4 ms·

Uber operates at global scale, will they just exit seattle market?

by dustingetz 11y ago

darkstar999 11y ago
I imagine that they wouldn't want to set that precedent. Uber is very aggressive. They will fight this tooth and nail.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- __jal 11y ago
  Or allocate more towards pushing lobbying, technical and business efforts on self-driving cars harder. I don't have anywhere near the expertise to guess at how long the legislative meat-grinder for self-driving cars will take to hammer out, but an amoral minimax might be to just double down on firing all the drivers, and let them have a few more shekels for a couple years. But they have the money to walk and chew worker-bees, so we'll probably see both. ( This is getting further afield, but. Do we even have a semi-reasonable comparison for a bundle of legal and societal changes involved in self-driving transport? I can't think of one outside of the original introduction of cars. And on the legal side, that was mostly new law, not revising the assumption of human action across criminal, tort, insurance and whatever other categories. The analogous social changes - at first, demonizing pedestrians to get them off streets; later, suburbs, the propaganda tying the car to U.S. American notions of freedom, towns becoming dependent on violations for income, etc. - are somewhat harder to make bets about, but more interesting. There certainly have been bigger changes (I'm guessing, of course, but I don't see auto-autos as a bigger deal than agriculture), but I don't know that legal codes were as complex then, and I know we don't have extensive records on the changes. The social upheaval of ag was worthy of the name 'singularity', which I really don't see self-driving cars as matching.)
pc86 11y ago
There are some legal options here that I'm not qualified to comment on (anti-trust, etc), but I imagine that's what they would do if everything else fails.
nostromo 11y ago
It'd be a smart move to leave. If Uber and Lyft left Seattle, local politicians would feel a tremendous amount of heat to change their positions. Cabbies in Seattle are in general not well regarded. I'm not commenting about the ethics of doing so, of course, but it reminds me of Walmart closing stores (apparently) because of labor unions. It's brutal, but effective. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over-labor-activism/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over...

Uber operates at global scale, will they just exit seattle market?

darkstar999 11y ago

I imagine that they wouldn't want to set that precedent. Uber is very aggressive. They will fight this tooth and nail.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
__jal 11y ago
Or allocate more towards pushing lobbying, technical and business efforts on self-driving cars harder. I don't have anywhere near the expertise to guess at how long the legislative meat-grinder for self-driving cars will take to hammer out, but an amoral minimax might be to just double down on firing all the drivers, and let them have a few more shekels for a couple years. But they have the money to walk and chew worker-bees, so we'll probably see both. ( This is getting further afield, but. Do we even have a semi-reasonable comparison for a bundle of legal and societal changes involved in self-driving transport? I can't think of one outside of the original introduction of cars. And on the legal side, that was mostly new law, not revising the assumption of human action across criminal, tort, insurance and whatever other categories. The analogous social changes - at first, demonizing pedestrians to get them off streets; later, suburbs, the propaganda tying the car to U.S. American notions of freedom, towns becoming dependent on violations for income, etc. - are somewhat harder to make bets about, but more interesting. There certainly have been bigger changes (I'm guessing, of course, but I don't see auto-autos as a bigger deal than agriculture), but I don't know that legal codes were as complex then, and I know we don't have extensive records on the changes. The social upheaval of ag was worthy of the name 'singularity', which I really don't see self-driving cars as matching.)

pc86 11y ago

There are some legal options here that I'm not qualified to comment on (anti-trust, etc), but I imagine that's what they would do if everything else fails.

nostromo 11y ago

It'd be a smart move to leave. If Uber and Lyft left Seattle, local politicians would feel a tremendous amount of heat to change their positions. Cabbies in Seattle are in general not well regarded. I'm not commenting about the ethics of doing so, of course, but it reminds me of Walmart closing stores (apparently) because of labor unions. It's brutal, but effective. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over-labor-activism/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over...