My wife had the same issue with Lyft. She was taking a ride home last year when they got hit from behind by a car that tried to drive around them and ended up hitting them. She gave a statement to Lyft support to make clear that the Lyft driver was not at fault. However when describing the driver who hit the Lyft she called him "young" - so Lyft support blocked her account for making discriminatory statements in violation of their community guidelines. We had to escalate that to the CEO because there was no avenue of appeal without an active account. They played back the audio of her conversation and afterwards did agree to restore her account, but cautioned that if she violated community guidelines again in 90 days she would be banned permanently! You can't make stuff like that up.
There's an argument that companies should be able to run themselves however they please, that Lyft should be able to have whatever community guidelines they choose, no matter how silly it's their right.
I agree with this as long as there is a healthy free market, and 2 or 3 companies to choose from isn't a healthy free market. Either we need to bust these companies up, or regulate them better. In D&D terms, a single company shouldn't be able to give you a permanent stat penalty just because you did something like use the word "young". Many of these companies are so big that if one of the big 2 or 3 ban you, your entire life will be affected. Another example is LinkedIn, if I get banned from LinkedIn I guess I'll just take the -50% to all future job opportunities. Once these companies get big enough they owe society better than automated support processes and surprise lifetime bans once an algorithm determines you might not be profitable enough to bother with.
Companies that operate under limited liability should have an obligation to run their companies in a way that benefits society (otherwise we should withdraw the limitation on investor liability, as it is being used against us).
It's pretty funny how lots of people that are more or less rabidly anti-regulation never manage to consider limited liability to be regulation.
This is exactly how I look at it. The “censorship” and “arbitrary banning” isn’t the key problem. The key problem is that some of these entities are so powerful that being censored by them, or arbitrarily banned by them, can have serious long term consequences on almost anyone.
Frankly, the antitrust regulators and legislators have been asleep at the wheel for decades and have allowed an unimaginable level of consolidation in multiple sectors of the market. We should never have gotten to this point, but now that we’re here I feel like we need to follow the Big Bell example.
It would be handy if they had a requirement of transparency. Having your job threatened for saying that a driver that hit you looked "young" is too obscure.
Make it clear what you won't accept, have a whole web page with every single thing that you have decided on as corporate taboo.
The problem is that there was a healthy free market, until the pearl-clutching wealthy decided they didn't like all the taxis that were cluttering up the streets and lobbied to introduce licensing. It took enormous companies breaking the law at an industrial scale to destroy this artificially expensive and terrible regulatory capture, and now those same companies are using the same regulatory mechanisms as a moat to stop competitors.
Gas tax is only paid for by cars that use gasoline. With Uber pushing Teslas pretty heavily ($1,000 to the driver if they get
drive a Tesla for Uber, which covers two months payment on a leased Model 3), I'd be okay charging a replacement fee. Batteries are heavy, which leads to increased wear and tear on roads, and the money for that comes out of the gas tax.
Yes. The price will be passed on only if the market will bear it. If my soda is going to cost me 10 cents more because of taxes and I’m still willing to buy it, the soda companies should raise their prices 10 cents even without the tax.
The price of every single good would go up, including all food - not just soda, diapers, toilet paper, toothpaste - everything.
Everything we consume is shipped and if the price of everything goes up the standard of living of everyone goes down. This would be a regressive tax that would disproportionately impact those who can least afford it.
This would be incredibly inflationary and hurt the poorest the most. Bad idea.
Large trucks do things like delivery food to the grocer next to your apartment so that you can live. The road is a public good. Sometimes the tax we pay funds something we don't really use, and sometimes we use more than our tax adds up to. If you have a better system, make it happen.
I’ve heard this before and if it is true I would be in favor of adjusting gas taxes on commercial vehicles to cover the cost of road maintenance. However, $0.10/mile sounds excessive and punitive and inflationary for all consumers.
I would love to see some data to support your claim.
Per this source [0] it appears you are correct. Trucks contribute 99% of wear and tear on the roads but pay only 35% of the cost.
My take is that cars/pickups/suvs are overpaying by a lot and commercial trucks are underpaying by a lot.
My biggest concern is that taxes, like inflation, only ever seem to go up, never down.
In this case I would be in favor of correcting this inequality if we reduce gas taxes for standard vehicles while increasing taxes on commercial trucks, but given their track record I suspect governments will never reduce taxes, only increase them.
In America personal vehicles are a necessity unless you live in the core of a city with adequate public transit of which there are only a handful.
They are a necessity if you live in a small town, the suburbs, a rural area, an area with extreme weather, have a family with young children, etc.
* In the US, 93% of households have access to a personal vehicle [0].
* 77.3% of respondents think owning a car is necessary [0]
If we increase taxes on personal vehicles it would disproportionately impact lower income workers who can barely afford to get by as it is. Forcing a single mom on a low income such that she could no longer afford to drive would tax her 10’s of hours every week resulting in untold hardship. It would be a disaster.
What you are advocating would only work if we invested trillions of dollars in transit infrastructure.
Taxation or more debt isn’t enough to pay for that transformation without absolutely destroying the economy and the quality of life of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Personal vehicles are only a luxury if you live in a fantasy.
> Except no one was discriminating against anyone. They simply described them.
In US every description is a discrimination.
Fat, slim, black, white ( they say caucasian in movies without knowing what skin color the people living in that region have), master, slave, red, yellow.
And i bet Lyft will never hire a Dick (Chenney) or a Peacock .
Depends on where this happened but in the US IIRC age discrimination only covers people older than 40. Discriminating against young people is legal, and it's not clear to me that describing someone as "young" is a form of discrimation.
> when describing the driver who hit the Lyft she called him "young"
> played back the audio of her conversation
Am I reading this right? She gave a verbal statement to a rep, ostensibly to support their internal processes. They turned around and hypercriticized her exact wording, looking for reasons to punish her? If you squint hard enough, you can almost understand why companies want to avoid any possibly-misconstruable language in public posts, regardless of how unreasonable the possible PR blowup would be. But this is the next level.
Why do so many tech companies think they have a right o issue decisions to employees, contractors, or customers without communicating context? Lack of contextual information seems to account for a large proportion of tech grievances discussed on HN.
Running a business as a top-down dictatorial entity with zero accountability says something bad about the founders and owners. The standard excuse is that 'if we give out too much information, people will game the system'. But by evading accountability and often regulation, it's these companies who are gaming the marketplace/regulatory system in which they operate, while offering themselves as victims of unscrupulous individuals whenever one of their counterparties exhibits even a slight degree of autonomy. This kind of control freakery is recapitulating the worst aspects of 20th century Taylorism.
I was very much in favor of Uber as a disruptive entity when they first appeared, given the numerous flaws in the in then-dominant taxicab model. But (along with many other companies that adhere to the same platform mentality) have mutated into something significantly worse.
> Why do so many tech companies think they have a right to issue decisions to employees, contractors, or customers without communicating context?
You're probably not gonna believe it, but it's because they don't know much, especially the context in which they're making decisions.
How could they really? The reality of any company is not its ideas, but its implementation details. For tech companies that's really difficult.
You know how everyone with a room temperature IQ keeps insisting that AI is gonna take away programming jobs? Imagine that it already happened except that instead of losing your job you have been left to manage the robots... that's the position they're in, but the robots are instead extremely stubborn 20-something contrarians who want to rewrite everything in Rust.
You are probably at that 4-7 years experience level where you are at the top of your stack and feel like you know everything. In the next 15 years you will learn anything can be implemented in any language and the tradeoffs are less important than they appear
Because the more information a company communicates about such a decision, the more likely they are to be liable, or sued, or litigated, or arbitrated based on some part of the decision that could be illegal, discriminatory, exculpating, etc.
Many employees are at-will, and that means that they can quit any time, for any reason, and their employer can terminate them at any time, for any reason. That means the company is not required to give context or information about their reasons; they don't need a reason and they don't need to tell anyone, so they won't.
I...don't care. Economic transactions between peers can and probably should proceed on a no harm/no foul/no reason basis; simplicity is the lubricant of economic activity and where and how you choose to spend your money is a sufficient signal. But once you have such large asymmetries that the possibility of dependence arises (eg a rideshare driver or a small online marketplace vendor), the great economic power comes with great responsibility.
The approach you describe is like a major league baseball player crushing little league kids. Sure, the major league player is winning through superior ability, but it's also a shitty way to behave.
> Why do so many tech companies think they have a right o issue decisions to employees, contractors, or customers without communicating context? Lack of contextual information seems to account for a large proportion of tech grievances discussed on HN.
Because they're extraordinarily self-centered and irresponsible. Issuing decisions without context is cheaper (e.g. the can use an insane algorithm without human backup), makes them harder to challenge, and insulates them from legal liability (because it's hard to know if they were improper).
IIRC, Google's about to get slapped by the courts because even its top executives were willfully avoiding legal record-keeping requirements around their decisionmaking.
They are building the ultimate faceless bureaucracy. Super efficient and amoral. Mix in some AI and most of your life will be controlled by entities that make decisions about your life without accountability. I am sure Kafka would write an excellent book about this
Well, in the case of firing people, generally there is no legal requirement in the US to provide a reason. I know this story isn't about the US though. It can actually hurt you to do so if it can be construed to be an illegal reason (discrimination).
Providing context requires someone to understand the context and the variables that went into the decision (including potential software bugs or edge-cases) and confirm the decision to the standard they're claiming "we've carefully reviewed this decision/etc BS".
Problem is that in reality, the decision is made by some heuristics that can be flawed due to software issues and/or eventual consistency (and the developer who brought up these issues got told "don't worry, it'll only affect 0.1% of users"), and the "escalation path" is an outsourced idiot that presses random buttons while moonlighting as a tech support scammer.
It is easier to give such feedback, as long as the reasons for firing are lawful, the company can request summary judgement. I honestly would think that a firing for no reason would be more likely to spark a lawsuit that actually goes all the way to a jury (or at least through the discovery process), than a firing where lawful reasons are given.
> An Uber spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that the court did not recognise the robust processes we have in place, including meaningful human review, when making a decision to deactivate a driver’s account due to suspected fraud.
That's a very bad way of saying they aren't sorry they got caught doing unethical automated decisions that would've left the driver with no recourse, had he not belonged to a Union.
I felt exactly the same. The term "suspected fraud" is so perfect PR speak in 2023. It is an excellent catch-all that makes it appear that the company is protecting is good customers from the Bad Ones. Banks do the same with KYC/AML. If your relationship is worth less than a million USD, who cares -- ban them / refuse them. If multi-millions, then the rules can be bent.
An Uber spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that the court did not recognise the robust processes we have in place, including meaningful human review, when making a decision to deactivate a driver’s account due to suspected fraud.
“These rulings only relate to a few specific drivers from the UK that were deactivated in the period between 2018 and 2020 in relation to very specific circumstances.”
That’s corporate speak for: we’re assholes who use automated processes to rule about some of our human drivers in a way that may be unfair and leaves them with no recourse. It’s ok though, because it only ruins a few people’s livelihoods.
I’m glad this guy stuck it to them in the courts, I hope he got a good settlement. The article didn’t say.
In terms of corporate speak and PR, that's actually a blunder. The second phrase is basically "yeah, we did it". Very weird, unless the courts have explicitly told them to say it.
definitely more evil, since the decision was made so they could hide from even the "meat bags" the sort of treatment they're giving to people
So bad that even "meat bags" would be sympathetic, so gotta replace them with algorithms
my government at least lets me speak to a "meat bag" who has helped me through the bureaucracy, Uber's goal is to eliminate all help, including even that
There are a lot of problems of Uber in India for example, as a native, even though I know most of the routes where I need to travel a lot of drivers do the following which makes it incredibly annoying
1. They'll ask to cancel the ride if it's an online payment and then say pay me in cash and I'll take you. That ride is effectively void from Uber's end and the only recourse I have is to either rebook which takes very long (reason[0]), or take the ride, risking my safety.
2. They'll just reroute without asking, and not notify you. Wait too long at turns, red lights, just to increase the trip time. I've had 30min trips take 1hr and upwards. Which have increased my fare when I had to pay.
[0]: There's a common pattern when you book an Uber, they'll call you and ask you where you want to go, if it doesn't fall within their day plan they'll outright tell you to cancel and then not pick up the call. Cancelling from my end often results in a penalty since the ride has been booked, and that causes a lot of issues and a waste of time. This is very common when you want cabs to the airport since they're located well out of city limits and a lot of drivers just don't want to make the trip.
Edit: Thinking about this a bit more, God help any tourists who travel here, since Uber is their safest bet. Local *-rickshaws/taxis can charge you anywhere from 5-20x if they see you're not a local let alone a foreigner.
> Cancelling from my end often results in a penalty
So…don’t cancel? If the driver bails on a ride, that should hurt their score, not yours. If you need to book a replacement ride immediately, just use another app.
It’s happened to me a handful of times in the US, I just waited for 10-15 minutes until the heuristics decided the driver wasn’t coming and assigned another one.
Regardless, sounds miserable to deal with regularly. Sorry about that.
I once decided to wait for a Lyft driver who clearly wanted me to cancel. They eventually came and ferried me to my destination, but after the ride they claimed I damaged their car. I was charged like $100 by Lyft for the “damage”. It took weeks of emailing back and forth before they eventually gave up simply because I was so insistent and reversed the charge, choosing to take the loss. Lesson learned, it wasn’t worth it and I wish I had simply disputed the cancellation charge instead.
Disputes are regulated by the card network's rules and most have generous, consumer-friendly clauses.
The credit/debit card distinction is mostly a legal one (in certain countries, credit cards have extra protection regardless of the outcome of a card network dispute), but as far as I know the actual card network rules apply to all types of cards.
There's one other app called Ola, which is horrible, prices fluctuate without notification, they'll autocharge your UPI as they please, customer support is non-existant.
Uber is the best bet and usually people don't have the extra 10-15 minutes to spare, since you're already waiting outside and probably have a time-sensitive task to attend to (that's the norm here btw, if you have something urgent you take a cab otherwise public transport since that's more likely to be delayed).
You do, but that usually runs out; as I mentioned in the parent, there's an extended foreplay with the Uber driver that sometimes happens, sometimes is resolved quickly, sometimes takes way too long.
If you mean they're uncomfortable with 15 minutes of leeway as in the rider steps in the car 45 min before their desired arrival time, then it seems trivial to just request the Uber further ahead, next time?
I understand it's a bit more difficult if the matched driver gets into an interminable argument beforehand.
I have seen the cancellation behavior quite frequently in London since the pandemic, so whatever penalty the drivers are getting, it's not enough in practice. Not just on Uber but on all their competition too which is just as terrible.
The problem is that as long as the competition is just as bad, it's cheaper for them to let this behavior continue and annoy all riders than actually clamp down on it and risk pissing off drivers for good.
> if it doesn't fall within their day plan they'll outright tell you to cancel and then not pick up the call
One would think that some interface where the drivers set the limits where they want to go would benefit all parties here. But yeah, Uber is in very intense disagreement since they launched.
Anyway, your #2 is outright fraud. The same kind that taxis were famous worldwide for practicing, and that pushed people into applications like Uber.
Yeah usually I have Google Maps open on my phone as well, and follow the route alongside and if they do take any turns that aren't on the optimal route, I point it out. Annoying, but eh.
I only started doing that after I was scammed twice though :p
4-5 years ago, on multiple business trips to India I had the following experience about 30% of the time. Order an uber, watch it get about 5 blocks away on the screen, and start driving in circles. I believe it was spoofed GPS because sometimes you could clearly see that no car was really there, or even walk right up to the spot on the map. If you send a message they say they are almost there, repeatedly. Finally after 10 minutes you give up and cancel, getting a charge. Then when you try again the same driver will come from about 1km away and actually pick you up.
I have to say that I got scammed by Uber drivers many times, when the region had dynamic pricing (not a fixed price at the moment of booking the ride). They took detours, ignored directions when I told them how to reach the destination in the most direct way (trying to make the best out of it). Always reported it, and got back the money most of the time.
So I think they have to deal with A LOT of fraudulent riders.
That's one of the many problems they've assumed the risk for (along with the reward of profit for solving). There are any number of creative ways to tackle it. Exploiting and abusing labor is not one of the tools they get to have in their belt to do that.
In other cities they have to use the official taxi price, that is calculated by distance and time. So this is different for every city and also changes over time. Fixed prices are much better for the customer, because you know how much you pay upfront and the driver tries to get you there on the shortest and quickest route.
Problem is that "human" here would mean outsourced idiot in a boiler room that isn't trained, paid or treated well enough to give a shit, so what you'll end up with will be no better than basing the ban decision on a boolean RNG.
From my experience around one in twenty rides the driver tried to pull some sort of scam on me. In Portugal the service was awesome, but in Austria, Hungary, Poland, South Africa and Argentina the experience was very mixed (ranging from great to poor).
- does the driver ever have a chance to interact with the person making this judgement? Do they have an opportunity to provide information which Uber was not in a position to automatically collect (e.g. a road was blocked due to construction or an accident)?
- what is the goal of the human reviewer and what incentives are put on them? Are they required to 'judge' a number of cases per hour, which places a limit on how much context they can actually consider? Are they responsible with arriving at a "fair" decision, or merely one which minimizes costs to the company?
- what outputs from the human reviewer inform future automated decisions? Are they merely adjudicating individual cases, or will their decisions help train the algorithms that automatically flag drivers going forward?
Merely having a human in the loop is insufficient. It's easy to create a system in which humans effectively rubber-stamp and amplify issues in the automated systems.
> The court found that he and other drivers involved in the case, based in the UK and Portugal, had the right to more information about the way automated decisions were made about them.
> Just before the case came to court, Uber apologised and acknowledged it had made a mistake.
So Uber tried to stop the court from making a ruling which would bind it by apologizing to the driver. Then when the court still goes on to make a ruling, Uber complains, and seeks to limit application of the ruling:
> An Uber spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that the court did not recognise the robust processes we have in place, including meaningful human review, when making a decision to deactivate a driver’s account due to suspected fraud.
> “These rulings only relate to a few specific drivers from the UK that were deactivated in the period between 2018 and 2020 in relation to very specific circumstances.”
This is why settlements are not always the societally best outcome of lawsuits.
And I don't get how Uber is trying to limit it to UK drivers when the court decision also applied to Portugal drivers.
"With the help of Worker Info Exchange and his union, Iftimie pursued Uber – and another ride-sharing app for which he worked, Ola – all the way to the court of appeal in Amsterdam, where Uber’s European headquarters is based."
Yet again we see that unions are important, as the only reason anything stopped uber in this case was their union. Every argument companies make against unions is false, the only reason they don't want unions is because it means they can't defraud and abuse employees (I mean "contractors").
