Because the other rich people who could take them down, choose not to do so. They profess to be non-evil, but the fact that they havent’ beat the Kochs at their own game is proof of their complicity.
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I originally assumed that Uber/Lyft would cut down on traffic due to fewer people taking their own cars, but didn’t take into consideration various things.
Mainly I thought that, like taxis in a taxi rank, the cars would be waiting idle somewhere popular, parked up, until someone requests a ride. Turns out: the drivers are encouraged to drive in circles to show they are “active” and so they get to their riders more quickly. It blew my mind that this was an official business practice and that is wasn’t shut down immediately.
It also entirely replaced the short-term car rental market. People use them for very short trips on a semi-daily basis… There are people who stopped driving, and started taking an Uber to work literally every day.
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One genuinely wonders if they’ll finally see a drop in stock price. I doubt it but I’d love it.
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Not news, just stories of Uber being dumb.
A typical example is that Uber had a team to implement their own Bazel-like system because “Bazel (or any other tool) does not scale in Uber-scale”. Same went for their own GPU database, their own SQS, their own key-value store, their own resource scheduler, their own datacenter, and their own deployment system. The end result was that almost everything sucked. Engineers suffered productivity loss for years. I kid you not that Uber’s docker system didn’t support persistent volume for more than three years, so anyone who wanted to build a persistent system like Elasticsearch had to jump hoops and spent weeks even just to get machines. And the sad fact is, Uber did not have a “Uber scale”. The traffic and complexity it had to handle was far less than other internet companies.