Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

you monster

They're the only service one my my favorite sandwich shop uses! Also we have ample public transit.

heh https://www.axios.com/benchmark-capital-sues-travis-kalanick-for-fraud-2471455477.html

omg so good

huh, wonder who owns the rest

I mean, 10%? 13% is a large enough stake they have them by the balls? is it all a split between founders and venture capital groups all holding less than 10?

It's enough to screw him over for life, and I will be deeply content.

I think uber is a good example of a company with a lot of power, requiring strong ethical guidance, that their users and stakeholders didn't get

the ability of data/tech being able to surface details easily is poorly understood, even among people who deal with software but don't consider that ethical line. I was mentioning Facebook graph search to a coworker today -- not the developer API, but the feature they rolled out in beta to users that opted in. In theory, I can click around and find anyone who has a public profile, any friend who has everything shared, every friend-of-friend or in-network person who hasn't locked down their sharing settings. But people click around a little and don't think about it.

When they had graph search for users, I could go to get dinner, think "hmm do I recognize that waiter from somewhere" and search "men working at <restaurant>" and even refine it to "men working at <restaurant> between age <x> and <y>" or do dumb general things like "women who live in san francisco and like nine inch nails" and it'd give me *everything* that fit within the limits of a person's security setting

that is way beyond the expectations of what any person would consider someone would find. Uber, they had all the data and showed their asses when they put up the data of "hey, here's where the people in the room were earlier today!" freaking people out. They kept doing that shit internally.

It's weird how Facebook rolled out graph search as a big revolutionary thing, and then it only sort of worked, and now it seems to be basically gone?

some people realized it did what I outlined and said "uhhh?" and they had enough ethics people to realized they fucked up

the rolled-out one was still a little too wtf and not monetizable enough

When they had graph search for users, I could go to get dinner, think "hmm do I recognize that waiter from somewhere" and search "men working at <restaurant>" and even refine it to "men working at <restaurant> between age <x> and <y>" or do dumb general things like "women who live in san francisco and like nine inch nails" and it'd give me *everything* that fit within the limits of a person's security setting

Most people have never had any real training on how to use a search engine. But yeah. People need to understand how this shit really can affect them, and how the back end works, and how analysts (and librarians, and researchers, etc) think.

I'm actually thinking now about how to use what you just posted as a way to explain why people *can* trust me and my colleagues at our jobs when I do engagements

I still get irrationally angry when people show screenshots where they type questions into Facebook ("what is" or "who" or whatever)

sorry, meant google

Whoops!

DO NOT PUBLISH https://t.co/51WK5CgvTv pic.twitter.com/j4iDnN3CiI

— noah kulwin (@nkulw) August 11, 2017

mh i used to too but now it can be an effective way to get results on a narrow question that you're pretty sure has been answered by someone who's used the query as their headline - precisely in order to game those people who type questions into google!

Yeah, that is true, and if you’re looking for question/answer format and get a site like Quora you may be in luck

but you have to realize if I type “who is the king of Spain?” I am looking for pages where people have asked this exact question, not searching for a fact and “king of Spain” or “king spain” or “Spanish king” is a more ‘proper’ search

Medical stuff or social concerns are odious offenders because “is x group racist” won’t give you a list of beliefs of that group, but places where people have a vested interest in answering that question

This seems bonkers:

https://amp.ft.com/content/0ab7c891-5d3c-37ae-abbd-13a356611477

Uber plans go raise money from a share sale but can't find anyone to buy in at the current notional value so will offer a discount. The actual value of the shares (ie what anyone will pay for them) is being treated as a special offer in order to pretend that the on-paper value is real, which it obviously isn't.

alphaville is great at roasting uber

and roasting bitcoin

Mmmm slow roasted bitcoin

Just falls off the bone

Bitmaster

Uber's licence for London has been revoked.

“Uber’s approach and conduct demonstrate a lack of corporate responsibility”

i'm sure this is just a slap on the wrist, i doubt the state will really stand up to a massive company like this, but perhaps i'm wrong.

It's competing special interests so taxi drivers / Addison Lee vs Uber so i don't think there's a clear long-term winner on that front.

don't have a lot of sympathy for black cabs and their prices but ideally there would be a company like uber that's more ethical. i use uber a lot - don't feel particularly proud of it - i find the conversations i've had with the drivers genuinely one of the best things about it, on several occasions it's been my first experience meeting a person from the given country, on many, many other occasions have just had really interesting chats. i get the impression that the actual setup works well for people, they can work as often as they want, pick their hours etc, that kind of thing seems appealing, but i'm not saying it's a great job or something. equally i know a lot of them are working 15/16 hours a day.

what i mean is the idea of opening up driving work for people is a good one, just make it fair.

Twitter responses some real dregs of humanity shit across the board - may have to stop paying my Internet licence.

There is a Goldline app btw. I use it. And if you have questions you can call and talk to somebody.

IGWB criticises TfL

James Farrar, co-claimant in landmark employment tribunal decision against Uber and chair of the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain's (IWGB) United Private Hire Drivers (UPHD) branch said:

"This is a devastating blow for 30,000 Londoners who now face losing their job and being saddled with unmanageable vehicle related debt.To strip Uber of it's license after five years of laissez faire regulation is a testament to a systemic failure at TfL. Rather than banish Uber, TfL should have strengthened its regulatory oversight, curbed runaway licensing and protected the worker rights of drivers. The Mayor must call for an urgent independent review of TfL to identify the causes of failure and prevent something like this from ever happening again."

IWGB even

Free market types sure like using the words 'innovative' and 'choice'.

communists

oof i didn't consider that whole scam where uber pays for the cost of the drivers' cars then garnishes their wages for repayment over ~5 years or whatever. i guess the drivers are left holding the bag for those repayments now except with no immediate means of keeping up with them?

i think it's not even uber they owe the money to. it's a different credit company uber retains in each city that has no interest or reason to defer payment if uber gets banned.

IGWB guy otm, but Uber as a company still deserves to be destroyed

There were minicabs before Uber and there will be minicabs after Uber. TfL is standing up for the traditional British way of life which includes stepping in a pool of drying vomit as you stumble drunkenly to a minicab office at 2am.

I have tinnitus and hyperacusis - it's a hearing problem where you hear everything much louder than it actually is. A long tube journey home, even with protective headphones, sometimes feels like being punched in the head for an hour. It's hardgoing, and harder still because you don't visually signify as a person with a disability. So whenever I'm dashing through streets or tube stations and people think I'm being an arsehole - I'm actually trying to escape from the noise.

I don't have any love for the people who run Uber, but the service has been a godsend for me - I genuinely wouldn't be able to afford to leave the house half the time, if I had to rely on minicabs and TFL. And I can't image how it'll affect those with much more serious disabilities.

The drivers can be arseholes, like any cabbie. But the proportion of jerks seems a lot lower than it did for minicabs and black cabs.

i will admit to reactivating my uber account (which I got rid of and never use in the US) when I was in london for two weeks and it was immensely helpful and I was spared having to talk to black cab drivers, pay them in cash, and be broke.

v good article on this miracle of a website:

https://www.londonreconnections.com/2017/understanding-uber-not-app/

used the Goldline app last night again in London. love it. Hackney to Stratford for £9. an Uber probably would have been 6 or 7. But fuck Uber. the Goldline app is honestly 95% as good. photo of the driver, description of the car, a little map showing where your car is, estimated time, debit card plumbed in.

Not sure where else to put this, or what it's even supposed to be, but I saw one of these the other day and was thinking an actual ambulance rideshare company would be pretty funny:

http://www.ambulnz.com/

So now uber is way cheaper than lyft at least in this city

thought this revive would be Uber concealed huge data breach

Lyft is really good now, deleted Uber off phone when all the cool kids were doing it and have not felt motivated to reinstall it in the many months since

same. It's not like Lyft is a "good" company, but at least it doesn't seem like an "extra shitty" company like Uber, and now that there app is at least as good as Uber's there's really no reason to use Uber.

ftr i only use lyft but my colleague ubers home every day and he constantly compares uber vs lyft and usu lyft is double the cost

lyft came up with the “let anyone drive for us, not just licensed chauffeurs” model and uber decided to copy it to remain competitive, sooo

i kno

just sayin bruh