"These tech companies used lobbies to destroy the enterprise structure of our civilization from taxi cab medallions to hotels to brick-and-mortar businesses."
Taxi cab medallions are a very poor example to cite. I'm empathetic to the story of terrible customer service and share sentiments about the overall erosion of user experience with many tech-adjacent, so-called disruptive services, but the second anyone suggests we were better off with the taxi cab than Uber or Lyft, they lose all credibility in my eyes. I think the biggest benefit that many fail to mention is that you can actually get rides when and where you need to. For example, people have far fewer excuses to drunk drive from bars in my hometown now than they did 15 years ago. I've had my skin saved by several rides that would be impossible without ride-sharing services.
My issue with taxi has always been the scams, not even the long detours.
The local law requires that the taxi must take credit card and/or debit cards. If the machine is broken, they can’t take customers till it’s fixed.
30% of the time they tell me that the machine is broken and they want cash. When I say I don’t have cash they offer to drive to the ATM so I can take out some cash, while still on the meter of course. When I asked them to turn off the meter to take me to the ATM, they say it’s illegal.
I realised that as a socially anxious person who wants to be more confident, an LLM might come useful in summarising the local law to this effect quickly and especially the right steps to take.
There’s an interesting middle ground also. I live in a city where you still need to be a licensed taxi driver to drive for Uber and the cars must be marked (in the UK; it doesn’t seem to be that uncommon here). I don’t in all honesty know how much regulation that actually involves, but certainly more than “some random person with a car”. So there is a least a little bit of accountability.
From idle chit chat with the drivers that used to drive for a traditional firm, many have told me they prefer it. They’re very keen on their ability to vet passengers first via ratings, and that people can’t hop out and run away without paying, which apparently is/was not uncommon on Friday and Saturday nights. As a passenger, I like that I can’t be fobbed off with “he’s just round the corner mate” for 30+ minutes and I don’t have to worry about getting cash.
It can be a mutually beneficial thing, it just can’t be an unregulated free-for-all which it sounds like many implementations are.
It's been a while since I was at JFK but when I frequented it I always took the subway. Same for Heathrow, CDG, etc. I generally have much better experiences with general public transport than I do with any sort of taxi "service" but maybe I'm the odd one out?
You have to deal with the AirTrain (which isn't free) at JFK. The Tube actually has a Heathrow station, and the RER goes directly to CDG. It's even easier to get to Gatwick than JFK.
what's the problem with the airtran? it's rare to get to lower Manhattan faster with a taxi than via subway even with congestion pricing. and the cost will be at least 10x.
And for the record, I've also had comically bad experiences with Lyft and Uber including drivers ranting about other customers in smelly unkempt cars (while on a date!) and my ride being significantly delayed because the driver wanted to stop for gas and also got themselves dinner while they were there. And I still love this crap!
Did you rate those drivers appropriately, and not tip them?
In general I try to avoid giving any less than 5 stars for anything but a safety issue, because a low-4.x rating can get a driver deactivated. But stopping for gas and getting food? Nope, that's gonna get you a low rating.
The ranting about other customers thing is something I'm torn on. Everyone has a bad day sometimes, and that shouldn't affect their livelihood. But still...
Genuinely don't know why you think Uber / Lyft are so much better than taxis? They cost slightly less now (used to be tons left till they needed to turn a profit), but it's still basically the same drivers driving them. They give the same type of service and do the same stuff. Only thing they don't do anymore is drive excessively long routes to run up the meter.
I guess it depends on where you live. Where I live, pre-Uber, I could never get a taxi in the first place. There were never any driving around to hail, and calling a cab company meant waiting 30-60 minutes, and more than half the time the taxi wouldn't show up at all. Drivers can and would take longer routes to run up the meter if they thought you weren't a savvy passenger. They'd also love to claim the credit card reader is broken, even when that was a violation of local law. If you had a complaint about a driver, you could call the taxi company, and they would assure you they care, but nothing would actually happen.
Now I get a car arriving in a predictable amount of time, at a pre-set price, paid outside the flow of the ride. If I have a problem with the driver or car I can report it with a low rating and a comment, and Uber and Lyft are notorious about deactivating drivers with even a rating in the low 4.x range. I can also give a lower or no tip if there's a problem, without feeling socially awkward about it.
Where do you normally take taxis? Hailing them can be hard, they might not want to go where you're going, the credit card reader might be broken, and they might take a worse route.
Taxis are a perfect example— as long as you tar the existing system as the enemy, you can get people to tolerate your bad behavior. “Those guys suck, we’re on your side!” Works for presidents, too.
Taxi cab medallions are a very poor example to cite.
"Things are bad where I am, and therefore it's OK for the tech bros to eviscerate an entire industry all around the planet, no matter what the local conditions were elsewhere."
Your experience is not the only experience. It does not justify what has been done. Your post only provides an yet another random angry anecdote, of which the internet is already flooded.
They got eviscerated specifically because taxi companies were horrible to begin with in a lot of these places. In other countries like Japan or Singapore where taxi drivers are ethical and honest, I’d happily take a taxi any day.
There's nothing wrong with eviscerating entire industries worldwide. That has been the way that disruptive innovations worked since the start of the industrial age. Adapt or perish.
> but the second anyone suggests we were better off with the taxi cab than Uber or Lyft
Uber or Lyft are more convenient for the customer, but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.
That's the thing about BigTech: nobody says that the product was not more convenient (at least before enshittification), but the problem is that BigTech abuses their dominant position, over and over again.
> Uber or Lyft are more convenient for the customer
Gross understatement!
1) You can find a cab wherever (almost) and whenever (24x7) - you don't have to hail a cab for minutes/hours (even worse was not knowing when/if the cab would even arrive).
2) Much safer. Emergency support + seeing the route on GPS (can see the path on the driver's uber app) + rating system.
3) Better behaviour, enforced by rating system. Yes, it's not perfect, but much much better than cabs. Cab drivers were regularly abusive, knowing there were no repurcussions. Unfortunately, humans only behave when there's consequences.
4) No scamming vulnerable un-informed people. Cabs were known for scamming foreigners or un-informed people.
I can point out a few more things.
Calling it `more convenient` is a massive understatement.
> but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.
This can be fixed by regulation. Just because a new technology brought a new problem, that doesn't mean we should discard the technology and go to its worse predecessor.
Remember : there is a reason the new technology took over its predecessor.
I think we can have both : the benefits of digital ride-share + good regulation for drivers to ensure they can maintain their livelihood.
PS : that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...
> I think we can have both : the benefits of digital ride-share + good regulation
Not in the US, who don't believe in regulations. But yeah, my point was that the best would be the convenience of those apps without the abuse. It seems possible outside the US, though: I believe Greece had banned Uber from the beginning on, and Taxis ended up building a similar app.
> that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...
Oh right, it's the year of the fully autonomous car! Or was it last year? Or 2016?
> Oh right, it's the year of the fully autonomous car! Or was it last year? Or 2016?
Just because CEOs have been hyping this tech up to raise valuations doesn't mean it will never happen. They said the same about landing rockets - now, it's a regular thing.
It's pretty clear that driverless is coming - exact timeline is unclear. Whether in 3 years, 5 years, or a decade, but it's coming.
I still don't get this one. You don't have to sign a long-term contract to drive for these companies. They don't own you. If you try it and it sucks more than working somewhere else then stop doing it. Your leverage is your ability to say no. But if it's better than your other alternatives then why isn't the complaint about the alternatives which are somehow even worse?
Vehicle depreciation is one big example. Any commercial vehicle operator knows that driving a car around causes its value to decrease substantially, 29 cents per mile on average as of 2018, and will (must!) account for that when running the numbers on their business. But most individual drivers don't have the expertise to intuit this, and Uber and Lyft don't tell them. So all but the most financially savvy drivers have an effective income significantly lower than they believe.
> Any commercial vehicle operator knows that driving a car around causes its value to decrease substantially, 29 cents per mile on average as of 2018, and will (must!) account for that when running the numbers on their business.
People are always saying this and then you go to KBB. The average car is >12 years old, so let's suppose you're going to get rid of your Prius when it's 12 years old instead of allowing it to become older than average. Typical mileage at that age might be around 150,000 miles. Trade in value in good condition for a 12 year old Prius with 150,000 is ~$4300. Double the mileage to 300,000 miles, it drops to ~$2600. That's $1700 for an extra 150,000 miles, or around $0.01/mile.
$0.29/mile is from new or nearly-new cars which are then resold as nearly new. If you buy a new car and immediately roll the odometer past six digits its value is going to fall off a cliff. But if you start with a ten year old car which has already lost most of its value to depreciation, and then put a lot more miles on it over a couple more years -- which is what most of the people driving for Uber would actually be doing -- the cost is dramatically lower.
Presuming that the people choosing to do this as a profession can't figure this out is kind of patronizing, but, in the common case, not even that much of a difference.
Uber requires that your vehicle be less than 10 years old and in good condition as well as pass an inspection from a licensed mechanic. You can’t just go ahead and grab a 12 year old clunker and run it into the ground unless you’re only planning to do food deliveries (which have no restrictions on vehicle quality).
Plenty of 10-16 year old vehicles are in good condition and will pass an inspection.
You can keep a vehicle in good condition indefinitely because vehicles are made of modular parts and parts can be replaced as they wear out. Whether this is worth doing depends on the expected frequency of future repairs, which in turn depends on the specific make and model (there's a reason the most common ride sharing car is a Prius), how well the car is maintained and how stupid you drive it, but most cars continue to be worth maintaining rather than scrapping until they're 20-25 years old. Which is why the average age of vehicles on the road is just over 12 years, implying that they last approximately twice that long.
This is presumably some kind of regulatory requirement since it's jurisdiction specific. But even selling the car at 10 years old under similar conditions still causes the depreciation to be less than $0.02/mile.
On the other hand, that's around an extra $1000 over the life of the car, and who is to blame for that increase in costs on the driver? It's not as if 10 year old cars are meaningfully safer than 12 year old cars, nor would non-trivial numbers of people be using significantly older cars than that to begin with. Is this really just the Canadian government screwing the drivers for want of something to do?
It might just be a weather thing. 10 year old cars in Canada can be almost completely rusted out unless the owner has been diligent about rustproofing and washing the car frequently during winter. It’s all that road salt slush that splashes all over the car underbody and sticks to it, causing horrible galvanic corrosion.
Using "empathy" as the reason to diminish the options of someone who has few to begin with is the oblivious cruelty of the political functionary.
If A and B are both bad but B is worse, and then you prohibit A because A is bad, what result do you expect? B is still worse than A and B is now their only option.
More than 70% are over the age of 50. Only 1.5% are 30 or under. Approximately 90% of Uber drivers are doing it part-time. These are not naive kids being taken advantage of, they're older people who want a little extra income and to get out of the house.
The people claiming that this is abuse are the people who want to sustain a taxi medallion cartel. Competition from bored retirees interferes with that, so they demonize it. This is how we get bad laws, regulatory capture and cost disease.
You help people by giving them new opportunities, not by taking existing opportunities away. Have some empathy.
> By making them work for BigTech that takes makes them rely on tips because it takes most of their profits?
Who is making them work there? Is there any place in the world where Uber is the only source of employment?
> With regulations, you don't have to take opportunities away. You can just control the abuse.
The incumbents define opportunities for competing drivers as abuse and then want to prohibit the competition from doing that. This is straightforwardly taking away those opportunities from others to benefit the incumbents.
If it was actually abuse, the people nevertheless choosing it as the best of their available alternatives would have to be in a position where all of their other alternatives are also abusive. This typically happens when there is some kind of serious monopolization or regulatory capture in the local economy. In that case you can forget about the original company for a minute and redirect all your efforts to addressing that, because then you're on a sinking ship and if you don't stop taking on water it's not going to matter how you position the deck chairs.
Whereas if there are non-abusive alternatives and people are willfully choosing the "abusive" one, something doesn't add up and you shouldn't assume that it's them rather than you who doesn't understand their situation.
That isn't what most of the proposals or actual laws to "regulate Uber" do.
But let's consider your proposal. The first question to ask about any proposed rule is, what are people going to do in response to it? If you limit how much they can take for providing a matching app, they'll add some other feature to their service and charge for that. Or just break out the existing charge on the customer's statement to list something else they're already providing. Your purpose wasn't to prohibit anyone from offering services other than matching to livery drivers and customers, right?
The next question to ask is, what problem are you trying to solve? Are their margins too high? Uber's net margin for 2024 was ~10%, and that was the first year it was even a positive number.
number of causal inference studies have shown that uber/lyft lead to broad based wage gains for the poorest segment of the working population. the cartel approach is only better for the select few who get to be drivers
Ok, based wage gains for the poorest segment. What about those who lose? Because Uber makes a ton of money while it's still cheaper to take an Uber than a taxi. Someone, somewhere has to lose, right?
Now imagine they did not abuse the drivers... it would possibly be even better for the poorest segment!
A lot of it boils down to a promise that existing systems (and existing ways to handle error and deter wrongdoing) have somehow been replaced by "With An App" that efficiently reimplements what came before... but in reality most of the expensive features have been secretly removed, and you won't find that out until you're the one getting screwed.
Come to think of it, a similar phenomenon applies to cryptocurrencies: Even when they aren't an outright fraud, somebody has just thrown away the hard parts learned over centuries, quietly dropping them or trying to convince you that it's better to be entirely without.
The general pattern is this: You create a system, it has problems, people establish some apparatus to address the problems, the apparatus is a central chokepoint which is then captured by incumbents and abused for oppression, people demand a new system, you create a new system, it has problems, ...
You either need to prevent the apparatus from being captured by incumbents or you need to prevent it from being a central chokepoint that can be abused for oppression.
Definitely sounds like one vector, along with enshittification and other factors.
>*You either need to prevent the apparatus...or..."
That solution set kind of assumes that we must get to this point where those are the viable options. For me that begs the question, "what's underlying all of this that makes it so arriving here is the pattern?"
For example, questioning what we can do about such centralization and entrenched incumbencies in the first place; exploring whether some industries should be not-for-profit or public benefit, etc.
In general, the current system/economy presents a ton of inertia, frequently backed by network effects. I think we'll need to start looking at more creative/disruptive solutions for many of these issues.
There's nothing wrong with offering consumer services through not-for-profit or public benefit corporations. The problem is getting enough initial capital to keep it running until it's cash flow neutral. Regular investors want to maximize returns so then you're stuck trying to find wealthy people to donate. Good luck with that.
It's a good point, and what you're really underscoring here gets to the heart of my comment—that is, the "creative/disruptive" solutions I referenced will require a re-think of everything, including the current "get investors who expect infinite returns" model. Likewise, expanding our thinking beyond wealthy donors being the only other alternative.
So, for instance, crowd-fundable or lower capex businesses may need to be prioritized. There are many other creative avenues waiting to be discovered.
Because, I agree that it's hard to see how you can keep all of these elements of the current model (and baseline assumptions) in place and expect a different outcome.
So, once you pull the thread of disruption, it'll unwind a lot more that needs to be addressed/solved. But, I believe it would be worth the pull.
That's just hand waving. The vast majority of people with capital will only ever be willing to invest based on expected returns. If they don't have a chance to make a significant profit on a risk-adjusted basis then they won't invest at all. They'll just keep their cash in the bank or spend it on consumption or real estate instead.
>That's just hand waving. The vast majority of people with capital will only ever be willing...
Yes, if the only option you can imagine for building a business is to go the traditional investor/VC route, then this is probably true.
Kind of odd, though. You actually introduced the idea of "regular investors" being some sort of requirement, when the whole point is to re-imagine how we build businesses.
But, I suppose all new ideas—especially disruptive ones—appear as hand waving, given that most people are unable to imagine beyond the status quo.
The whole "with crypto, you don't need to put your faith in anyone [foremost: the banking system], the ledger is the single source of truth" is depressing.
Remember the word "credit" is Latin for "I believe/trust".
I avoid the whole "sharing economy" as much as possible. I think I've taken an uber or lyft twice when I was in a pinch in a city I wasn't familiar with, and once ordered a truck part to be delivered from a store in town that ended up being through a third party app (I couldn't drive down without the replacement fuel pump).
I really don't get the hope of trusting individuals that are arguably being taken advantage of by a faceless tech business rather than trusting employees or contractors that are at least more invested in customer service for the company.
It makes about as much sense to me as distrusting humans so much that you want to put all your wealth in a glorified git repo coded by humans and run by a small number of people.
Either trust people or don't, its a pretty simple choice. Convincing ourselves that a layer of tech can abstract humans away so much that we don't need to trust anyone is just absurd.
I don't quite follow your point, can you help me out here?
> it sounds like you are less trustful of strangers, not more
Less trustful of strangers compared to what?
> i’m confused why you’re spinning it the opposite
What am I spinning the opposite? My point was that I don't trust the incentives behind the sharing economy and have no reason to expect better service than from the more service-focused businesses they're attempting to replace.
I very much expect that I just didn't explain myself well in the earlier comment. Sorry about that.
He should have taken the car to the local police station to be impounded and started a credit card chargeback the moment Turo started demanding that he return a car that isn't legally drivable. It's still not too late to initiate the charge back.
All of these peer to peer apps have the same fate; it works in the high trust parts of the country, but the moment you scale, the quality of service decreases, fees increase, etc.
That's all businesses. Ever visited an inner city corner market? Items cost more, there's less selection, and quality of service? The employees are behind bulletproof glass.
I've fortunately had nothing but great experiences renting through Turo, but a story like this will definitely give me pause if I am in the position of considering renting through them again.
OP praises Enterprise, but I can't say I've ever had a delightful experience with them, or with any of the big car rental chains. Usually it involves a 20 minute wait in a line at an airport, followed by 10 minutes of someone typing into a computer for who knows what reason, followed by me wandering aimlessly in a parking lot looking for the correct car, which is always a surprise. There was also the time when I paid up front online for a car, and when I got there they wanted to give me an EV. I didn't want one, because I was pretty sure I was driving to a place with little to no charging infrastructure, and they ended up charging me more (surprise!) for an ICE car.
With Turo I always know exactly what I'm going to get, and it's easy to search for a car with specific attributes, like AWD or a roof rack. But yeah, you're also at the mercy of whoever random person owns the car, and it sounds like Turo's customer support is garbage when there's a problem.
National is excellent but you pay a premium. They focus on airports and business travelers, which means their fleet is newer and less beat up (also tend to be driven by individuals rather than families). If you sign up for free Emerald program, theres no waiting. Go to lot, pick any car and drive to gate and check out.
Enterprise owns them but they definitely operate on a different tier of service. If your work has discount codes with them, they're definitely better than all the other rental agencies. (I travel for work and have rented from almost all the major brands)
Problem with Turo is that most credit card damage waivers don't work with Turo.
My experience at rental car companies has in the last couple of years degraded to say the least. Customer service has been pretty hostile similar to the descriptions of turo in this article.
I think part of it is consolidation of the companies. Hertz now seems to be hertz plus dollar plus some other company. Hertz used to be cool (and more expensive, now it’s one of the cheapest).
It feels like it felt as the taxi companies were being killed by uber and later Lyft. Some external factor is causing them to fail and they’re floundering and clawing for every penny they can get.
I never heard of turo but may check it out for my next trip to the USA. But I think the real killer of the rental car companies is rideshare. It’s now usually cheaper for me to do two rides a day on rideshare than to rent a car for a week.
> It’s now usually cheaper for me to do two rides a day on rideshare than to rent a car for a week.
That's a big thing too. Whenever I have to rent a car, I go for the cheapest option, and that usually ends up being no lower than $60/day (plus taxes). If I only need it for a couple rides per day, that could very easily cost less. Plus I don't need to deal with gas, parking, or returning the car, worry about damaging the car, or ensure that I haven't had alcohol to drink before those trips.
There's truth to the main point that "gig economy" companies aren't adequately held responsible for the services they broker or sell (depending on your perspective). They avoid risk in a way that isn't obvious to buyers until something goes wrong, and there are few enough horror stories that they can stay in business.
That's the meat of the story.
It goes off the rails a bit with quotes like these, and mentions "Big Tech," but is really about the gig economy brokers.
> [tech billionaires] not only destroyed the financial system
Not really. Maybe he lumped 2008 bankers in with tech, but Uber was the worst offender, and it disrupted a differently bad taxi medallion monopoly, not the "financial system."
> These corporations don’t pay taxes
Also not true. I'm sure some don't because they're not profitable, but you can't be not profitable forever.
>Also not true. I'm sure some don't because they're not profitable, but you can't be not profitable forever.
They might pay taxes in some jurisdiction, but usually not in the UK.
The profit problem is actually that they can be not profitable for a really long time due to VC money. Long enough to put competitors out of business, for instance
What’s amazing about Turo is how they just get around the law and regulation to screw everyone but themselves
How? They don’t rent airport space they use existing lots. Hawaii airports are full all the time because Turo cars are parked in them waiting for passengers
I can't believe what I'm reading on this thread. I have seen two people argue that it is OK for a corporation to not provide the service it is contracted to provide. I have seen one argue that it is OK to commit fraud. I have seen one claim that there is no such thing as a social contract.
I call you all out as sub-human, waste of a skin, unethical, money worshippers. Get a grip of yourselves before the pendulum swings back from the far right, and knocks you off your perch.
The government and the law exist to keep property from the majority. If you erode those systems for short term business gains, you will lose that protection. Your smart mouths and Ayn Rand books won't offer the slightest resistance when the majority kick in your door, and take their share. Meritocracy won't mean 'who had a rich dad and went to a fancy school' anymore. Meritocracy will be about who is strongest, the nerd or the mob of manual labourers. What a bunch of clowns.
It is OK to force corporations to provide the service that they were contracted to provide, yes. I think most right minded people would agree with that.
That's correct. My criticism is that he bends this into a criticism of tech in general. As if they somehow denied him the ability to rent a car from somewhere else.
It is a valid criticism of VC backed tech, awash with free money and able to operate below the margins of other rental firms, thereby forcing them out of business. It is also a valid criticism of tech firms that decide they can disrupt a market by pretending the rules don't apply to them. That is until the law catches up with them, by which time they have degraded their competition.
The guy had to order 2 cars since the first didn't show up, his second car was illegal to drive but still rented out to him, and then he was charged a bunch of clearly fraudulent fees by an angry "host" who is mad his car wasn't street legal.
Idk, I think he has the right to complain about that. It's all wrong, and his time is worth something and should be compensated for.
So, you are forcing people to accept something regardless of their opinion.
Isn't that the principle of authoritarianism?
Sure, you have vote, you may ot many not have freedoms depending of the country, but did that person accepted that social contract?
What is the difference with slavery? The social contract is basically slavery of born children to do whatever the "nation" says. This is not different than a slave and their owner.
What the hell are you talking about? You just don't seem to understand... I don't know... words?
The concept of social contract is descriptive. "Descriptive" as in it "describes" something. It has nothing - as in 0% - to do with forcing people to accept anything or authoritarianism.
Not a lawyer, but: When you order food at a restaurant, the law assumes an implied contract—you agree to pay for what you consume. Even without a written agreement, courts recognize this as a valid contract based on common practice.
I wonder if a future society can allow geniuses like you to opt-out of the social contract, and there'd be outlaws roaming the lands, ready to rob you that evening, hey you agreed to opt out of police protection!
once again, this is an implication that I ordered it. If you put a gun to my face and demand that I order a McBurger, that does not mean that we entered a contract.
As Hume called it, a convenient fiction. It isn't how any government came to be, and a contract imposed under threat of force isn't valid anyway.
I'm reminded also of that meme cartoon with the annoying person coming out of a hole and observing the suffering citizen is still participating in society, "how interesting".
Depends on where. There's a place on Earth that has an actual bona fide document titled "social contract", enacted and regularly updated via referendums:
Which one? Hobbes's, Rousseau's, Locke's, or Spencer's? Generally, these so-called contracts are morally fashionable bandwagons attempting to appeal to some vague authority. They lack at least two elements that make a contract in the proper sense of the term: mutual consideration and clear, well-defined, promises of fixed duration and scope. There's no contractual obligation to keep a society "alive" indefinitely and for its own sake anymore than there was one to keep the British Empire in tact.
You can have the anarchy you desire in a cabin in the woods or on some a random island away from society. You won't have to adhere to common decency or common currency there.
At some point we need to know the difference between making decisions in good faith or seeking discounted goods and services in a way that jeopardize your own family safety. Knee-jerk reactions related to template interpretations of the situation do not help.
How was trying to use Turo as a last resort not a decision made in good faith? I imagine jogging alone at night is also a decision not made in good faith, by your estimation. Please spare me.
Fact that it's in their file means they went through the justice system for it, and paid for their crime, which is precisely part of the social contract. Point of their article is that tech services should be bound to some similar expectation. What you're suggesting is that making some mistake in your early years makes you unredeamable to society's eyes.
And even then, it's an attack ad hominem. Who makes an argument doesn't detracts from the argument's validity if it's a good one.
I don't understand this story. Why would you have an "expectation that the service will be professional", when you first heard about the company from news reports their service was used in multiple terrorist attacks? When was there ever a social contract that every company with an app can be trusted to provide high-quality service?
> their service was used in multiple terrorist attacks
For as much as Turo sucks, the fact that vehicles used in terrorist attacks were rented through them is somewhat irrelevant to the trust you should put into the service ; not much more than where they ate their breakfast before, slept that night, or what brand of clothing they were wearing. It seems that said terrorists didn't have a criminal background, and they could very well have rented them through Avis, Enterprise and whatnot. They could have purchased Teslas, that would not have made Teslas a more terrorist-risk prone car than a Ford.
Right, it’s entirely irrelevant! So why was the source author surprised when he used this car rental company he had no reason to trust and they turned out to be untrustworthy?
Not only that, it sounds like the sort of thing that could happen with rental cars in general. The car is being rented out to randos, one of the randos does something sufficiently heinous with the car to cause the registration to be immediately suspended and then returns it without saying anything, the next renter gets a car with a suspended registration before the rental place gets the notice telling them about it.
Some people are not so horrifying that they would start a business with liabilities of that type. Any of us can hook up an uncensored LLM right now to a lot of apps, but it's very dangerous to release. There are greedy people that don't care and are doing it.
If you are going to do these things, you must go into it with both eyes open. Some people are not ethically qualified to run businesses, but they will still have tons of success in it because they stick to the raw standard of $$$ accumulated.
The broader standard for success (well rounded citizen) in society is more robust. Morality and ethics are part of it. Many parents don't talk to their kids, or their parents never talked to them, and the cycle continued. Many of these people can reach very very old ages as half a human.
> Some people are not ethically qualified to run businesses, but they will still have tons of success in it because they stick to the raw standard of $$$ accumulated.
Let's take the article's account as true and consider the "businessperson"/host he rented the car from. This isn't a matter of "there should be laws" here. The things they allegedly did are already illegal. Overstating the mileage on the vehicle is fraud etc. A person who does that is a criminal. Likewise the drivers who assault women.
The mistake is in looking to Turo or Uber to adjudicate this. They're not the police. Go to the actual police. What nonsense is this that we expect a tech company to replace the courts? That's the source of the problem. Let the app just be an app and if criminals use the app they face an actual judge.
Alright. Not a hill to die on. I do like that there is activism here. Truly, its civic activism that's done freely. If this is the last time I hear about bullshit like this, then wonderful. Otherwise, this all joins the very large pile of shit the tech bros have been unleashing.
It's seductive to want to align with the bravado of cut-throat businessmen. I was sucker for it too. It's such a cool archetype when you are impressionable, but then you grow up and realize humanity is about more than that.
Taxi cab medallions are a very poor example to cite. I'm empathetic to the story of terrible customer service and share sentiments about the overall erosion of user experience with many tech-adjacent, so-called disruptive services, but the second anyone suggests we were better off with the taxi cab than Uber or Lyft, they lose all credibility in my eyes. I think the biggest benefit that many fail to mention is that you can actually get rides when and where you need to. For example, people have far fewer excuses to drunk drive from bars in my hometown now than they did 15 years ago. I've had my skin saved by several rides that would be impossible without ride-sharing services.