Yes a lot of my friends are also complaining about Uber and its suspicious activities.
They were all good. I am from US and I have never used Uber. Few of my friends flew to Eastern side of Europe and they complained about Uber.
Ok so, uber being shitty is nothing new and I’m acknowledging it here.
That said. I don’t see what prevents the drivers from just giving them the finger. The article says they’re forced to listen to anti union podcasts before they can get any rides for the day and they’re “encouraged” by text to go to events and other nonsense that are anti union.
I read that as, they’re forced to have their phone play some bs podcast. which I would do, right as I woke up, and it would sit on my nightstand playing its nonsense into earbuds sitting on my pillow as I went about my business like brushing my teeth and showering.
I already ignore 80% of texts because they come from people not using signal. Or some other messaging app that I actually pay attention to. I mean, this is terrible but sounds pretty ineffective.
Any single thing Uber does, taken on its own, could be seen as pretty ineffective, or innocuous, or a simple error in judgment. But it is never just one thing! It’s layer after layer after layer of constant bullshit, no matter how far you dig. It’s a shit sandwich already for drivers, and employees, and drivers who should be employees but aren’t, and for the share holders, and for the regulators, and for the competition, and for everyone else… except the person who is happy to pay for a ride in the immediate moment.
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A friend of mine flew to Pakistan and he said that even there Uber is not performing well, and the drivers are not maintaining their quality. However, Careem there is outperforming Uber and its time that Uber should close down in emerging markets. If you can’t stay out of controversies, maintain your quality its useless to expand and burn cash in emerging markets.
The Waymo/google lawsuit takes another turn for the worse: Criminal charges are being considered against Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of the corporate espionage suit.
After a long, difficult fight in Massachusetts, along with Uber and Lyft threatening to leave as they did in Austin, new background check laws for ride-sharing have been introduced. First step? Background checks for all existing rideshare drivers in the state.
Of course, that’s where we find out why Uber and Lyft threatened to leave, and why they left Austin: New Background checks fail more than 8,000 Uber and Lyft drivers that previously passed their background checks.
Further interesting bits - 51 rejected applications from registered Sex offenders, that with the companies system had already been passed, more than 300 rejected(again, who had all already been passed by Uber and Lyft) for crimes related to “Sex, Abuse, and Exploitation.” And, weirdly, a huge portion of that 8,000+, the majority in fact, were rejected for driving offenses, suspension of license, or hadn’t been driving long enough to qualify - all things that both Uber and Lyft claim that they check for, and are things that fall within the seven-year period that their background checks are allowed to search.
Reading through this thread for the first time (I knew Uber is shit but they don’t really operate in my part of the world). I believe the technical term for what you are describing is “shit fractal”.
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Adding yet another layer to the fractal: Uber is now accused of ripping off drivers in a much more direct way than previously thought.
If the link is down(and it may be - Ars has been a bit up and down today) Basically, uber has been displaying longer routes to passengers with the estimated fares, charging them that price, but sending to drivers(and paying them based on) the shortest calculated route, pocketing the difference themselves.
NYT today with a beast of an article regarding Uber and more of their shady dealings.
Highlights include:
- Getting in the shit with Apple because they kept tracking users after they’d deleted the Uber App.
- Getting in MORE shit with apple, because after it was discovered apple had found out about it, they tried to geofence apple’s campus, so that anyone trying to examine their code in that location would get a heavily obfuscated, cleaned up version of the code.
- Travis’s tax evasion woes
- Manipulation of public opinion(and the perception of) by having Employees write autovote scripts for public polls, votes and surveys, especially those issued by governmental bodies such as City councils
- A culture of protection for certain workers at the expense of others, with the example being a high-performing employee who hurled a coffee mug at one of his subordinates in a fit of rage, which despite being reported to HR, was covered up, as the employee was considered too valuable to lose.
- A HR complaint against Travis for taking his employees to an Illegal south Korean brothel on the company dollar.
- Using Information gathered from Email Digest services like Unroll.me to gauge lyft’s business, by getting anonymized reports of driver’s receipts. It’s also been suggested elsewhere that they used this information combined with driver tracking to discover which drivers were working for both, and punish them.
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Boy oh boy I can’t wait to see the fanboys defend this one.
[quote=“Ikatono, post:53, topic:499, full:true”]
Boy oh boy I can’t wait to see the fanboys defend this one.
[/quote]They hate apple and see them as baby’s first fisher price phones, they hate taxes and if they don’t would argue that travis’ taxes are not an Uber corporate issue, more often than not they view manipulation of public opinion as either “Just marketing” or valid because they think the general public is too stupid to know what’s good for them, wouldn’t see a problem in protecting high-performing workers because they think of themselves in that position, they’d smear anyone who complained about the brothel trip as sex negative, and they’d argue that the information collected from digest services was anonymized and sold, therefore you can’t hold Uber responsible for buying a product that was up for sale.
It’s predictable as clockwork.
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Uber has fanboys? Did I miss something?
[quote=“rastergrafx, post:55, topic:499, full:true”]
Uber has fanboys? Did I miss something?
[/quote]Yeah, there’s a hell of a lot of folk who are huge fans, still. Turns out a cheap taxi cover a multitude of sins, I guess.
My main problem is mostly that suburban taxis suck. If they’d 1) take cards and 2) actually show up when I asked for them, I’d use them.
The reality is that the use case for suburban taxis is laughable in light of the expectation that everyone owns a car. They exist at the fringe of society serving the poor primarily, so there’s no real sustainable business model there.
Not quite laughable. Just mostly laughable. I point to taking a taxi to an airport or train rather than taking the car you already own.