app to see what their services cost and you can then choose to use their services or not.

There is no price transparency in many businesses. Try buying airline tickets online - first try at your own home. Then take your laptop and go to a zipcode where one of your friends lives that is much better off than you financially and try the same thing. Next, do the same but go to a different friend's house, one that perhaps lives in a zipcode that is a lot less affluent and see what happens there. Then repeat this same test but use MacBook Pro vs some shitty HP running Windows 7 and see what the difference is. Next, get NordVPN and get your self parked elsewhere and see what happens with the pricing... It is quite silly to even discuss "price transparency" in 2024 mates :)

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Re:Uber charges more if you have credits in your account by saghm on Monday September 23, 2024 @08:37PM (#41631989)
> There is no price transparency in many businesses. Try buying airline tickets online

People hate airline pricing as well, so I'm not sure that makes the point you think it does. I don't see why "lots of business do something people don't like" somehow means people should stop disliking it.

> It is quite silly to even discuss "price transparency" in 2024 mates :)

If you think it's silly to spend time discussing it, you're not under any obligation to. There's nothing wrong with people who do think it's an issue discussing it either though, and I don't think anyone concerned by it is going to be particularly dissuaded by just asserting that they shouldn't be.

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Re:Uber charges more if you have credits in your account by bdangubic on Tuesday September 24, 2024 @10:42AM (#41637008)
The question isn’t whether people like or dislike something, the comment I commented on stated that free markets depend on transparent pricing which in my humble opinion cannot be further from the truth.
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Re:Uber charges more if you have credits in your account by saghm on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @02:38AM (#41644340)
Yes I know, and I explained that the person who was confused by the way your comment was worded. We continued discussing the issue after that, and personally, it doesn't matter to me whether it's a strict requirement of the free market or not; there are plenty of things that are theoretically not incompatible with a free market that I think are bad, and this is one of them.
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