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If you consider it a moral imperative to honor a regulatory monopoly granted to certain members of an industry, then I guess it would be immoral for Uber to do

by imgabe 11y ago

If you consider it a moral imperative to honor a regulatory monopoly granted to certain members of an industry, then I guess it would be immoral for Uber to do what they're doing. Personally, I consider laws and morals to be two separate things.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Consider that laws, be them right or wrong, are what keeps society together. Those particular laws seem to be outdated and it's good that someone challenged them. But there are many ways and motivations to do it, and Uber is doing it in a very bad way for very bad reasons. It worries me they're so loved, because the mindset they promote is "just fuck the law". It's not the example we want every new startup to follow - because as you point out, companies tend to grow amoral, and the law is the only thing that keeps them from hurting people for profit. Also, if you look outside the US, we had Uber-like companies in Europe for some years. The process of destroying taxi monopoly was way under way here. It was going slowly, but in a way that didn't threaten the social order.
- imgabe 11y ago
  I think that's backwards. We had society first, then we had laws. Laws exist to serve society, not the other way around. When a law stops being useful to society, we get rid of it. There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that disregarding one law that's considered unjust implies someone is going to disregard ALL laws. Rosa Parks didn't immediately decide to start murdering and raping people after she sat in the front of the bus. Uber does not promote "fuck the law". They promote "fuck this one particular law that sucks for everybody except a few who benefit from it". Maybe we could have had a long, drawn out process where the taxi system was slowly dismantled over the course of several decades, but who benefits from that? Not the customers who are stuck paying for overpriced, inefficient taxi service. Not the many drivers who are able to get flexible part-time work.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > We had society first, then we had laws. Laws exist to serve society, not the other way around. Laws are extensions of social customs that happen when society grows beyond a certain size (think few dozen - hundreds of people). The things Uber does break are against social customs as well. > When a law stops being useful to society, we get rid of it. Yes, but the way we usually do it is not by someone unilaterally deciding they don't like it and breaking it, while raising enough money to keep its enforcement at bay. > They promote "fuck this one particular law that sucks for everybody except a few who benefit from it". They break this particular law (and a set of others, like tax laws, insurance laws, etc., as well as ideas of being decent and not threatening people who disagree with you - ideas that are sort of important in a civilized society) because that's the area they're doing business in. But other companies enlightened by their example will be breaking other laws. Who knows, maybe next SV-backed startup decides to ignore FDA? Because who cares about those "clinical trials", they're only slowing progress down. And the next one after that will ignore biosafety. Would you like to live in that world? > Maybe we could have had a long, drawn out process where the taxi system was slowly dismantled over the course of several decades, but who benefits from that? Not the customers who are stuck paying for overpriced, inefficient taxi service. Not the many drivers who are able to get flexible part-time work. We had that in Europe before Uber, and it was going fine. As a customer, I benefited from local company that offered pay-for-distance drive-by-GPS service stirring up the taxi market. They had some legal battles, there was a law adjustment, and the local market improved (the company is still around, and I'm still their happy customer). Rinse and repeat. That's how you do the progress of civilization.
    - imgabe 11y ago
      Uber doesn't get to unilaterally decide anything. Customers overwhelmingly decided that they prefer Uber to whatever benefits they had been receiving from the regulated taxi industry. If they hadn't, Uber would be out of business and we'd only have taxis. > maybe next SV-backed startup decides to ignore FDA? Because who cares about those "clinical trials", they're only slowing progress down. Maybe they will? If a company can reliably produce safe drugs without FDA trials, why wouldn't we want that? Right now we have expensive drugs that are very safe. Few people die because they got a drug that was manufactured incorrectly (presumably, I don't know the actual statistics), but many people die because they can never afford the drug in the first place. Maybe without the trials more people would die from bad drugs, but more would live because they'd have access to cures that were previously out of reach. I don't know, but it's a question worth asking. There's also the issue of the black market created by the high prices caused by FDA trials, where drugs are sold from shady online pharmacies and manufacture under who-knows-what conditions. Desperate people will take risks like that when they have no options. If you were poor and contracted some rare disease where the treatment costs $100,000, but only has a .0001% chance of complications, would you rather die because you can't afford it, or try a $100 treatment that has a 1% chance of complications? Right now you don't even get the choice. For whatever reason we've decided it's better for people to die because they're poor than for them to die because of a manufacturing / clinical problem with a drug. If that's what we all think, that's fine, but we should be aware we're making that choice. > As a customer, I benefited from local company that offered pay-for-distance drive-by-GPS service stirring up the taxi market. They had some legal battles, there was a law adjustment, and the local market improved The fact that they had "some legal battles" and the laws was changed, implies to me that they were also operating in defiance of the law at the beginning. How is that different from what Uber does? Besides, now you have the taxis, your preferred company, and Uber as options. With your recommended strategy of "everybody obey the taxi laws", you would only have the taxis. Aren't you better off this way?

by imgabe 11y ago

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Consider that laws, be them right or wrong, are what keeps society together. Those particular laws seem to be outdated and it's good that someone challenged them. But there are many ways and motivations to do it, and Uber is doing it in a very bad way for very bad reasons. It worries me they're so loved, because the mindset they promote is "just fuck the law". It's not the example we want every new startup to follow - because as you point out, companies tend to grow amoral, and the law is the only thing that keeps them from hurting people for profit. Also, if you look outside the US, we had Uber-like companies in Europe for some years. The process of destroying taxi monopoly was way under way here. It was going slowly, but in a way that didn't threaten the social order.

imgabe 11y ago
I think that's backwards. We had society first, then we had laws. Laws exist to serve society, not the other way around. When a law stops being useful to society, we get rid of it. There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that disregarding one law that's considered unjust implies someone is going to disregard ALL laws. Rosa Parks didn't immediately decide to start murdering and raping people after she sat in the front of the bus. Uber does not promote "fuck the law". They promote "fuck this one particular law that sucks for everybody except a few who benefit from it". Maybe we could have had a long, drawn out process where the taxi system was slowly dismantled over the course of several decades, but who benefits from that? Not the customers who are stuck paying for overpriced, inefficient taxi service. Not the many drivers who are able to get flexible part-time work.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > We had society first, then we had laws. Laws exist to serve society, not the other way around. Laws are extensions of social customs that happen when society grows beyond a certain size (think few dozen - hundreds of people). The things Uber does break are against social customs as well. > When a law stops being useful to society, we get rid of it. Yes, but the way we usually do it is not by someone unilaterally deciding they don't like it and breaking it, while raising enough money to keep its enforcement at bay. > They promote "fuck this one particular law that sucks for everybody except a few who benefit from it". They break this particular law (and a set of others, like tax laws, insurance laws, etc., as well as ideas of being decent and not threatening people who disagree with you - ideas that are sort of important in a civilized society) because that's the area they're doing business in. But other companies enlightened by their example will be breaking other laws. Who knows, maybe next SV-backed startup decides to ignore FDA? Because who cares about those "clinical trials", they're only slowing progress down. And the next one after that will ignore biosafety. Would you like to live in that world? > Maybe we could have had a long, drawn out process where the taxi system was slowly dismantled over the course of several decades, but who benefits from that? Not the customers who are stuck paying for overpriced, inefficient taxi service. Not the many drivers who are able to get flexible part-time work. We had that in Europe before Uber, and it was going fine. As a customer, I benefited from local company that offered pay-for-distance drive-by-GPS service stirring up the taxi market. They had some legal battles, there was a law adjustment, and the local market improved (the company is still around, and I'm still their happy customer). Rinse and repeat. That's how you do the progress of civilization.
  - imgabe 11y ago
    Uber doesn't get to unilaterally decide anything. Customers overwhelmingly decided that they prefer Uber to whatever benefits they had been receiving from the regulated taxi industry. If they hadn't, Uber would be out of business and we'd only have taxis. > maybe next SV-backed startup decides to ignore FDA? Because who cares about those "clinical trials", they're only slowing progress down. Maybe they will? If a company can reliably produce safe drugs without FDA trials, why wouldn't we want that? Right now we have expensive drugs that are very safe. Few people die because they got a drug that was manufactured incorrectly (presumably, I don't know the actual statistics), but many people die because they can never afford the drug in the first place. Maybe without the trials more people would die from bad drugs, but more would live because they'd have access to cures that were previously out of reach. I don't know, but it's a question worth asking. There's also the issue of the black market created by the high prices caused by FDA trials, where drugs are sold from shady online pharmacies and manufacture under who-knows-what conditions. Desperate people will take risks like that when they have no options. If you were poor and contracted some rare disease where the treatment costs $100,000, but only has a .0001% chance of complications, would you rather die because you can't afford it, or try a $100 treatment that has a 1% chance of complications? Right now you don't even get the choice. For whatever reason we've decided it's better for people to die because they're poor than for them to die because of a manufacturing / clinical problem with a drug. If that's what we all think, that's fine, but we should be aware we're making that choice. > As a customer, I benefited from local company that offered pay-for-distance drive-by-GPS service stirring up the taxi market. They had some legal battles, there was a law adjustment, and the local market improved The fact that they had "some legal battles" and the laws was changed, implies to me that they were also operating in defiance of the law at the beginning. How is that different from what Uber does? Besides, now you have the taxis, your preferred company, and Uber as options. With your recommended strategy of "everybody obey the taxi laws", you would only have the taxis. Aren't you better off this way?