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Uber dismissed warnings about its illegal self-driving test for months
- sharkmerry 10y agoasking for forgiveness rather than permission is not something any company should do when people's lives are at stake
- bstar77 10y agoYou work with the agencies you are beholden to, to determine if you are working within the parameters they set- this should not be an antagonistic relationship. Uber apparently does not believe in that sort of thing and are arrogant enough to just go it alone. They will pay dearly for that hubris now. Uber is just a disgusting company that I wish didn't exist. Fortunately they have far more ethical competition to choose from.
- ziszis 10y agoHow many ethical and legal violations will be until the CEO of Uber is fired? If this were a public company, 1) the stock would have taken several hits and 2) he would have been out a long time ago. A decade ago it was Worldcom and Enron and other giants. It is unfortunate that the founder mythology has shifted some of the worst corporate behavior to start-ups.
- danielcampos93 10y agoI think this will keep Uber private for much longer/indefinably. If they were public, the company's stock would be in the pooper. Since they are private, who knows what secondary markets have 'priced' the effect of all the allegations(toxic management, previous SVP sexual harassment issues,IP theft, running red lights, etc). If anything this will probably ripple to other Unicorns that staying private is a better idea. No accountability so you can get away with way more.
- dastbe 10y agoThe problem is your workforce still wants a liquidity event that rewards them for helping build a multibillion dollar company. this means either company buy-backs or authorized secondary market transfers that will likely not result in the amount of money they expected. say what you will about the tech giants, at least you know what you're going to get paid.
- jacquesm 10y agoYou might not be able to unload at all...
- bravura 10y agoLet's say Uber (or any unicorn) would not provide any liquidity to employees. Could employees unionize and threaten to quit en masse unless a company-wide liquidity solution was offered?
- seanp2k2 10y agoAnd suddenly that 200K base + 400K stock comp plan is looking a lot more like 150K total comp
- x0x0 10y agoThat's why Uber is doing buybacks -- with, naturally, a good haircut for the employees. While Uber’s buyback approach can help it retain talent, it may also benefit the company’s bottom line. Using its own money, Uber purchases common stock for 25 percent to 35 percent less than the price of preferred shares from its most recent funding round, one person familiar with the matter said. It can then turn around and sell shares at a premium in a subsequent round. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-15/uber-gives-restless-employees-a-way-to-cash-out https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-15/uber-give...
- lancewiggs 10y agoGreat deal - if you are an insider with shares then sell all of them. This thing is hyper-valued.
- samfisher83 10y agoThe reason why Airbnb and Uber are working is because they found a loophole with the law and skirting around it as much as they can. So are you going to fire the guy for doing that?
- madeofpalk 10y ago"loophole with the law" is a very interesting way avoiding the fact that they flat our broke the law in jurisdictions and reimbursed fines drivers incurred.
- stale2002 10y agoWell, the laws in question (forced taxi monopoly laws) were bad to begin with.
- Ntrails 10y agoAh, so it's ok to break laws as long as you disagree with them? Because I have some serious issues with the idea that [insert abhorrent thing] is wrong so it'd be neat to just say it's a bad law and get on with doing it
- ionised 10y agoThere is a case to be made for a form of civil disobedience involving significant numbers of people breaking a law in an attempt to have it repealed. I personally break a few laws I just don't care for. Drugs laws to name one. Nobody is taking my LSD from me and I imagine there are millions like me. That said I don't agree with what Uber is doing. They are one company trying to skirt the law.
- kedean 10y agoYou can't invoke civil disobedience when a commerce is happening, because civil disobedience is a symbolic act, meant to draw attention. As soon as somebody is making money doing it, it's just breaking the law.
- aanm1988 10y agoWell companies are content to just stay private, or go public but hand over 80-90% of the voting power to founders anyway. It's a pretty ridiculous situation.
- Bluestrike2 10y agoAll of that over a $150 permit? They paid more in legal fees just to have their attorneys (in-house or otherwise) open the DMV's regulations on the subject, and all they got out of it was a decidedly antagonistic start to their relationship with the regulatory body that will regulate them. For some reason, I think their executive team's fondness for self-destructive impulses is far more of an existential threat to Uber than coming in second in rolling out autonomous vehicles.
- vgt 10y agoMajor requirement associated with getting that $150 permit is reporting disengagement statistics, and, hence, showing up on this report: http://www.recode.net/2017/2/2/14474800/waymo-self-driving-dmv-disengagements http://www.recode.net/2017/2/2/14474800/waymo-self-driving-d...
- petee 10y agoIronically, all the effort to avoid regulation and oversight, will probably lead to far more expensive lawsuits on the flip side - Run a red light now, maybe hit a pedestrian later.
- stale2002 10y agoNot really. Red states like Arizona seem to like self driving cars just fine. It is Californias loss, and other people's gain. The cars are going to be tested, no matter what. Self driving cars are already much safer than humans. The recent government investigation of the Tesla self driving cars proved this (ten's of thousands of self driving cars are already on the road right now) .
- anigbrowl 10y agoRegulatory approval in California is generally a green light for the rest of the country because California's standards tend to lead the way for other states'. Arizone, not so much.
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- erpellan 10y agoIt's hard to play the scrappy upstart 'disrupt' card when you're a 50-billion or so valued company who can afford to hire people who can tell you how not to fuck up quite so incompetently.
- aaron695 10y agoKinda tempted to just flag Uber stories atm. There obviously a negative campaign going on (probably just organic, but these days who knows) Self driving cars will save millions of lives. We need to speed this up. When does HN normally love regulations so much?
- amaks 10y ago"Self driving cars will save millions of lives. We need to speed this up." By killing some in the process?
- petee 10y agoWhen? When they can't run me over and kill me. Uber is doing this to themselves - note other companies aren't having nearly as many of these issues, nor as serious, and deserve to be called out on it. They have a history of lying and disdain for law. For months Uber told Boston police that they did do vehicle inspections, and when finally called out on it, the CEO admitted to the police chief that he lied. Recently they lied about running red lights...And they should be allowed to experiment on the roadway?
- bykovich 10y agohey everybody, it's me, the utility humper
- whateveracct 10y agoIt's not a "campaign" if it's "probably just organic."
- deathanatos 10y ago> Self driving cars will save millions of lives. We need to speed this up. The DMV doesn't appear to be asking them to slow down. The DMV appears to be asking them get a $150 permit, and to be transparent about errors their software makes. > When does HN normally love regulations so much? CA's regulations seem incredibly friendly towards autonomous vehicles; it could have been a legal grey area, but from everything I've read (and seen with Google's testing in Mountain View), the DMV's policies seem acceptable. Software that is going to be responsible for people's lives should be transparent, and I've yet to see it demonstrated how the DMV's requirements even approach onerous. Like the article mentions, other companies such as Google seem to have no issue complying. (And, from what I've seen of Google reporting of Waymo's incidents, most of their incident reports seem to suggest that their vehicles are doing a job that surpasses my expectations of where they would be. What little we know of Uber's does not.)
- alphabettsy 10y agoThe fact that they keep lying and getting caught regularly should be very troubling to their investors. I could understand differences in definition, but lying about what objectively happened is beyond that.
- wapz 10y agoAren't they a private company? Do people keep investing after the company takes off?
- Tangurena2 10y agoI would have thought that the end-customer paying only 40% of the actual cost would be more troubling; investors are subsidizing the cost of rides. Does Uber have a practical plan to get the costs down to where they're profitable? Without breaking the law?
- sandworm101 10y agoSo are these uber guys the kids of Enron guys? The managment style, the flouting of rules and decorum, seems very similar.
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- tlb 10y agoTo quote a lawyer friend, "Break only one law at a time. If you have a dead body in your trunk, be sure to use your turn signals." The pragmatic reason for this is that the penalties and probability of getting caught for a given crime are often inversely correlated. So if you commit a small crime and a large crime simultaneously, you're likely to get caught for the small crime and then they'll notice the large crime too. Uber set out to break a set of laws that arguably needed breaking: those that protect incumbent taxi services against competition. Calling their taxi service a limo service to avoid anti-competitive regulations is a small crime. But instead of learning the "one crime at a time" rule, they seem to have learned "Hey, we can get away with crimes!"
- jfim 10y ago> they seem to have learned "Hey, we can get away with crimes!" I'm not sure if it's really that. It seems that they're closer to having a scorched-earth policy where they intentionally break the rules. If the regulators step in and put some legislation that blocks Uber from operating, it also blocks their competitors from operating as well. If not, then they win by having their way and having a first mover advantage. Either way, they win or their competitors lose. That strategy seems to have worked very well for them in the US, but not as much in other markets.
- unityByFreedom 10y agoAren't there places in the US where Lyft is operating and Uber isn't? Like Austin?