Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

a local uber driver tried to scam my friend over the weekend

he gets into the car, and the driver says that surge pricing kicked in. driver shows his own phone, displaying a fake uber app showing some ridiculous fare on it. driver says, hey, cancel your ride request, and I'll just take cash instead and not charge you this surge price.

i'm not sure what to think on this one

seems like he's mostly scamming uber

based on convos w/three separate Lyft drivers (who had both Uber and Lyft stickers on their cars), they all prefer driving for Lyft and get a bigger cut (80% vs 70%) of their fares, one said Lyft had at least some training....

also, they all three said they will take a Lyft fare over a Uber fare if they are getting multiple calls at once (like bar time, etc)

I really hate the ubiquity of Uber - people get cars for me when I work (flying to & from places, hotel to airport etc) and over the past couple of years it's now always "I'll get you an Uber" every single time followed by me saying "please just a cab" but it's an uphill battle, people are pretty into Uber. worse problems to have I know but like...I don't wanna ride in yr Uber

lol agreed. People are so easily like "Call me an Uber" like the nounification was so fast. It's gross to me.

so weird for other services to seem like off-brands when uber is, outside of the logo and app, so brandless. any random car could be your ride!

some people get quite defensive if you reveal you don't love uber and don't relish the opportunity to use it

lyft is pretty big, i use it as my generic noun for app-hailed ride, no one bats an eye

i see what you (and they) did there

https://twitter.com/kurtopsahl/status/802764934736015360

"Heads up @uber users. The 11/23 update (version 3.222.4) removes the "While using" location privacy setting, now only Always or Never."

― Elvis Telecom, Sunday, November 27, 2016 6:19 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there are companies i would trust to do this but with its history of sociopathic libertarianism in upper management uber is not one of them. uninstalled.

does the app just not work if you choose "never" or can you manually enter your location?

If your company prefers uber rather than a traditional taxi cab, it's portable because ubers are usually cheaper

I used to use uber a lot and it was pretty obvious some were a "collective", because they use the same phone numbers

Wouldn't be surprised if lyft does the same as uber as they grow

Also I've bargained with the uber driver and paid him cash before. Worked great for me and I'm sure it wasn't the first time this dude has done it

Probably*

Autocorrect

Don't you lose $5 if you cancel a ride after the driver shows?

From my understanding it's up to the driver. I believe s/he has to cancel it though

I've done it about 10 times and have never been charged and I usually call them unless i requested it within a few minutes

Can I just support a driver collective through Patreon

just start dating someone who is underemployed and owns a car

If your company prefers uber rather than a traditional taxi cab, it's portable because ubers are usually cheaper

I used to use uber a lot and it was pretty obvious some were a "collective", because they use the same phone numbers

Wouldn't be surprised if lyft does the same as uber as they grow

Also I've bargained with the uber driver and paid him cash before. Worked great for me and I'm sure it wasn't the first time this dude has done it

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Monday, December 5, 2016 1:55 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in fairness, when i first heard of uber a long time ago i used it for a whole weeklong trip and the expense reporting and charging directly to the company card was way easier and faster that a mitful of yellow taxi cards i would have to try to fill in from memory after the fact

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-forum-idUSKBN1431KU

Exciting new shitbags:

"Uber blames humans for self-driving car traffic offenses as California orders a halt.
Transit regulators ordered the company to take vehicles off the roads on first day they were launched without permits in Uber’s home town of San Francisco."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/14/uber-self-driving-cars-run-red-lights-san-francisco

delete uber https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber

(this happens elsewhere too, but delete uber)

the writer is a speaker at that conference I'm going to in april

That is a lot of writing, so i just skimmed it

Anyway, sounds horrible, but a couple things

This unfortunately sounds like normal hr practice to me. They're there to protect upper management, especially one who is well connected and is a high performer, unless there is no way they can defend them

Also, i closes my uber account a while ago because i happen to know someone who used to work there and said they were treating the drivers unfairly. He switched to lyft, and it's a lot better, so now that's what i use

yeah it sounded like this dude wasn't near upper management and no, HR in any competent place isn't going to do some shell game bullshit when it's obvious coworkers are going to talk and realize a "first incident" is anything but

any org of decent size is going to do something to place both people somewhere else

Ah ya you're right he's not even part of management

Right, hr would do something in this case

When someone in management is involved, I've been at 3k+ employee companies where they give both parties options instead of hr actually coming in and taking care of it

(Happened at two places i worked at)

where does "management" begin? he was her manager

Upper mgmt

I mean, I work at a large place and iirc (reorgs make me forgetful) it's like me->manager>manager>department head>org unit head>vp

Sorry I'm eating while posting

In the case of my workplaces, this wasn't just middle mgmt, and there were groups of sr mgrs

well tell em to stop trying to fuck the underlings

All the places I've worked, I'm fairly confident someone'd be fired after even one sexual harassment complaint. Ive seen people fired for less (sending a racist email, swearing at a colleague over skype) so I'd fully expect my current HR at the least to act on someone with *multiple* complaints.

The fact they straight up lied to each complainant that this was his first offence is... just horrifying.

but yes, also, HR are there to protect the company, not the workers, sadly this is so.

it's allocating humans as resources, not resources for humans

https://twitter.com/cjc/status/833504902445821952

imagine if this article were written by a driver

Ya it's a shame because i guess there are times when hr/rest of upper mgmt don't believe the victim because maybe drinks were involved, it was at an office party, or there is not enough hard evidence. But hr/upper mgmt don't explicitly state this, so they seek to fix it in a roundabout way, without causing too much damage/defamation to both parties and the company's reputation

Awful situation for women and hope more is done to prevent harassment

I can't tell whether that piece is really making the rounds as they say or whether I just get all my stories from a bubble predisposed to stab at uber whenever the opportunity presents itself

This account that my friend wrote up is also gaining som emomentum: http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2017/02/20/uber-is-on-alert-following-reports-of-abhorrent-sexual-harassment-at-the-company/#6326b93b1118 so it may be at least a couple of bubbles. At least some aggregators/searches were using her own author photo (shot by yours truly) as the thumbnail, which strikes me as kind of weird and unfortunate.

i use this app nuzzel which connects to your twitter and tells you about links that lots of friends or friends of friends have shared recently. in my network a widely shared story might be posted by 5 or 6 people. the most i'd ever seen until yesterday was 10. this was posted by 25.

Doctor, don't be so hard on yourself, that photo's perfectly okay

Haha I like the photo, just the idea that it illustrates this article is...er.

FAKE NEWS?

I can't tell whether that piece is really making the rounds as they say or whether I just get all my stories from a bubble predisposed to stab at uber whenever the opportunity presents itself

I'm really not in this bubble and like 10 copies of this came across my twitter feed

Ya it's a shame because i guess there are times when hr/rest of upper mgmt don't believe the victim because ...

are you kidding me? there are functional workplaces and i would like to think most of us are in them, but in a lot of them (especially in the service industry or others with a significant management/worker gap in status, like salaried versus hourly) it's not that "there are times", it's that no one gives any shit whatsoever and favoritism or seniority wins every time

man, this is a juicy read

xp

sounds quite diff from

and no, HR in any competent place isn't going to do some shell game bullshit when it's obvious coworkers are going to talk and realize a "first incident" is anything but

― mh 😏, Sunday, February 19, 2017 5:07 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you mean where I said "in any competent place" and also referred to "functional workplaces" in the other?

I guess it depends on whether you judge competence by their ability to shield management or their ability to act justly

I have a friend and former coworker who works at Uber and is friends with Susan; he corroborrated all of this, but also told me that there was a large HR shakeup several months ago (before she left) partially as a result of all of this already; and the two principals she mentioned (the one who did the whole thing with the jackets, and the one who propositioned her) were both gone; the latter fired, the former quit and is not director of eng at google, and is apparently a massive shithead. He defended the company to a degree, because he still drinks their kool aid, and also thinks that this situation isn't that abnormal (and drew comparisons to his former place of work, where I am now a manager; but, though the place I work has some ethical issues w/r/t who is in HR and how they've responded to, like, two things, it's absolutely not even close to being the same kind of thing where it seems like systematic workplace wide harrassment is covered up)

"and is NOW at google,"